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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal
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- gkfasdfasdf 2y agoWas anyone else horrified because they thought the powerplant was going to be run by a Microsoft AI? (TFA is about Microsoft purchasing nuclear power to run their AI)
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoNuclear powered Clippy.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoWorse: Clippy running a nuclear plant.
- bt1a 2y agoAs an AI assistant, I'm not equipped or trained to handle an ongoing nuclear meltdown..
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- lobochrome 2y agoFascinating. How will we live ok back in, say five years, at this very funny period from, 2018ish to 2022ish when our echo chamber made us believe ESG was going to save the world. How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!
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- mc32 2y agoESG ended up being a scam. Lots of these things are nothing but cover to make money off of people’s concern for the enviro. All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.
- brookst 2y agoSaying ESG is entirely a scam because some ESG backers travel in airplanes is like saying climate change is a hoax because it was colder than usual in Peoria today. ESG is a huge thing. Some of it is greenwashing, some is outright scam, some is legitimate pressure to make better environmental decisions. But insisting that ESG proponents can’t make suboptimal individual choices is silly.
- 4fterd4rk 2y agoAh yes. Some people use airplanes so we need to keep burning coal, who cares when the sea levels rise and the water wars begin! The important thing is that some people acted silly by gluing themselves to the road! Can't give in to them, even if it would save the world for our children.
- mc32 2y agoYou're not trying to convince the choir, you're trying to convince the masses. Sure, Leonardo DiCaprio, Richard Branson, Albert Gore, Barrack Obama and high schoolers are impressed, but not the mom and dad working jobs that are teetering, driving beaters and facing pressure from cheap labor. They see these people jet-setting being hyper-overconsumers and think, what the hell? They see these people increasing their wealth promoting change, but they don't change. Why should I change, they're not changing, they're adding more!
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- rdl 2y agoWow. AI has already accomplished more positive in a few years of big commercial stuff (admittedly as a side effect) than cryptocurrency has since, say 2009. :(
- lopis 2y agoHow is this positive news?
- izzydata 2y agoIf using a ton of energy has to happen then I'd prefer it be generated from nuclear, but I don't see the need to supply LLM data centers with a ton of energy as a positive.
- rdl 2y agoSolving the political problems behind nuclear power (getting TMI restarted being one of the more difficult politically but easier technically), and generally bringing the "build more nuclear" to forefront. (Although to be fair there's been a fair bit of wind and solar subsidized heavily by crypto, as well as flare gas power generation, and a bit of PV solar)
- nancybelowzero 2y agoCrypto created a trillion dollars out of thin air (well, slightly thicker air from more CO2). AI is poised to do the same, but also has already polluted the entire internet with worthless slop.
- mc32 2y ago[flagged]
- karaterobot 2y agoI don't think insults are called for, but I directionally agree that protests against atomic power, largely based on needless fear and lack of understanding, caused the world a lot of damage. If we could compare the world we have today to the counterfactual where anti-nuclear protests hadn't stopped progress, I believe a lot of people would be ashamed of their actions. Some already are. But the net effect of the anti-nuclear movement was to prolong the use of fossil fuels by many critical decades.
- mc32 2y agoI am angry because if it had not been for her and the movement that rode on her coattails, we'd long have been weened substantially from fossil fuels and we'd be in a very different world today. She caused this. She is not even owning it; though it can't be undone. She is responsible for more damage to the environment than GW Bush or Shell Oil. People don't realize the magnitude of the damage she inflicted.
- mikeortman 2y agoI feel like we are living in an episode of the Simpsons at this point
- nikau 2y agoexcept the electron app running the powerplant cant respond fast enough to the nodding duck
- lopis 2y agoWhile this is better than loading up a coal power plant, the way I see it, it's still a tragic situation. Even if AI used purely fossil-free electricity (which it doesn't), it's still putting pressure on our grids and energy production. The green energy AI consumes if the green energy some other less lucrative industry will not consume. Big tech is currently scraping their net neutrality plans left and right...
- unglaublich 2y agoYeah, that's how economies work? If someone offers more for a resource, they get it. More incentive to build better grids.
