Nuclear Power | Computational Impacts

I vividly remember the Three Mile Island incident which, to-date, remains the most severe accident in US commercial nuclear plant history. The military’s own radiation soaked history, still mostly classified, surely includes even darker moments. At the time, I was a boy who, among other things, studied nuclear energy. We all need hobbies, and learning about reactors was one of mine. Softball, lemonade and subcritical atomics; a good childhood, various things considered. Once the story broke on local news in Philadelphia on what I recall as a crisp, March day in 1979 that TMI, as it was known, was in trouble, the adults in my life – at church and school and in my family – aware of my interests, turned to me to explain what it all meant. Would it explode, like the warhead of a Titan II, meant for Moscow? Or would radiation creep down the Susquehanna River from TMI’s upstate Pennsylvania location, killing us softly? Unexpectedly, I had an audience for ad hoc lectures about failing coolant systems.

What motivated those adults to listen to a child was unease, approaching terror. That was the dominant emotion. Quietly managed, ever present unease. It was appropriate. How close we came, we now know, to a full meltdown, a Chernobyl-level event.

***

TMI recently came back to my thoughts, like a suddenly remembered nightmare, because of news stories that Microsoft, claiming an acute need for electrical power to supply its ‘AI’ data centers, had signed an agreement with Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, to re-open one of its reactors.

Here’s an excerpt from the Financial Times article, ‘Microsoft in deal for Three Mile Island nuclear power to meet AI demand –

Constellation Energy will reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania to provide power to Microsoft as the tech giant scours for ways to satisfy its soaring energy demand while keeping its emissions in check.

The companies on Friday unveiled a 20-year power supply deal which will entail Constellation reopening Unit 1 of the nuclear facility which was shuttered in 2019, in what would be the second such reopening of a plant in the US.

Three Mile Island’s second unit, which was closed in 1979 after a partial meltdown that led to the most serious nuclear accident in US history, will remain closed.

“The decision here is the most powerful symbol of the rebirth of nuclear power as a clean and reliable energy source,” said Constellation chief executive Joe Dominguez on a call with investors.

[…]

As I began writing this essay, I tried to think of an appropriate introduction, perhaps a quote from Phillip K Dick, whose work is a meditation on technology and madness, leitmotifs of our barbarous era. In the end, I decided to let the situation’s dangerous absurdity speak for itself.

Let’s then, state the absurd: Microsoft and its ‘hyper-scale’ competitors (more co-conspirators, at this point), Amazon and Google, are turning to nuclear power to provide energy for their generative AI data centers. Pause for a moment to reflect on that sentence which I wrote as plainly as possible, foregoing writerly effects. To some, it’s a dream materialized, the science fiction world they imagined, come to life. To more sober minds, it’s a nightmare; an indication of how detached the software wing of capitalism is from the work of providing anything related to the goods and services people and organizations need or want.

It also puts flesh on the bones of that old phrase, ‘late stage capitalism’.

***

No one asked for so-called ‘generative AI’, the marketing name for a collection of algorithmic methods that ingest text, images, sounds etc – primarily from the Internet, without permission or compensation – iteratively processed using statistics, adjusted by poorly paid workers, computationally kneaded, to produce plausible outputs, that are sold as products. No one asked for it, but as I’ve discussed in a previous essay, the US tech industry’s key players, like gamblers drunk on hubris and hope, have bet their futures on super profits, courtesy of ‘AI’.

And, like desperate gamblers who, as their streak of luck ends, insist everyone around them just believe, the tech industry uses its media leverage to push a story: there’s an urgent need for more electricity to power the ‘AI’ the world allegedly clamors for. We are told there is a demand so great that even old nuclear power plants, such as the Three Mile Island facility must be restarted.

“AI demand” is the theme, the leitmotif; a story that ‘demand’ (no numbers are offered) is extraordinary, requiring that an ancient and indeed, infamous, nuclear plant must be resurrected, rising unbidden, like Godzilla, patron saint of the atomic age, from Tokyo bay. In 1966, Phillip K Dick wrote a novelette titled ‘We Can Remember it for You Wholesale’, the basis for the 1990 action film, ‘Total Recall’. Today, looking around at our world, PKD might be inspired to write a sequel, ‘We Will Demand it, For You’.

But what, exactly, is being demanded? According to Microsoft, its products such as Copilot, the company’s rebranding of OpenAI’s suite of large language model based systems (ChatGPT is the best known example):

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant designed to help people with a range of tasks and activities on their devices. It can create drafts of content, suggest different ways to word things you’ve written, suggest and insert images or banners, create PowerPoint presentations from Word documents and many other helpful things.

[…]

Our demand for creating automated drafts of documents is so incredible, Microsoft tells us, that it is running out of electricity to spark the data centers providing this vital service and nuclear power, even if supplied by a decades old plant, best known for being the site of a partial meltdown, is their, and we’re encouraged to think, our last, best hope to keep the document summaries flowing. In the science fiction stories I read as a boy, nuclear power took humanity to the stars and energized the glowing hearts of robots. In the world crafted by the tech giants, it helps us create pivot tables for spreadsheets the sales team must have, lest darkness fall.

***

As lies go, the tech industry’s promotion of the idea that we’re demanding it build more data centers, to host more computational equipment, to produce more ‘generative AI’, for more chatbots and variations thereof, ranks as among the most incredible and ridiculous. It seems however, that we live in an age in which danger, lies and absurdity walk arm and arm, dragging us straight into the abyss. This is the moment in a critical essay when it is expected that the author proposes solutions, an answer to the question, ‘what is to be done?’.

Instead of that I offer a warning: the tech industry cannot be regulated and ‘ethics’ is only a diversion. Instead of trying to reform this system, monstrous in conception and execution, our efforts would be better spent preparing to circumvent and eventually, replace it.