AI and Nuclear Power and ‘Wizard of Oz,’ Oh My!

Summary

WSJ Tech News Briefing: AI and Nuclear Power and ‘Wizard of Oz,’ Oh My!
Released April 21, 2025

The Wall Street Journal’s Tech News Briefing hosted by Victoria Craig delves into the intriguing intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) with both classic cinema and the nuclear energy sector. This episode, titled "AI and Nuclear Power and ‘Wizard of Oz,’ Oh My!", explores how AI is revitalizing beloved cultural icons and modernizing critical infrastructure.

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1. AI Transforms Classic Cinema: A 21st Century Makeover of The Wizard of Oz

Las Vegas Sphere’s Immersive Experience

The episode opens with an exciting development in the entertainment industry: the Las Vegas Sphere is set to offer audiences an immersive rendition of the 86-year-old classic film, The Wizard of Oz. Adapting such an iconic movie to a cutting-edge format posed significant challenges, requiring innovative technological solutions.

Technological Innovations with Google DeepMind

Isabel Bousquet, WSJ CIO Journal reporter, provides an exclusive look into the collaboration between the Las Vegas Sphere and Google DeepMind. The project leveraged AI in two primary ways:

1. Enhancing Resolution with Generative AI
   Bel Lin explains at [01:42]:
   “They essentially went really deep and used generative AI to generate new pixels. And that was a better way of enhancing the resolution there.”

   Instead of traditional pixel-based resolution enhancement, generative AI was employed to create new pixels, resulting in a superior visual upgrade suitable for the Sphere's massive 160,000-square-foot curved screen.

2. Expanding Scenes Through AI-Powered Outpainting
   Bel Lin continues at [01:42]:
   “They can see characters that were off screen in the past. This is a technique that they called out painting.”

   AI facilitated the expansion of original scenes, allowing a wider view that includes previously off-screen characters and broader backgrounds, such as the poppy fields and Emerald City crowds.

Reception and Industry Impact

While the technological advancements garnered excitement, they also sparked controversy:

• Audience Concerns:
  Bel Lin notes at [03:53]:
  “This film is so beloved. So when Google says AI has touched more than 90% of it, it gives a lot of anxiety.”

  Many fans felt uneasy about AI's extensive involvement, fearing that the sacredness of the original film might be compromised despite Google’s efforts to remain true to the source material.

• Hollywood’s Anxiety Over AI:
  The use of AI in such a cherished film has heightened fears within the acting and writing communities about the future implications of generative AI on creative intellectual property.

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2. AI Fuels the Revival of Nuclear Power

AI Integration in Nuclear Plants

Shifting from entertainment to energy, the briefing highlights the U.S. Energy Department's initiative to incorporate AI into nuclear power operations. The focus is on an AI tool named Pro A, developed by Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Enhancing Efficiency in Aging Nuclear Plants

Isabel Bousquet explains at [06:28]:
“This tool really kind of dovetails quite nicely because as AI is driving this immense great need for power, and particularly nuclear power, it's also arriving as sort of a way to help make these nuclear plants more efficient.”

Pro A addresses the outdated technology prevalent in many existing nuclear plants, which often resemble the analog setups from decades past. By automating and assisting with routine tasks, AI can significantly improve operational efficiency.

Functionality and Human-AI Collaboration

Pro A acts as an assistant rather than a replacer:

• Assisting Operators:
  At [07:44], Isabel states:
  “It's essentially acting as an assistant. ... meant to aid the work of an operator in a lot of the making sure that the flips and the switches are running green rather than running red.”

  The AI tool helps monitor systems and alerts operators to potential issues, such as overheating, allowing humans to make informed decisions based on AI's observations.

• Natural Language Processing for Troubleshooting:
  Isabel further elaborates at [09:02]:
  “Pro Aid's kind of the only one that is really harnessing LLMs, for instance, can assist with. ... you can sort of interrogate in plain English the way that you and I are chatting with the tool.”

  Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), Pro A enables operators to communicate with the AI in natural language, making troubleshooting more intuitive and accessible.

Implementation and Future Prospects

Pro A is already developed and ready for deployment. However, widespread adoption requires commercialization and partnerships with the private sector. The integration process varies:

• New vs. Existing Plants:
  Isabel mentions at [08:19]:
  “It's a bit of a combination of both. But it's a lot easier to add new technology to newer builds ... there’s also a hope that the existing nuclear plant providers will be wanting to upgrade their plants.”

  Modernizing existing plants with AI requires significant effort, whereas new plants can more seamlessly incorporate advanced technologies like Pro A from the outset.

