AI took us from micromanaging light bulbs to Microsoft re-starting 3 Mile Island because they need the power to run their engine. It’s like the made up climate crisis never happened.
Now, companies (and China) are racing to get their hands on as much power-generating capacity.
Data center demand is rising at a break neck speed, with little signs of slowing.
As the electricity consumption of AI rises, by 2028, a projected 12% of U.S. electricity demand could be driven from data centers. Beyond America, countries are pouring billions into AI sovereignty efforts which require data center facilities running 24/7 to power them.
Here is the share of each region’s total power demand that is driven by center centers:
As we can see, America’s data center demand leads globally, at 8.9% of total power consumption.
In Virginia, data centers account for 26% of the state’s total power consumption—or nearly triple the national average. This year, the state’s leading utility firm expects to connect 15 new data centers given surging demand.
As big tech ramps up AI spending, a significant share is being funnelled into massive data centers along with the energy sources that power them. In particular, demand for nuclear is expanding at the fastest rate in decades.
By comparison, data centers comprise 4.8% of the total power share in the European Union and 2.3% in China.
Wrong on just about everything in life and an American traitor, Jane Fonda pulls this.
You might think that a self-proclaimed climate advocate would be thrilled to see an announcement of more clean, reliable energy on the grid. But, you’d be wrong.
Last month, Constellation Energy announced a deal with Microsoft to reopen a reactor at Three Mile Island, now called the Crane Clean Energy Center. Expected to open by 2028 and operate for at least 20 years, the reactor is a promise of not only energy security amidst exploding energy demand, but an economic boon for Pennsylvania as well. According to a report completed by the Brattle Group, reopening the reactor is expected to create more than 3,000 jobs and add $16 billion to Pennsylvania’s GDP.
Yet, actor and activist Jane Fonda took to the pages of The Philadelphia Inquirer to proclaim that “Nuclear power at Three Mile Island is no climate solution.” Fueled by her decades-long hatred of the energy source, Fonda makes a bizarre and convoluted argument that America’s single largest source of clean energy is not what we need to tackle climate change.
Even worse, she misleads readers by conflating the two reactors at TMI. Unit 2, owned by Energy Solutions, was the site of the partial meltdown in 1979 and has not operated since. Unit 1 is owned by Constellation and was one of the most reliable nuclear power plants in the country until it closed in 2019 for economic reasons. Having grown up just an hour south of the facility in southern York County, I remember hearing about the ramifications of the accident. Nuclear power was seen as “scary” and “dangerous” by Pennsylvanians who simply cared about their family’s health and safety.
Now there will be less electricity for cars and other things that shouldn’t be electrified. For the rest of us, we’ll just get a bigger power bill for our houses.
Tech companies are increasingly looking to nuclear energy to meet their evolving power needs, potentially at the expense of grid reliability and ordinary American ratepayers, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The owners of about one in every three American nuclear plants are negotiating with technology firms to reach deals in which the plants would sell tech companies nuclear-generated electricity to operate their power-hungry data centers, key infrastructure that the tech firms need to support the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, according to the WSJ. The trend could divert reliable energy generation away from the rest of the power grid at a time when grid watchdogs are warning of longer-term reliability problems as electricity demand is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years due to the proliferation of data centers, electric vehicles (EVs), advanced manufacturing facilities and more.
For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is close to reaching an agreement with Constellation Energy to buy electricity from an East Coast nuclear plant, and AWS also spent $650 million on a nuclear-powered data center in Pennsylvania earlier this year, according to the WSJ. The Pennsylvania data center can receive enough electricity to keep the lights on in hundreds of thousands of households, and its purchase spurred tech sector interest in similar deals that allow companies to buy power directly from plants without needing to spend much on additional grid infrastructure to access that electricity.
Data centers may end up accounting for as much as 9% of all power consumption in America by 2030, according to the WSJ, and some officials — such as Pennsylvania Consumer Advocate Patrick Cicero — are concerned that the tech sector’s union with nuclear energy could hurt ordinary consumers by driving up prices and commanding a large share of the nation’s reliable carbon-free power.
There are two easy answers that no one wants to use. The second is the real answer in the title of this post
First, nuclear power. It’s clean, safe and as affordable as the waste of money that has occurred chasing carbon as a bogeyman. It has it’s detractors, but if the climatards were serious it would be the main source of their energy. They just want to penalize the USA and some western countries and it’s petroleum production to line their wallets. They don’t mind using other countries gas. That puts our country at a disadvantage for cost of goods produced and sold. It’s on purpose. We already saw our economic freedom between 2016 and 2020 with fracking.