- throwaway48540 2y agoWhat exactly is the problem? That they're using any energy at all? Well, I don't like that people have lights on after 7 PM...
- CaptainFever 2y agoYeah. The only way the sentiment "I don't like that ___ is using energy, even though the energy is completely clean" makes sense is if they've already made up their minds that ___ is bad, and thus any energy usage is bad. The energy usage argument is a red herring; it's actually just a value judgment on AI itself. > If you're an AI hater, it's frustrating to see what you consider a useless technology growing to take up more and more of our energy mix, eating into climate gains being made from the immense growth of renewable energy. If you're an AI maximalist, on the other hand, the significant energy use projected for AI is a small price to pay for a technology that you think will revolutionize our lives much more than technologies like air conditioning, refrigeration, or the automobile ever did. > The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the long run, AI's energy use will likely level off at a significant but not grid-melting level that's roughly commensurate with the collective economic value we as a society get from it. Whether the trade-offs inherent in that shift are "worth it" involves a lot of value judgements that go well beyond how much electricity a bunch of servers are using. Source: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
- 1970-01-01 2y agoMore nuclear is a good thing. FAANG nuclear is even better, because they will be be ready and equipped to push back the insane NIMBY crowd(s) and also don't need to be worried about getting reelected.
- rebolek 2y agoYeah, 'move fast and break things' is certainly the best ideology for running nuclear plant.
- fergonco 2y agoHow are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
- brookst 2y agoIf only safety was a matter of system design and operational practices, not geographic location.
- unglaublich 2y agoBecause the alternative, fossil fuel generation, is much, much more polluting and deadly.
- Nullabillity 2y ago
- cpascal 2y agoSo how would this work? Does this mean Microsoft will build a directly connected data center nearby? Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?
- rgmerk 2y agoPresumably they’ve signed an agreement to buy the power (delivered through the grid) from the plant operator at a contracted price. The plant operator can then get finance for the work required to actually deliver on the contract. A lot of renewable energy projects were financed through similar agreements, called PPAs.
- burkaman 2y agoThey are just buying the power. Microsoft's goal is 24/7 matching, so every MWh of power they use is matched by a MWh of clean power (generated in that same hour) that they paid for. This is called market-based carbon accounting, as opposed to location-based accounting which considers the source of the electricity that is actually used by the company's infrastructure. There are pros and cons of each approach, market-based is a little less intuitive but not necessarily worse, it depends on the application.
- aziaziazi 2y ago> market-based carbon accounting […] not necessarily worse They are better for the corps communication and worse for anyone else. Transporting electricity over distance has a non trivial cost in $ but also ressources and energy, as well as relocating an industry near a clean energy source or optimizing the production units. Carbon-matching systems are great for entreprise wanting to claim they don’t produce carbon (24/7 carbon neutral) while they do. It does not depict the CO2E one (entreprise) did product de facto.
- rgmerk 2y agoHmmm. 50 years old and out of action for half a decade. That’s going to require a lot of work to persuade the NRC it’s safe to operate. Given how difficult it’s proven to build new nuclear around the world, what are the odds of this recommissioning being on time and budget?
- weberer 2y agoThey're not restarting reactor 2. They're starting the one that shut down in 2019.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoI think the GP knows that. That's why they said "out of action for half a decade".
- weberer 2y agoOh, I misread. Never mind then
- wffurr 2y ago2019 was half a decade ago.
- coolspot 2y agoOr a fifth of a century’s quarter.
- rdl 2y agoIf the recommissioning requires 20% of the work of new-build (in time and money), I'd rather have the "normal" 50-100% overrun in costs and time happen on recommissioning vs new-build. The delay is usually heavily on the permitting/legal challenges/etc. stage, not actual concrete-pouring and equipment installation, so an already-once-permitted site will probably do better relatively, too. Extra reactors at exising operating sites would make even more sense, though. Putting 2-4 extra AP-1000 at ~1GW/ea at each of the 54 facilities operating today would be huge and minimal incremental risk, and if there were a shortcut one time permitting process for it...
