Nukes or No Nukes?

When I was in college I commuted to Villanova and worked part time at a convenience store in Swarthmore, PA.

The early 70s were a different time politically.  Swarthmore College was, effectively, Berkeley east, but without the violence of its western brother.

The college was located in the affluent borough of Swarthmore, and many of my customers lived in town and were staff of the college.  In today’s world most of these customers would probably be categorized as “left wing” or radical.  Back then they were just customers.

One thing that was pretty common amongst my customers was the bumper sticker that many of them had on their Volvos and Mercedes: “No Nukes.”

Frankly, I never gave the stickers much thought.

The 60s and 70s were the heyday of nuclear power plants.  Plants were built in the U.S. and in many countries around the world.  In fact, France would build so many plants that, even today, a large portion of their electric power was derived from nuclear.

After graduation I got a job in a bank.  One of my favorite customers was a composer and symphony conductor.  He and his wife were the nicest people.

One afternoon in early 1979 they approached me to make a large withdrawal.  They had a high five-figure balance in their passbook account and wanted to withdraw about half of it.  When this type of situation would occur, we were trained to chat with the customer, not so much as to stop them from making the transaction, but to ensure that they were not being swindled or that perhaps they were making an investment with which we could compete and retain the funds.

No, my customer said, everything is fine but they were making an investment based on their stockbroker’s advice.

No problem.  I cut them a check and didn’t think another thing about it.

A few months later they were back with a much smaller check from their broker.  I found out that they’d invested in General Public Utilities (GPU).  What happened?   GPU was the owner of the Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant.

In late March of 1979, TMI suffered the worst nuclear power plant accident in U.S. history.

Fortunately, the TMI accident was much less severe than the Chernobyl disaster or the Fukushima nuclear accident, but it was bad enough that, until recently, iodine pills were distributed to the communities around TMI and special sirens to warn citizens of another meltdown would blast in tests once a month.

Recently I was surprised to learn that, until about five years ago, the Unit One reactor continued to operate.

So, was TMI the death knell for nuclear power in the U.S.?  Not necessarily.  In fact, last month the Constellation Energy Group announced that it would restart TMI and sell the its electricity to Microsoft.

The 20-year deal gives Microsoft the power it needs to operate data centers that run its Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.

A few weeks ago I wrote about this coming electric capacity crisis.  In EV vs AI I described how electric vehicles (EV), AI and cryptocurrency mining will require massive amounts of energy in the coming years.

In fact, Rystad Energy has forecast that data centers and EVs alone will add 290 terawatt hours of electricity demand by the end of the decade, equivalent to the entire consumption of the nation of Turkey.

Microsoft isn’t the first to turn to nuclear.

in March, Amazon Web Services acquired Talen Energy’s data center campus connected to the Susquehanna nuclear station in northeast Pennsylvania.  Talen said it had sold the 960 MW Cumulus data center campus to Amazon for $650 million.

Google is working with utilities in the U.S. and other countries to assess nuclear power as a possible energy source for its data centers, underscoring surging interest in using atomic energy to feed the AI boom.

In a world where the electric power grid has little room for growth in the short term, utility regulators such as the Public Utility Commission of Texas has stated that if you want to build AI data centers next to power plants, you may have to build the power plant, too.

For 45 years since TMI and 60-70 years since the 1960s, there has been a fear or nuclear power and a desire to shut existing plants down, regardless of their “green” renewable energy.

Now, a resurgence of nuclear appears to being fostered by these tech giants who need the power for consumers to even more quickly find funny cat videos.