Three Mile Island owner seeks taxpayer backing for Microsoft AI deal
Three Mile Island owner seeks taxpayer backing for Microsoft AI deal
The Department of Energy is weighing a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a plan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant with Microsoft as its sole customer.
The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers, according to details of the application shared with The Washington Post. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company.
Microsoft, which declined to comment on the bid for a loan guarantee, is among the large tech companies scouring the nation for zero-emissions power as they seek to build data centers. It is among the leaders in the global competition to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity.
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Nuclear energy had always been a way to funnel public money into private pockets. It never has and never will work without massive subsidies.
I don't support most new nuclear projects, but saying "it never has and never will work without massive subsidies" is asinine. I live in Ontario where roughly half our electricity comes from Nuclear, and that helped keep the cost reasonable for over a generation. France has also seen great success.
It only looks cheap because the real cost is never fully accounted for. Research and development are paid for by governments. Construction is massively subsidised. Then the corporations reap the profits during regular operation and the tax payer is left holding the bag again for decommissioning. This is how it happened in Germany and what is happening right now in France. The French are in such deep shit it's not even funny any more. And I'll bet it's a similar situation in Canada.
I think you need to read up on shit because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Électricité_de_France owns and operates all the large domestic reactors and they're fully owned by the government. We can talk about how financially efficient they are - sure - but it's a very different setup from the US where utilities, bizarrely, absolutely must be privatized.
Power is a service that costs money - it's essential and naturally forms local monopolies... the fact that private power utilities in the US exist is the issue - not that they use nuclear reactors.
This comment is getting downvoted, and I don't oppose nuclear, but I do think it's worth noting that the nuclear energy sector has still under-priced the costs of nuclear waste management, transportation, and storage. Engineers don't have practical methods of building storage containers and buildings that can last as long as the half-life of nuclear waste (1,000-10,000 year), and the long tail of storage costs has not been priced into the cost. Typically, this does end up being paid for by taxpayers over the course of many years. No energy generation system is without downsides, but it's worth acknowledging them.
In the US. Where we run all energy production that way. That's a pretty big asterisk. Because other countries realize it's a public good that they cannot function without. So it's owned and operated by the government.
It has many times. It's cheaper in other nations. The only reason it's so expensive and takes so long to start in the US is because dirty energy companies have gotten laws passed that make it harder "in the name of safety" or whatever they claim. Most anti-nuke groups are funded by oil companies. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, reliable, produces insignificant waste that is easily managed, and provides a baseline power that other clean sources can't do alone.
You’re being downvoted, as is tradition, but you’re right.
You say they're right, but you didn't counter any opposition. Great input. You do realize that the anti-nuke movement is largely funded by oil companies, right? If they weren't a good alternative, why would they need to do this? They would just fail regardless. Instead we've passed a ton of laws increasing the cost and time to build a nuclear facility to protect them, and then people like you just repeat that it's too expensive, or that it's unsafe despite being essentially tied in safety with solar, and better than everything else.
Great input.
Meanwhile you just trot out the usual nonsense about how we would all be living in a glorious nuclear utopia if it wasn't for those pesky oil companies while providing no proof yourself.
The bottom line is that if nuclear could compete on price then we would be building more nuclear but it's just not competitive. If you have any regulations that could be done away with in a safe manner and would make a sizable difference to the cost then cite them.
I never claimed it'd be a utopia. Stop being a jackass.
Nuclear is
cheapclean and safe:https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
Nuclear waste isn't an issue:
https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=o6YA2XthpOg6MwV6
https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU?si=K0Drxo0xxe_Q7gFe
Anti-nuclear groups funded by oil companies:
Regulatory burden dramatically effects nuclear profitability:
https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/putting-nuclear-regulatory-costs-context/
I can get more receipts if you want. Anything you still don't believe?
Nuclear is cheap and safe:
Your sources don't mention anything about price, unless I'm missing something.
It was a typo. It was meant to say clean, and it was fixed shortly after posting. The one about regulation does discuss cost.
If you notice on the graph you posted nuclear gets more expensive over time. Why? Everything else gets cheaper over time, until recently where they all increase together. Clearly there's a temporal link increasing the price of nuclear and it isn't just expensive always. What has been happening over time to make it more expensive? We pass laws to force it to be unprofitable. It used to be one of the cheapest, and it still is in many places around the world. The US has purposefully made it expensive at the behest of the oil industry.
Edit: I like that you down voted me for disagreeing but also responding with what you wanted. You're not a very good person are you?
As I said, “If you have any regulations that could be done away with in a safe manner and would make a sizable difference to the cost then cite them.”
If you can’t do that, just say so.
Sea-lioning. Nice. I'm not an expert in the field. I don't know which regulations do what. I don't need to prove that to you. The fact that it costs more and takes longer in the US than any other nation, and also that nuclear accidents are extremely rare and safety is high, proves that we have needless regulations. I don't need to know which ones those are to know that's true. If you somehow can't see that without specific regulations being cited, maybe you need to work on your deduction skills.
The fact that it costs more and takes longer in the US
Not a fact. Hinckley C in the UK is facing similar cost and time overruns.
I don’t need to know which ones those are to know that’s true.
You absolutely do if you don’t want anyone capable of rational thought to think you’re full of shit.
As you can see in this chart from the paper, after the Three Mile Island incident, the cost to build a nuclear reactor went up significantly in the US.
Clearly this is due to increased regulations after the anti-nuke movement gained so much influence after Three Mile Island, despite the very minor effects of the event itself.
"When the full cost experience of US nuclear power is shown with construction duration experience, we observe distinctive trends that change after the Three Mile Island accident. As shown in Fig. 3 in blue, reactors that received their operating licenses before the TMI accident experience mild cost escalation. But for reactors that were under construction during Three Mile Island and eventually completed afterwards, shown in red, median costs are 2.8 times higher than pre-TMI costs and median durations are 2.2 times higher than pre-TMI durations. Post-TMI, overnight costs rise with construction duration, even though OCC excludes the costs of interest during construction. This suggests that other duration-related issues such as licensing, regulatory delays, or back-fit requirements are a significant contributor to the rising OCC trend."
Good enough for you?
You absolutely do if you don’t want anyone capable of rational thought to think you’re full of shit.
No, you do not. I can be assured the sun makes things warmer by showing a graph of temperature based on the position of the sun in the sky. I don't need to know precisely what fussion reactions are happening in the sun to know the cause. If you aren't capable of that then that's on you. No one else needs to know the exact cause to see correlations that point towards the cause.
Edit: Based on history you're already responding, but I thought I should include the global trend graph from the paper too. In some other nations it's gotten cheaper over time. The US is by far the worst of making it more expensive over time, despite technology and knowledge advancing.
I recommend going through the study yourself though.