The U.S. government is shelling out a whopping $2.7 billion to three companies in an effort to strengthen domestic uranium enrichment, amid surging electricity demand from AI data centers.
The Department of Energy announced on Monday that it will award $900 million each to American Centrifuge Operating and Orano Federal Services, as well as General Matter, a nuclear startup backed by billionaire investor Peter Thiel.
The funding will be distributed through task orders over the next 10 years, under what the department described as a “strict milestone approach.”
The cheapest choice for reliable power in the US is natural gas. Fossil fuels are often in the news for causing all kinds of issues. Therefore a statement like “this is highly unlikely to benefit the public at large” seems quite unfounded. That is, unless you don’t consider burning fossil fuels instead to be a harm.
If you give a shit about our future, investments in carbon-free power are to be celebrated.
Your missing my point. This is solely being driven by the need being created by data centers, not from any kind of environmental analysis. I have zero confidence the energy created from these projects will go to public infrastructure in a way that will drive down costs for the average American. This will likely solely benefit the tech oligarchs at the helm of these companies to keep their operational costs to a minimum.
Because AI is not about turning a profit, it’s about surveillance and if you give a shit about the future, that is not something you can forget.
We’re still burning coal in this country. If AI dies down and we shut down the coal plants because we have more nuclear, that’s a win