The operator of the decommissioned nuclear power facility at Three Mile Island announced on Friday that it intended to bring the reactor back online by a 20-year contract that requires Microsoft to purchase electricity to run its data centres with carbon-free energy.
Constellation Energy made the news five years after Exelon, the plant’s former parent firm, closed it down due to financial losses and the refusal of Pennsylvania politicians to provide subsidies.
As politicians increasingly turn to nuclear power to shore up a deteriorating electric power supply, help avert the worst consequences of climate change, and meet the growing power demand generated by data centres, the decision to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 comes amid something of a nuclear renaissance.
The plant, located just west of Harrisburg on an island in the Susquehanna River, was the scene of the worst commercial nuclear power disaster in US history in 1979.
Unit 1 remained operational at the plant while Unit 2, the other reactor, was destroyed in the disaster.
Microsoft intends to purchase the power to fulfill its pledge to become “carbon negative” by 2030.
The mid-Atlantic electrical system stretches from Virginia, a data centre hub for Microsoft and other tech companies, to Ohio, where Microsoft has plans for a new data centre complex outside Columbus.
Microsoft will not disclose which of its data centres will be fueled by the nuclear reactor.
Constellation stated that it intends to activate Unit 1 by 2028.
According to Constellation, restarting the reactor will need permission from state and local governments in addition to approval from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Laptops 1000Constellation will need to spend $1.6 billion to repair the turbine, generator, main power transformer, cooling system, and control systems to restart Unit 1. It stated that it is not presently looking for federal or state funding to assist.
The terms of the arrangement between Constellation and Microsoft were not disclosed.
Microsoft will probably pay more than the market price for dependable, carbon-free power, according to Jacopo Buongiorno, head of MIT’s Centre for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems and professor of nuclear science and engineering.
According to Buongiorno, restarting the plant is feasible but difficult, and “everything depends on the state of the components, the systems.”
If they were properly maintained during the shutdown, the process should proceed quite easily, according to Buongiorno. The plant itself is in fantastic condition, according to a representative for Constellation.
Michigan is currently experiencing the closest example of a nuclear plant restart, according to Buongiorno.
To revive the nuclear facility in Palisades, which shut down in 2022, the federal government has pledged a $1.5 billion loan.
According to Buongiorno, both parties can benefit from the Constellation-Microsoft agreement’s economic model.
He added that reviving an existing nuclear power station is less expensive than building a new one.
Transmission lines, cooling towers, control buildings, and concrete containment structures are already intact, he claimed.
Constellation’s statement follows the closure of numerous nuclear and coal-fired power facilities during the last ten years due to intense competition from low-cost natural gas in the power market.
This has led to caution that the United States is experiencing a crisis in energy reliability.
Meanwhile, the demand for cloud computing and digital services like artificial intelligence systems is rapidly increasing from data centres managed by internet behemoths like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, states that are witnessing the rapid development of large-scale data centers—Virginia and Texas in particular—are seeing the majority of the country’s growth in electricity demand.
Currently, data centres account for about 4% of all electricity used in the US; some estimates indicate that percentage may double by 2030.
The Biden administration, states, and utilities are pressuring utilities to reevaluate their use of nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector that warm the planet.
This is shown in the Constellation-Microsoft agreement.
After the disaster at Three Mile Island halted enthusiasm for building new nuclear reactors, Georgia Power started generating power from the first nuclear reactor built in the United States in decades last year.
Constellation stated that Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 had a producing capacity of 837 megawatts, which is sufficient to power over 800,000 homes, before its shutdown in 2019.
The twin cooling towers of the demolished Unit 2 are still intact, and the building is sealed.
Years ago, the Idaho National Laboratory of the US Department of Energy received its core. Encased in concrete, the remnants of the containment building continue to be extremely radioactive.
The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, which was made possible by Microsoft’s data centres, sparked a global demand for chatbots and other generative AI products, which normally require a lot of processing power to train and run.
This year, Google and Microsoft admitted that their inability to fulfill the aggressive climate targets they set before the AI boom is a result of AI’s electricity requirements.
Scientist Sasha Luccioni of Hugging Face, an AI startup that has drawn attention to the carbon footprint of AI, stated,
“Microsoft, above and beyond their products, are also providing the compute for OpenAI, which is growing and expanding very ambitiously.”
“To be able to fuel that growth, they must rush to obtain as much energy as possible.”
