Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions

Lol. I just love it how so many people complain that Nuclear doesnt make financial sense, and then the most financially motivated companies just actually figure out that using a nuclear reactor completely privately is best.

Fuck sake, world.

Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can't really solve problems, they are now fully committing.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on these investments are not guaranteed. Generally, GenAI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.
This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn't say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.
- On the other hand, if they ever admit the whole genAI thing doesn't work, they could just sell the electricity produced by the plant.
- My org's Microsoft reps gave a demo of their upcoming copilot 365 stuff. It can summarize an email chain, use the transcript of a teams meeting to write a report, generate a PowerPoint of the key parts of that report, and write python code that generates charts and whatnot in excel. Assuming it works as advertised, this is going to be really big in offices. All of that would save a ton of time.
Nuclear safety and penny-pinchers don't make good bedfellows.
- Nuclear safety and ~~penny-pinchers~~ capitalism don't make good bedfellows.
  ftfy. Possibly ironically, nuclear safety and communism (or totalitarianism) don’t work either. It’s odd, innit.
Honestly it seems crazy that companies that are so focused on short-term profits in 2024 would be able to make nuclear work.
- Every once in a while they get faced with a line on a chart somewhere so unbelievably vertical that they have no choice but to look beyond next quarter. Power consumption going 10x in 2 years is one of those times.
It has been operated privately for a long time, unit 1 (this one) being operated by constellation energy. It stopped in 2019 because Methane had undercut it, and MS has now made an agreement to buy 100% of unit 1s output, but they aren't buying the facility. Most power generation in the US is private, for better or worse (usually worse).
Have they solved the disposal questions?
- We haven't solved the "disposal" question of using fossil fuels, and those turned out (or were known along) to cause much bigger problems.
- Mostly, yes. Use breeder reactors to turn long term radioactive waste to sort term radioactive waste, store for short time and done. The downside: it's more expensive to move and process the stuff so nobody wants to do that.
- Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.
- Relatively yes. There are disposal sites under construction that are in highly stable and environmentally safe locations. One good thing right now is that radioactive waste is temporarily easily stored. Transport of waste is an issue still, but far less of a problem than transporting oil and oil products.
- We have, but of course not to the satisfaction of anti-nuclear activists because solving it would be counter to their actual goals.
  Nuclear waste is actually quite easy to deal with unless your purposes are best served by it being very difficult to deal with, in which case you make as much trouble as you can for it.
- Uh... Yeah. The reactor was in operation until 2019 when it stopped being profitable. Disposal was never a problem.
I'm firmly in the "building new nuclear doesn't make financial sense" camp, but I do think that extending the life of any existing nuclear plant does. Restarting a previously operational nuclear plant lies somewhere in between.
- I think when you start looking at how expensive other forms of green energy are (like wind) long term, nuclear looks really good. Short term, yeah it’s expensive, but we need long term solutions.
Yeah for sure it is cheaper, if they only have to pay the operational costs. Not the ones of building and decomissioning the plant. Lol.
- OP really thought they had something there.
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.
- you deleted your comment saying "you're saying exactly what i am saying with different words"
  I want you to think about it like this. Some folk don't throw out their old stuff even if they could afford a new one. It's called "not being wasteful".
- 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.
It doesn't make financial sense to build new nuclear power plants. They're hugely expensive and such projects routinely run well over time as well as budget. If it did make sense, Microsoft would be building them, instead of reviving the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the US. Thing is, they want lots of power, and they want it yesterday. By the time you can build a new nuclear plant to satisfy these needs, AI will have run its course and big tech will be on to the next scam.
But hey, why pay attention to such nuances?