Addressing Workforce Concerns

A senior nuclear engineer's perspective highlights that AI will not eliminate human roles but rather support them:

At [09:02], Isabel relays:
“If we can hand off some of those lower level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her.”

This statement underscores AI’s role in taking over repetitive tasks, allowing human operators to focus on more complex responsibilities, thereby addressing workforce turnover without eliminating jobs.

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Conclusion

This episode of Tech News Briefing underscores the dual role of AI in both preserving cultural heritage and advancing critical infrastructure. From transforming a classic film into an immersive spectacle to revolutionizing the operational efficiency of nuclear power plants, AI continues to shape diverse aspects of technology and society. However, these advancements also bring forth discussions about the preservation of legacy systems and the ethical implications of AI’s expanding presence in traditional domains.

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Produced by Ariana Osperu with Deputy Editor Chris Insinsley. Additional production support from Julie Chang and Pierre Bienname.

Transcript

[Victoria Craig]

Without your data, compliance becomes chaos. Veeam restores order with seamless data protection, ensuring resilience through any disruption. Keep your enterprise business running with Veeam. Welcome to Tech News briefing. It's Monday, April 21st. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. Artificial intelligence goes retro. We've got a show all about how today's hottest tech is upgrading innovations of. We'll take you to Las Vegas where the wizard of Oz is getting a 21st century makeover. And then look at how an AI based tool can help operate decades old nuclear reactors. But first, to the wonderful world of Oz.

[Isabel Bousquet]

Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.

[Victoria Craig]

If Dorothy was shocked when her world went from black and white to Technicolor in 1939, she'd be amazed at how AI has reimagined it.

[Isabel Bousquet]

We must be over the rainbow.

[Victoria Craig]

The Las Vegas Sphere is preparing to give audiences an immersive viewing experience of the wizard of Oz this summer. But adapting the 86 year old film for the ultra big screen presented quite a challenge. WSJ CIO Journal reporter Isabel Bousquet has an exclusive look at how the Sphere worked with Google to find the solution. So, Isabel, just walk us through the technology first, because this wasn't just a few tweaks here and there to the original wizard of Oz film. This was a project really on a massive scale. So just describe that to us.

[Bel Lin]

Yeah, I mean, when you think about the fact that this movie, it was shot in the 1930s on a 35 millimeter camera and they're trying to essentially put it on one of the highest resolution biggest screens in the world. It's 160,000 square feet, it's curved. The challenge of doing this is essentially a big one, such that even the engineers at Google DeepMind were initially like, oh my God, where do we even start? But essentially what they did was two things, both involving AI. On one hand, they just used AI to enhance the resolution. This is a slightly different technique than traditional resolution enhancement, which would essentially involve taking the existing pixels and doing a copy paste. They essentially went really deep and used generative AI to generate new pixels. And that was a better way of enhancing the resolution there. And then the other thing they did was expand scenes essentially in the original movie, if the screen ended at certain boundaries but you know, other characters are off screen, the Sphere version is now giving you a much wider view into what's happening in that scene. You can see characters that were off screen screen in the past. You can see a Much broader background, maybe parts of the poppy field or parts of the Emerald City crowds essentially that were not in the original shots. That's a technique that they called out painting. There's also going to be some other sensory elements they're working on. They didn't want to talk about that a lot yet. Some of those elements are still under wraps, but they're really leaning into this is not just going to the movies. This is really experiencing this film.

[Victoria Craig]

And this use of AI has really generated a lot of excitement for some in the entertainment industry. But not everyone, including a lot of people in the comments section of this story, are thrilled with the technology really seeping into, I guess, more traditional, can we call it, sacred aspects of our memories?

[Bel Lin]

This film is so beloved. So when Google says AI has touched more than 90% of it, it gives a lot of anxiety and they feel like something that was sacred is maybe now being reinvented in a way that maybe not everyone is happy with. Google did put in a lot of work to sort of stay true to the core of the film. They match it shot for shot. So it's not like they're inventing new scenes or anything, but people were still pretty upset. They looked at the AI version and they were like, I don't like her movements. This is not the way it was intended. And like, what are they going to do next? Within Hollywood as well, this is also stoking a lot of fears. There's a lot of anxiety in the acting community and the writing community over how their creative intellectual property is going to be used and reused by generative AI. So it's stoking a lot of those anxieties and unanswered questions.

[Victoria Craig]

That was WSJ CIO Journal reporter Isabel Bousquet. Coming up, the Energy Department is hoping AI will take a starring role in advising humans at the helm of nuclear power's big tech fueled revival. That story after the break.

