(edited transcript)
JULIAN ZELIZER:
Welcome back to Then and Now. I’m Julian Zelizer of The Long View.
JONATHAN ALTER:
And I’m Jonathan Alter of Old Goats.
JULIAN:
So, Jon, like you, I’m sure, I’ve been following protests that have been taking place against AI data centers. It’s becoming a big political issue. It’s affecting some of the midterm races already and promises to get even bigger as these data centers are being put into place.
So I was thinking back to the second half of the 1970s, when there were a lot of protests about nuclear power plants. That really accelerates around 1977. There’s a huge occupation in New Hampshire that really kind of gives character to the movement. You see a couple in California, and it all culminates with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and a protest with hundreds of thousands of people in New York. And it was a big part of 1970s politics.
So, curious, how do you think of those two in relationship to each other?
JONATHAN:
Well, you know, after Three Mile Island, the United States didn’t build nuclear power plants for decades. And even now, they’re not very economical to build, and that’s a problem if we care about climate change. Because nuclear power needs to be used in an all-of-the-above energy policy — safe nuclear power.
In those days, the Clamshell Alliance, as it was called in New Hampshire, was very concerned about safety. That’s not an issue with these data centers, but what is an issue is use of local resources without proper reimbursement, including water, which was used for nuclear power and is used for these data centers, and other forms of energy. And the question is, who’s going to pay for it?
So a lot of the anti-nuclear movement was about ratepayers getting socked to pay for these nuclear power plants. And that’s part of what’s going on in these local communities with these data centers.
The big difference is that we had other sources of energy when nuclear power went away. AI is here to stay, so these communities are going to have to learn how to live with these data centers. And what you’re probably going to find is greater efforts by these huge AI corporations to find communities that really want them, where they’re really welcome, and be more careful about the siting of these centers.
They’ve been very arrogant in the way they’ve just gone in and assumed that everybody was as enthusiastic about AI as they are, when they weren’t going to share in the benefits.
JULIAN:
Well, important lessons from the past. That’s another Then and Now, and we’ll talk again next week, Jon.
JONATHAN:
Talk to you then. Bye, Julian.
JULIAN:
Bye-bye.
