Long in decline, the U.S. nuclear industry is hoping for resurrection at two sites of its greatest failures: Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Hanford Site in Washington state. Nuclear power, the industry claims, will help satisfy the surging power demands from data centers and the growing AI economy. But such a wrong turn ignores the long-unresolved problems of radioactive nuclear wastes that AI cannot wish away.
In September Constellation Energy announced plans to restart a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island, prodded by Microsoft, which will need many gigawatts of power to perform extensive AI calculations in its expanding fleet of data centers. Amazon followed suit and announced in November that it will invest $334 million to develop small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) at Hanford, site of the world’s first plutonium-production facility.
Google and Meta are also hoping to bring nuclear power back. In October 2024 Google announced it eventually plans to purchase 500 megawatts of electricity from Kairos Power, which is developing a novel SMR in Oak Ridge,
Tenn., on the site of the national lab that long refined uranium for the nuclear industry. And Facebook parent Meta is seeking bids for nuclear power plants for its data centers.
These tech giants recognize that the next generation of microprocessors to be used for AI calculations at data centers will require oodles of electricity to power and cool them. A single Nvidia Blackwell chip, for example, can draw up to two kilowatts, more than what is needed for a typical house. Cram thousands of them in servers inside a data center, and they will need as much power as a small city.
So-called hyperscale data centers require over 100 megawatts (100 MW)—a sizeable fraction of the output of a major power plant. And that power should be cheap, steady, and reliable.
An authoritative December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Energy, written by energy experts at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is especially illuminating. The growth in U.S. data-center energy usage over the next five years, they state, would correspond “to a total power demand for data centers between 74 and 132 [gigawatts].” That would represent some 7 to 12 percent of the U.S. electricity consumption forecast for 2028.
Where on Earth is all this power going to come from? Given the challenges electric utilities face in supplying electricity to meet other growing needs, including electric vehicles, it’s small wonder that big tech has turned back to the atomic nucleus. But the power demands outlined in the DOE report would require building or resurrecting the equivalent of at least 40 Three Mile Island reactors over the next five years. That’s impossible.
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Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Londonderry Township, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania was shutdown following the partial meltdown of its Unit 2 reactor (TMI-2) on March 28, 1979. Andre Jenny/Alamy Stock Photo
Teaching kids how to share, take turns, and be considerate of others is often top of mind for parents and caregivers. But kids also need to learn to how be assertive and stand up for themselves — even if that’s a skill parents don’t talk about as often.
“Assertiveness is all about teaching kids to express their needs and boundaries confidently without being aggressive,” said Ann-Louise Lockhart, pediatric psychologist, parent coach, and owner of A New Day Pediatric Psychology. “[This] equips kids with skills to make it through challenges like bullying, peer pressure and interpersonal conflict.”
We talked to experts about phrases parents can teach kids so they’re able to verbalize their feelings, develop confidence and set boundaries — all while still being respectful.
Why is it important to raise kids who are assertive?
It’s important “to teach our kids to be assertive so they can advocate for both themselves and others,” said Amy McCready, founder of Positive Parenting Solutions and author of “The ‘Me, Me, Me’ Epidemic — A Step-by-Step Guide to Raising Capable, Grateful Kids in an Over-Entitled World.” “Kids need to learn this skill in childhood so they can carry it with them through their teenage years and into adulthood.”
Knowing how to be assertive also helps kids be open with their emotions and avoid bottling them up, she explained.
“Assertive communication [also] creates healthier relationships in both personal and professional life and … more successes in all areas of life,” added Lisa Schab, licensed clinical social worker and author of “Cool, Calm, and Confident: A Workbook to Help Kids Learn Assertiveness Skills.”
Teach kids simple phrases that are direct, but not aggressive.
“I don’t like that. Please stop.”
Whether your kid is being pushed on the playground or teased by a friend, this simple and clear phrase sets an instant boundary.
“By saying, ‘I don’t like that,’ your child acknowledges their emotions, which helps them own their perspective without blaming or shaming,” Lockhart said. “The follow-up, ‘Please stop,’ is a firm yet polite demand for a specific behavior to end.”
