A strange marriage of convenience: when artificial intelligence and nuclear energy shake hands

Artificial intelligence has skyrocketed the carbon emissions of big technology companies. The large energy expenditure that this technology entails is distancing all of them from their goal of being carbon neutral, a milestone that they had planned to meet by 2030. The solution they have found are strange marriages of convenience, in which the digital industry The 21st century shakes hands with a technology that has barely advanced since the 20th century, nuclear energy.

Each one has signed different terms. Microsoft has reached an agreement to reactivate a nuclear power plant that had been offline since 2019 due to lack of economic profitability. This is unit one of Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania (USA), the same one that suffered in 1979 the worst nuclear accident in the country’s history. Then its unit two had a reactor failure that caused the leak of radioactive gases and iodine, the evacuation of 200,000 people and the beginning of the decline in the construction of nuclear power plants in the country.

“This agreement is an important milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to contribute to the decarbonization of the grid in support of our commitment to reduce carbon emissions,” Bobby Hollis, vice president of Energy at Microsoft, said in a statement.

Amazon has purchased a high-capacity data center adjacent to another of the large centers in the United States, Susquehanna, also located in Pennsylvania. In this case, it was the company that operates the plant that decided to build the digital infrastructure, hoping that the growing energy requirements of the technology giants would attract them to this alternative.

He didn’t even have to wait to finish building it: Amazon put 600 million euros on the table and kept it. When fully operational, the data center will consume 40% of the maximum power Susquehanna can produce.

“To complement our wind and solar energy projects, which depend on weather conditions to generate energy, we are also exploring new innovations and technologies and investing in other sources of clean, carbon-free energy,” an Amazon spokesperson explained to elDiario. is. The nuclear data center “is a project that goes in that direction,” he assured.

Pocket nuclear: the SMR

There is a third way in addition to resurrecting plants built in the 70s or taking advantage of the surplus that the current ones are not capable of placing. They are small modular reactors or SMR, for their acronym in English. This is an emerging technology that consists of assembling and building reactors in factories so that they can be more easily transported to the place where they are needed. At the moment they have not gone beyond the prototyping phase.

All the tech giants have approached SMRs, but “the world’s first corporate agreement to buy nuclear power from multiple small modular reactors” has been signed by Google with a startup trying to develop a stable working model, Kairos Power. “The initial phase aims to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR into operation quickly and safely by 2030, followed by the deployment of additional reactors until 2035,” he said. detailed Google.

The multinational comes to explain that the end justifies the means. “The grid needs new sources of electricity to support artificial intelligence technologies that drive important scientific advances, improve services for businesses and customers, and drive national competitiveness and economic growth,” he says. This will allow us to “unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence for everyone.”

For specialists, this alliance has not come as a surprise. The key, they explain, is availability. “Unlike other fossil fuel markets, the uranium market is a very stable market overall, with very little price swing. Therefore, the future costs of electricity generation can be predicted,” explains Gonzalo Jiménez, professor of Nuclear Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

“Another thing that makes them quite attractive is that they have a very intense energy. With very little physical space they are capable of generating a lot of energy. You can have a small modular reactor very close to your data center with the assurance that, regardless of the weather and wind or sun conditions, you will have stable energy production,” he adds.

Spain and Germany, against

For the moment, Google will only deploy these reactors in the US. In Spain the PP and Vox have expressed this type of technology. However, Spain is, along with Germany, the countries most reluctant to this type of new reactors. “Right now they are the exception in all of Europe,” says Jiménez.

“In most countries, even those that have historically had no interest in the technology, there are initiatives to build this type of reactors in the more or less near future. There are countries that already have more advanced studies, industrial type, call France or Poland, for example,” adds the professor.

However, neither optimism nor the “green” vision of nuclear energy is shared by everyone. “Nuclear is on the decline, not the rise, and no push from lobbyists is going to change that fact. It emits between 9 and 37 times more CO2 than wind power so no matter how much some people repeat it, there is no nuclear solution. It is magical thinking,” Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere and Energy program at Stanford University, recently told elDiario.es.

Other specialists highlight that many of the assertions about the business potential of these small reactors do not hold up. “There is a lot of smoke and a lot of propaganda,” says Pedro Fresco, energy expert and author of Energy Fakes.

“They hope that by manufacturing them in series they can improve costs. Based on repetition. That line is exactly the opposite of what nuclear engineers had traditionally followed, of making them bigger and bigger to make them more efficient. Now a race has begun to apply economies of scale,” adds Fresco: “What is the reality? That today there are only two countries that have a connected SMR, which are Russia and China. In both cases they are prototypes, and in both cases the costs have skyrocketed far above what was expected.”

The specialist emphasizes that the only Western company that has obtained a license to deploy an SMR, NuScale, has had to cancel the project because it implies final costs much higher than budgeted. The other Western companies do not yet have a license and have not installed any reactors, so the real cost of the technology is unknown.

Google has not made public the figures for the contract with Kairos Power, but says that buying several reactors from it before they have even been able to verify that they have a commercially viable model will help its development. “By procuring electricity from multiple reactors we will help accelerate the repeat deployment of reactors needed to reduce costs and bring Kairos Power technology to market more quickly,” he noted in his announcement.

“Many agreements of intentions have been made, but we do not have them as realities. They are all prototypes, we don’t know costs. It is an idea that may look very good on paper because it generates 24/7, but if they are going to charge you for electricity four times more expensive than solar or wind, what are you going to say? The reality is that we have had enormous expectations for the development of nuclear energy for 70 years, but they are never fulfilled. The SMRs are another huge bubble of expectations,” concludes Fresco.