405
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
405 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
59466 readers
3684 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
Personally? I don't think this is a bad idea. The less they drain from the grid, the less they consume fossil fuel.
The reactor isn't active right now, and they are a PWR design, and like the 1979 incident showed, they do fail safely.
So long as Microsoft pays for the operation of the plant? Seems reasonable to me if they're going to consume an assload of energy with or without public support.
we could use that extra energy to offset a bunch of existing carbon emissions now. This is still waste. If it's going to be started up again, and its energy used for something useless, it's waste.
Is it going to be started up again?
If M$ doesn’t invest into this for their own purposes, is it still going to be started up? Or is your position that M$ should be investing in a nuclear power plant for the good of the world?
Because while I can agree with the idea, we all know that would never happen. So if it was never going to be started up again, we are at 0 gain or loss no matter what they do with it.
And that’s ignoring the fact that they are apparently intending on using that energy anyway.
it would be a missed opportunity in the sense of "if they can allow it to be turned it back on to waste its power on this dead-end tech, why couldn't it have been allowed to operate again (earlier) for reasons we actually need?"
I'm not putting the blame on microsoft here, even though it might seem that way. But it's not microsoft who need to give the go-ahead for this to happen. It's the higher ups who decided to give the capacity to microsoft.
Yes it was still going to be used, but they could have been paying out the ass for it, which could fund other projects.
It operated for a long time profitably. It ceased operations in 2019 because it became unprofitable, largely because Methane undercut it. Methane should cost a lot more, but they don't have to pay for negative externalities. Nuclear has to contain all of its waste, and handle it carefully.
as opposed to just spewing it out in the air? (carbon 14 is a thing, those things emit a lot more radioactivity to the environment)
I'm not saying they should not contain it. I'm saying other sources should have to. We only force one energy source has to pay for the cost of all of its waste. Why is that? It's only to the benefit of dirty energy.
If there were plans for it to be used, then I’m with you. But if I’m being honest, I’d put money on the original plan consisting of letting it sit there for decades to come without being used.
And “paying out the ass” is what they will likely be doing, just to the private corpos that own the plant. It’s not government run, the money would never circle back to taxpayers beyond normal taxation.
that's what I'm complaining about. If there can be plans now, why was the original plan just "let it rot"?
Greed? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think you’re going to get the answer you want here. But I’d be willing to bet M$ is dropping the $$$ for whatever retrofits and repairs need to be done, with the agreement being they get the power near cost for a set duration.
Obviously that’s speculation on my part, but would explain the situation quite cleanly.