Is nuclear fusion really the ultimate solution to AI’s crazy power usage?

Two weeks ago, we reported how artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency mining and clean energy manufacturing are powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or simply 4R, and driving disruptive trends, including the rise of data and connectivity, analytics, human-machine interaction, and improvements in robotics. Unfortunately, these secular megatrends are pushing the US power grid to its limits.

Excluding China, AI represents 4.3 GW of global power demand, and could grow nearly fivefold by 2028, according to Sreedhar Sistu, vice president of artificial intelligence at Schneider Electric (OTCPK:SBGSF). of AI will grow exponentially, increasing at least 10x between 2023 and 2026.

AI tasks usually require more powerful hardware than traditional computing tasks. Meanwhile, bitcoin mining shows no signs of slowing down, with mining rates currently reaching 565 exahashes per second (EH/s), a fivefold increase from three years ago.

Bitcoin mining consumes 148.63 TWh of electricity per year and emits 82.90 Mt of CO2 per year, comparable to the power consumption of Malaysia. And the demand for data centers is not helping business at all. Data center storage capacity is expected to grow from 10.1 zettabytes (ZB) in 2023 to 21.0 ZB in 2027, good for an 18.5% CAGR.

A Boston Consulting Group analysis predicted that data center electricity consumption will triple by 2030, enough electricity to power 40 million American homes.

The situation is already getting out of hand: US power demand has started to rise for the first time ever in 15 years. “We as a country are running low on energy,” Michael Khoo, climate disinformation program director at Friends of the Earth and co-author of a report on AI and climate, told CNN.

To be fair, AI has been touted as one of the key technologies that will help tackle climate change. The revolutionary technology is already being used to detect pollution, predict weather, monitor melting ice and map deforestation. A recent report commissioned by Google and published by the Boston Consulting Group claimed AI could help mitigate up to 10% of planet-warming pollution.

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Unfortunately, past trends in technological advancements suggest that AI disadvantages will most likely outweigh the advantages in terms of power demand.

“Efficiency gains have never reduced the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining. When we make certain goods and services more efficient, we see increases in demand,” pointed out Alex de Vries, a data scientist and researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

At this point, almost everyone agrees that we are unable to develop renewable energy plants fast enough to meet this rising power demand. So what other recourse do we have, other than to say, let’s just build more natural gas and fossil fuel power plants?

Enter nuclear fusion, long considered by scientists to be the Holy Grail of clean and nearly limitless energy. Sam Altman, head of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, says nuclear fusion is the ultimate solution to the AI ​​energy conundrum, “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough, we need fusion,” Altman said in a January interview said. Altman reiterated this view a few weeks ago when podcaster and computer scientist Lex Fridman asked him about the AI ​​energy conundrum.

Blue Sky Thinking

Unfortunately, Altman’s proposal is probably another case of overly optimistic blue-sky thinking, and we may be no closer to building a commercial nuclear fusion reactor than we are to harvesting energy from black holes.

Nuclear fusion has been considered the “Holy Grail” of clean energy for decades. If we could harness its power, it would mean endless clean and sustainable energy. This is what powers stars, and the theory is that it could be successfully applied to nuclear reactors – without the risk of a catastrophic meltdown disaster.

Scientists have been working on a viable nuclear fusion reactor since the 1950s – always hopeful that a breakthrough is just around the corner. Unfortunately, the running joke has become that a practical nuclear fusion power plant could be decades or even centuries away, with milestone after milestone falling time and time again.

Again, to be fair, there were some promising glimpses of the possibilities here. Last year, a nuclear fusion reactor in California produced 3.15 megajoules of energy using only 2.05 megajoules of energy input, a rare case where a fusion experiment produced more energy than it consumed. The vast majority of fusion experiments are energy negative, consuming more energy than they generate, thus rendering them useless as a form of electricity generation. Despite growing hopes that fusion could soon play a role in mitigating climate change by providing vast amounts of clean power for energy-hungry technologies like AI, the world is “still a ways away from commercial fusion and we can’t help it now the climate crisis,” Aneeqa Khan, research fellow in nuclear fusion at the University of Manchester, told the Guardian just after the initial December breakthrough.

You don’t have to look very far to get a healthy dose of reality check.

For decades, 35 countries have collaborated on the largest and most ambitious scientific experiment ever created: the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the largest fusion power machine ever. ITER plans to generate plasma at temperatures 10x higher than that of the sun’s core, generating net energy for seconds at a time. As is usually the case with many nuclear power projects, ITER is already facing massive cost overruns that call into question its future viability. W

When the ITER project formally began operating in 2006, its international partners agreed to fund an estimated €5 billion (then $6.3 billion) for a 10-year plan that would have seen the reactor come online in 2016 come. Charles Seife, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at New York University, sued ITER over a lack of transparency about costs and incessant delays. According to him, the project’s latest official cost estimate now stands at more than €20 billion ($22 billion), with the project nowhere near meeting its key goals. To make matters worse, none of ITER’s key players, including the US Department of Energy, could provide concrete answers on whether the team could overcome the technical challenges or estimates of the additional delays, much less the extra expenses.

Source: Scientific American

Seife notes that while Notre Dame took a century to complete, it was finally used for its intended purpose less than a generation after construction began. However, he concludes by saying that the same can hardly be said about ITER, which looks less and less like a cathedral – and more like a mausoleum.

By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com

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