Three Mile Island Went From Cautionary Tale to AI Power Plant. The Public Hasn't Caught Up.

A Bluesky user posted this week about reaching out to a scientist friend who works in water regulation — someone whose professional life is built around exactly the kind of resource anxiety that AI's critics invoke when they talk about data center cooling systems. The scientist's response: she's far more worried about agriculture than about AI. The post got 21 likes, which isn't much. But the argument it made cut across nearly everything else happening in the {{beat:ai-environment|AI and environment}} conversation this week, where a single story — the federal government's $1 billion loan to restart {{entity:microsoft|Microsoft}}'s partner plant at Three Mile Island — has collapsed whatever remained of the distinction between "AI's energy problem" and "America's energy policy." The Three Mile Island news landed with the full weight of American nuclear symbolism. The {{entity:trump|Trump}} administration's energy secretary called it a "poster child" of the AI agenda. The New York Times covered the federal loan. The BBC covered the deal. Former Trump energy officials went on record saying it would "never work." What's missing from most of that coverage is the argument the Bluesky scientist made obliquely: that the environmental conversation around AI has a scale problem. X user @dlature, replying to a thread about data center impacts, put the catastrophist case plainly — AI demand could reach 12 percent of U.S. electricity consumption by 2028, much of it fossil-fueled, actively slowing the transition to clean energy. Another voice on X cited high water usage for cooling as a significant environmental driver. These claims are real and documented. But a different X user pointed to World Models and next-generation robotics architectures as evidence that the compute-per-task ratio is already falling — that "our usual expectations for AI infrastructure" may need updating. The argument that AI's footprint is large, growing, and fixable through efficiency gains is running simultaneously with the argument that it's large, growing, and being papered over with nuclear nostalgia. {{story:corporate-climate-pledges-dying-west-virginia-af64|The West Virginia data center story from earlier this month}} established the template: a single facility, a broken climate pledge, the gap between corporate sustainability language and actual grid decisions. Three Mile Island is the same story at a larger scale, with federal money attached. What's changed is the framing. Where West Virginia was about Microsoft breaking its own promises, Three Mile Island is about the government actively financing AI's energy appetite, using the vocabulary of national competitiveness. "Poster child" is not the language of environmental ambivalence. It's a declaration that the tradeoff has already been made. The Bluesky scientist's instinct — to pull the camera back, to ask whether AI is actually the right target for water anxiety when agriculture dwarfs it — is probably correct as a matter of hydrology. But it may be missing the political point. Three Mile Island isn't just a power plant. It's a decision about who pays for AI infrastructure and who gets to name the terms. A billion dollars in federal backing means this isn't a corporate climate bet anymore — it's a public one. The people on Bluesky pointing at data center cooling loops and the people on X running efficiency projections are both reacting to a fait accompli, not a debate.