If you flick a flat stone toward a pond at just the right angle, it skips across in a series of smooth jumps. Inch-long cricket frogs also seem to skitter over the surface of water with physics-defying grace. But when Talia Weiss, then a bioengineering graduate student at Virginia Tech, filmed the frogs with a high-speed camera, she saw a very different picture.
“The motion is so fast that if you look at it with the naked eye, you really can’t tell the difference,” Weiss says.
For a new study in the Journal of Experimental Biology, Weiss and her co-authors recorded skittering cricket frogs from above and below the surface at 500 frames per second and then played the videos back much more slowly. The researchers found that instead of hopping with just their feet breaking the surface, as older studies had described anecdotally, the frogs were actually doing a series of belly flops—sinking for a fraction of a second and then kicking themselves upward with each jump.
Rather than actually skittering across water like basilisk lizards do, the frogs were “porpoising”—leaping from the water as they swim. Weiss says their legs may be too slow for true surface hopping.
“To jump on the water surface, you have to have your legs retracted and ready to push down again by the time you’re approaching the water in every jump,” she explains. “And these [frogs] don’t prepare for their landing at all; they sort of just belly flop. They don’t retract their legs fast enough to immediately jump again” from the surface itself.
“Fast animal movements can be really deceiving,” and the new camerawork reveals what the frogs are actually doing, says Jasmine Nirody, an organismal biologist at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study. By carefully analyzing such motions, “we can think about how we might be able to use [the frog’s] strategy in various bioinspired robots,” she adds. “Now we know what to look for.”
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Graduate researcher Talia Weiss observes a cricket frog, whose unusual locomotion lets it appear to skip across the water’s surface. nJake Socha
Because we are living longer than previous generations did, there is a higher likelihood that people will experience brain deterioration.
A study published in January showed that an estimated half a million people may be diagnosed with dementia this year. By 2060, the number is predicted to reach 1 million cases annually.
The aging population may be living with lifestyle chronic diseases like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes, which also raise a person’s dementia risk. “We estimate that about 40% of cases of dementia are preventable through lifestyle and other factors,” said Dr. Meredith Bock, neurologist and chief medical officer at Remo Health. Just because you carry a gene that puts you at a higher risk for developing dementia doesn’t mean that you will.
“There’s certainly a benefit to lifestyle interventions, both at reducing the time of onset of dementia or potentially getting it at all,” Bock said.
Some of these interventions, like getting plenty of exercise or doing brain puzzles, are well known. Others, however, may not be. Below, neurologists share the behaviors they do daily to keep their risk of dementia low, which may seem unusual to some:
They walk to their colleague’s office instead of sending an email.
Instead of being glued to a chair in front of a computer at work, Dr. Gabriel Leger, a neurologist at UC San Diego Health, is very intentional about getting up and moving to break up prolonged sitting periods.
“If I’m not with patients, I’m more likely to stand up and go across the building to speak to somebody instead of sending an email just because it gets me off the chair and makes me more active,” Leger said.
Our bodies weren’t designed to be still for prolonged periods, explained Leger. A 2023 study of nearly 50,000 adults revealed that 10 hours or more of sitting per day is linked to increased dementia risk.
They interact with people IRL as often as possible.
Another reason Leger will discuss a matter with a colleague face-to-face instead of simply sending an email is that interacting with other people helps preserve brain function.
“The more social interaction you have, the more connections your brain is making,” Leger said. Socializing with others is a protective factor to reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. He added that it is as much a stimulator of brain connections as education.
“When you have a typical conversation, there are a lot of different cognitive domains you may be drawing on, comprehending language, speaking, following a story, and a lot of behavioral aspects, socio-emotional cues that you’re picking up on and responding to,” Bock explained. “Social interactions are also just really good for mood, which is also closely related to cognition.”
If they have pets, they really commit to caring for them.
Leger owns two dogs and two cats. With dogs in particular, “you interact with them socially, you are obligated to take them out every day for a walk, and they force you to interact with other dog owners,” Leger said.
“You have a responsibility and are maintaining the sense that ‘There’s something that I need to do. I need to feed my dog. I need to make sure that they’re well.’ It’s a bit like parenting, where that sense of purpose is kept.”
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F.J. Jimenez via Getty Images Caring for pets can have brain-protecting benefits.
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