Three Mile Island Reactor 1 Will Be Restarted to Power Microsoft Data Centers.

[NNadir]

Three Mile Island Unit 2 is the original antinuke boogeyman that has helped bring on the collapse of the planetary atmosphere by demonizing the only sustainable option capable of addressing it at any level.

This is about Three Mile Island 1, a reactor which was unfortunately shut four years ago. It is to be restarted apparently, much like the presently shut Palisades Nuclear Reactor in Michigan, which with the support of Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the Biden administrations DOE, will also be restarted to benefit the environment and save human lives.

The news item:

Constellation to restart Three Mile Island unit, powering Microsoft

Constellation has signed a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will see Three Mile Island unit 1 restarted, five years after it was shut down.

Constellation purchased the 837 MWe Three Mile Island Unit 1, in 1999. The unit, which had enough capacity to power 800,000 homes, was retired prematurely for economic reasons in 2019. In its last year of operation, the plant was producing electricity at maximum capacity 96.3% of the time - well above the industry average and employed more than 600 full-time workers.

The Unit 1 reactor is located adjacent to TMI Unit 2, which was shut down in 1979 after an accident which resulted in severe damage to the reactor core and is in the process of being decommissioned by its owner, Energy Solutions.

Constellation says "significant investments will be made to restore" unit 1 "including the turbine, generator, main power transformer and cooling and control systems. Restarting a nuclear reactor requires US Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval following a comprehensive safety and environmental review, as well as permits from relevant state and local agencies. Additionally, through a separate request, Constellation will pursue licence renewal that will extend plant operations to at least 2054".

The plant is to be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Centre - after Chris Cane, who was CEO of Constellation's parent company and passed away in April. The aim is for it to be online in 2028...

I'm a big admirer of the Governor of my neighboring State, Josh Shapiro. Quoth he:

Governor Josh Shapiro said: "Under the careful watch of state and federal authorities, the Crane Clean Energy Center will safely utilise existing infrastructure to sustain and expand nuclear power in the Commonwealth while creating thousands of energy jobs and strengthening Pennsylvania’s legacy as a national energy leader."

The Biden administration has weighed in:

Michael Goff, Acting Assistant Secretary, Department of Energy's Office of Nuclear Energy, said: "Always-on, carbon-free nuclear energy plays an important role in the fight against climate change and meeting the country's growing energy demands."

So called "renewable energy," which has been promoted not to address the extreme global heating now being observed (claims to the contrary are an absurd add-on) but to attack sustainable nuclear energy, and has failed miserably, at a cost of trillions of dollars to have any effect on extreme global heating other than to make it worse is unsuitable for data centers.

So called "renewable energy" is particularly useless in systems requiring reliability, especially those requiring continuous power, because so called renewable energy is notoriously unreliable, leading to the need for very filthy back up, generally fossil fuels. By contrast, nuclear energy is optimal for this application, and it is notable that the movement toward new SMR type reactors is often cited as a motivation for doing something to minimize the extreme environmental cost of electrical power which has led to extreme global heating.

It's very good news indeed.

As for the boogeyman at Three Mile Island 2, despite all the nonsensical fear and ignorance spread about it over the last 45 years, its environmental and human health consequences have been negligible, and most of the money squandered to address the fear and ignorance associated with the reactor failure has been uselessly spent in a misguided effort to "clean it up" to a standard we apply to nothing else, certainly not fossil fuels, fossil fuels being a waste problem that actually kills people. People who carry on about Three Mile Island and other boogeymen are generally, in my observation, spectacularly disinterest in how many people fossil fuels kill, or for that matter the number of planets (1) fossil fuels kill.

My home is relatively close to TMI, only about twice the distance between Kiev and Chernobyl, and I have personally driven through Harrisburg many times where one can observe people, including Governor Shapiro, living healthy and useful lives.

[hlthe2b]

1. Well, there IS a renewable energy argument. But, I'm more taken aback that AI seems to be the lead justification

(based on its MASSIVE energy needs, much like Crypto) to restart these reactors. That is breathtaking as a decision point to me (and not in a good way).

[NNadir]

3. Like anything, data science can be used or abused. As a person working in the sciences, I am mostly involved with...

...the good, not the bad.

In particular, the understanding of the ongoing disaster of extreme global heating, which is clearly to my mind an outgrowth of the coddling of fossil fuels with so called "renewable energy" lipstick on the pig, is very much involved in data processing.

