Three Mile Island was closed because it wasn’t economical to operate. Now Microsoft wants it restarted in the hopes it can one day supply carbon-free energy for its datacenters.
Walter Bibikow/Getty Images
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Walter Bibikow/Getty Images
Three Mile Island was closed because it wasn’t economical to operate. Now Microsoft wants it restarted in the hopes it can one day supply carbon-free energy for its datacenters.
Walter Bibikow/Getty Images
Artificial intelligence uses a lot of power.
Some of the next generation data centers may use as much power as one million U.S. households.
Tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta hope nuclear power will offer a climate solution for this massive energy use. Nuclear power plants can deliver hundreds of megawatts of power without producing greenhouse gas emissions.
But while Silicon Valley tends to “move fast and break things,” nuclear power has a reputation for moving slowly. That’s because in the nuclear energy field, “breaking things” can mean catastrophic damage. That makes some long-time watchers of the nuclear industry skeptical that it’s the right investment for big tech companies to make.
Read more of science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel’s reporting here.
Interested in more stories about the future of energy? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We’d love to hear from you!
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts and James Willets was the audio engineer.
