The island where three apocalypses meet

A.I. and climate change, today's existential threats, reach back in time to resurrect a companion from yesteryear

You may have read recently about Microsoft cutting a deal to reopen Three Mile Island to power its A.I. development efforts. And if you’re old enough to remember March 28, 1979, you probably read that with a bit of a shudder.

While the news on the day of the meltdown was indeed extremely frightening, luckily the aftermath — at least considered in physical impacts — wasn’t really all that bad. Despite the release of some highly dangerous radioisotopes into the surrounding environment, no health impacts have been linked to the release (there has been some argument over rates of illness following the accident, but the very small uptick in some cancers has been attributed to increased stress around the experience itself). TMI-2 has been in a more-or-less safe state all these years (safe enough for people to spend these decades working right next door without ill effect); most of its damaged reactor was removed for controlled disposal in Idaho. 

The far more important fallout was symbolic. The Three Mile Island accident — which took place just a couple of weeks after the release of the nuclear-meltdown thriller The China Syndrome — crystallized the defining fear of the time and, like the film (or maybe compounding it), the effects have been largely symbolic. Three Mile Island was a PR disaster for the nuclear power industry, leading both on the one hand to better regulation of existing plants and on the other to diminishing public support for the construction of new facilities.

Whether that’s been for good or ill has long been debated. As historian Natasha Zaretsky has written:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently warned that the window to prevent the worst consequences of the climate crisis is rapidly closing, and July 2019 was the hottest month on earth ever recorded. In this dystopian moment of ecological catastrophe, it is hard not to look back at Three Mile Island with a strange nostalgia, which is arguably why some environmentalists once opposed to nuclear power have now embraced it as a carbon-free technology that will need to be enlisted in the transition to a post-fossil fuel economy.

But did you know that TMI-1 (the other half of the plant; the one that didn’t suffer a meltdown) ran until 2019 and only closed when electricity became so cheap (driven by the then-plummeting cost of natural gas generation) that it was no longer profitable to run the reactor? The current owners (the folks who’ve now made the agreement with Microsoft) were reluctant to abandon the plant until they felt they had no other options, given how high startup costs would be for anyone deciding to get back into the business. Microsoft’s investment solves that problem. 

Even though TMI-1 has been cooking away, supplying its 800 megawatts to the grid all these years as most people have slowly forgotten about the incident, there’s no reason to be totally complacent about nuclear power. The threat of nuclear reactor accidents isn’t unfounded, a point driven home by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 (that far worse incident persists even more strongly as a metaphor for humanity’s technological and political hubris). Waste and what to do with it is a serious issue. Radioactive materials are scary indeed, and there’s no denying the potential for much worse to happen. 

Though looking back, even the Chernobyl disaster had a strange kind of upside, clearing humans out of the way and making way for wildlife to flourish. Something to think about, considering the existential scale of some of the other threats we face.

Speaking of those, this revival of Three Mile Island reaches back into the collective past for a thread that’s neatly tied up with two of the most pressing challenges for humanity these days: climate change and A.I. (even if you count A.I. as an expression of unfettered capitalism and not something that’ll be turning us all into grey goo or paperclips anytime soon).

And speaking of how it could always be worse, the firms behind those energy-hungry artificial intelligences could be turning to even nastier forms of power generation to make possible their mission of creative destruction and putting artists out of work unleashing consciousness and solving as-yet-unforeseen business challenges. Or something like that. 

But you know what? They are in fact doing just that. Coal has staying power. Gas is back!

Doesn’t seem worth it, does it? Burning even more fossil fuel and releasing ever more carbon into the already over-sated atmosphere for the benefit of these generative models that we depend on to…er…invent poison foods, create imaginary friends, eliminate jobs, and enable propaganda? 

Maybe going back to nukes isn’t so bad?

Even so, in every generation, there is an alleged threat to the survival of all humankind. Some persist, and some fade into the past. And in the story on Three Mile Island, three of them crash into each other: the anxiety over today’s greatest existential threat, climate change, is compelling a relaxation of anxiety about a once-dreaded existential threat in nuclear power, but the purpose of this revival is to facilitate A.I., which could well be the next apocalypse we all fear.

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