To the extent power is used to power porn sites for the "family values" Republican candidate for Governor of North Carolina; I regard this simply as a part of the price we pay for the abuse of otherwise good technology. Crypto may be another case; I don't follow it.

In the field of molecular biology, in which much of my professional work is involved, a key to understanding human disease, data processing is very important; a mass spectrometer generates huge amounts of data which would be impossible to analyze with a pencil and paper. A computer can now do in five minutes what would have taken graduate students years of work, and a full thesis, to do less than 30 years ago.

This website requires energy. It doesn't run only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. I regard DU as a positive resource.

I am hoping that this trend, refurbishing and restarting nuclear reactors will come closer to my home, refurbishing and restarting Oyster Creek. That reactor, a gift from my father's generation to mine, might prove to be a gift from my generation to that of my children if we restore it and bring it back.

If we are save what is left to save, and to restore what can be restored it should be unambiguously clear that we need reliable and clean energy, which nuclear, and only nuclear, can provide.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. "This website requires energy."

That’s true, it does, now let’s talk about “orders of magnitude."

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/10/nx-s1-5028558/artificial-intelligences-thirst-for-electricity

Artificial intelligence's thirst for electricity
July 10, 20245:09 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
Dara Kerr

…

KERR: When this process happens, a lot of energy is consumed. AI uses far more electricity from those data centers than traditional internet use, like posting on social media or storing our photos in the cloud. A majority of that electricity involves burning fossil fuels.

…

KERR: These emissions contribute to climate change, and Google notes a stunning revelation deep within its new, 86-page sustainability report - the company's total greenhouse gas emissions increased nearly 50% over the last five years. It says that's in a large part due to its growing AI push.

ALEX HANNA: There's a lot of people out there that talk about existential risk around AI, about a rogue AI thing that somehow gets control of nuclear weapons or whatever. That's not the real existential risk. We have an existential risk right now. It's called climate change, and AI is palpably making it worse.

KERR: Alex Hanna used to work on Google's Ethical AI team. She left the company over the handling of a research paper that highlighted the environmental costs of AI. Hanna now works at the Distributed AI Research Institute. In its report, Google says that as it continues to add more AI into its products, that, quote, "reducing emissions may be challenging." Google declined an interview with NPR. This spike in greenhouse gas emissions is a big change for Google, which has an ambitious climate pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2030.

…

[BrianTheEVGuy]

2. Hmmmm

I hear that Microsoft’s latest cloud solutions get GLOWING reviews!

[NNadir]

4. Um, Nuclear Engineers are highly educated, highly trained professionals, and are, happily, largely indifferent...

...to tiresome rote and frankly boring knee jerk fifty year old jokes disconnected from reality. Extreme global heating isn't funny.

The people with whom my son, seeking his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering, works are not clowns wasting time watching Simpsons episodes on TV, but rather people working hard, day and night, in the very difficult task of trying to save the world.

[BrianTheEVGuy]

5. Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning NT

[CoopersDad]

7. Is there any chatter about restarting San Onofre?

With all that demand for Data Centers, I can see where it might be under discussion, as much as I might prefer smaller distributed modular reactors.

[NNadir]

8. Not to my knowledge. San Onofre however, has a large inventory of used nuclear fuel which I expect will be...

...useful to future generations. As I understand it there's over 1500 tons of used nuclear fuel there.

Some of that fuel has had remarkably high burn ups, some of the best in the industry, meaning a pretty fair amount of valuable plutonium.

The spent fuel, as a rule of thumb, is generally about 95% unreacted uranium. Roughly 1% is reactor grade plutonium, the rest small amounts of fission products and transuranium actinides other than plutonium. This suggests that the energy content of this fuel alone is on the order of 100 Exajoules, enough to fuel the entire United States - all of its energy from coal, gas, oil, hydroelectricity, nuclear and the wilderness industrialized for solar and wind junk - for about a year or all of California for about 20 years. Under these circumstances - they are purely theoretical at this point - there would be zero air pollution in the State and lives would be saved.

Under circumstances where the fuel were used in process intensification situations, with high energy efficiency, the length of time to be covered would be longer.

This makes it an extremely valuable resource, and I expect that future generations will get it. Happily the fuel isn't going anywhere, and will remain available for wiser generations.

I always, when I drove past it, during my time in California, thought those reactors were quite beautiful. I don't know their current status as far as decommissioning goes, or whether they'd be suitable for restart.

[hunter]

9. Most of the power plant has already been scrapped...

... essentially everything that doesn't require special handling.

There's no rebuilding it at this point.