Harv's Corner 11/18/2024

THREE MILE ISLAND A NEW TEST
A plan to restart one of the reactors that didn’t melt down in 1979 is part of U.S. efforts to expand its nuclear power capacity without raising emissions.
Story by REBECCA F. ELLIOTT • Photos by GEORGE ETHEREDGE • The New York Times

FINANCIAL BACKING FROM MICROSOFT IS BEHIND THE PLAN TO RESTART A REACTOR AT 3 MILE ISLAND. A BALANCE TO MEET INCREASING POWER AND REDUCING POLLUTION TO MEET GLOBAL WARMING STANDARDS.

Both Bitcoin and AI are expected to require significantly more energy in the future. Here's a breakdown:
Bitcoin:

• Proof of Work: Bitcoin's energy-intensive "Proof of Work" system, where miners solve complex puzzles to validate transactions, will continue to demand more energy as the network grows and competition increases.
• Increased Adoption: If Bitcoin becomes more widely adopted, the number of transactions and the energy needed to process them will also rise.

AI:

• Larger Models: AI models are becoming increasingly complex and require more powerful hardware to train and run. This translates to a greater energy demand for data centers and computing resources.
• Wider Applications: As AI is integrated into more applications and industries, the overall energy consumption associated with it will grow.
• Data Explosion: The massive amounts of data generated and processed by AI systems contribute to its growing energy footprint.

Key Considerations:

• Efficiency Improvements: Both industries are actively exploring ways to reduce energy consumption through more efficient algorithms, hardware, and renewable energy sources.
• Environmental Impact: The increasing energy demands of Bitcoin and AI raise concerns about their environmental impact, particularly regarding greenhouse gas emissions.

In conclusion: While both Bitcoin and AI offer transformative potential, their growing energy demands pose a challenge. It's crucial for both industries to prioritize sustainability and actively pursue solutions to minimize their environmental footprint.

MIDDLETOWN, PA. - The concrete cooling towers that rise from a sliver of land south of Pennsylvania's capital became symbols nearly a half-century ago of the risks of nuclear energy.

Now, a plan to restart one of the two reactors at Three Mile Island is at the leading edge of efforts to greatly expand the country's reliance on atomic fission to meet the growing power demands of homes, businesses and data centers.

Refurbishing this aging plant — a fenced-off maze of pipes, valves, pumps and turbines in the middle of the Susquehanna River — depends on the financial backing of Microsoft. The technology giant has agreed to buy all of the electricity the plant generates, most likely starting in 2028, for 20 years.

Three Mile Island's proposed revival reflects how vastly the perspectives on nuclear power in the United States have shifted since a cooling failure led to the partial meltdown of one of the island's reactors in 1979.


Once the target of fierce opposition, nuclear power plants are now coveted for generating large amounts of electricity around the clock without releasing the emissions that contribute to climate change.
What's less clear is whether expanding U.S. nuclear capacity will pencil out economically.

Resuscitating the Three Mile Island reactor that didn't suffer a partial meltdown amounts to an early test of whether an industry known for blowing timelines and budgets can deliver on its promises.

Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation Energy, which bought the reactor in 1999, is confident that he is laying the groundwork not just to bring Three Mile Island back to life but also to add further to the company's nuclear power fleet, the largest in the country.

"Twelve months from now, Constellation will have started on the path towards building new reactors," Dominguez said in a recent interview.
No reactor set to close permanently has been brought back online in the United States, and only three new ones have been completed in the past quartercentury.

The last two, built in Georgia, arrived seven years late and cost around $35 billion, more than twice as much as planned. Others have fared even worse: Utilities spent roughly $9 billion on two nuclear reactors in South Carolina before abandoning the project in 2017.

If Constellation and others succeed in scaling up nuclear power — currently around 19% of the U.S. electricity mix — the result would largely be due to the financial backing of some of the world's most valuable companies. These plants would also be eligible for federal tax credits.

Microsoft is effectively paying Constellation to bring Three Mile Island back online, while Google and Amazon recently struck deals with startups developing smaller reactors that they hope will power up in the 2030s.

All three tech giants pledged to decarbonize their operations, but their data centers are consuming huge amounts of energy, making those goals more difficult to meet.

If this proves to be another false start for the nuclear industry, it will mean all the money in the world wasn't enough to overcome the technological and regulatory hurdles to expanding the use of fission, in which atoms are split to create heat and make steam that is used to generate electricity.

