by Nick Bowler
On September 20th there was an announcement by a little known energy company located in Baltimore Pennsylvania:
Constellation announced today the signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft that will pave the way for the launch of the Crane Clean Energy Centre (CCEC) and restart of Three Mile Island Unit 1, which operated at industry-leading levels of safety and reliability for decades before being shut down for economic reasons exactly five years ago today. Under the agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from the renewed plant as part of its goal to help match the power its data centers in PJM use with carbon-free energy.
There are two highly significant things about this announcement. The first is that the company operates a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of one of the world’s biggest nuclear accidents. The reactor was due to be decommissioned in the next few years and the plant shut down completely, but it now has been given a new lease of life with this deal. If Constellation gains approval from its local authorities to go ahead with the project, it will truly be a turning point for the future of nuclear energy.
The second significant fact is that the purchaser of the entire output of this reactor for the next 20 years is Microsoft. The technology giant will build a new plant to develop AI nearby, and it will need the output of a nuclear reactor to guarantee the energy requirements of the project.
The anticipated huge surge in energy demand from this sector (all of which has to be in the form of electricity) is prompting AI companies to make deals with energy companies to secure their slice of the cake in a world where energy security is becoming less and less certain.
AI is set to surpass even the huge energy consumption requirements of digital crypto-currency transactions and storage.
It takes a very long time to build a new nuclear power station, so the spotlight is now turning to small modular reactors (SMRs) for a faster turnaround. These can be built and commissioned a great deal more quickly than conventional reactors, assuming of course that the political will is there to approve their construction in the first place.
There are many companies eyeing the opportunity presented by this new technology. Amongst others, Rolls Royce is getting in on the act – with an emphasis already on “clean and affordable”, tying the technology in to the green revolution in order to win Government backing.
All of this provides both a problem and a solution for the Labour Government’s drive towards Net Zero. It is becoming increasingly clear to many people that the limitations and costs of Net Zero are going to far outweigh the benefits of trying to reach the lofty goals contained in the eco-aspirations of the current Government.
In particular, as many articles on this website have attested to, it will be impossible to rely on renewable sources of energy without a constant power backup. As fossil fuels are ruled out, that leaves only one currently viable source at reasonable price levels: nuclear energy.
However, nuclear energy comes with a severe political taint due to a long history of fear-mongering and negativity, associated for decades with Labour party opposition to the Trident missile system.
The political activism group Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which opposes all forms of nuclear energy, saw a surge in membership when Tony Blair announced plans to expand U.K. nuclear power capacity in 2007.
This rekindling of public anxiety at that time must contain a warning to the Labour Government when it comes to try to ‘sell’ nuclear to its supporters and the public. But how much choice will it really have in the matter? The catalyst for the change is coming from the AI revolution, which doesn’t look like it has any intention of being stopped in its tracks.
This is what Yann lecCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta had to say about the deal with Constellation:
AI datacentres will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously.
Basically, next to nuclear power plants.
The advantage is that there is no need for expensive and wasteful long-distance distribution infrastructure.
Note: yes, solar and wind are nice and all, but they require lots of land and massive-scale energy storage systems for when there is too little sun and/or wind. Neither simple nor cheap.
AI and nuclear energy are a marriage made in heaven it seems. It holds out hope for a more sensible energy policy in the U.K. to be developed after all. But expect to see all kinds of hand-wringing and hypocritical statements from the Government as it tries to make nuclear power palatable to its Left-wing supporters.
Have anti nuclear types sign up for a load shedding priority?
There must be some way that Jane Fonda can be involved in the Christening of the plant.
Can I just kick this off with this –
Dispelling the Myths of Nuclear Energy [Dangers] (Live Lecture) by Illinois EnergyProf
ALSO worth the time viewing –
Economics of Nuclear Reactor by Illinois EnergyProf
I bet there’s more danger from using your “mobile” phones.
Maybe from distracted driving?
After lab-testing almost every human on earth, _Science_ has decided that any downside to mobile “phones” is worth it.
Bananas are higher than background radiation too
Come on now. Baltimore is in Maryland, not Pennsylvania, TMI is miles away south of Harrisburg, PA. And Constellation is a huge electric utility. Also, the electricity from a restarted TMI will probably be fed into the PJM grid, so the new Microsoft AI centre could be anywhere there are power lines. Maybe close would be best, but not necessary.
Introducing the term fungibility to the discussion …
fungibility
noun
Wow, I was just going for the Google button. Not looking below yet, I bravely write “now someone just has to trust lawyers and accountants to decide how much the plant is actually making”.
If the company that operates the plant has a guaranteed profit margin for power generated from other sources (yes they do) then they also have a perverse incentive for the already-paid-for source to fail at reliable power generation. To avoid bad optics, the operator would fail using safety concern as an excuse.
The company – Constellation – is in Baltimore. The plant is nearby in Harrisburg, PA.
The company says it wants 100% of the output of this plant, and so does not need to build new transformers or power lines to deliver power if it is geographically proximate to the plant location. Will the plant still be cross-connected to the grid? Probably, because even nuclear power plants, that have the highest up time of any power source today, have to be shut down occasionally for maintenance.