[Lou Di Lorenzo]

Cyber resiliency is becoming an enterprise wide priority for many companies. On this episode of techfluential, Deloitte's Lou Di Lorenzo talks with Rohan Amin, Chief Product Officer at Chase, and Jamil Farshi, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Security Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Equifax. Together they reframe the conversation on resiliency and risk management as a catalyst for innovation and long term growth. Where technology and influence converge, new opportunities can emerge. That's techfluential, a podcast from Deloitte and custom content from WSJ.

[Victoria Craig]

We've talked a lot on the show about how nuclear Energy is seeing a revival thanks to big tech's data centers and their ravenous appetite for power, especially when it comes to AI. But to add an inception like layer here, the relationship between, between nuclear and AI doesn't end there. Artificial intelligence could be used to help humans run those nuclear plants too. Bel Lin covers AI and technology for the Wall Street Journal. Bell There's a lab in Illinois that's run by the Energy Department, and it's come up with an AI tool that can not only help design, but also run the nuclear plants. Just walk us through that tool and what it could be used for and how it would be used.

[Isabel Bousquet]

This tool is called Pro A and it was developed by Argonne National Laboratory in Lamont, Illinois. And it predates this current AI boom. But it really kind of dovetails quite nicely because as AI is driving this immense great need for power, and particularly nuclear power, it's also arriving as sort of a way to help make these nuclear plants more efficient. And the reason why nuclear plants really need this kind of AI boost is because they sort of belong in the era of nuclear's heyday, which was really in the 19th century, 70s, the 1990s. And since then, the utility providers that run them really haven't updated the technology. And so if you kind of jokingly imagine Homer Simpson sitting in his nuclear power plant with all the monitoring switches and the analog buttons, that's actually not too dissimilar from what a lot of these nuclear power plants actually look like in their monitoring rooms. And so there's a great need for technology like this Pro Aid tool from Argonne to come in and replace some of the more manual tasks that a lot of nuclear operators have to do on a regular basis.

[Victoria Craig]

What are some of those tasks? I mean, what really, for people who can't conceptualize this, I'm one of those people. What kind of things can AI take over from humans in this way?

[Isabel Bousquet]

It's essentially acting as an assistant. So it's not really taking over a lot of the work of a utility plant operator. It's really meant to aid the work of an operator in a lot of the making sure that the flips and the switches are running green rather than running red.

[Victoria Craig]

You talked about how long nuclear power has been around and how old some of these plants are. So walk us through the process to integrate this newer technology. Is it easier to do with newer build plants? Is that an option? Or are they really looking to sort of like retrofit all of these older ones?

[Isabel Bousquet]

Yeah, it's a Bit of a combination of both. But it's a lot easier to add new technology to newer builds to the sort of newer generation of small modular reactors. And companies that are hoping to bring nuclear power power online rather than updating existing nuclear power plants, some of which may be aging out of commission. Argonne, for instance, is looking to these companies like TerraPower and Oklo, which are backed by big tech and big tech personalities. But there's also a hope that the existing nuclear plant providers will be wanting to upgrade their plants as their lifetimes become extended because of the greater need for nuclear power.

[Victoria Craig]

And one of the things that really struck me from your story was a quote from a senior nuclear engineer at that Illinois lab. He said, if we can hand off some of those lower level capabilities to a machine, when someone retires, you don't need to replace him or her. And to me, when I read that, I think, oh my gosh, humans are gonna be completely out of this nuclear power game. But you alluded to this before. That's not the case. It's not that AI is gonna completely take over operating and running these plants. It's just gonna be helping assist in certain ways here and there.

[Isabel Bousquet]

Yeah, I think that's a good way to describe it. There's just a lot of that kind of more tedious work that Pro Aid and tools like it. But Pro Aid's kind of the only one that is really harnessing LLMs, for instance, can assist with. And a lot of the work in the plants has had to do with troubleshooting. And so that's something that LLMs are good at in terms of communicating with plant operators in natural language. So you can sort of interrogate in plain English the way that you and I are chatting with the tool, and it can return a response as if you were chatting to a person who really knows a lot about the nuclear plant that you're operating.

[Victoria Craig]

So if it notices that maybe something is overheating, it can alert an engineer or someone at the plant and then they can go from there. Then the human basically takes over.

[Isabel Bousquet]

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

[Victoria Craig]

And how far along is this tool in its development? Is it already being implemented?

[Isabel Bousquet]

In some places the tool is ready because it's been developed by taxpayer dollars essentially as part of Argonne National Laboratory. It needs to be commercialized by the private sector, so they're looking for partners to work with them on making it widely available commercially.

[Victoria Craig]

That was WSJ reporter Bellyn. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Ariana Osperu with Deputy Editor Chris Insinsley. Additional production support from Julie Chang and Pierre Bienname. I'm Victoria Craig for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

[Lou Di Lorenzo]

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