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'Hellscape': Microsoft Deal Would Reopen Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant to Power AI
"This is another chapter in a nightmare that won't end," a campaigner said.
Sep 20, 2024
The corporation that owns the shuttered nuclear plant on Three Mile Island on Friday announced a deal with Microsoft to reopen the facility to provide power to the tech company for data centers using artificial intelligence.
Three Mile Island is well-known as the site of largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history—a reactor there, Unit 2, partially melted down in 1979. However, the site's other reactor, Unit 1, continued to operate safely until 2019, when it was closed for economic reasons.
With the help of tax breaks from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), plant owner Constellation Energy plans to spend $1.6 billion to restart Unit 1, with all of the power going to Microsoft for the first 20 years. Microsoft and other tech firms use inordinate amounts of energy to power data centers used for AI and have advocated for nuclear as a zero-emissions power source.
Though it doesn't emit carbon, nuclear power's downsides make it the subject of fierce opposition from many environmental and public safety groups.
Friday's deal, combining nuclear power and AI, which also poses great safety risks, was too much for The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch, who quipped that "the hellscape of modern life" had been captured in one headline.
Local campaigners vowed to push against the reopening and keep the area free of nuclear activity.
"We will challenge this proposal at every venue that is available for us," Eric Epstein, a former chairman of Three Mile Island Alert, a campaign group, told the Inquirer.
"This is another chapter in a nightmare that won't end," he added.
Siri, define the hellscape of modern life in one headline https://t.co/miQMSWROmp
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) September 20, 2024
Three Mile Island would be the first decommissioned U.S. nuclear plant to reopen, and the first to provide all of its power to one corporation, according toThe New York Times. Microsoft and Constellation didn't disclose the financial details of the deal.
About 19% of electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear power, and a drive for "clean energy," as well as the IRA credits, have spurred growth in the sector. Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates is a vocal proponent and has started his own nuclear company, TerraPower, which is building a plant in Wyoming.
The Three Mile Island project, expected to get the plant back online in 2028, still needs regulatory approval at multiple levels. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has already come out in support of the plan.
A study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Building & Construction Trades Council, which represents more than 115 local unions, found that reopening the plant would create 3,400 direct and indirect jobs, including 600 at the plant itself, which is in the middle of the Susquehanna River, just south of Harrisburg, the state capital. The plant's reopening is seen by some community leaders as the revival of an "economic anchor in a region beset with financial hardship," according toThe Washington Post.
Pennsylvania has five active nuclear plants, including two owned by Constellation, whose stock price shot up on Friday morning after the Three Mile Island announcement was made. The company and other industry backers celebrated the symbolic victory of restarting the plant.
"If anything says nuclear power is here to stay and expand, it's Three Mile Island reopening!" Amir Adnani, CEO of Uranium Energy Corp, wrote on social media.
Epstein, the campaigner, said the focus should be finishing the cleanup from the 1979 disaster. About 99% of the Unit 2's fuel has been removed to Idaho, but the last 1% has proven difficult to deal with.
"First things first, remove the waste from the island, and clean up [Unit 2]," Epstein said.
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Investigation Exposes Big Tech Ties to Israeli Genocide in Gaza
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," said one policy expert.
Aug 05, 2024
The Israeli military is using cloud storage and artificial intelligence services provided by U.S. tech titans for "direct participation and collaboration" in what many critics around the world call Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, according to an investigation published this week.
Two Israeli publications—+972 Magazine and Local Call—on Sunday published a joint investigation revealing that the Israeli military is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to store data gleaned from the mass surveillance in Gaza, where nearly 10 months of bombings and ground invasion have left more than 140,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international estimates.
Multiple sources told the outlets that pressure on the IDF since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel has "led to a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon's AWS, and Microsoft Azure." The report states that cooperation between the IDF and AWS "is particularly close" and "even helped on rare occasions to confirm aerial assassination strikes in Gaza—strikes that would have also killed and harmed Palestinian civilians."
IDF Col. Racheli Dembinsky—who spoke at a recent "IT for IDF" event near Tel Aviv—told investigative journalist Yuval Abraham that the "most important" advantage offered by cloud computing companies is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. AI, she said, provides the IDF with "very significant operational effectiveness" as it obliterates Gaza.
Last year, Abraham published an investigation on the same two websites that showed how the IDF is using AI to select targets, essentially creating what one former Israeli officer called a "mass assassination factory." In April, the journalist revealed that the IDF was using a previously undisclosed AI system that had replaced "human agency and precision" with "mass target creation and lethality."
According to Abraham:
Many of Israel's attacks in Gaza at the beginning of the war were based on the recommendations of a program called "Lavender." With the help of AI, this system processed information on most Gaza residents and compiled a list of suspected military operatives, including junior ones, for assassination. Israel systematically attacked these operatives in their private homes, killing entire families. Over time, the military realized that Lavender was not "reliable" enough, and its use decreased in favor of other software. +972 and Local Call could not confirm whether Lavender was developed with the help of civilian firms, including public cloud companies.
