Fossil Fuels Initially Needed for AI Boom, Nuclear Expert Says

(Bloomberg) -- The rise of artificial intelligence will drive a surge in electricity demand that’ll initially be met by fossil fuels, before nuclear replaces that source, the head of a body advising Japan’s top utility said.

As data centers are built in countries like the US and Japan, more natural gas will be needed in the short term as power demand is “rising so fast that we will not have time to build nuclear plants initially,” Dale Klein, chairman of the nuclear reform monitoring committee for Tokyo Electric Power Co., told Bloomberg TV. Klein is also a former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The rapid global adoption of AI has triggered a boom in demand for the energy-hungry data centers on which the technology depends, putting power grids to the test. While companies including Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google have invested in nuclear power to secure clean electricity for their facilities, that solution can’t be applied universally or immediately.

“We just cannot meet this big demand for these data centers without nuclear plant, if we’re going to maintain a reduction in greenhouse gases,” Klein said.

Even in the US — where there’s bipartisan political support for atomic energy — gas will be used to address the boom in power demand from AI, before small, modular reactors and larger plants can be built, according to Klein.

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In Japan, meanwhile, nuclear power remains a sensitive topic following the 2011 Fukushima disaster. While local electricity demand has been trending downward due to depopulation, experts have suggested that the decline could be reversed as the nation builds more data centers and semiconductor plants.

“At the end of the day, if Japan is going to maintain their manufacturing supply chain, and all of their activities, they are going to have to have more and more electricity,” Klein said.