Reviving nuclear power plants to power AI threatens an avalanche of nuclear waste
Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania was shutdown following the partial meltdown of its Unit 2 reactor on March 28, 1979.in Washington state. Nuclear power, the industry claims, will help satisfy the surging power demands from data centers and the growing AI economy. But such a wrong turn ignores the long-unresolved problems of radioactive nuclear wastes that AI cannot wish away.
An authoritative December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy, written by energy experts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is especially illuminating. The growth inover the next five years, they state, would correspond “to a total power demand for data centers between 74 and 132 .” That would represent some 7 to 12 percent of the U.S. electricity consumption forecast for 2028.
, “In some cases these new reactors may make it worse by creating more waste that’s more costly to manage, new kinds of complex waste, or just more waste, period.”the procedural and practical difficulties faced by novel nuclear reactor technologies in gaining NRC acceptance and achieving commercial success. Shortly after it had received NRC certification in 2023, for example, the much-toutedafter anticipated construction costs more than doubled to $9.3 billion.
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