Re-starting Three Mile Island reactor to power data centers?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree. And putting A.I. in charge of it, pure lunacy.
That's how you get intentional meltdowns when A.I. decides to exterminate humans SkyNet style.

No one's saying AI is going to run the plant.

Umm yes. They are planning that.

AI runs in the current electrical grid in the US. Predicting demand is a hard problem.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/22/1083792/ai-power-grid-improvement/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know why you think utility scale batteries are unfathomable. They represent a significant amount of generating capacity added to the grid in 2023.

And the reasons we continue to increase extraction of fossil fuels have nothing to do with levels of renewable energy on the grid it’s because there is no political will to stop doing it. So instead we have started exporting— 10 millions bpd last year. We are basically at Saudi Arabia’s level of oil exports.

Reasons I said. Enough batteries combined with enough solar to get us through every night, and he periodic weeks like we’ve just had of almost nonstop clouds and rain, is an unfathomable cost that society and customers simply will never pay. If you want to hold out for that, you will be disappointed for the rest of your life, and your kids will never see it, either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know why you think utility scale batteries are unfathomable. They represent a significant amount of generating capacity added to the grid in 2023.

And the reasons we continue to increase extraction of fossil fuels have nothing to do with levels of renewable energy on the grid it’s because there is no political will to stop doing it. So instead we have started exporting— 10 millions bpd last year. We are basically at Saudi Arabia’s level of oil exports.

Here’s some more evidence that utility-scale batteries are not “unfathomable” but are actually being currently used—


https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=63025

That’s not evidence. That’s a meaningless graph without any context. 20 GW for how long? And at what cost? Your child can power a light bulb by riding a bike at the science center, so maybe that was, what, 40 watts? Your child can’t do that for more than a couple minutes, tops, if he really has to sprint to get the full 40.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The suggestion that nuclear is cheaper than solar/wind plus battery storage is ridiculous— and that doesn’t even count all the subsidies nuclear gets from liability limits under Price Anderson, waste management, DOE etc.

Not a nuclear engineer, but we have existing nuclear power plants. You don't need to find space and build out the infrastructure to reach your new wind or solar farm. You can run the nuclear plants while we build out the new infrastructure instead of burning fossil fuels.

Waste disposal is a problem that was never solved as far as I know. As I understand it, the spent material sits onsite in cooling ponds. There's no long term storage because people.

It’s not currently in cooling ponds. It’s on dry concrete pads, sealed in concrete cases, about the size of a football field, which represents roughly 40+ years of major amounts of power.

Yucca Mountain is the solution that the government promised. NIMBYs blocked it for NIMBY reasons. But the solution is there. In the interim, local storage is fine, too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the major problem with nuclear power is NOT safety. There are safety issues but that is not why I can count the new 21st century US nuclear power plants on one hand.
The issue is cost and complexity.

The newest US units are at Georgia Power's Vogtle plant. Construction started in 2009 with one unit online in 2023 and the other earlier this year. Total cost: $30 billion. Those figures are about double the expected construction time and double the expected cost. Even the simple reactivation of the unit at Three Mile Island will depend on a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee.

Aside from some token, small demonstrations there are zero new nuclear power plants under development in the U.S. We will keep the existing fleet going but that's it. The industry will continue to stab at the straw man safety issue but the truth is they are not cost competitive. That's why they aren't getting built.

We've known about climate change and the challenge of zero carbon power generation for at least 20 years. The nuclear industry had a HUGE window to develop a viable business model for nuclear power. I'm going to say they don't have one. As Clara Peller famously said, "Where's the beef?"

You’re correct that cost is the biggest issue.

There is some promise that SMRs will fix that.

But cost is a MUCH bigger problem for solar and wind. So, my point is, if you want to compare it to natural gas, nuclear costs more.

If you want carbon-free electricity because you actually believe in climate change, then nuclear is by far the cheapest, and only realistic option.

That’s the beef.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've never seen a solar bomb explosion, so I think solar is a better investment.

Solar energy, and wind energy, have caused far more human deaths per MW*hr, than nuclear, even counting Chernobyl.

People fall off roofs and wind turbines with some regularity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Saying it’s a smear campaign that Vogtle costs $30 billion just illustrates that the pro-nuke people can be just as irrational as the anti-nuke people.

Just like it was economics that killed coal it is economics that limit nuclear.

How much does solar cost that provides the same capacity AND THE SAME CAPACITY FACTOR (that’s the key) as Vogtle #3?

At least an order of magnitude higher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What does it say that TMI has a guaranteed customer for all of its electricity and it still needs the federal gov’t to give them a $1.6 billion loan guarantee.

It says that it would be cheaper to power the data center by burning natural gas. I thought we’re trying to move past that.

[Anonymous]

Great thread OP. Thank you. I'm learning a lot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The suggestion that nuclear is cheaper than solar/wind plus battery storage is ridiculous— and that doesn’t even count all the subsidies nuclear gets from liability limits under Price Anderson, waste management, DOE etc.

Not a nuclear engineer, but we have existing nuclear power plants. You don't need to find space and build out the infrastructure to reach your new wind or solar farm. You can run the nuclear plants while we build out the new infrastructure instead of burning fossil fuels.

Waste disposal is a problem that was never solved as far as I know. As I understand it, the spent material sits onsite in cooling ponds. There's no long term storage because people.

It’s not currently in cooling ponds. It’s on dry concrete pads, sealed in concrete cases, about the size of a football field, which represents roughly 40+ years of major amounts of power.

Yucca Mountain is the solution that the government promised. NIMBYs blocked it for NIMBY reasons. But the solution is there. In the interim, local storage is fine, too.

But what about the cave trolls in Yucca mountain? Who is going to care about them?

[Anonymous]

There’s a role for nuclear but the suggestion that the only way to get to a renewable grid is a massive expansion of nuclear or that if you look at all direct costs and subsidies nuclear is an order of magnitude cheaper than solar and wind is just not credible and the fact that you keep saying it and even say it in all caps doesn’t me it so.

[Anonymous]

It is credible. France has made nuclear 80% of their generation share for decades. It’s totally possible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There’s a role for nuclear but the suggestion that the only way to get to a renewable grid is a massive expansion of nuclear or that if you look at all direct costs and subsidies nuclear is an order of magnitude cheaper than solar and wind is just not credible and the fact that you keep saying it and even say it in all caps doesn’t me it so.

It's not a massive expansion to turn existing reactors back on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems like a horrible idea to me.

TMI has been shut down for decades. The people with the expertise to run it are all retired or dead now. Decades of prior use have degraded the reactor casing with neutron induced fragility. And it’s an older, less safe reactor design to begin with. All these risk factors just for data centers? Is AI really that important? How did we manage to survive until now without it then?

It seems like a really really bad idea. I cannot believe they are seriously considering it.

What do we have an NRC for?

I just picture AI getting smarter than humans, deciding we're a pointless species, and engineering a radiation leake to exterminate us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP it closed 5 years ago, not "decades"

Yeah OP's getting confused. There were two reactor units at Three Mile Island, the one that was involved in thr 1979 incident had its core removed but the other one was simply shut down in 2019 and not decommissioned. They're merely reactivating the one shut down in 2019.

It's also not like the facility is abandoned, they don't just walk.away and leave these things, they still maintain them until they are fully decommissioned.

Reading this thread, I get the impression that Harrisburg is a Potemkin village.

What does that mean?