The American power grid is buckling under pressure. Climate change and increasing energy demands are pushing the dated infrastructure to its limit. While plans are under way to revamp the power grid over time, the recent AI boom requires a significant amount of energy that has to come from somewhere.
To meet increasing energy demands and limit their environmental impact, tech companies are turning to renewable energy sources. While sources like solar and wind come with the downside of not being available around the clock, nuclear energy seems to hold promise in delivering consistent power.
Three major tech companies with offices in Seattle: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have already begun to invest in nuclear power sources. Microsoft is funding the refurbishing of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, which was shut down in 1979 after an unfortunate incident where two of the plant’s reactors melted. In addition to the refurbishing initiative, Microsoft has also agreed to buy energy from the Seattle based nuclear fusion energy startup, Helion Energy, which aims to develop nuclear fusion on Earth by 2028. The reader should note that nuclear fusion does not exist on Earth yet. The closest nuclear fusion reactor to Bellevue College would be the sun. Google and Amazon have both made agreements with modular reactor startups to meet their energy demands, the former with Kairos Power and the latter with X-Energy.
While these decisions seem like a positive step to reducing emissions from AI, not everyone is convinced that tech companies mean to follow through with their promises. Dr. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, made a statement where he emphasizes that none of the three companies have made upfront investments, and believes that all the risk and costs of operating nuclear plants will fall on taxpayers. He criticizes Google and Amazon’s investment in technology that has not yet made it off paper and raises concerns on the currently short supply of uranium fuel needed to power the reactors.
