329
Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
329 points (97.1% liked)
Technology
58180 readers
4863 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The fact that they want to buy an old nuclear reactor instead of building a new one should be all you need to know to realise that it's not financially viable.
It's not quite equivalent right? Using an existing plant is cheaper and faster than building a new one?
Its like saying a datacenter is not financially viable only because top brass decided to use a perfectly good existing one.
No, that's only because the US has constructed barriers to make it cost more and take longer, to protect conventional dirty energy. Those barriers do not need to be as large. A new reactor being built would take several years, and they don't want to wait for that. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be profitable, although again the barriers may make it unprofitable or at least a riskier investment.
Edit: also, they aren't buying this reactor. They are not in the energy business. They're buying 100% of the output of unit 1. That's all. The previous owners are still running it. It stopped temporarily in 2019 because Methane undercut it, because Methane does not have to pay for its pollution like nuclear does.
I see this as a good thing because they'll invest more on making energy efficient. That's something bound to trickle down and help poorer regions unless they die off first.