- nancybelowzero 2y agoAI might be the thing that ends badly this time. Better than using fossil fuels for it though.
- jameshart 2y ago> restart one of the units at the noted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania Ah yes, the ‘noted’ Three Mile Island. I wonder why this particular plant enjoys a degree of fame? The name certainly is familiar… Seems like a rebranding might have made sense - like the UK switched Sellafield to Winscale.
- atomic128 2y agoNo battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and the uranium fuel is very cheap, perhaps 10% of the cost of running the plant. This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if you care about greenhouse emissions. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505514). In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were announced a few weeks ago. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW). Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. But you don't hear about it in the mainstream news yet. And many people (Germany, Spain, I'm looking at you) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this. Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
- jakewins 2y ago> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather.
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- swozey 2y agoMy sister is a geologist who works at nuke plants (regulatory stuff, determing if they're in legal areas to build, ground contamination, etc). She always complains that it's an old-mans (this was in her 20s, 20 years ago) group of staff everywhere with guys who had incredibly light educations on what they're actually working on and had been in the business, and sometimes at the same plants, for decades. Some 40-50+ years. We might have a severe lack of people who can work in the field at plants and tech getting involved is probably a good thing on making that field more prominent for new students than it currently is. "Nuclear Engineer for Microsoft" is a cool title.
- marcodiego 2y agoNuclear plant, microsoft and AI on the same phrase. What could possibly go wrong?
- spixy 2y agoI see nothing wrong there.
- bfrog 2y agoPresumably all the things that have gone wrong have been fixed? I can honestly say the micro reactors and pebble beds look far more fail safe than the typical PWR/BWR that must have power and a pump running as I understand things to prevent catastrophe.
- connicpu 2y agoThe Three Mile Island incident happened in one reactor at this plant in 1979, but the plant kept operating its other reactors without any further incidents until they shut down in 2019 due to economic pressures (primarily the low price of natural gas).
- V__ 2y ago> Constellation, which plans to spend about $1.6 billion to restart the plant, is awaiting permits and expects the facility to come online by 2028 [and] would provide Microsoft with 835 megawatts of energy. I don't quite understand how this makes sense financially for Microsoft. A 1 GW offshore wind farm costs about 1 billion [1]. The Gemini Solar + Battery Storage Project in Nevada is about 1.1 billion (690 MW + 380 MW battery). [2] With solar, wind and battery prices continuously trending downwards, how does it make sense to invest in nuclear which nearly always has cost overruns, bad PR and unknown potential future costs? [1] https://businessnorway.com/articles/cost-of-wind-turbines https://businessnorway.com/articles/cost-of-wind-turbines [2] https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar-power-plant-a-warren-buffett-investment-to-be-built-in-nevada/ https://commercialsolarguy.com/americas-first-gigawatt-solar...
- greenthrow 2y agoIt makes no sense. Bill Gates is a huge nuclear proponent for bad reasons and I'm sure somehow this is related, wherher it's just that Microsoft decision makers have read his bad takes or because he actually pushed for this terrible idea.
- freeqaz 2y agoMaybe the lead time is faster because refurbishing a plant is easier than building one from scratch? Just speculating but that comes to mind for me. If their need is immediate term then this could be the "throw some money at the problem to make it go away". Also maybe good for PR?
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoI doubt that anything that connects to the name "Three Mile Island" is going to be good for PR.
- 39896880 2y agoNo one died from the incident at Three Mile Island, so I hope that with better access to information people can be persuaded to change their minds.
- Kon-Peki 2y agoThis article says it will be the first restarted nuke. But there is also a restart in process in Michigan. Will this beat the Michigan one into full operation?
- RandomLensman 2y agoWait and see if this will actually be up and running by 2028 at the costs indicated.
- jprete 2y agoI'm generally in favor of nuclear, but the symbolism of reopening Three Mile Island for AI power is strikingly anti-human.
- tomohawk 2y agoClassic SNL skit from when it was originally shut down. https://vimeo.com/357925913 https://vimeo.com/357925913
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelease from Constellation Energy: https://www.constellationenergy.com/newsroom/2024/Constellation-to-Launch-Crane-Clean-Energy-Center-Restoring-Jobs-and-Carbon-Free-Power-to-The-Grid.html https://www.constellationenergy.com/newsroom/2024/Constellat...
