HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant said Friday that it plans to restart the reactor under a 20-year...
said Friday that it plans to restart the reactor under a 20-year agreement that calls for tech giant Microsoft to buy the power to supply its data centers with carbon-free energy.The plan to restart Three Mile Island 's Unit 1 comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power , as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to bail out a fraying electric power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers .
To restart Unit 1, Constellation will spend $1.6 billion to restore equipment including the turbine, generator, main power transformer and cooling and control systems. It is not currently seeking state or federal subsidies to help, it said.Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear science and engineering professor and director of MIT's Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, said Microsoft will likely pay above market price for electricity that is both carbon-free and reliable.
Constellation's announcement comes after a wave of coal-fired and nuclear power plants have shut down in the past decade as competition from cheap natural gas flooded power markets. The data centers’ share of U.S. electricity use in the United States is around 4% currently, with some projections expecting that to double by 2030.from the first American nuclear reactor to be built in decades, after the accident at Three Mile Island froze interest in building new ones.
“Microsoft, above and beyond their own products, are also providing the compute for OpenAI, which is growing and expanding very ambitiously,” said Sasha Luccioni, a researcher at AI company Hugging Face who has called attention to AI’s carbon footprint. “They have to scramble to get all the energy that they can in order to be able to fuel that growth.
Constellation Energy Microsoft Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant Nuclear Power Jacopo Buongiorno Power Transformer Buongiorno Power
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