President-elect Donald Trump wants to gut the Biden administration’s policies that promote wind turbines and electric vehicles.
But nuclear power is the only source of energy with growing support among both Republicans and Democrats, and this week President Joe Biden handed his successor two more major victories in the bipartisan fight to reverse America’s atomic decline.
At the United Nations’ climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Tuesday, the White House unveiled a sweeping new pledge to triple the United States’ production of nuclear power by 2050.
Over the next quarter century, the proposal aims to add 200 gigawatts of power, or enough to power every household in the U.S., with plenty left over for industrial purposes. That’s at least three times the output of U.S. nuclear power in 2020, before the country’s only two new reactors built from scratch in decades came online in Georgia.
The announcement builds on a global pledge the Biden administration led at last year’s conference in Dubai to triple global nuclear capacity by 2050.
San Luis Obispo Tribune via Getty Images
On Wednesday, California’s last nuclear station took a landmark step to deploy semiconductor giant NVIDIA’s new artificial-intelligence computing technology at the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. In January, the Biden administration helped save the plant from closure with a $1.1 billion loan to fund maintenance work to keep its two reactors running.
Now the plant, owned by utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric, is set to be the first in the country to use the startup Atomic Canyon’s generative AI software to “transform document search and retrieval, and deliver significant cost savings and improved operational efficiency.”
The announcements are the latest in a series of deals that look to be turning around the long-ailing American nuclear industry’s fortunes.
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In September, Microsoft said it would spend $16 billion to bring the functioning reactor at the Three Mile Island station in Pennsylvania, which closed in 2019 for financial reasons, back online to power a data center serving its own AI efforts. Later that month, the Energy Department finalized a $1.5 billion loan to bring the nation’s most recently shuttered nuclear plant, the single-reactor Palisades station in Michigan, into operation again.
Last month, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon struck deals to build what could be the country’s first fourth-generation reactors, relatively small units that use molten salt or high-temperature gas as coolants instead of water.
Though the benefits of nuclear power to curb climate change might have helped win over once-skeptical Democrats during the Biden administration, supporters of atomic energy are likely to change tack, said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
“Being a leader in new nuclear technology is something very clever because that can afford you export opportunities,” she said.
“If you are approaching the nuclear question by saying, ‘This is actually good for the economy,’ then suddenly you are changing the argument,” Corbeau added. “If you say, ‘This is good because this is clean,’ I don’t think this is appealing to Mr. Trump.”