Depending on the loading, the AI datacenter is going to need its own transformer and circuit protection.
And giant batteries for outages? Really large batteries?
Look up the term “battery plant” as term used in industry (e.g. Telco); Any large, competent ‘high nines’ reliability application platform (think: Telco central office switch) runs their equipment off of a battery plant to start with, id est:
ACmains -> Rectifier -> BatteryBank -> DCtoAC Converters TO dc -> Computing Equipment
Even more importantly, nuclear plants need to be connected to the grid at all times to provide power for running the cooling pumps when the plant is shut down.
The plants have a redundant back up power supply–generators–that provide that sort of power.
Hopefully these generators are not in the basement.🤦♂️😉
Well at least it’s unlikely that a tsunami will reach Harrisburg, PA.
😄
It is a low lying island on a river that could easily flood.🤷♂️
Yes, understood. But hopefully they took into account flood records from the river when they built TMI.
A little harder to plan for tsunamis in subduction zones.
(Was more a joke 😉)
The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was located on the banks of the Susquehanna River specifically to access its water for each reactor’s power cycle cooling.
Now imagine a 7-magnitude or greater earthquake in the area . . .
For reference, the largest recorded earthquake in Pennsylvania’s history was the 1998 Pymatuning earthquake, which had a magnitude of 5.2 on the Richter scale. A larger earthquake in the area is improbable, but not impossible.
Clearly Microsoft has multiple data centres in the region. Northern Virginia is Data centre Alley , dozens of all types and companies
Almost sounds like they intend to build the AI center on 3 mile Island which is near Hershey Penn.
just across the river from Etters
Have you seen the island? The plant and attached transmission facility take up the whole island. The main distribution substation is on the east bank of the river. Any big data centre will have to be on one side of the river or the other. The west side is relatively hilly, the east side less so. Also, the bridge is quite small, as are the connecting roads. It is a pretty rural area. I fly over it at least once sometimes twice a month going into Harrisburg. Landing from the south you can get a great view. Unit 2 is pretty much gone, just concrete pads, but Unit 1 is all there.
MSFT can afford tractors.
If they are going to use all the power then they won’t need the transmission facility
They probably want reliability so the shorter and bigger the link, the more reliable. I doubt they will be placing a UPS at the connection point.
The UPS at a nuclear plant is likely an EMD diesel locomotive engine with a large generator at each end. If the plant ever looses the grid, it the ‘UPS’ must be up to speed in seventeen seconds to power the orderly shut down of the plant. There are hundreds of thousands of horsepower of pressurized water flowing through steel pipes a couple of feet in diameter that will turn to steam if released. The energy has to go somewhere until the reactor cools down.
Exactly.
As poster _Jim points out, grid electricity is a fungible commodity so there is absolutely no need for Microsoft to locate their future energy-gobbling data center anywhere near TMI. It could be (likely will be?) on the campus of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA. That would be really convenient and Microsoft already owns ample open land there for the data center . . . see attached photo.
Since we have a nation-wide electric grid, any MWh drawn in Redmond, WA, could be replaced by a MWh produced at TMI at Harrisburg, PA.
Have to account for the transmission losses. That is a long run.
In a nutshell: The idea of fungibility is applicable, within practicable limits, and IS how the three GRIDS in North America operate, as we don’t have separate ‘sub-grids’ within each of the three grids (E, W, and Tx) that operate in the US, each of the 3 grids exists as a ‘pool’ into which generation sources ‘pour’ in (or enter) energy into their respective grid (E, W or Texas), and energy sinks (local served areas) remove energy, with each entry and exit point metered for accounting and balancing (control) purposes.
Grid just means that area is running at same AC frequency.
Plenty of longer distance DC lines arent frequency stabilised for obvious reasons
Northern Virginia is data center heaven, this is what the nuclear station will serve
“As of 2020, Data Center Alley is home to over 12 million square feet of commissioned data center space with over 800 megawatts of power
According to the above article, 100% of the restarted TMI Unit 1 power output will be fed to the Microsoft data center.
Thats because you nad journalists dont understand power distribution. Microsoft through out the Virginia-Pennsylvania- New jersey region will buy power for maybe dozens of its data centres.
The idea a single site would be a colossal data centre for one company – a huge risk if some incident occurs- is nonsense.
A single large data centre might be 40-50MW – thats huge already. A large cluster of these for different companies is 400-800MW
See: “fungibility”
(nothing needs to cover distance greater than nearest source to the final destination except the money)
Really??? Do you really think that electrons have “send to this address” labels when they are put into the grid?
To be technically accurate, the electrical energy a transmission line moves from Point A to Point B is being transported by the electrical field surrounding the transmission wire, not by the electrons inside the wire itself.
Back to the main point …. Any AI data center located in the US Northwest, such as one which might be located on the Microsoft campus, must be attached through its local grid to the Western Interconnect, whose operational policies and power supply planning efforts are being managed by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC).
