Technology companies and Silicon Valley tycoons have continued to invest for years in nuclear power, describing this sustainable power source as an essential part of moving the world into a cleaner future. They now have another reason to hail it: artificial intelligence.
The rapid development of generative AI is not kept back by Those elements which often go with nuclear power projects heavily regulated and tend to roll forward like snails. And that makes many people wonder can nuclear energy really help us to achieve a swift reduction in emissions? It is a question that is troubling increasingly as energy-consuming AI technologies grow at an explosive clip and add yet more greenhouse gases.
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“If you were to plug large language models, GPT-style models into all the search engines, it’s going to be five times as expensive environmentally as with a regular search,” said Sarah Myers West, who directs the AI Now Institute, a research group that studies social impacts of AI. By current growth rates, some of these new AI servers could soon gobble up over 85 terawatt hours of electricity each year, some researchers estimate. This would surpass the yearly total annual consumption in some small nations.
“I want to see innovation in this country,” Myers West said. “I just don’t want the scope of innovation to be defined [only] by these huge corporations’ incentives.”
Oklo is one startup betting on nuclear power with its backing from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI who sees artificial intelligence and affordable, green energy as two essential contributors to a “future marked by abundance.”
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In an interview Altman told: “What it comes down to is, in the world today all you see are these two ultimate things, intelligence and energy.” He then went on to make a $375 million investment in Helion Energy, a nuclear fusion startup that he chairs. That same year, Microsoft reached a deal with Helion to purchase electricity starting from 2028.
Fission–the process used in nuclear reactors to generate electricity by splitting atoms apart–is the focus of Oklo, which Altman also chairs. In contrast, fusion occurs when atomic nuclei merge together and produce energy.
Altman did not respond to queries regarding his representatives’ silence on the matter, by special acquisition company AltC.
In rural southeastern Idaho, Oklo is seeking to build a nuclear powerhouse on small scale that could supply the data centres such firms as OpenAI use for processing and storage services. Whether or not the concept would lend itself to fuel supply mixed-use residential neighborhoods as well as corporate users remains unclear; however, two commercial plants are already under contract. They will be located in southern Ohio.
According to Jacob DeWitte, CEO and founder of Oklo: “The demands for energy will rise dramatically as readies America’s infrastructure for widespread electric vehicle use by 2025 or so… Oh how much power we are going to need then won’thout it in fact would be impossible. Also heating and cooking processing–if we want to electrify those production processes, you need still more.”
In contrast to prospective customers, Oklo has found the regulators stand in resistance.
Then, in 2022, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected Oklo’s Aurora powerhouse design application for its Idaho facility; that same year, the Air Force announced it would no longer pursue plans to construct a microreactor to provide power for one of its bases in Alaska.
The NRC head DeWitte, said: “Now that you have new physics you need new models To do all sorts of things that they haven’t seen before.” From now on Oklo, he noted the agency had “a responsibility to put aside their own interests and make sure this meets minimum safety requirements.”
To further improve security, DeWitte said, Oklo has selected a remote site 37 miles from Idaho Falls. The company chose a rocky region in the northeast corner of Hollow Mountain. Each machine consists of 21 cylindrical reactors and generates enough electricity to run between 1,000 and 3,000 homes claims Chief Scientist Jacob Decavit.
At the Idaho National Laboratory, DeWitte says, the new design might also be more secure, with liquid metal as coolant instead of water. A project to test this form of nuclear recycling new fuel from wastes has been funded by the Energy Department.
But for decades, the US nuclear industry hasn?t substantially increased. Then came Calamity. There have been accidents that have killed hundreds of people, yet the industry keeps chugging along.”Most Americans now support expanding nuclear energy, a recent Pew Research surveyfound; 57 percent do, up from 43 percent in 2012.
Currently only 19% of the electricity in the nation is nuclear-generated, with 93 commercial reactors up and running today (down from a high of 112 in 1990). The Department of Energy has estimated that we will need as much as 800 gigawatts from new plants by 2050 in order to ameliorate greenhouse gas emissions in line with current goals for renewable energy.
However, as more and more tech firms jump on board AI development, already many data centers simply cannot expand their capacity quickly enough to keep the service affordable. In fact, data center building leases have gone up almost 16 % from 2021 to last year!That demand crunch means that the industry’s big guns have been sweetening their investments in nuclear.Capital: Lastsummer Microsoft and Constellation, one of America’s top nuclear power plant operators, cut a deal to supply nuclear-generated electricity to Virginia (data) centers.AccessIT (Baidu, the company that runs The search engine access our inn) took part in aTAE Technologies $250 million funding round held January 2021;Prior to this, Google invested TAE in their own first such round during 2020;And in late 2021, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and others raised more than $130 million to fund Canadian nuclear company General Fusion.For a tech company, going right to the source is just simple business sense, Ross Matzkin-Bridger, senior director for the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a nonprofit that works with countries and organizations to reduce nuclear and biological threats, said. While it is clean in nature, electricity from nuclear reactors may also be hauled long distances without transmitting power lines.In recent years most such (nuclear) projects are very small and easy to maintain. You could put more power per acre into a nuclear plant than anything else,'' he stated simply.Beyond Silicon Valley itself, the funding is actually coming through that this will go on,” said Ayan. If those people will lower funds below reasonable levels themselves each would reduce supply and thus increase costs.BackThese (people) need more time to get started before everyone else gets hurt.
In order to move to a low-carbon future, “We need nuclear power,” as Carleton University assistant mechanical and aerospace engineering professor said Ahmed Abdulla. With engineering projects that have historically involved timeframes of decades, “There needs to be method in the regulatory proposal,” he said, “Or else we might go fumble around in our haste just as we reach deliverance.”