Here is a recent example of one western country cutting it’s own throat, but proves that it is a cheaper solution for energy.
Germany just shut down its last nuclear power plant
Now, German energy prices are increasing by up to 45%
On top of that, Germany started importing nuclear energy from France on Saturday to cover a shortfall 🤦♀ pic.twitter.com/2kJ5YjuOd2
The wrong people are leading the the self created energy crisis and climate scam.
The real answer is fusion energy. It is self perpetuating and an endless source. Of course that would mean the end of the climate gravy train and control of the narrative that we are being assaulted with.
Here goes:
On Dec. 5, for a fraction of a second, a man-made star was created at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. The occasion was an experiment in nuclear fusion that succeeded in doing something no fusion experiment had done before: It emitted more energy than it consumed.
The experiment amounted to a big step forward in basic science. If the technology used at NIF is developed to its full potential, it could provide a virtually endless source of energy that would be clean and inexpensive. You’d think that nuclear fusion technology would be pushed forward by billions of dollars in research and development, but you’d be wrong, because it doesn’t fit into the “climate change” industry’s mantra that any nuclear power generation has to be bad.
Nuclear fusion is what happens on and in the sun. At temperatures up to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit, the sun fuses types of hydrogen — tritium and deuterium — under enormous pressure in such a way as to produce enough heat and light to warm and illuminate our planet, which is about 93 million miles away.
One of the benefits of fusion technology is that it produces virtually no nuclear waste like a nuclear fission plant does. Moreover, the “half-life” of the “activated” materials is far shorter than those of the conventional nuclear power plant, which produces “hot” waste such as fuel rods that are radioactive for hundreds of years.
Oh, it has it’s problems, but we went from the Wright brothers to the moon in 66 years. If we were serious about the problem of replacing petroleum, then it would get solved.
For example:
First, the “target” mass of tritium and deuterium is destroyed by the fusion that takes place within it. To render the technology feasible, you have to create targets about 10 times per second, not over a period of months as they are now.
Second, fusion emits neutrons that, at this stage, have to be converted into heat and steam to power a turbine engine that will produce electricity. Along the path of research, scientists may discover how to convert neutrons into electricity more simply and directly.
Both of these problems have to be solved — as well as the “unk-unks” that are encountered — before fusion can be made into a usable technology. And that’s where the government has to come in.
But if the Government was actually interested in the energy/climate issue other than an ATM…..
Industry can only spend money on research that is paid for either by the government or by rapid transformation into profitable products. The government’s proper role is to fund research into technologies that can later be made into profitable products. It did so many times, from the development of stealth aircraft to former President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” which developed the COVID vaccines in months rather than the decade or more it would normally have taken.
Fusion research will continue, but at a far slower pace than it could were it better funded. The outlook is good, but fusion won’t, at the current rate, produce practical — i.e., usable — fusion technology for at least a decade or two.
What is needed is a major research effort, such as the Manhattan Project, which produced nuclear weapons in the 1940s. But that won’t happen while President Joe Biden and his “climate change” minions govern us. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said on March 1: “As the Secretary of the Navy, I can tell you that I have made climate one of my top priorities since the first day I came into office.” Climate change is his priority rather than rebuilding our Navy, which has far fewer ships than the Chinese navy.
As always, it comes down to money. The climate change clowns are investing in reducing carbon emissions — eliminating fuels such as coal, natural gas, and petroleum — and converting us to weather-dependent sources of energy such as wind and solar power. They won’t even consider building more nuclear power plants regardless of how safe they are. (One of my friends used to command a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. He often reminds me that our nuclear-powered Navy ships have had zero accidents.)
Our government wastes billions on too many idiotic ideas. They are far too many to rehearse here. If we have a new president in 2025, Biden’s priorities can be tossed aside, and those billions can be spent in productive research and development of fusion and other technologies that could make us more secure and energy independent again.
Lastly, we aren’t going to run out of petroleum reserves, and it is the cheapest and easiest source of energy. Hating it is the cheapest and easiest source of increasing bank accounts and control of the masses by tyrants.
Delusions of Adequacy 