My personal opinion is that WECC’s senior managers and senior technical staff have all bowed to the renewable energy delusions of western US green politicians and are not doing an effective job of either operational governance or of maintaing the future reliability of the regional power grid.
With the consequence that shortages of electric power here in the US Northwest will become the new normal before this decade is out.
OK . . . but I appeal to the wave-particle duality of EM photons.
Electrical circuit engineers almost always refer to the movement of electrons, not to the “electric field surrounding a transmission wire” or printed circuit board trace. Especially so in describing the functioning of semiconductors (i.e., transistors).
Also, one might question how the electric field field surrounding a DC transmission line is able to “transport” electrical energy . . . but I digress.
Circuit boards ? HVAC is nothing like that
Its the falling domino theory. The energy is passed like from domino to domino at near the speed of light
There is the “falling domino theory”, and then there is the reality of current flow (electrons per second, or amperes) in electrical circuits.
BTW, given the characteristic size of electrons (when defined as particles) do you think the relative size of HV transmission wires versus the size of printed circuit board traces really matters???
ROTFL.
Go watch Veratasium who has an excellent presentation explaining why electrons don’t flow in electrical circuits.
Sorry, but an “excellent presentation” (which is in the eye of the beholder) does NOT necessarily equate to excellent science.
As to any assertion that electrons don’t flow in electrical circuits, here are a just a few questions for rebuttal:
1) With no electrons flowing, what causes ohmic heating in circuits and fuses to “blow”?
2) With no electrons flowing, why do all operating electrical circuits have the property called “current flow”, typically measured in units of amperes, with one ampere being defined as one coulomb of (electron) charge flow per second?
3) With no electrons flowing in electrical circuits, how is it possible to charge an electrical capacitor and how is it possible to recharge a rechargeable battery, such as used in a cellphone or laptop computer?
4) Without flowing electrons, what then explains the basic action of semiconductors which physicists describe as being the control of electrons as they cross N-type (having excess electrons) and P-type (having an excess of “holes”, or missing electrons) materials?
5) With no electrons flowing in a wire, what causes the magnetic field that can be measured around that wire? IOW, did the physicist Hans Christian Oersted get it all wrong back in 1820—that it is the movement of electrons in a wire that creates a magnetic field—and thus have all the designers of electric motors since then been fooled as to how electricity can be transformed via creation of magnetic fields to create a useable force/torque?
I could go on and on, but need I?
Dont keep digging the hole you are in. Having a digital readout doenst mean its working like that at the electron level
To be technically accurate, it was the physicist Hans Christian Oersted who in 1820 found that a current (that is, a flow of electrons) running through a wire created a magnetic field, kicking off the modern field of electromagnetism. That finding is still true today . . . and grid transmission lines are rated in the maximum number of amperes they can safely carry.
Yes. As its AC the electrons dont ‘move’ at all. Its not like cars down the highway .
Now the HV DC lines are a different matter and thats generally how the ‘energy’ is best transferred long distances with lower losses
No but grid losses are substantial you can prove it to yourself and walk under a high tension line at night with a fluorescent tube
Substantial grid loss is a fact. The fluorescent tube experiment is real, reproducible and fun. That light tubes do not prove line losses takes more words than belong here.
I never commented on grid losses.
According to https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Energy%20Information%20Administration,States%20in%202018%20through%202022. :
“The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.”
IMHO, losses on the order of 5% don’t merit the adjective “substantial”.
Not to mention potential grid instability caused by proliferation of wind and solar pumping periodic generation into transmission assets. Most stability is gained by having the facilities adjacent to one another with dedicated transmission facilities and an on-site substation
TMI is less than 90 miles from Baltimore.
Correct. But it is not in Baltimore, and Baltimore is not in Pennsylvania. That is the point I was making.
The reference to Baltimore was in regards to the headquarters of Constellation Energy, NOT to TMI.
Something missing yet equally important…
Those massive storage systems require dedicated massive overbuild of capacity to create an unhindered source for recharging said massive storage system when the Fuel is available 10a-2p.
If you use up your storage capacity overnight you need to refill it in the 4 hours solar allows or run out the next night.
Massive overcapacity will be needed to complete a 4 hour recharge cycle
“source for recharging said massive storage system”
Yes, any system based on wind and solar with massive storage devolves into a grid with the primary purpose of keeping the storage charged. Keeping the lights on and the heat pumps running will be second or third priority.
______________________________________________________________________________
Yes, and we all know who is going throw a hissy fit, throw
paint, block traffic and lawyer up to oppose the plan.
I’m not sure. Lets see. If protesters get shadow banned by AI vendors, maybe college campuses relapse to advocating free speech?
Could be amusing…always fun to watch leftists eat their own.
Clearly Microsoft have their head in the sand. They could literally ask anyone what the lowest cost form of electricity is and they would get the answer – wind and solar. I checked with Perplexity AI and that is the answer it gave.
Now I thought Microsoft has to be reasonably smart so I added the proviso lowest cost for reliable 24/7 electricity. Perplexity still answered wind and solar firmed by batteries.