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.
- Microsoft would do it with or without the power plant. Make no mistake about that.
  The same argument could be said if they made a 1GW solar farm, or any other form of power generation. Unless you have a way to legislatively prevent Microsoft from producing their own energy or prevent acquisition of decommissioned plants, I don't see how you can prevent waste.
- That argument presupposes that the reactor would otherwise be brought back into operation, which I don't think is necessarily the case.
- 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.
- If it also shifts their current load off the existing grid, that might be beneficial.
I remember I had to do the 3 mile Island incident as part of my university degree. Apparently one of the biggest problems was that the control interface was hard to understand for the human operators.
So I guess if they just replaced the control system with a modern computer that would fix most of the problems. Obviously not a Windows system, otherwise we've just got the same issue all over again.
- It was the SCADA view right? A lot of SCADA software is basically running on top of windows, though you typically would never see the desktop. Ignition at least is cross platform, but that is because the server is Java and Jython. A big part of why things are running on windows is due to OPC, which was traditionally all DOM and .NET. It is basically a standard communications protocol and is what allows your HMI/SCADA to communicate with PLCs. Otherwise, you use proprietary drivers and native PLC specific protocols.
  SCADA programming/design is kind of an art and is usually written by an either an overworked engineer or someone who had far too much time on their hands. You basically build screens using specialized software, hook up buttons and UI elements to PLC signals, and pass some signals from the UI to the PLC. They are all heading in the Edge/iot/cloud/web based/techno-babble direction these days...
  Ignition, programming software is free!: https://inductiveautomation.com
  Some other random ones I have seen or used in the past: https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/automation/simatic-hmi/wincc-unified.html https://www.aveva.com/en/products/intouch-hmi/ https://www.rockwellautomation.com/en-us/products/software/factorytalk/operationsuite/view.html
- It continued operating for decades after the event. I'm sure they already solved that issue. It can still be improved I'm sure though.
- So I guess if they just replaced the control system with a modern computer that would fix most of the problems
  Introducing new Clippy For Reactors.

Are we eventually gonna get more fusion because billionaires are demanding more energy for their stupid projects?

Sure, knock yourselves out.

Are we eventually gonna get more fusion [...]
Either you mean fission, or the "more" could be omitted.
Most likely more fossil fuels because they’re faster and cheaper to roll out.
This is how I'm able to sleep without worrying about death, one of these billionaires has got to be funding research so they can live forever. No guarantee they'll share but that's at least a less dread inducing issue.
- yeah, larry ellison
  Ellison’s biographer Mark Wilson notes that Ellison sees death as “just another kind of corporate opponent he can outfox.”
Yeah, too bad there's no long-term storage for the waste so it will mean more and more leaks polluting land for centuries since the power companies will just go bankrupt when it's time to do anything about it like with most forms of pollution.
- The amount of waste is tiny. Coal plants cause more radiation than nuclear plants because of tiny amounts of radioactive matter in coal. You need to burn so much coal the amount of radioactivity is higher per unit of energy.
  Until we shut down all coal plants we shouldn't even think about closing nuclear plants

I'm sure that everyone will recognize that this was a great idea in a couple of years when generative LLM AI goes the way of the NFT.

Honestly, it probably is a great idea regardless. The plant operated for a very long time profitably. I'm sure it can again with some maintenance and upgrades. People only know three mile island for the (not so disastrous) disaster, but the rest of the plant operated for decades after without any issues.
- with some maintenance and upgrades.
  Hopefully we can trust these tech bros to do that properly and without using their usual "move fast and break things" approach.
- It's one of a hell of an old nuclear plant if it's the original three mile island one.
Once operational, the energy generated is cheap and will still be in demand
Nfts were a scam from the start something that has no actual purpose utility or value being given value through hype.
Generative AI is very different. In my honest opinion you have to have your head in the sand if you don't believe that AI is only going to incrementally improve and expand in capabilities. Just like it has year over year for the last 5 to 10 years. And just like for the last decade it continues to solve more and more real-world problems in increasingly effective manners.
It isn't just constrained to llms either.
- The creators who made the LLM boom said they cannot improve it any more with the current technique due to diminishing returns.
  It's worthless in its current state.
  Should be dying out faster imo.
- I suspect you're right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.
LLMs have real uses, even if they're being overhyped right now. Even if they do fail, though, more nuclear power is a great outcome

Holy sunk cost fallacy, batman. How fucking much does it cost to operate an ENTIRE GODDAMN NUCLEAR REACTOR just to fuel a tech project that nobody wants???

