(Original caption) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The four cooling towers at the three -mile nuclear power plant do not work after a leak in the cooling system that ends the factory here.
Bettmann file
“What will I do with the rest of my life?” This was asked by the legendary naval officer Hyman Rickover after 2nd World War, and after a US Navy powered by diesel fuel was revealed as somewhat behind the seasons by an air force that could promote greater power much faster in a global way.
Fortunately, Rickover was the personification of the “absurd”, and it is the absurd that creates the future. In the case of Rickover, he saw the nuclear energy in response to the navy suffering.
Not only the nuclear submarines that could operate underwater for months at a time, while they were ready to hit from anywhere in a moment, the same nuclear energy made it possible for the Navy ships to glorify their locations much more efficiently, including aircraft and aircraft. power. The depreciation born of a creative disaster caused by the US Air Force was resolved. But for a problem.
As Marc Wortman observed, one of Rickover’s biographers, “nuclear propulsion for merchant ships” finally “fell soon. What was possible for entities capable of getting taxpayers was not possible for businesses disciplined by the real market forces. A nuclear power plant built for the Navy in Pennsylvania costs $ 116 million for construction, but production “costs eight times that of a typical carbon burning plant”.
The look is a navy and its mission is perpetuated by the ineffective use of resources. The invisible is how the US military would have evolved more generally from walking, speaking a government subsidy that is the US Tax Code.
This brings us to artificial intelligence (AI) and the enormous demands of power related to promises to transform work as we know it and convert it, release millions and possibly billions of the work they need to do, all in favor of the work they cannot do. What will lift workers and their productivity to levels that make the present appear primitive from comparison also converting the use of energy in front of our eyes.
See Microsoft’s collaboration with Constellation Energy, in which the technology innovative will buy power from a renewed three -mile nuclear plant as a way of meeting the needs of consumption of multiplier data centers. Readers are likely to guess where they are going, or maybe not.
While some consider nuclear energy as one and only source of abundant power that is also clear, its finances have never been added. What worked very well in a sense of power had a luxurious quality in it so that what made sense for the government -funded entities did not have any financial logic in entities that did not have such a consistent and increasing source of capital. Enter AI.
Its power requirements are so important that nuclear energy is made economically, where it was not for the longest period. Better yet, since Microsoft will not currently demand all the power produced on a renewed three -mile island, excess will reduce energy costs for businesses and people in the area ready to benefit from what Microsoft does not consume.
What is a happy reminder that where the markets prevail, problems are solved much faster. By doing nuclear economic energy, Microsoft and others do not just bring the transformative technology to the world, they also set the stage for a market -based energy evolution that would not have been revealed without the abundance of the necessary power to discover it.
