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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

reuters.com

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Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#111

Post by qwytw »

bayindirh wrote: post #104
nickpp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without profit there is no reason anybody will provide those. Countries that tried socializing food - starved. Capitalism is the only one that brought plenty - because there is an incentive to do so.

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all. -- John Maynard Keynes. I think he's onto something as I see the lengths Boing, Intel, FAANG, et. al going to benefit us all everyday...

Well they did overall, throughout their entire existence, didn't they?

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#112

Post by closewith »

pjc50 wrote: post #82
closewith wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage systems that deliver 24/7/365 energy with many nines SLAs, on the real earth with real statistics on weather. Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Hence these deals.

> Once you start adding nines, nuclear starts to be become attractive again. Only if you ignore reliability issues with nuclear, such as France having to take a lot of reactors offline at the same time to check for cracks. The comparison has to be fair.

Well, that's a false dichotomy, because no-one's (at least no-one reasonable and in good faith) is suggesting shifting the grid entirely to nuclear. Instead, a diverse set of generation sources is ideal, including solar, wind, nuclear and hydro.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#113

Post by qwytw »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #107
himinlomax wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” Something close to that happens almost every year in Europe. Last year there was nearly 3 weeks in winter where there was very little wind across the continent (<20% capacity production on all wind farms), and obviously little to no solar (high latitudes).

Spain isn't part of Europe? It's sunny in the winter.

You "just" need to get all of that energy north somehow...

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#115

Post by EasyMark »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #110
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

You don't need battery farms to make renewables viable in the US. What you need is to replace the AC grid interconnect system in the US with a HVDC super grid system. The key difference here is that HVDC is exceedingly efficient in energy transfer and has effectively negligible losses compared to AC over distance. The US is big enough that any impact from weather should basically average out over that distance.

There are huge downsides though because moving power generation further and further from where it’s used opens you up to more disruption from terrorist attacks on the grid (and cyber attacks) unless you also do less centralized production which is going to be more expensive.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#116

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #92
burnte wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A corporation getting its way, irrespective of the democratic will of the people, or rather, those "insane NIMBYs". Corporatocracy truly is a beautiful thing. Generally a NIMBY is anti-progress and very selfish, putting themselves ahead of everyone. My dad was called to help resolve TMI during the meltdown and was part of the engineering design group the the Beaver Valley nuclear power station. People were complain…

>a NIMBY is anti-progress And what is "progress"? We both have ideas about what progress is. Are mine the same as yours?

Does your definition of progress say that a civilization that gets safer, cheaper, carbon-neutral power has progressed?

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#117

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #105
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

Fission is a bad complement for solar power. A good complement for solar provides dispatchable fill-in-the-gaps type of power. However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement. You can get to 100% carbon free by using a combination of overprovisioning, source diversity, geographic diversity, storage and statistics. Yo…

> However, nuclear power plants cost about the same amount of money per hour whether they're running or not, so are poorly suited as a solar complement.

I think this is why they call it baseload. Yes it costs the same, used or unused... but it's always there, ready to be used. This is its strength, not a defect.

> If you really want 100% reliability out of a primarily-solar grid

But no reasonable person wants that. They want "100% reliability, and who cares where it comes from". If you're environmentally minded, you can tack on a "with no carbon"... but even that isn't the same thing as a "primarily solar grid".

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#119

Post by exe34 »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

and remember, it's only fair to include the cost of carbon capture to return the carbon into the soil, since the cost of nuclear in these discussions will include both the cost of disposal and cleanup of disasters that only happen several continents away.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#120

Post by aziaziazi »

burkaman wrote: post #29
cpascal wrote: post #15

So how would this work? Does this mean Microsoft will build a directly connected data center nearby? Or is Microsoft just buying power from the plant's owner on the energy market?

They are just buying the power. Microsoft's goal is 24/7 matching, so every MWh of power they use is matched by a MWh of clean power (generated in that same hour) that they paid for. This is called market-based carbon accounting, as opposed to location-based accounting which considers the source of the electricity that is actually used by the company's infrastructure. There are pros and cons of each approach, market-…

> market-based carbon accounting […] not necessarily worse

They are better for the corps communication and worse for anyone else.

Transporting electricity over distance has a non trivial cost in $ but also ressources and energy, as well as relocating an industry near a clean energy source or optimizing the production units.

Carbon-matching systems are great for entreprise wanting to claim they don’t produce carbon (24/7 carbon neutral) while they do. It does not depict the CO2E one (entreprise) did product de facto.

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