When pressed to go through the numbers Perplexity resorted to LCOEs and gave silly results.
When I said the generator was near a coal field it gave a cost of $80/MWh, which was lower cost than what it arrived at with wind and solar plus battery plus gas plus nuclear plus pumped storage despite it being nonsense.
So Microsoft have found truth on “renewable” energy. How long before they realise they have been scammed by the CO2 planet warming nonsense.. You have to think that someone in that organisation could take a few minutes to work out that climate models are pure bullish!t.
Since Microsoft already runs almost all digital information source access, they are really scamming themselves and apparently falling for it
There is a coal plant on the west side of the river, slightly north. Don’t know which one it is.
Brunner Island is on the west side just south of TMI
At these coords 40.0953612,-76.6938483
Or in Google Maps
https://www.google.com/maps/search/coal+power+plant/@40.0949097,-76.6919203,15z/data=!3m1!1e3
They probably know but love their jobs- like all the “burros” and academics who sing the climate emergency opera.
Gates was pro SMR a long time ago.
Anyone, anywhere, who has been involved in the design, construction and use of a date centre knows that it can never be reliant on a single source of power, even if that is nuclear.
Most quality data centres have contingency, provided by duplicated feeds and backed up by on-site generators in case of a fail over. Having a data centre near a nuclear reactor, as the primary, is a smart move, but even those can go off-line, so back-up and fail over are necessary. This is why whatever MS builds will be connected to the grid.
Makes me wonder- do we really need AI? For what, to do the work of most middle class white collar jobs? Will it solve difficult problems?
No it won’t. Actually I don’t even consider what they are doing now as real AI. If it was real AI they wouldn’t need to program it as it would program itself. I also believe that if they ever invent real AI them the human race is done because what the heck would it need us for?
John Von Neuman already proved mathematically that an algorithm cannot program a different algorithm. AI continues to be a fast idiot that will only do what it is told to do.
Von Neuman proved no such thing. Which is clear since you can ask chatGPT to write simple python programs for you. And as the technology improves so till will their ability to write programs.
I’ve seen ChatGPT code. For anything of any complexity, it’s a nightmare.
It doesn’t actually know how to generate code, it “knows” how to look for code online (such as StackOverflow) and possibly amalgamate it into something resembling a solution.
I doubt it will ever be able to create solutions for complex problems.
To keep the grid going, but then we’re screwing up on that job with wind and solar stupidity, so maybe our Cyberdine moment is coming…
Do we really need pants? Bananas? Baseball?
Does “need” drive supply and demand amongst overweight middle class shoppers?
re: “that it can never be reliant on a single source of power,”
Introducing the term and concept of ‘the grid’ into the discussion (NOT the common misconception and frivolous misuse by the typical public layman use of the term); you will have to go back and look at the history and development in the early 1900s to understand the utility and usefulness that interconnected sources of generation contributed to the reliability of the grid at the power transmission level.
Most laymen ONLY experience end result of the gridded power system at the END of their distribution ‘spoke’ or leg, and this is not the experience of large users, who almost exclusively have their OWN substation with delivery of the energy via HV transmission lines, again, unlike your and my experience via the ‘spoke’ of a distribution leg downstream of a substation a few (maybe tens) of miles away.
PS. MOST serious ‘data centers’ operate from battery plants as part of NORMAL operation anyway. TAKE the central office switching office that TELCO used to operate; 48V DC ‘battery plant’ fed or ‘charged’ via what was called a ‘rectifier’ (DC power supply to electronics types) capable of supply power for some number of hours before an onsite generator will start up and take over the load.
From the above article:
(my bold emphasis added)
One question: how about the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) . . . have they already approved the project?
Does the NRC have that kind of jurisdiction? I don’t know. My understanding is that Unit 1 still has a valid operating license, so the NRC approvals or denials may be limited.
The NRC has ultimate jurisdiction over all civilian nuclear power plants, from design approval, to site location approval, to construction and safety and anti-terrorism standards, to plant operational procedures, to the handling and storage of resulting nuclear waste, to the plant’s decommissioning plans and procedures.
NRC regulations have changed since TMI Unit 1 ceased operating more than five years ago.
Why would NRC regulations change? That would have to mean that the previous regulations were wrong. Not a good message coming from the NRC regulators.
No, not “wrong”. Time marches on. You fail to recognize that NRC regulations have become more stringent than they were five years ago . . . primarily the result of ever-increasing knowledge and technology related to nuclear power plant construction, operations, monitoring equipment, safety systems and anti-terrorism measurers.
For example, https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/cfr/part020/full-text.html lists NRC regulations under 10 CFR, Part 20 – STANDARDS FOR PROTECTION AGAINST RADIATION, Subparts A through O (with this webpage last updated April 14, 2023) that have had numerous updates that occurred in 2020, 2021 and 2022, all within the last five years.
Gosh. Will ItsUsername stop using MS products and services? Unlikely.
Wet and windy.
How much “bang” for your buck?
