How the AI boom is fueling a nuclear renaissance

Who’s a bigger nemesis of mother nature – frequent flier Taylor Swift or you, using AI for the most trivial reasons?

People are increasingly using AI to settle arguments in their relationships. Other common everyday AI applications include email writing, summarizing texts, and guiding users through job interviews.

But at what cost?

Well, probably not a big one for you, even if you subscribe to some premium features of ChatGPT or other AI models. All you need to do is to charge your phone to play with AI.

Charging your phone every day for a whole year will cost you less than a dollar. But there’s a catch.

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, your query goes to a data center where the AI model is stored. There, it can draw on hundreds of gigabytes of data to answer a single prompt, which requires a lot of electricity.

In fact, ChatGPT alone consumes enough energy in one year to fully charge over three million electric vehicles.

Shaming Taylor Swift for jet-settling won’t help the planet anymore (not that it ever did) as a new extremely power-hungry monster emerges. As we transition into that Sam Altman-predicted future where AI is everywhere, we will need that abundant power he’s talking about.

Solar and wind, which big tech has been investing in up until now, won’t do the trick as they’re not reliable. Nuclear power, though, might. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have invested billions of dollars in nuclear power companies. Altman himself has invested in at least three projects to ensure there’s “abundant energy” to power AI in the future.

Nuclear power is good for the environment since it doesn’t produce greenhouse gases. But there’s a catch.

Typically, nuclear fuel rods are used in power plants only for around five years before decommissioning. While no longer useful to the stations, they still contain about 90% of the energy and are largely not recycled.

The common way to dispose of spent nuclear fuel is to cool it down (takes 5-7 years), encapsulate it, and put it into underground storage. But those only last 50-60 years, and then someone else has to figure out what to do with those highly radioactive materials. Decommissioning nuclear fuel has been largely just delaying the problem for future generations to solve.

But there are ways to address it now. They are not simple or cheap, but they are there. A company in France, Orano, has been turning plutonium from nuclear power plants into MOX fuel. MOX, in fact, produces around 10% of France’s energy (65% is nuclear).

Interestingly, Orano is transporting plutonium to a recycling facility across the country in secrecy and with army protection. And here’s why.

Plutonium is used to make atomic bombs. In fact, the plutonium for India’s nuclear weapon in 1974 was a “gift” from a Canadian research reactor. Given for “peaceful purposes,” it was used for the opposite, leading to Canada simply banning the reprocessing of plutonium just a few years later. It remains banned to this day.

Big tech-backed companies are mostly focused on so-called small modular nuclear reactors (or microreactors). The Altman-backed Oklo could be the company behind the first commercial microreactor planned for 2027.

You’d think 100 or even 1,000 times smaller than usual nuclear reactors would be equally less dangerous. Well, there’s a reason why a concept developed as early as 1939 by the US Navy is guarded so closely by the state.

The uranium from these microreactors can be converted to weapon-grade material more easily. Also, microreactors aren’t really cost-effective yet. And, while small, they can, in fact, only exacerbate the challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste.