The Unlikely Hero in the Climate Saga
The simple truth is that our modern world is fantastically, almost comically, hungry for electricity. Governments have spent years patting themselves on the back for installing wind turbines and solar panels, which is all well and good until the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down. You can’t run a country on intermittent power. Nuclear, for all its baggage, offers something renewables cannot, a steady, reliable, carbon-free hum of baseload power, 24 hours a day.
Then there’s the small matter of artificial intelligence, which, it turns out, is thirstier for electricity than a marathon runner is for water. The vast data centres needed to power our new AI overlords require a staggering amount of guaranteed energy. And let’s not forget the geopolitical angle. The war in Ukraine was a rather brutal lesson in the dangers of relying on your adversaries for energy. Suddenly, having your own domestic power source that doesn’t depend on foreign gas pipelines looks terribly sensible.