Hydrogen – ~5.3 MJ/kg (MegaJoules/kilogram)
Wood – 16 MJ/kg
Coal – 24 MJ/kg
Oil – 45 MJ/kg
Gas – 55 MJ/kg
Uranium – ~4,000,000 MJ/kg
Lithium ion battery – < 1 MJ/kg
Wind – 5 to 20 watts/metre^2
Solar – 2 to 3 watts/metre^2
Gas – a natural gas power plant generates 1,000 watts/metre^2.
All theoretical energy density and power flux numbers. Now apply various efficiencies-of-conversion to produce electrons and you get . . .
More from nuclear
. . . strictly on a energy density basis, which (a) is a pretty irrelevant metric for comparison, and (b) overlooks the problem that nuclear fission reactor waste (i.e., spent nuclear fuel rods containing U-235) still has more than 90% of the fuel’s original available nuclear energy density.
Reference for (b): https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-nuclear-fuel
That is why we need to process the impurities out of the fuel and put it back into the reactor. That way we can use all of the fuels potential energy.
Yes! It is an unmet need with no plans in the US to address that failing.
Of course, there is the uncomfortable “Ka-ching” factor associated with reprocessing spent nuclear fuel that 99% of people don’t want to even think about.
Why is it AI but it is U.K. ? It should be A.I. and not AI, like the man from U.N.C.L.E.
Velocitous and sophisticated pattern matching.
That passes for intelligence, nowadays.
Yes pattern matching with a bit of “fuzzy logic.”
IOW, still Automated Idiocy, not Artificial Intelligence.
So, is it USA or U.S.A.? How about am/pm, or A.M./P.M.? Is it TV or T.V.? GB of computer memory or G.B. of memory? RAM or R.A.M.?
So many questions, so little time to worry over such trivia. 🤔
“W” used to call his nation ‘Murica. Probably still does.
U.S.A. (proper multiple noun name) People are lazy so the current convention is USA (since it costs less to put on t-shirts/tee shirts and uniforms)
a.m. (lazy it is am, not to be confused with am amplitude modulation)
p.m. (lazy it is pm, not to be confused with pm phase modulation)
tv (television is a compound word)
Gb (gigabyte is a compound word)
RAM (by generally accepted convention)
AI is another generally accepted convention. It should be a.i. but that is not impressive.
Sometimes U.K. is UK in map references and other instances.
Now the real question is: Is it B.S., b.s., BS, or bs?
Curious minds want to know.
“generally accepted convention” . . . would that be “gac”, or “g.a.c.”?
Curious minds want to know!
The general rules fall under is it an acronym, an initialization, an abbreviation, or another form of annotation?
As the son of a farmer, for me AI is Artificial Insemination which has worked brilliantly for many decades without the need for lots of electricity; just needs enough to heat the water for the vet to wash his/her hands in.
As a young boy growing up supporting my dad on an active dairy farm, I had occasions to witness AI. I’m still traumatized by witnessing such, even though in my case the vets used finger-to-shoulder heavy rubber gloves.
Pretty amazing- splitting atoms to power artificial intelligence. We’ve come a long was since we climbed down from the trees.
We climbed up the trees to begin with because that’s where the energy was. We never climbed down until it became apparent that was a limiting source and there was more available on the ground.
Mostly, we climbed the trees to avoid predators- sleeping up there. I prefer memory foam.
We mostly climbed down because the forests of East Africa opened up during a dry period. Running around out in mostly grassy country encouraged standing up and being tall. That climate change promoted the proto humans. With that hot sun- they were all black.
Of course, as everyone should realize:
1) human “ancestors” were well known for their PV skin, which also had chlorophyll just like tree leaves, and
2) the shade offered by trees 4 or 5 million years ago didn’t diminish solar energy (aka sunlight) anywhere near the degree it does today.
/sarc
I’d rather like to think that my lineage doesn’t include tree climbing/dwelling hominids, so please don’t include me in that “we”. 😉
“Early human ancestors stopped swinging in trees and started walking on the ground sometime between 4.2 and 3.5 million years ago, according to a new study”
— https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna41319336
And catch this . . . that nbcnews.com article says the reason for “human ancestors” leaving trees and starting to walk upright on the ground was . . . TA-DA! . . . climate change!
We actually climbed out of the swamps, which is why we are more or less hairless.
Microsoft already operate 200 data centres, Google and Amazon each operate more than that. How long before the net zero warrior worriers call for the internet to be shut down? 🙂
There are several facilities within 10 miles of my locale, one of them quite low-profile with no indication of what the ‘plant’ does or who owns it, the other located on the property of a noted network equipment provider, but, the building itself having additional security surrounding it. Those are just the two plants I know for a fact from +10 yrs back now.
Seems the internet has been shut down more than once in the past year.
Once was due to a bad security patch spammed world wide.
The more recent seems to be limited but due to cyber warfare activities.
Oh, and they are calling for the internet to be shut down today. It is called censorship of disinformation and misinformation.
Here’s what Microsoft doesn’t want you to know: they have already designed—and are near completing construction of—the equivalent of the Deep Thought computer* and need all the electricity generated by TMI Unit 1 to power it. Once that computer comes on line, humanity won’t ever again need the Internet.
