Three Mile Island Reactor 1 Will Be Restarted to Power Microsoft Data Centers. [View all]

[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.