Maintaining the safety and reliability of our electric grid system is one of America’s greatest national and economic challenges. The system is in great distress, as even the grid operators have continually warned.
What is clear is that unrealistic and unattainable mandates to switch to wind and solar power have put our power system in great jeopardy. America continues to shut down vital coal plants, and even natural gas is under assault. These two fossil fuels provide well over half of our electric power.
At a rally last month in York, Pennsylvania, Trump endorsed a bigger role for nuclear energy to power our submarines and aircraft carriers and jump-start urgently needed data centers. “We will make the historic commitment of bringing advanced small modular reactors online,” Trump promised.
He’s not the only one who sees nuclear power as a clean and reliable path forward. Microsoft’s recent announcement to reopen the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania is a welcome development. The accident on that planet did more than anything in the 1970s to scare Americans about the risks of nuclear power.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates argues that nuclear is safer now and a necessary addition to our energy portfolio given that the cloud, data centers, and the AI revolution, require massive energy.
The urgency of action was recently noted by the Washington Post, which reported that America is falling behind in the race for data centers, which are essential in developing new AI programs. What’s the hold-up? The capacity of our electric grid system across the country needs rapid expansion.
Nuclear power is one obvious solution. Yet the left is still living in the 1970s in its opposition to nuclear plants. This opposition is hard to explain, given that clean nuclear power is key to any strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Small and less dangerous modular reactors can be dedicated to a single data center complex, powering the whole facility independently of the larger power grid.
These smaller modules protect our energy supply and the internet from security attacks launched against the grid. They can also relieve the stress from our already overburdened system, allowing the data centers to operate autonomously. One of these small and less dangerous modular reactors can be dedicated to a single data center complex, thus providing relief for the overburdened grid system.
This can’t happen soon enough.
The energy required to power one of the smaller data center facilities is the equivalent of the energy consumption of 700 households.
Microsoft is designing a $100 billion data center, and other American tech titans, including Google and AWS , have similar plans. These giant data centers are the next big thing in storing and processing trillions of pieces of data, which is vital to the AI revolution. None of this technological evolution can happen if our electric power capacity experiences blackouts and brownouts, as we’ve seen in California.
It should seem obvious to all but the most ardent green energy activists that wind and solar power are not scalable and too intermittent to serve this enormous need for reliable power.
Natural gas can be one major source of abundant power, but there is room for nuclear power. But nuclear is critical.
Whether it is Kamala Harris or Trump in the White House next year, the next president must appoint people to the regulatory agencies who are overtly pro-nuclear. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has been an obstacle to new nuclear reactors, and those regulatory hurdles have been in place for decades.
We believe that allowing states to conduct their own environmental reviews and submit them to the NRC for approval is a possible compromise between pro-nuclear states and Washington, D.C. Other challenges with nuclear power include securing insurance on these new plants in the case of accidents.
America has the brainpower and the entrepreneurial drive to lead the world in the next generation of AI and robotics. The only obstacle is a safe and stable energy mix to power the transformation.
