OPINION:
Americans have various sentiments about artificial intelligence, ranging from a collective shrug to enthusiasm about the technology’s enormous economic potential to fear of the apocalypse. The one thing, however, that pretty much all Americans agree on concerning AI is that no one wants our adversaries in China to win this race.
Tech companies are well aware of this sentiment and understand that it drives the conversation toward the need for more reliable and on-demand energy and away from less pressing issues such as climate change.
For instance, despite a pledge to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions last year were almost 50% higher than they were just four years before. The company probably will not reach its goal, but its executives are smart enough to realize that few people care.
At the same time, however, tech companies are trying their best to find a way to provide reliable, substantial electricity without releasing greenhouse gases.
As a practical matter, that means nuclear power. Amazon has agreed to use 480 megawatts from Talen Energy’s Susquehanna nuclear power plant. Microsoft recently signed a 20-year deal with Constellation to buy power from Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, which will restart after being retired.
In a recent interview, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai drily noted that the net-zero goal was “a very ambitious target.” He went on to say: “We are now looking at additional investments, be it solar, and evaluating technologies like small modular nuclear reactors, etc.”
There’s the problem. For whatever reason, those in the technology industry imagine that they can buy or build advanced nuclear reactors — particularly smaller, more modular ones — easily and quickly. The reality is a completely different matter.
As currently constructed, it would take at least a decade for anyone to make their way through the permitting process at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Tech companies, accustomed to bringing products to market in months and locked in existential competition with the communist regime in Beijing, are not likely to have the patience to wait for one of the slowest federal bureaucracies to make decisions.
The bad news is that the NRC will not get better in the near future. The Biden administration recently nominated Matthew Marzano, a former reactor operator, to become a commissioner.
Mr. Marzano is no doubt a perfectly competent reactor operator. Still, he is not prepared by experience, temperament or judgment to make the changes that need to be made to improve the NRC’s broken regulatory process. In his confirmation hearing, he struggled to identify anything he would change about the dysfunctional NRC. That alone should disqualify him from the post.
The Biden administration nominated Mr. Marzano with the specific intention of blocking a prospective Trump administration from addressing the flaws at the NRC by nominating someone who understands that the NRC itself is the real impediment to the growth of nuclear energy in the United States.
In short, the NRC is the problem. If we are serious about growing and improving nuclear power in the U.S., and if we are serious about building new reactors and using them in innovative ways and places, we need to renovate the NRC down to the studs. Anything less ensures that we will continue to live with delay, disappointment and failure.
Once the tech companies figure that out, we will be one step closer to the needed changes. In the meantime, the Senate needs to get serious about fixing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The first step is not rubber-stamping go-along, get-along nominees such as Mr. Marzano.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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