Essay by Eric Worrall

The entire output of the re-opened Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be used to drive artificial intelligence computers.

A once-shuttered nuclear plant could soon return to the grid. 

The planned reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant is praised as a boon for Pennsylvania and a boost for AI, but it is loathed by residents still haunted by a near-catastrophic meltdown there in 1979.

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The resurrection of Three Mile Island (TMI) — half of which remained operating after the 1979 meltdown, only closing down due to economic reasons in 2019 — was prompted by Microsoft’s need to fuel its power-hungry data centers.

A revolution in generative artificial intelligence has triggered a surge in energy needs for those data centers, pushing cloud computing giants to look for additional low carbon energy sources. 

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For others, the fear and anxiety of 1979 is still strong.

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A series of equipment malfunctions and human errors saw the plant’s Unit 2 melt down in 1979, releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere and launching mass evacuations.

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Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/cheers-angst-as-us-nuclear-plant-three-mile-island-to-reopen/ar-AA1uDRIg

It is hard to get your mind around – the entire output of the re-opened Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be used by Microsoft’s artificial intelligence data centers.

Why does AI need so much power? The reason is big AI systems need to sift through trillions, sometimes quintillions of failed attempts to find the solution they are looking for. Even at billions of potential solution evaluations per second it can take days, months or even years to achieve a result. But this process of digitally mining neural networks to find the nuggets of rightness can be accelerated by adding more computer hardware – an AI hardware arms race which has led to the current situation, in which big tech companies have started rehabilitating nuclear reactors, for the sole purpose of powering their next generation data centers.

Anyone wanting to delve deeper into why AI needs so much power can read an explanation in my recent article about AI, and see a real AI in action.

The renewable energy revolution is dead man walking thanks to the rise of AI. Even if better algorithms are discovered, the huge AI data centres won’t be retired, the better algorithms will be used to increase the processing power of existing AI systems, and help design next generation systems which suck even more power.

We stand at the dawn of the Information Age, the age of Artificial Intelligence. Politicians and even tech companies might still pay lip service to renewables, and some of the more intellectually challenged holdout politicians in Britain and Australia still haven’t received the memo, but one thing is beyond doubt: the energy hungry Information Age will not be powered by rooftop solar and “community batteries”, it will be powered by nuclear, coal, gas, whatever scraps of power energy hungry AI companies can scrounge to feed the wolf, to cast into the gaping maw of their frantically growing AI systems, to maintain their competitive edge. Anyone who hesitates or pauses even slightly to question what they are creating will be trampled by the stampede, the race to the finish line.

Drill, baby, drill.