Carolyn Krause is exploring what’s happening in Oak Ridge. She has read that new companies are investing in building facilities on Oak Ridge land partly for creating tomorrow’s nuclear reactors and making the special fuels they need to power future data centers for advancing artificial intelligence.
The companies will help to meet the goals of the U.S.. Department of Energy’s Manhattan Project 2.0. DOE is aiming to ensure that the United States maintains its global leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) and its competitiveness in national security, economic prosperity, and scientific discovery through supercomputing and quantum computing. AI data centers require electricity 24/7, and of all the energy sources, nuclear power is the most reliable, generating electricity more than 90% of the time.
Past accomplishments can lay a path for future achievements. As this “Historically Speaking” column has often mentioned, researchers in Oak Ridge and elsewhere learned in the past century how to make nuclear fuel and nuclear reactors, on land and sea, that have used the fuel for decades to produce electricity worldwide. Oak Ridge helped chart the way for developing advanced nuclear fuels and for designing easier-to-build, safer, more efficient, and less expensive small modular reactors that will require the new fuels to meet 21st century needs for power…