Jason Bordoff and Jared Dunnmon
Hollywood thrillers rarely change the course of history, but if they had their own category at the Academy Awards, a good candidate might be The China Syndrome. Released 45 years ago, the hit film depicts a disaster at a nuclear plant in California, sparking fears that the reactor’s core would melt down through the containment vessel—all the way to China (hence the name). Less than two weeks after its release, life imitated art as a partial nuclear meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania quickly turned public opinion against nuclear energy and effectively halted the expansion of nuclear power in the United States.
Yet after almost a half-century, the advent of artificial intelligence, described by Google CEO Sundar Pichai as “more profound than electricity or fire,” has achieved what many thought impossible. Last month, Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced they would spend $1.6 billion to restart the remaining functional reactor at Three Mile Island to fuel the tech firm’s plunge into AI, a technology with vast energy requirements due to its needs for computational power. With a global race underway to capitalize on AI’s economic and military potential—and as China quickly catches up to the United States—fears of another kind of China shock are trumping yesterday’s nuclear angst.
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