- jcgrillo 2y agoThere's something glorious about the optics of using one toxic disaster to power another.
- ck2 2y agoFeels like right out of a Westworld plot. Wait, it literally was. So someone is paying massive insurance premiums on this right? Not "privatize the profits, socialize the costs" right?
- Yawrehto 2y agoSomething that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more dangerous is due to its unfortunate habit of clumping deaths. People remember Chernobyl, but not Bill, who died mining coal, even if there are a thousand Bills all over, their total deaths dwarfing Chernobyl's. The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.
- Tade0 2y ago> It's cheap That hasn't been the case for at least a decade now - not after safety requirements were brought to where they are now. And that 60-80 year lifetime which is supposed to spread the cost is a myth. Most plants are decommissioned before they turn 40 years of operation: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-of-nuclear-reactors-shut-down-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272139/age-distribution-...
- nzjrs 2y agoThere has been a generation of activists and NIMBYs campaigning and protesting to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear, while having this delicious benefit of now being also able to claim about the cost of nuclear. The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.
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- Wytwwww 2y agoOften mainly due to political reasons though. Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...
- krunck 2y agoMaybe we should take some the money being put into AI and direct it towards fusion research. The rest of the funds can be spent on AI to help with fusion research. Once we have fusion we can forget about the awful fission era and also get on with healing the planet.
- southernplaces7 2y agoWhile I love to see nuclear get a comeback from new tech ventures and commercial impetus, it's also interesting to point out how one now mostly hears crickets from the people who screamed about the energy consumption of crypto. AI has so far mainly managed to generate enormous amounts of spam sludge, pollute the already toxic landscape of social media with auto-generated garbage, and lead to a level of data prying and mass data ripping by the big tech companies that makes their previous efforts seem almost quaint. This shit is largely what this voracious drive for more power is helping build. Even crypto wasn't this shitty, since at least its fundamental application wasn't nearly so broadly parasitic. Yet now I hear very little about uselessly burning vast loads of energy. I guess if the companies responsible for the above trash heap are largely the same ones that hire or indirectly subsidize the jobs of so many people in the tech world as represented by a site like HN, then the whole dumpster fire is okay. I'm also fairly sure that OpenAI, Microsoft and others would happily burn baby seals in coal furnaces if it meant powering their precious AI data needs. It's only for PR that they make useful noises about using clean power.
- modeless 2y agoIt's unfortunate that Three Mile Island is a meme. Objectively this is a good thing, but it will create headlines and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption.
- CaptainFever 2y ago> and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption Yeah, as shown by this very thread (and that your comment is greyed out). Nuclear energy is good. Whether or not AI consuming that energy is good or not, depends on how much you value AI as a technology. No one cares about how much energy gaming PCs or refrigerators uses, because their existence is not currently controversial. See: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-going-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-power-grid/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...
- Qem 2y agoShould be renamed Three E's Island.
- coolspot 2y agoTres Comas '''
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- cykros 2y agohttps://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/ https://www.energytransitioncrisis.org/ If this story shocked you, do yourself a favor and check out Erik Townsend's docuseries on the need for nuclear to even come close to filling humanity's need for energy in the coming decades.
- atombender 2y agoCan someone explain why it's going to take so long to fully decommission TMI-2, the old reactor? Reading the commission report, they have about $733m in the decommissioning fund, while decommissioning is projected to cost $1B. Active demolition projected to start 2046, completed in 2052. They've started some work on debris demoval, but it looks they're going to take a break 2030-2046 to let the fund accrue (at expected 2% real RoR) enough to get the fund to $1B. Isn't that insane? So from 2030-2046, it will just sit there "mothballed" with a minimum spent on security and so on, just for the fund to gain value?
- petre 2y agoMaybe this is going to shed more light on the subject? Looks like the coolant and 99% of fuel have been removed, maybe it's to also give more time to the radioactivity to subside. https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3...
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