Microsoft's darkly hilarious nuclear flailing

Don't trick yourself into thinking Three Mile Island is Actually Good.

Not a photo of the Microsoft executive who had this brilliant idea.

Most modern, nuanced climate-minded people are grudgingly in favor of nuclear power. That made the recent announcement that Microsoft is paying to have the notorious Three Mile Island nuclear generating station reopened a bit undigestible. 

But you should go with your gut on this. Microsoft buying nuclear power (at a premium) from a facility made famous by a meltdown, at a time when it's energy footprint is ballooning due to its insistence on the inevitable ubiquity of a technology consumers actively dislike is like a Succession plot line. It’s ridiculous and should be called out as such.

Here's an excerpt from my new piece for The New Republic:

Microsoft has long wanted to power the A.I. future with nuclear fission, and has hinted at plans to be at the forefront of this technology. A.I. data centers are notorious power-hogs, their electrical demand projected to grow 160 percent by 2030. But nuclear energy, Microsoft suggested, might offer a way out of this problem. Last year, the tech giant posted a job ad seeking a manager with at least six years of experience in the nuclear energy industry for a role leading “all aspects of energy infrastructure for global growth.” What hi-tech magic did Microsoft have up its sleeve? Was it about to crack the code and roll out the long-awaited series of small modular reactors that have been touted for years with “let’s get real” smugness by activists like Michael Shellenberger as the only way to cut greenhouse gases and still meet the world’s energy needs? Would Microsoft’s “AI for Good” team, supposedly “working to accelerate solutions and develop climate resilience with AI,” somehow find the silver bullet?

Now, almost exactly a year later, Microsoft has finally announced at least one part of what this energy plan actually is: to reopen America’s most cursed nuclear generating station, Three Mile Island. Microsoft and Baltimore’s Constellation Energy will bring the shuttered 835 megawatt Three Mile Island Unit 1 back online after five years out of service. Unit 1 is not, it should be noted, the same unit that melted down in 1979 in America’s worst and most notorious commercial nuclear accident. That would be unit 2—which will remain closed. The enterprise will be renamed “Crane Clean Energy Center.”

In a sane world, this farce should mark the end of the romance between Big Tech and nuclear power. But that is not the world we live in.

(Read the rest here.)