Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6B to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and sell all the output to Microsoft for AI energy demands.
Constellation Energy plans to invest $1.6B to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and sell all the output to Microsoft for AI energy demands.
Constellation described the agreement with Microsoft as the largest power purchase agreement that the nuclear plant operator has ever signed.
Three Mile Island was the worst nuclear accident in US history. Was mainly caused by poor design of human feedback systems which caused operational confusion and lead to a catastrophic failure.
Seriously, we need the less carbon-emitting plants to replace the dirty coal ones, not come online just to power the AI hype :smh:
If/when the ai hype train crashes, it would already be online and therefore a good argument can be made to redirect the power to the grid instead of the then-defunct project
That's true, but this reactor had been operating for decades, until 2019. Methane was too cheap (and didn't have to pay for its waste) and made it unprofitable, so they stopped. Presumably the price MS is willing to lock in at makes it profitable for them again. I assume they predict prices going up or they're getting it cheap.
Keep in mind, MS has only signed an agreement to buy 100% of the output, not the reactor itself.
Maybe true. But if we have increased energy demand it might as well be nuclear.
Halting ai development might be nice according to many people, but we cant make that happen. Fraud alone is magnitudes more rampant. Its here to stay and we have to deal with it. I think this is a big win.
AI better cure cancer if we're using this much energy on it.
If you hate nuclear energy because you think it's dangerous or polluting, that is as dumb as choosing to drive instead of taking the train for the same reasons.
Nuclear energy is one of the methods of generating electricity with the smallest environmental impact and also much, much safer than the alternatives. The number of nuclear accidents can be counted on one hand, while the number of people who have died from cancer from coal power plants is conservatively estimated to be in the millions.
Nuclear energy produces waste that burdens present and virtually all future generations. There is no operating repository anywhere in the world. And even if there were, the question of the risks to future generations will always be one that, from today's perspective, can only be answered in a projection-based manner. Positing that the issues of final disposal and long-term safety for the next one million years have been technically solved is thus insufficient. (https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BASE/EN/2021/1109-brussels-nuclear-energy-is-not-green.html)
Nuclear has its advantages, but there is hardly anything as cheap and maintenance free as solar+batteries. Anyone can set it up, and it just runs all by itself for years and years.
In Europe, the price for electricity on the spot market regularly goes in the negative. Jep, you can get paid money to consume electricity because it's so abundant.
Look at France, their new NPP is taking 12 years and 12 billion euros more than planned. Is it really worth all that financial and environmental risk building something poisonous and explodey that needs constant attention?
- Not poisonous.
- Not explodey. Chernobyl destroyed all common sense and support for nuclear power, even though it was mostly terrible terrible management and horrible corrupt (Soviet) government that caused it. Nuclear reactors can't explode like Chernobyl unless someone purposely flips all the switches to red, does manual overrides aand it was specifically built to ignore all logical safety concerns.
The number of kille people by coal is orders of magnitude higher over the same period (lets say 60 years) per GW generated.
Any other arguments?
Batteries scale horribly and are extremely toxic themselves.
SOME parts of Europe are cheap some are expensive and are subject to bad price spikes.
The reality is we need everything. More solar/wind is great! But we also need secure stable baseline generation that works. Nothing comes close to nuclear.
datacenter are perfect for nuclear as they are generally a fixed load that never changes, solar needs expensive batteries as does wind, there are functionaly no* renewable options for covering extended periods on no wind or sun. datacenters bring in money partially because of their reliability, normal ones have huge generators to accomplish this, nuclear is much greener.
- ignoring hydro due to regulations and tidal as it isn't ready yet
I mean, comparing that to coal isn't a very impressive feat. Nuclear power is very expensive, fission material is limited and sourced from dodgy countries, storage is difficult etc. The emissions are the only good thing about it. There are good alternatives to that. I guess using the existing ones until they need to be decommissioned is still a good idea though.
Nuclear only has one caveat is the price.
It's the safest, bar none. More people died constructing the Hoover Dam than died in relation to Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
It uses the least amount of land per megawatt produced. This applies both in raw terms of reactor size to generators, turbines or solar panels, or if you include all land needed to mine, process, refine, construct and decommission a form of energy. Cadmium based roof top solar is the only thing that comes close, which is not just niche use as no single building footprint can hope to produce enough power for a single floor, let alone high density structures, but cadmium based solar is also ridiculously expensive. And this metric fails to mention how inefficient battery storage for things like solar is, which further inflates the land use.
In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, be it carbon, methane and other climate devastating, Nuclear is the lowest in terms of emissions, and those emissions are all front loaded as part of the construction and mining process, which can theoretically be lowered with more RnD into greener practices for those industries.
So we have a source of power that is safe, efficient and proven that would allow us to put more land aside for conservation efforts which would help with carbon capture as well as lower emissions. And the only major downside is the higher upfront cost? Take a guess what's going to happen to energy costs if we continue the current course and climate collapse continues to happen.
