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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

#141

Post by venj »

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.

This event happened in 2022. this is the only year since 1995 where nuclear production fell below 300TWh (278TWh in 2022 vs 360 in 2021 and 320 in 2023).

These cracks are not the only factor for the poor performance on nuclear in 2022 : several reactors had to do their 10-year maintenance (grand carénage), which had been delayed because of the pandemic.

It's hard to extrapolate reliability issues from an event that happened once in 30 years.

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

#142

Post by voxadam »

sesm wrote: post #48
jameshart wrote: post #27

> restart one of the units at the noted Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania Ah yes, the ‘noted’ Three Mile Island. I wonder why this particular plant enjoys a degree of fame? The name certainly is familiar… Seems like a rebranding might have made sense - like the UK switched Sellafield to Winscale.

Just rebrand it to Five Kilometer Island.

Getting Americans to accept the metric system is probably a taller order than getting them to accept nuclear power.

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

#143

Post by bryanlarsen »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #117
bryanlarsen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

baseload is base load, not base generation. Base generation is not a thing.

Way back when, they realized that grids had a base load below which it never dropped. They realized that if they designed some of their plants without the expensive features which allowed them to be turned on and off quickly, they could build plants cheaper.

You don't design grids for base load, you design grids for peak load in all scenarios. If you can handle peak, you can also handle base.

Baseload is for cost optimization. And nuclear is a horrible way to optimize cost.

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

#144

Post by berkes »

jgtrosh wrote: post #137
berkes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. An energy mix is the answer. One of the parts that is mixed in, can be nuclear. Probably should be. But always a small part of the mix. Nuclear is slow: slow to power up, slow to adjust to demand or supply from others in the mix. And extremely slow to build. Nuclear plants that already run, often take days, some even weeks to adjust significant: so if on monday the wind stops blowing, on tuesday it gets cloudy, a…

> > Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy. > No. > An energy mix is the answer. Maybe that “No.” was unnecessary.

Maybe.

Probably, if "future" means 50+ years, so two generations in future.

But not if it means "future" in even overlapping the current nuclear plants that are EOL, 10, 20 even 30 years. Because to replace those nuclear EOL with other nuclear, we'd need to start building plants in 2014, 2015 (which we didn't). The next best time may be now, but "We", at least in Europe aren't doing that either, and AFAIK neither in the US.

TBC: I'm not saying "it won't work, so stop chasing it" on contrary. But shoehorning "fission" into a discussion of a current energy crisis, what this article is about, isn't relevant. Such tech isn't for today, tomorrow. Not even for when your kids grow, up, but at most for your grandkids when they are working - horizons.

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

#145

Post by exe34 »

qwytw wrote: post #108
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US. Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality? Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.

they could use renewables?

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

#146

Post by 4fterd4rk »

mc32 wrote: post #7
lobochrome wrote: post #4

Fascinating. How will we live ok back in, say five years, at this very funny period from, 2018ish to 2022ish when our echo chamber made us believe ESG was going to save the world. How far we’ve come. Is it all due to the prospect of finally seeing a feasible road to AGI?!

ESG ended up being a scam. Lots of these things are nothing but cover to make money off of people’s concern for the enviro. All you need to look at is the carbon footprint of people who clamor and demonstrate for green policies. Including idiots gluing themselves to roadways —all the idle traffic they create and the manpower necessary to remove them and repair the damage. It’s a sucker’s game.

Ah yes. Some people use airplanes so we need to keep burning coal, who cares when the sea levels rise and the water wars begin! The important thing is that some people acted silly by gluing themselves to the road! Can't give in to them, even if it would save the world for our children.

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

#147

Post by baq »

qwytw wrote: post #109
baq wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit is… not fake, but fiat. Energy and clean water are real. With collapsing demographics the current economic system will fall over anyway, either due to inflation or defaults, so maybe it’s a good time to start thinking about how to separate utilities from money.

> how to separate utilities from money Forced labour? Central planning? Requisition? How exactly would that work? Somebody still needs to build and operate those power plants. Also commercial and industrial users consume >60% of all electricity in the US, should they also be subsidized? Or subsidize residential users?

If I had answers, I wouldn't be saying that it's a good time to think about that.

But you shouldn't assume that things will just continue on as they were in the past hundred years. Boomers are retiring now, when the busters start going into retirement it's going to be a huge mess. Inflation is how democracies die.

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

#148

Post by akamaka »

quickthrowman wrote: post #80
akamaka wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the price of energy can be negative, so a new nuclear plant might never pay off its cost, even if it provides the public benefit of cheap electricity.

Did you read the post you’re responding to? > That's not how this works though, energy abundance means industrial abundance, more energy availability (for cheap) would simply mean that demand will scale to meet the output. If the price of electricity is negative, people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again. https://en.m.wikiped…

> people will build stuff like aluminum smelters and desalination plants to use the excess energy, and electricity will cost money again.

But will electricity cost enough to justify the huge upfront cost of nuclear plants?

If we have the wealth to build capital-intensive projects that are marginally cost effective, it might be easier to build smelters and desalination plants that only run at 40% capacity, when the sun is out.

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

#149

Post by pjc50 »

closewith wrote: post #112
pjc50 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Dunno, all the nuclear advocates seem to contrast it with wind/solar, which are also much cheaper and quicker capital investments.

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

#150

Post by qwytw »

exe34 wrote: post #145
qwytw wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Residential users make up ~38% of the electricity market in the US. Where do you suggest the rest of the users should get power from? And how would that work exactly in reality? Even of the government had to ensure that everyone has access to affordable electricity they'd still have to buy it from someone which fundamentally doesn't change anything.

they could use renewables?

Right, and? Will that also be socialized? Or will they have to build their own grid?
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