*reference: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, D. Adams, 1979
With tech industry support for reliable power for AI, crypto, etc., maybe this is the crack in the dam holding back opposition to the whole climate issue to begin with. Someone with a sharp pencil in PA and elsewhere in the U.S. will eventually realize that fracked gas supplying reliable new capacity in the form of CCGT power stations is just the ticket. Climate impact? No good reason to expect so. Skeptics understand this already.
The Three Mile Island plant in one of a few restarts on the table. That is one
in a new trend. There’s another one in MI, a 805 MW that got a $1.5 billion loan from the government. There has yet to be a restart of a shuttered nuclear plant in the country.
A quick google puts a bit of color on the subject.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/palisades-three-mile-island-nuclear-restart
https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/-World-Nuclear-Industry-Status-Report-2023-.html
Seems the Inflation Reduction Act and Union Labor is a driving force behind this movement.
It will be interesting to see how they deal with the Hydrogen Embrittlement of the steam tubes
among other issues. There has yet to be a restart of any shuttered nuclear plant.
“Three Mile Island Unit 1 is a large nuclear power station with the capacity to generate 837 megawatts of electricity”
“It takes a very long time to build a new nuclear power station, so the spotlight is now turning to small modular reactors (SMRs)”
“Small modular reactors (SMRs) have a maximum power capacity of 300 megawatts electric (MWe) per unit,”
“The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan is the world’s largest nuclear power plant, with a net capacity of 7,965 megawatts (MW).”
Prediction: The present 300MW rule of thumb will be forgotten quickly and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa will lose its “world’s largest” title – lets say within 10 years of TMI supplying its first MWH to MSFT. 10 years is a long time, but as the article says “It takes a very long time to build a new nuclear power station“.
The Canadian province of Ontario is now working hard to establish itself as the go-to SMR manufacturing hub for North America.
Ontario Power Generation is now using direct government funding to expand its Darlington site to support four 300 MW GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs for a total of 1200 MW — a total output equivalent to that of a single 1200 MW Westinghouse AP1000.
The first of the four SMR units at Darlington will go online in 2029, the last in 2034. The great bulk of the systems and subsystems used in these four SMRs will be manufactured in Ontario.
Strict quality assurance requirements drive the costs of nuclear systems and safety-affecting components.
Over the next decade, other kinds of regulatory requirements related to basic nuclear safety, to operational ALARA, and to LNT radiation exposure theory will eventually be streamlined and reduced.
But not the quality assurance requirements. Today’s strict QA requirements as are now being applied to the manufacture and installation of safety-affecting components and systems are not going away. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
As things stand today, supply chain issues and a lack of funding resources — not government regulation — are the two largest obstacles to an expansion of nuclear power in North America.
The reactor vessel for a 300 MW reactor is significantly smaller and easier to manufacture to a strict QA standard than is a 1200 MW reactor vessel.
We have no source for these large 1200 MW reactor vessels here in North America. If you want one, you have to go to Japan, Korea, or China and put yourself on a waiting list.
The province of Ontario has all the manufacturing capability needed to produce the GE Hitachi BWRX-300 design. The province is also setting itself up to produce reactor vessels and supporting subsystems for other SMR designs.
So the question arises … Here in North America, will we be constructing more power plants based on large AP1000 size reactors such as those used at Vogtle 3 & 4?
I doubt it. We simply can’t build enough of these large 1200 MW reactors fast enough to establish the optimized manufacturing and supply chain infrastructure needed to support them.
The question is why.
Why is building 4x300MW faster than building 1x1200MW?
And why NOT build 8000/300 = 27x300MW aka bigger than KK?
Kevin M: “The question is why. Why is building 4x300MW faster than building 1x1200MW?And why NOT build 8000/300 = 27x300MW aka bigger than KK?”
As it applies to nuclear construction in North America, the basic reason why it is faster to build four 300 MW SMRs versus one 1200 MW AP1000-size reactor is that the industrial supply chain for the 300 MW SMRs can be kept in continuous operation, more or less, and that it can be operated and managed under direct North American control.
The province of Ontario, using government financing, is setting itself up to do just that, to become the industrial manufacturing hub for reactors built in North America.
As things stand today with the large 1200 MW plants, reactor orders, if they come at all, are by circumstance few and far between, for a variety of reasons.
The QA-certified industrial base for the 1200 MW plants shuts down after each reactor project is completed and then must be reconstituted for the next order, if and when that next order comes. This takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
Especially so if the knowledge and skills needed to produce QA-compliant systems and subsystems is being lost in between reactor orders.
For the smaller reactors such as the NuScale design and the GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 design, the QA-certified nuclear manufacturing infrastructure doesn’t have to be shut down and then rebuilt with each new reactor order.
Over the next decade, we are likely to see a reduction of the NRC’s requirements in the areas of basic nuclear safety, operational ALARA requirements, and LNT radiation safety policies.
But we will not see any reduction in the NRC’s quality assurance requirements as these are now being applied to the manufacture, testing, and installation of safety-affecting systems.