We are installing gobs of distributed, cheap, safe solar and batteries to smooth load and nuclear proponents will still be running around advocating for expensive centralized nuclear reactors that generate either long-lasting radioactive waste or nuclear bombs.
🤷♂️
A good chunk of the world is still stuck where the options are coal vs nuclear for base load coverage. Of course people are going to push for the safest option for large load needs.
We're generations away from worldwide energy needs being met entirely by green renewables and battery banks. I'll never be against expansion of those technologies, but nuclear is an important middle step that is far less dangerous than the most widely used technologies for meeting base load (coal).
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Are you paid to spew bs or is this something you enjoy doing?
Just create cheap RTGs with the radioactive waste. Invent the process and give humanity the best of both worlds. All you have to do is increase the power generation from a few hundred watts up an order of magnitude using garbage instead of actual purpose engineered materials. Simple.
Cheap, safe batteries
Oh you sweet ignorant child. Industrial scale battery storage to offset solar for continues power during night time hours is horrifically expensive when you're talking gigawatt grids, to say nothing of the severe safety hazard they are.
Wow Bethesda is really going all out to promote Fallout.
Brb gettig my Nuka cola
bro just one more
lanepower plant bro, bro I swear just one more and it'll fix thetrafficenergy demands broLet's save money and have AI control the Nuclear Power Plant, see what happens >:]
That’s an episode of the original Star Trek.
Ohh amazing what happen when corpos need something done lol
Fuck u peasants, sucks to suck
How dumb. Solar and Wind are SOO much cheaper per kWh than Nuclear and fossils. With them also comes the benefit of decentralisation. With 1.6B you could install so much more Watts of power with wind turbines and solar parks with the added benefit of less carbon and less nuclear waste and less chance of boom.
Not to mention that wind turbines and solar parks are faster to set up AND scalable. A nuclear plant is neither.
Interesting. What is the chance a nuclear plant goes boom? Sounds legit.
Very unlikely if maintained properly. The other facts are a lot more important. In addition to the most important one of WAY cheaper price per kWh (of Solar/Wind). And one medium important thing: Nuclear plants often rely on a river for cooling. If said river gets to warm/carries to little water the plant may have to shut down (happened a lot in France recently).
I mean, I guess it might be cheaper to start up a nuclear plant again than to build a new solar/wind farm. There's also someone below who claims that nuclear is actually cheaper.
This plant, had it exploded in the 1970's, would have made New York and Washington DC uninhabitable.
Seeing as a PWR isn't really capable of exploding in the way you're describing, horseshit. At worst, it can flash boil a bunch of water and melt. Besides that, the containment building alone is miles better than anything the USSR ever commissioned. All you need to do to have a safe reactor is to take the goddamn people out of it.
Nuclear energy produces waste that burdens present and virtually all future generations. There is no operating repository anywhere in the world. And even if there were, the question of the risks to future generations will always be one that, from today's perspective, can only be answered in a projection-based manner. Positing that the issues of final disposal and long-term safety for the next one million years have been technically solved is thus insufficient. (https://www.base.bund.de/SharedDocs/Kurzmeldungen/BASE/EN/2021/1109-brussels-nuclear-energy-is-not-green.html)
No it's true. During clean up they were about to use a crane inside the reactor to lift a steel lid that had not been inspected that was damaged during the meltdown. The FBI stopped them at the last minute. Had the core touched the water during a meltdown it would have spread a radioactive cloud over DC and New York with enough Fallout to force them to be abandoned like Chernobyl
I think it's fine if Microsoft has their own nuclear power plant as long as every Microsoft corporate officer is required to live downwind of it. ✌🏻
What?
Coal plants are the ones that produce radioactive smog. Nuclear plants just put off steam. The radioactive material doesn't come into contact with the clean water loop that is used to spin the turbine and generate power unless something is catastrophically wrong.
The dangerous byproduct, spent fuel rods, are stored in pools buried deep, and radioactivity is drastically abetted by the spent rods being submerged in water.
Seriously, you anti nuclear people are like anti vaxxers. It's very minimal reading to learn how this shit works so that you can have valid critique, but no, that's too tough.
And as you called “anti-nuclear people” “anti-vaxxers” I might add that those small nuclear reactors are such a tech bro bullshit.
I can just repeat myself while al of your mentioned facts are facts (although I do not know of any storage anywhere which is save for thousands of years). Of course Nuclear is infinitely better than fossils. The most important thing most people do not talk about however is price per kWh. And if you were to read up on that you would see that Nuclear is pretty bad. Just investing the money in renewables (which Nuclear also is not) gives way more value.
Um... you realize that nuclear doesn't give of any pollutants?
Three mile island certainly gave off pollution. Scientists are studying if people downwind of it ended up getting thyroid cancer as a result.
Microsoft already works on nuclear stewardship + the NIF, how much worse could it possibly be?