Half a century ago, raw emotion drove an anti-nuclear energy campaign that still stifles clean energy development in the U.S. Today, that same fear-driven playbook is being deployed in a campaign to shut down data centers.
Between 1970 and 1990, America built 95 nuclear power plants that still supply nearly a fifth of the nation’s electricity, but the minor incident at Three Mile Island led to cancellation of another 67 planned builds.
The U.S. did not build another nuclear powerplant between 1996 and 2016. Even today, efforts to revitalize the nation’s nuclear power industry face skepticism and legacy regulatory roadblocks.
Small modular reactors were first tested decades ago and could already be powering data centers had anti-nuclear fearmongering not stopped the Integral Fast Reactor program in 1994.
Many Americans today are rightly riled up about data centers robbing communities of precious drinking water resources and raising their electric bills. Others ask whether data centers are part of a vast secret conspiracy to take away their jobs, their freedom, and perhaps even their lives.
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