The job of enabling and maintaining a QA-certified manufacturing environment is simpler and less expensive for the smaller reactors. The systems themselves are physically smaller and are thus easier to manufacture to a strict QA standard. More of them are being manufactured thus keeping the QA-certified facilities and personnel busy from one order to the next.
In comparison with Japan, the US is geographically a much larger area to be served with a reliable supply of electricity. It makes more sense to build larger numbers of smaller reactors and to disperse them in ways which minimize the need for new transmission capacity.
So, how many 300 MW SMRs have been built to date under direct North American control and begun commercial operation?
With no answer to that fundamental question other than “zero”, nobody has any idea of the time required to build even one 300 MW SMR under direct North American control.
re: ““The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan is the world’s largest nuclear power plant, with a net capacity of 7,965 megawatts (MW).””
Misleading verbiage, I think.
The site is occupied by 5 x 1,100MW reactors plus 2 x 1,356MW reactors.
The website https://www.power-technology.com/projects/kashiwazaki/ describes it as “the largest rated nuclear power station in the world.” Note the bolded words “power station”.
Thanks, I copied from the headline Google result. Yeah I know, not always smart to trust Google or Wikipedia, but the broader point stands: If it made sense put 5 reactors on a site in Japan, then why is everything different in, say, Vermont?
Beta Blocker’s answer above contains a lot of what reads like a marketing brochure to me – BUT – it answered my question. USA has a different geography and population density than Japan so a different solution might be better. I still think a the market will prefer large centralized power generation connected to a grid accessed ad hoc, analogous to the Internet with its giant servers connecting to anyone at anywhere.
KevinM, my mission in life isn’t to sell nuclear power and nuclear reactors. I am an energy policy wonk who happens to have spent most of his working career in the nuclear industry.
As it concerns nuclear projects, my personal participation in those projects is to help keep them on cost, on schedule, and in compliance with the regulatory requirements being imposed on these projects.
Adding nuclear power to our energy mix is strictly a public policy decision. We buy nuclear because we want energy security and reliability, and because we are willing to pay a premium for nuclear’s inherent energy security and reliability benefits.
New-build nuclear power will not go forward in North America unless governments directly finance enough new reactors to get the nuclear industrial base up and running in a reasonably self-sustaining and cost-effective condition. Years of effort are needed to make this happen.
I’ve explained above why SMRs are more suited to the North American market than are the large 1200 MW unitary reactors.
The province of Ontario in Canada has studied the market for new-build nuclear in North America and has reached the same conclusions I have about SMRs versus the large 1200 MW unitary reactors.
The BWRX-300 design Ontario Power Generation is using is basically a quarter-size version of the much larger GE-Hitachi Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) design.
Ontario’s own nuclear experts have gone with the quarter-size version of the ESBWR because it can be deployed in a more geographically-diverse set of locations; and because as knowledgeable customers for nuclear technology, they can maintain tight control over the end-to-end process of manufacturing and installing these smaller reactors.
Key phrase “net capacity” so not misleading, even if math says it is in error by a bit.
Power station – power plant…. you call it toe-may-toe I call it tau-mah-toe….
Sometimes it becomes necessary to gain a toe-hold on your own toes.
Being a pragmatic and a skeptic, I feel it imperative to ask 1 basic question.
Given the state of the world today and even US society, politics, etc.:
Should we be concerned with terrorism?
Chernobyl was inadequate in design and resulted in radio active clouds in the skies over most European countries. 3 Mile Island had containment and that worked. The reactor in Japan had problems due to a massive earthquake and tsunami, but very limited radiation issues.
There is no such thing as perfect security. Any security protocols implemented can be defeated.
I am not concerned about normal operations, nor am I concerned about equipment failures.
Terrorism is the concern that must be addressed.
If 3 mile is blown up, where will I get my chocolate?
(humor intended to dampen the reaction to this post)
A large plane being flown into a active nuclear power plant would likely
kill many hundreds of thousands according what I’ve read. The
head of the counter-terrorism unit at the pentagon is from my home
town but that’s not where I get any information of any kind.
No.
Thank you.
I already know the answer. 9/11 is just one example.
I hope to get others to start mulling the issue.
There is NO comparison of the multistory office structures at the WT center site to the construction of a containment building. I would suggest some self-study on the latter.
Dunning-Kruger assumptions (layperson based assumptions lacking rigor and/or lack of specific knowledge of subject matter) appear to be ‘ruling the roost’ here.
It does not have to be an airliner flown into the building.
There are too many other ways to do it.
Have a watch of the first video posted above; this plane crashing into nuclear plant scenario is even less of a threat than CO2 emissions.
Sun just fired off the largest X-class flare of this solar cycle, with an accompanying fast moving CME directed dead-on at Earth. CME arrival will be sometime Saturday at Earth.
Expect severe geomagnetic conditions to hit sometime Saturday. Higher latitude Power grids and comms, LEO sats, and GPS will likely be affected.
Aurorae may be visible Saturday night across much of lower US 48 states.
