The US is falling behind our competitors in building new nuclear power plants, even as the demand for electricity to fuel the growth of AI is exploding. President Trump is offering a new twist to the AI industry. Build your own plants, and the administration will fast track your approvals. Mikenzie Frost reports from South Carolina, where she found one startup racing to revive the nuclear industry.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

Chris Gatch: Every time you do something on your phone, something happens in a data center.

Chris Gatch works with DC Blox in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The company is a digital hub, where fiber optic lines from all over the world deliver torrents of data to fuel artificial intelligence.

Mikenzie Frost: So how much would you say, how much energy would you say it takes to do an AI search compared to a regular internet search?

Chris Gatch: Yeah, so a regular internet search probably uses enough energy to light a light bulb for maybe 10 seconds. And na AI search, like a chat box search, probably two to three minutes.

The US is leading the world in expanding artificial intelligence. Last year, AI startups raised a total of $159 billion in private investment. At the same time, new AI data centers are being built, driving energy demand that is expected to more than double in the next five years.

Tech giants like Google, which rely heavily on AI to power tools like Flow — where entire video scenes are created and edited without a human — are securing long-term nuclear energy agreements to meet their growing power needs.

Meta, parent company of Facebook, secured power from a nuclear plant in Illinois. Microsoft is working to restart a reactor at the Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania. Amazon and Google are making similar moves.

Chris Gatch: I think nuclear has to be part of the conversation because I don’t think ultimately we want to, for the next 20, 30, 40 years, build this amount of incremental capacity, um, and have it all be carbon based power.

But there’s a major obstacle: the time it takes to get a nuclear plant online. In the US, a nuclear plant averages a decade in the making. China’s reactor timelines are around five-to-seven years on average for recent builds, and the country has a much larger pipeline of ongoing construction.

Mikenzie Frost: If someone told you that they could cut the construction of a nuclear power plant in half, what would you say?

Chris Gatch: That would be very good news.

Joe Klecha: So this is our main project office.

Joe Klecha is the chief nuclear officer at a private company named “The Nuclear Company” in Columbia, South Carolina.

Joe Klecha: We just opened it a couple months ago.

The Nuclear Company video: “American nuclear energy is being revived in South Carolina.”

The Nuclear Company touts itself as a pioneer in what’s called fleet-scale deployment of nuclear power. Its strategy of building multiple plants at once using standardized processes to cut costs and timelines.

Joe Klecha: Our target as a company would be able to get new nuclear deployment to a five year cycle.

It’s an ambitious goal, shaped by some hard lessons learned.

Klecha worked at the Vogtle nuclear facility in Georgia.

The plant is the only new nuclear facility built in the US in 30 years.

It was mired in decades of delays. The original $14billion price tag soared to over $30 billion and forced the original contractor, Westinghouse Electric Company, into bankruptcy.

Mikenzie Frost: Why would this not experience the same levels of budget issues and timeline problems?

Joe Klecha: The Vogel plant was a first of a kind project. With any first of a kind project, you expect there to be a higher cost. We believe in not building first of a kind technology. So we’re very interested in technologies that exist today that have been built that we can take those initial lessons from and continue to feed those forward to drive the cost and efficiency down.

As the demand for nuclear power on a shorter timeline grows, the White House is weighing in.

President Donald Trump: “Thank you very much. We have a big announcement today. It has to do with nuclear energy.”

President Trump has signed a series of executive orders to speed development of nuclear power.

The Trump plan aims to fast-track approvals for new nuclear plants and build 10 new reactors within five years. It also encourages government funding to increase power output and upgrade existing plants.

In the end, the stepped up focus on nuclear energy transcends soaring energy demands at home. It’s a matter of global power.

Joe Klecha: China’s very focused on this for a reason. From a military perspective, a national security perspective, or even a business perspective, there is a large push to win this AI war. And right now, with that path going through energy, we are falling behind.

Mikenzie Frost: What happens if that power need is not met?

Chris Gatch: If the power need, need isn’t met, then we don’t meet the opportunity of AI. We’re in a race on AI, there’s a commercial race, right? A global economic race. We don’t want businesses that are not using AI to its full potential when our economic competitors are.

Mikenzie Frost: Besides the race to build new plants, is the need to fuel them. Last month the Department of Energy launched a new initiative to grow the nation’s nuclear fuel supply chain. For Full Measure, I’m Mikenzie Frost.

Watch video here.

The post (WATCH) New Nuclear appeared first on Sharyl Attkisson.

 

IPAK-EDU is grateful to Sharyl Attkisson as this piece was originally published there and is included in this news feed with mutual agreement. Read More