The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers, according to details of the application shared with The Washington Post. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company.
Microsoft, which declined to comment on the bid for a loan guarantee, is among the large tech companies scouring the nation for zero-emissions power as they seek to build data centers. It is among the leaders in the global competition to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity.
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if microsoft wants the power, they can pay for it. up front, and entirely. including assuming liability for when something goes wrong, and for the ongoing storage of waste materials and the eventual decommission/clean-up of the site.
So they can have an exclusive deal giving Microsoft power?
I’m pretty sure they’re going to make enough money doing that.
How about, ‘no’?
Do not give them one penny.
As a former resident of Washington, fuck that noise.
If you get a paywall, a paywall-free link is here: https://archive.ph/hoaIs
My take on this story: dragging this reactor out of mothballs is expensive and risky, and operating at 50+ year old reactor is risky. The company that owns admits it isn’t even solvent enough to run it, much less ensure the risks of operating it. Microsoft and the 3 Mile Island owner are basically asking for a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer subsidy for an enterprise—so-called AI—that eliminates jobs and is used more for revenge porn and deepfakes than it is for any societal good. This is a bad deal.
I didn’t read the article but I’m for any safe use of nuclear energy. Bringing an old reactor online might be significantly easier than building a new one.
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Nuclear energy had always been a way to funnel public money into private pockets. It never has and never will work without massive subsidies.
I don’t support most new nuclear projects, but saying “it never has and never will work without massive subsidies” is asinine. I live in Ontario where roughly half our electricity comes from Nuclear, and that helped keep the cost reasonable for over a generation. France has also seen great success.
It only looks cheap because the real cost is never fully accounted for. Research and development are paid for by governments. Construction is massively subsidised. Then the corporations reap the profits during regular operation and the tax payer is left holding the bag again for decommissioning. This is how it happened in Germany and what is happening right now in France. The French are in such deep shit it’s not even funny any more. And I’ll bet it’s a similar situation in Canada.
I think you need to read up on shit because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Électricité_de_France owns and operates all the large domestic reactors and they’re fully owned by the government. We can talk about how financially efficient they are - sure - but it’s a very different setup from the US where utilities, bizarrely, absolutely must be privatized.
Power is a service that costs money - it’s essential and naturally forms local monopolies… the fact that private power utilities in the US exist is the issue - not that they use nuclear reactors.
