WSJ: South Carolina to Reboot Giant Nuclear Project to Meet AI Demand

January 23, 2025 Hunter Wallace Capitalism, Conservatism, Economy, Energy, Politics, Populists, Progressives, South Carolina, Technology 15

The Gilded Age of the Sunbelt has arrived.

WSJ:

“Santee Cooper, the big power provider in South Carolina, has tapped financial advisers to look for buyers that can restart construction on a pair of nuclear reactors that were mothballed years ago. 

The state-owned utility is betting interest will be strong, with tech giants such as Amazon.com and Microsoft in need of clean energy to fuel data centers for artificial-intelligence capabilities. 

Santee Cooper plans to announce Wednesday it is seeking proposals for buyers to complete the project at South Carolina’s sprawling V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, according to people familiar with the matter. 

The utility is working with bankers at Centerview Partners, which will accept proposals until May 5, the people said. …

A number of big nuclear reactors had gone dark amid competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. But growing demand for electricity, including that needed to power data centers, has renewed interest in nuclear plants …”

Axios:

“President Trump said in a virtual address at the World Economic Forum on Thursday that his administration is going to give “rapid approvals” to AI companies looking to build power plants attached to their data centers.

Why it matters: This makes it clear that a motivation for his national energy emergency declaration is easing construction of new fossil fueled-power plants to serve AI data centers.

Driving the news: Trump said that many people want to build power plants, which is “going to be a very big thing,” and intends to approve them under the emergency declaration “without having to go through years of waiting.”

The Trump plan is to reindustrialize America with AI to compete with China. He has obviously struck some kind of energy bargain with the tech bros that is being rolled out.

Note: The AI version of the Manhattan Project is creating a Wizard of Oz-like “superintelligence.”

14 Comments

  1. V.C. Summer was an abysmal failure with corruption abound. Guess it needs to be used for something or repurposed but definitely not what I want to hear about in the Seat of Secession. Keep the AI crap out. I don’t understand this fascination with AI. What is the logic for replacing humans with AI? I guess it’s all for the money? Scary times and nowhere to hide even in the rural South.

    • AI, crypto and commercial space opportunities are the three big obsessions of the tech broligarchs. They have persuaded Trump to go along with their agenda. It requires an enormous amount of energy to run these AI data centers. The Left hates all types of energy production. It is one of the biggest reasons they all of a sudden turned into Trump superfans.

      • “requires an enormous amount of energy”

        I wonder if energy consumption will be a limiting factor on AI ?

        Will all AI and data centers move to Iceland, for limitless geothermal and natural cooling ?

        Iceland as the global capitol of crypto mining and AI ?

      • Great point HW about their sudden about face. I still can’t comprehend the AI end game but feel it’s ultimately very sinister.

      • The “Green” crap has always really scared me because I see how suicidal it is, and how the people it most hurts are the less affluent who would be manual peasant farmers in the idyllic 19th century pastoralism these “green” autists dream of. Its the provence of the richest, out of touch, spiteful saboteurs on the autism spectrum for whom “green” crap fulfills the same, silly warm and fuzzy feeling that purchasing papal indulgences from the corrupt Borgia Vatican did back in 1500. No matter what happens with the weather, rain, drought, snow, heat, cold…it’s always “climate change.” Pretty lame playbook from tyrants in the premodern time, blaming bad weather on your political enemies as some sort of secular “wrath of the weather gods.” “Why if it wasn’t for cisgendered republicans driving SUVs we wouldn’t have a snowstorm!!!”

  3. Data centers are not for so called “AI” but for mass full spectrum surveillance by the Temple-Cathedral’s unit 8200 (garbage in garbage out programming of the doulós x-mass)…. The whole “artificial general intelligence” “bit” (?) is a psyop…

    As one of the world’s foremost Quantum computing experts, Doug Matzke (formerly of Texas Instruments) pointed out, AI general intelligence is probably not possible and certainly not even close for the far future…

    • Yes, I’ve read that deepseek outperforms all current AI LLMs on most tasks and it uses older GPUs. Plus Nvdia is having thermal problems with its Blackwell gpus.

  5. Mostly unregulated nuclear energy sites in the South, refurbished by the Techbros, who value robots over people to begin with. What could go wrong?

    They know not to take this nonsense to blue states, so they tell us we’re “special”, and we lap it up.

  6. The world’s first commercial nuclear-fusion power station is being built in my county. Virginia has 35% of the hyperscale data centers in the world.

  7. So silly, using antique nuclear concepts of 1930s Germany. Step into the 21st century and build modern designs, modular, burner breeder, accelerator driven reactors. Reactors that can be turned on or off , like a light bulb.
    The old light water reactors only get 1% of the energy out of the uranium, inefficient.
    People wanted to build burner/breeders back in the 70s, but Carter stopped it.

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