🐝⚛ Bees 1, Mark Zuckerberg's nuclear plans 0

How 1970s-environmental laws put a 21st Century nuclear revival in jeopardy

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg’s and Meta's plans for a nuclear-powered AI data center were stymied by a rare bee species that was found on the proposed site. As reported by the Financial Times:

Zuckerberg had planned to strike a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator to provide emissions-free electricity for a new data centre supporting his artificial intelligence ambitions.  However, the potential deal faced multiple complications including environmental and regulatory challenges, these people said. The discovery of the rare bee species on a location next to the plant where the data centre was to be built would have complicated the project, Zuckerberg told a Meta all-hands meeting last week, according to two people familiar with the [company staff] meeting.  … Zuckerberg told staffers at the all-hands that, had the deal gone ahead, Meta would have been the first Big Tech group to wield nuclear-powered AI, and would have had the largest nuclear plant available to power data centres, two people said. One person familiar with the matter said that Zuckerberg has been frustrated with the lack of nuclear options in the US, while China has been embracing nuclear power. China appears to be building nuclear reactors at a fast clip, whereas only a handful of reactors have been brought online over the past two decades in the US. 

After reading about this rude regulatory rejection — one that I’ll judge as utterly absurd unless presented with compelling evidence to the contrary — I immediately thought about the 1973 discovery of the endangered snail darter fish during construction of Tennessee's Tellico Dam by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It became a landmark environmental controversy, one that I write about in my 2023 book. The dam project, which began, the Endangered Species Act, and many other environmental laws, was halted by federal courts — even though it was 90 percent complete — to protect the tiny fish's habitat.

The dispute captured national attention, even becoming fodder for late-night comedy, as it pitted a major, almost-completed infrastructure project against about a thousand three-inch fishies. (As TVA chairman Aubrey J. Wagner testified to a congressional panel back then, “In our rush to correct decades of environmental neglect, we have tended to place man’s needs in a changing, complex world somewhere well down our list of environmental priorities.”)

In 1979, Congress granted an exemption to the Endangered Species Act, allowing the dam's completion. Environmental groups strongly criticized President Jimmy Carter for signing the exemption, though his administration argued this prevented Congress from potentially revoking the entire law. (“It is difficult to imagine a decision more calculated to alienate the environmental community, who have been your strongest supporters until now,” said the head of the Sierra Club.) The snail darter, survived, by the way.

We’ll see what happens with this mystery bee. But it’s just the sort of Down Wing occurrence that makes one skeptical not just of a nuclear energy revival, but of a revival in America’s ability to do big things in the physical world, from clean energy transmission to advanced transportation to an orbital economy. On the former point, however: Goldman Sachs is out with a new and quite relevant analysis on data center energy needs, in which the bank declares, “We are in the early stages of nuclear renaissance in the US and globally.”