In 2021, Israel signed a $1.2 billion contract with Amazon and Google for Project Nimbus, which provides cloud services to the Israeli government and military. The move sparked the #NoTechForApartheid campaign, in which disaffected tech workers and dozens of advocacy groups rose up against Big Tech's complicity in Israeli human rights crimes in Palestine.
"Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid and ethnic cleansing," the campaign explained in 2021.
Earlier this year, Google—which Abraham said was briefly listed as a sponsor of the "IT for IDF" event—fired 50 employees for protesting Project Nimbus.
IDF Col. Avi Dadon told Abraham that "of course" tech companies want to work with the IDF, because "it's the strongest marketing."
"What the IDF uses was and will be one of the best selling points of products and services in the world," Dadon explained.
However, Big Tech's alleged complicity in Israeli human rights violations is coming under more intense scrutiny lately as Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan has also applied for arrest warrants for two Hamas leaders, Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri and Ismael Haniyah—at least one of whom has since been killed.
Last month, the ICJ ruled in a separate case that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must immediately end.
Some campaigners have noted that Google is apparently violating its own AI principles, which vow that the company "will not design or deploy AI in… technologies that cause or are likely to cause overall harm… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people… technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms… [or] technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights."
Others have noted Google and Amazon's lack of transparency on how its systems are being used.
"Neither company has publicly disclosed what, if any, human rights due diligence they carried out before participating in Project Nimbus," Zach Campbell, a digital rights expert at Human Rights Watch, told Abraham. "They haven't mentioned which, if any, red lines there are in terms of what would be permissible use of their technology."
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told Abraham that while "there's always a lot of focus on the direct military assistance the United States provides to Israel—the munitions, fighter jets, and bombs," far less attention "has been paid to these partnerships that span both civilian and military environments."
"It's more than complicity: It's direct participation and collaboration with the Israeli military on the tools they're using to kill Palestinians," he stressed.
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Watchdogs Blame Corporate Concentration for Global IT Outage
"It is long overdue that Microsoft and other Big Tech monopolies are broken up—for good," said one expert.
Jul 19, 2024
Digital rights advocates responded to Friday's havoc-wreaking global technology outage by sounding the alarm on the Big Tech monopolies.
The outage—which is being attributed to a software update by the U.S.-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike—sparked worldwide chaos on Friday, causing so-called "blue screens of death" on computers using Microsoft Windows. The outage grounded commercial flights and caused serious disruptions to transportation, financial, and healthcare systems.
"Today's massive global Microsoft outage is the result of a software monopoly that has become a single point of failure for too much of the global economy," George Rakis, executive director of the advocacy group NextGen Competition, said in a statement.
"For decades, Microsoft's pursuit of a vendor lock-in strategy has prevented the public and private sectors from diversifying their IT capabilities," he continued. "From airports to hospitals to 911 call centers to financial systems, millions today are feeling the consequences of the greed and ego of one of the most egregious offenders in Big Tech."
Emily Peterson-Cassin, who heads Demand Progress' corporate power program, said that "today's outage shows how one software issue stemming from only one or two companies can ground flights, take down hospital systems, stop 911 calls, and cut off access to the internet in one fell swoop."
"Economy-wide reliance on a few giant companies is a serious fundamental risk to Americans," she asserted. "No one regulatory or legislative intervention will prevent this kind of situation, but there are plenty of policies that can reduce the danger. Efforts to empower regulators' ability to tackle the risks posed by concentrated corporate actors are critical to protecting Americans from these kinds of failures."
Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson—who focuses on tech issues—said that Friday's outage "should spur Microsoft and other IT firms to do more than simply administer a Band-aid."
"The bigger problem is the supply chain itself for cloud computing and, by extension, cybersecurity services, which has left too many organizations vulnerable to a single point of failure," she noted. "When just three companies—Microsoft, Amazon, and Google—dominate the market for cloud computing, one minor incident can have global ramifications."
European Union nations "are furthest ahead in addressing the market stranglehold that these so-called hyperscalers have with the new E.U. Data Act, which aims to lower the cost of switching between cloud providers and improve interoperability," Olson noted.
"U.S. legislators should get in the game too," she argued. "One idea might be to force companies in critical sectors like healthcare, finance, transportation, and energy to use more than just one cloud provider for their core infrastructure, which tends to be the status quo."
"Instead, a new regulation could force them to use at least two independent providers for their core operations, or at least ensure that no single provider accounts for more than about two-thirds of their critical IT infrastructure," Olson added. "If one provider has a catastrophic failure, the other can keep things running."
However, most congressional efforts to rein in Big Tech monopoly power and encourage competition have failed or languished amid opposition and obstruction from lobbyists and corporate lawmakers.
Ultimately, Rakis stressed, "it is long overdue that Microsoft and other Big Tech monopolies are broken up—for good."
"Microsoft has turned a blind eye to cybersecurity vulnerabilities for years and enough is enough," Rakis said. "Not only are these monopolies too big to care, they're too big to manage. And despite being too big to fail, they have failed us. Time and time again. Now, it's time for a reckoning. We can't continue to let Microsoft's executives downplay their role in making all of us more vulnerable."
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