Investors want it, because they want to ride the wave towards profit. It doesn't matter if it's good, sustainable or not. That is what matters.
- A tax break for "clean energy", "strategic investment corridor" or "self-poweting companies" to reduce the load on the grid (that a few enormous companies like MS are creating) will be written into law, if it isn't already, and it will be a complete tax write-off or something so they get to reap any rewards and when AI hype dies down they'll still have increased profits by reducing taxes. When you win/win by owning the system you just win.
that nobody wants
lol
A lot of the cost is building a giant centralized nuclear facility. Once they are built it is not nearly as expensive to run them.
I think this is generally a good thing. Companies should be thinking of ways to supply their power needs.
Having said that, people want a good AI. The LLMs they are working on are probably not that. I am very skeptical we are anywhere close to where the hype train has taken us
Just because you don't want it doesn't mean others don't.
And just because you don't know much about the actual tech product itself doesn't mean that it's as narrow as you consider it to be.
There is a ton of vapid hype that everyone including myself is getting sick and tired of. I'm more than happy to recognize that. However, there are still real world problems and continued advancements being made daily.
It's not all about LLMs either, there are many other types of science being done to develop improve and augment various other flavors of artificial intelligence. This has been a pretty constant trend for at least the last 10 years, we've just had a recent explosion in language capabilities with the introduction of generative AI. Thus fueling the hype.
That's a really weird stance that I keep seeing on here which is to be proud of being ignorant. Being proud of hating something without actually understanding what it is. Being proud of not knowing how something works so that you can be more contrare.

Ironically, the power hungriness of AI might actually do good for the environment if it normalizes nuclear energy.

Quite the twist

I had to do a double take to make sure this wasn't an onion article.

especially since just reading the headline made me cry.

This sounds like the intro to a bad post-apocalypse sci-fi movie.

I think pre post-apocalypse is just the apocalypse. If you read the news these days that sounds like a pretty accurate description of the time we're living in. We're all just pretending it hasn't started yet.
- Turns out planetary extinction without an asteroid is slow AF.

I just hope this deal doesn’t involve using their AI to monitor the reactor …

There actually has been good work on using AI to control fusion plasmas its at the point where it can keep them stable significantly better than any human or simple automated system.
- You know, that actually makes sense. Fusion is so energetic and probabilistic in nature, plus it's effectively "charged fluid dynamics" and there are an impossible number of variables to handle. That's literally the kind of shit AI is great at.
  Fission though? Not so much
- Yes in a research lab. Here we’re talking about Microsoft.
  Have you ever used something they made? Did it meet your standard of being “good work”? No. It’s a greedy, soulless cash grab disguised as software that infects the entire organization and disables common sense.
  M$ actually running a nuclear plant is a guaranteed disaster. Blue Screen of Death.

I am all for nuclear power, but I'd rather it be from modern reactor designs and builds, and I'd rather it not be wasted on bullshit.

Hey now that's not fair. AI can randomize your music playlists, summarize an email, write terrible code, steal others work, and completely invade your privacy.
What's that? Oh, I guess you're right, we could do all that stuff already.
I’d rather it be from modern reactor designs and builds
There's a reason new nuclear loses out to renewables and storage, it's just too expensive. Microsoft are paying to start up an existing reactor.

Based on their Windows updates history, this seems like a bad idea. Nuclear boogaloo let's goooooo

So they fixed the leak?

Different reactor. Unit 2 partially melted down, there's no turning it back on. Unit 1 continued running after Unit 2's failure, and was only shut down because it became economically unviable
- Oic

I think I saw a movie like this.

It doesn't end well. 💀

There is something society could learn about itself if we spent anytime thinking honestly about how much of a dead end it is politically speaking to increase our use of nuclear power as a means of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Yet, when big corporate interests want it for their own reasons, it is no big thing and almost no politician will speak ill of it. Even though if some kind of disaster comes about because of it they will be left holding the bag of public opinion since that industry is so heavily regulated.