Bloomberg report above refers to Nuclear power as “renewable energy”, so that’s an interesting usage.
We’re seeing a reboot of one of the 20th century’s most notorious brands.
Yahoo Finance:
Constellation Energy signed a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Microsoft on Friday (20 September) to help the restart of a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, US.
Under the latest agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from Three Mile Island to power its data centres in the state.
Technology companies have looked to nuclear energy, considered more reliable than solar and wind, to power their data centres for intensive activities such as cloud computing and AI.
Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, said: “Powering industries critical to our nation’s global economic and technological competitiveness, including data centres, requires an abundance of energy that is carbon-free and reliable every hour of every day, and nuclear plants are the only energy sources that can consistently deliver on that promise.”
In July, Constellation announced plans to bring back part of the Three Mile Island site, which was operational from 1974 until its closure in 2019.
“Before it was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics, this plant was among the safest and most reliable nuclear plants on the grid,” Dominguez said. “We look forward to bringing it back with a new name and a renewed mission to serve as an economic engine for Pennsylvania.”
There is so much momentum behind a Nuclear Revival in this country, that it’s unlikely to be stemmed by any kind of public opposition. Moreover, many of the most prominent proponents of “new” nuclear are also some of the same people who are indispensable allies of clean, renewable energy.
We’re at a point in the fulminating climate catastrophe that a circular firing squad among zero carbon advocates seems like a bad idea.
If Nuclear fizzles now, it will be for the same reason that it fizzled in the 80s – poor planning, worse execution, and subsequent economic cratering.
I tell my pro nuclear friends, that since large scale nuclear scaling won’t really happen til the 2030’s, help me site more renewable energy now – because there is no realistic decarbonization scenario that does not include huge wind and solar buildouts – and we can do that now.
I tell my anti-nuclear friends, help me support siting of solar, wind and battery storage now, because there’s a real chance that renewables might very well out compete nuclear in the coming decade, particularly if we see the emergence of a possible dark horse like advanced geothermal.
Posting from my phone while my Microsoft Windows laptop reboots from yet another “critical” update
I’ve got a really bad feeling about this …
I just did a search for how many depleted fracking wells there are in Pennsylvania.
Here’s the AI generated result.
“The exact number of depleted fracking wells in Pennsylvania is unknown, but estimates range from 100,000 to 750,000:”
Why not convert some of them to enhanced geothermal instead? The drilling has already been done. – clean base load power 24/7
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Former Shell employees resurrect dead well in ‘monumental’ move for geothermal energy: ‘Big step change for humanity’
“The well didn’t contain gas, but it did burrow deep enough to reach the hotter layers of stone under the ground.”
Sage Geosystems is the company they’ve formed.
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/geothermal-energy-oil-gas-industry-tech-startup/
Sage Geosystems is the company that Meta Platforms has contracted with to power its data centers
Has Microsoft announced their power plans for the required maintenance downtime all large nuclear reactors require? They’re hitching a data center to a single-reactor plant in Eastern Pennsylvania. Amazon’s also going to be sucking electrons from nuclear in Eastern Pennsylvania.
So even supposing the plants have no unexpected downtime, there’s the expected downtime, and a nuclear plant’s downtime is not brief, and what will the grid in that region be needing to do with the extra demand?
“In recent years, the average refueling outage duration has been about 32 days.”
That from here: https://www.powermag.com/planning-is-key-to-successful-nuclear-refueling-outages/
And the EIA: “Nuclear power plants undergo seasonal scheduled outages”
“Like most electric generators, nuclear reactor operators typically schedule maintenance in the spring and the fall to help ensure that the reactors are available to meet peak electric demand in the summer and winter. (See previous electricity maintenance story.) Although a reactor can hold several years of fuel, operators choose to refuel their reactors after approximately 18 or 24 months of full power operation.”
From this page: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=1490
My concern about the FOMO rush among the big tech firms to try to out-invest their competitors in power-hungry AI, and do it near population centers, is that their demands will be for power all day, every day, and that’s going to affect the decision to retain or remove fossil plants – since these carbon-credit buying tech firms are probably pretty willing to demand more generation even if from methane or coal for when “their” share of a nuclear plant is unavailable. We’ve already seen crypto miners restart coal and gas plants that had been shut down.
Per the article:
“Under the latest agreement, Microsoft will purchase energy from Three Mile Island to power its data centres in the state.”
I understand this to be commodity power by way of what I call contractual magic. Just as a customer’s natural gas contract can define gas* going through a valve in Louisiana to magically come out of a valve in Illinois, the power customer and provider can structure purchases where the contracted power doesn’t reflect the physical source, transmission and consumption. Any pre-arranged turnaround shutdown should be invisble to the customer, and the provider (nuclear plant owner) would just seamlessly cover the cost of a different power source.
These contracts typically have insurance riders and failure-to-comply contingencies, too.
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*As long as it is comparable grade or the difference in grade is taken into account.
I like the idea that AI data centres not put their possibly enormous power requirements onto the grid but have their own consistent supplies. Since large reactors can end up down for a month or two for maintenance then a selection of small modular reactors would probably work better.