"It's an industry with a really substantial burden of proof based on all of the disappointments — all of the very expensive disappointments," said Peter A. Bradford, who served on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in March 1979.

It was then that America began to fall out of love with nuclear power.

Ken Bryan was on the island, working the night shift, when the telephone rang. It was just after 4 a.m., and alarms were sounding in Unit 2, the newer of the island's two reactors.

The warnings came so quickly — hundreds of them — that the control-room printer couldn't keep up.

It later became clear that a valve designed to regulate pressure in the reactor had become stuck in an open position, allowing cooling water to escape as steam. The core overheated, and the plant released radioactive material.

"The reactor's supposed to get hot, but not that hot," Bryan, 80, said in an interview.

Some 6 miles away, Patricia Longenecker was asleep on the farm she shared with her husband and two young children.

Hours later, she heard the news come over the radio, and soon it was just about all her neighbors could talk about.

"There isn't a person in this room this evening who hasn't asked the question, 'How much radiation has my family received?'" she would testify that spring, during a state hearing at her children's elementary school. "How is it going to affect our health?"

Studies ultimately found that the radiation had a "negligible" effect on people's physical health and the environment, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Public backlash was swift, however — and grew after the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine. Facing steep construction costs and heightened public opposition, dozens of planned reactor projects were canceled.

Three Mile Island's undamaged reactor, down for refueling during the accident, remained offline for six years. It resumed operations in 1985 over the objections of residents and activists, providing power for nearly 34 years before shutting down in 2019 as utilities opted for cheaper electricity from natural gas plants.

By early 2023, Constellation was exploring whether to fuel it up again as long-flat U.S. electricity demand was poised to rise.

In addition, the dangers posed by climate change have become more visible in the wildfires scorching the West and the hurricanes buffeting the Southeast.

Nuclear power had also grown more popular, with 56% of U.S. adults favoring new plants, up from 43% in 2016, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

"The trade-off is: Are you concerned about the dangers of nuclear power, or are you more concerned about the dangers of climate change?" said Patrick McDonnell, who previously led Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection.

"Climate change is the biggest issue we face."

Goldman Sachs projects that U.S. power demand will grow more than 2% a year on average through the end of the decade, with data centers consuming around 8% of the country's electricity by 2030, a jump from roughly 3% now.

The day Constellation announced in September that it would spend around $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island — a plant big enough to power more than 700,000 homes and employ upward of 700 people — the company's stock rose 22%.

C onstellation and Microsoft haven't disclosed the financial terms of their deal, but the investment bank Jefferies estimated that Microsoft may have agreed to pay $110 to $115 per megawatt-hour, or nearly double the market rate for wholesale electricity.

"In their wildest dreams, Joe never thought that he could get the off-take agreement he got from Microsoft," said Jigar Shah, director of the Energy Department's loan programs office, referring to Dominguez of Constellation.

Constellation anticipates that the reactor vessel won't require any repairs, and the steam generators — costly equipment that help produce electricity — were replaced about 15 years ago. The company had them inspected in May and said it found no corrosion.
The main power transformers that connect the plant to the grid will need to be replaced at a cost of around $100 million. The plant is also getting a new name: the Crane Clean Energy Center.
"We know how to run this reactor, so as long as the equipment is in good shape, the level of complexity here is — I would describe it as significantly lower than building a new reactor," Dominguez said.
Unexpected hurdles could arise, and meaningfully expanding nuclear capacity would require not only reviving shuttered reactors but also building new ones.

To make it more economically feasible to build reactors, companies will need to manufacture many of them rather than one-off models, the Energy Department has said. Adding new reactors to existing nuclear sites would further reduce costs and other hurdles.

Dominguez said Constellation was exploring with clients what such an undertaking would entail, including who would shoulder certain risks.
"We'll pick a technology that we think is being successfully deployed by others and where we have a chance to effectively buy the next, call it the next six, units from a company that's already built the first six,"Dominguez said.

Some investors remain wary.
"We're going to need new nuclear," said Bobby Edemeka, a portfolio manager at investment manager Jennison Associates, which holds around $300 million in Constellation stock. But, he added, "I personally won't be investing in those companies that are building new nuclear until the industry has proven that it's possible to get these done on time and on budget."