Nuclear Energy May Be The Only Solution To Energy Hungry AI

Facebook Tweet LinkedIn

Most forecasts of the electricity needs for AI server farms are that the demand is so huge that there will be competition with residential and traditional business use. This collision will happen soon. The US grid is not ready to handle this demand, and neither are traditional suppliers of electricity, which is often coal driven. Solar and wind are not coming online fast enough to solve the problem. This leaves nuclear power, which may be able to address the entire dilemma

In a new study of the future of nuclear energy CNN points out the data centers will be absolutely necessary as a if not the major engine for AI installations. The analysts also show that the billionaires and America’s richest companies plan to build these installations themselves.

Nuclear has two hurdles to overcome. The first one is that Americans fear the health effects of older installations. They remember the 1979 meltdown of Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986. That anxiety may not go away for decades.

SMRs May Be Solution

These anxieties leave small modular reactors (SMRs) as the most likely solution, They purport to be safer, and can be built faster than traditional installations. They also have virtually no emissions. One challenge of these is that they need to be built near AI server farms and cannot use the traditional grid. This may be easier said than done, However if the electricity source and servers are self contained, they be the sole solution to AI’s primary problem,

No one is going to rebuild the traditional US grid soon. It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. That leaves nuclear at the top of the pyramid of solutions.