Severe geomagnetic storm conditions (G5) will also kick start the Atlantic Basin TC conditions into high gear.
Today’s X9.0 flare and CME follows an X7.1 flare and CME on Tuesday 1 October. This second one will be much stronger. The first wave of the X7.1 CME will hit Friday. This will serve to clear out the solar heliomagneto sheath allowing the second one following to hit with even more effect on Saturday.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/g1-g3-minor-strong-geomagnetic-storm-watches-issued-03-05-october
Buckle up boys and girls!
Saturday is gonna be a wild ride for Power Grid and satellite operators. Expect GPS and RF comms degradations.
I’d better pick up my weekly Burger King double whopper meal, large size with Diet Coke, before I head out of town this evening. I might not get another chance at it before Mother Nature’s solar-driven EMP strike hits the earth.
Wow! Someone finally figured out it made sense to build data centers next door to a power plant providing continuous (not intermittent) electricity.
These people must be extraordinarily brilliant.
We don’t actually know where the data center will be built.
What IS extraordinarily brilliant is the acceptance of the FACT that you can’t get reliable power for these things from breezes and sunshine.
Of course that required no brilliance on Microsoft’s part – we skeptics of the “climate crisis” bullshit have been telling them that for years and years.
Starting with the first apparently serious propaganda about new nuclear technology I’ve been entering the occasional comment that the long term plan is for big data and AI, which are important to government for its surveillance and people control programs, along with the government centers those technologies serve, will get the best synchronous, reliable electricity supplies while the little people will have to make due with the unreliable, asynchronous supplies — whenever those happen to be running. Watch it unfold.
It might be slow and complicated to develop a parallel generation system.
re: while the little people will have to make due with the unreliable, asynchronous supplies”
For us, out here in the fields, it is a ‘last mile’ problem for the most part. The reliability of electric delivery to your nearby substation is fairly robust, but, it is the distribution part of the network that is subject to tree limb contact, automobile accidents taking out power poles, as well as lightning strikes and animal damage or infestation that result in outages.
The recent fanout of S&C Electric’s “Intellirupter” ™ series (of pole-mounted reclosers) on distribution system power poles in the Oncor system has improved reliability of power delivery in my area, and this was accomplished back in 2019 now. These Intellirupters allow the identification and segmentation of bad segments of a distribution ‘spoke’ (from the central hub being a substation) allowing the restoration of power immediately for most customers, and isolating only that segment of the distribution line having a fault.
“The political activism group Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which opposes all forms of nuclear energy,…”
I’d love if there were a way to gauge the average age of members active for more than one year. The Cold War ended somewhere around 1990 – more than 30 years ago now. Nuclear weapons are still plentiful and dangerous but I don’t think nuclear disarmament is an issue kids care about these days. Is anyone on the comment thread at a school? Do the kids care? I imagine the older teachers care about nuclear war but I wonder whether the younger students consider it ” a thing”.
I wonder if MicroSoft checked with Harris to confirm this was “opportunity economics.”
It takes far too long to build a nuclear power station for us humans, and it costs far too much and is dangerous too. Well, that’s what they are telling Australians. But it will obviously be cost-effective, quick and safe if it’s built for computers. Here’s a good idea: Why not get Microsoft to build one in Australia, saying it is for computers, and then actually use it for people.
AI is set to surpass even the huge energy consumption requirements of digital crypto-currency transactions and storage.
Nothing stopping Microsoft leveraging off their corporate reputation and setting up their own crypto currency to boot with any net-zero electricity to spare. They could really kick ass with ‘Greenbacks’ crypto and AI block chain seignorage and wouldn’t that freak out the climate changers and their helicopter monopoly money.
***** BREAKING NEWS *****
As reported in the Washington Post just last Thursday (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/03/nuclear-microsoft-ai-constellation/ ), Constellation Energy, the utility company that already owns Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Unit 1 nuclear reactor, is expected to seek a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee for its project to restart a reactor that would provide power to Microsoft for a new artificial intelligence data center.
It was revealed that The Baltimore-based energy company submitted an application to the U.S. Department of Energy for the taxpayer-backed loan in May, the Washington Post reported Thursday.
Previous announcements from Consolidated Energy has stated the company’s plans to invest $1.6 billion for the restart without mentioning that money would be an “investment” of taxpayer dollars.
Now catch this: Microsoft Corporation is presently valued (has market capitalization) at $3.09 TRILLION. Simple rhetorical question: why can’t Microsoft provide this loan to Constellation Energy since they are the stated sole beneficiary of the electrical output from a “restarted” TMI-1?
Also, these questions: Are you kidding me? . . . $1.6 billion to just restart (Constellation Energy’s word) a nuclear plant that has already been purchased? . . . Where is all that money really going???
The gullible US taxpayers, via their inept Congressional representatives and the complicit Biden Administration, are going to be taken for a ride if this loan goes through.
Ooops . . . in the fourth paragraph of my above comment, it should read:
“Previous announcements from
ConsolidatedConstellation Energyhashave stated . . .”Mea culpa.