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DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

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Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#41

Post by UltraSane »

stonogo wrote: post #40
UltraSane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is reliable 24/7 while wind and solar are not and handling this costs money. Microsoft has said that they have more GPUs than electricity to run them so even at $110/MWh it makes sense for them.

I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.

"they have maintenance outages like anything else"

not often and most importantly they are PREDICTABLE. You do understand why being able to control when a power plant is operating is a very important thing, right?

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#42

Post by mikeyouse »

stonogo wrote: post #40
UltraSane wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power is reliable 24/7 while wind and solar are not and handling this costs money. Microsoft has said that they have more GPUs than electricity to run them so even at $110/MWh it makes sense for them.

I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.

France’s nuclear fleet has an average capacity factor of ~75%… so less “24/7” and more like 18/7 or 24/5.25 or something..

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#43

Post by UltraSane »

tjmc wrote: post #38
UltraSane wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any idea how little Uranium reactors use? And in any case Australia host a LOT of uranium and is a very close ally and is happy to sell it to the US.

And we're even happier if you keep it!

Nuclear power is great and Australia is foolish for having 1/3 of all uranium in the world and not using it.

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#44

Post by protocolture »

UltraSane wrote: post #43
tjmc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And we're even happier if you keep it!

Nuclear power is great and Australia is foolish for having 1/3 of all uranium in the world and not using it.

100%. We have this thing where every 10 years or so we collectively admit that if we started nuclear 10 years ago it would be fine, but we need it now, so it should remain illegal because its too expensive. Its some of the most insane doublethink in human politics.

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#45

Post by jazzyjackson »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #17
pseudalopex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft committed to purchase the plant's capacity for 20 years. And US electricity demand grew very slowly from 2005 to 2020. It is growing rapidly now.

At around $110/MWh, according to the article. This is about 50% higher than what utility-scale PV or wind would cost. Guess they're using OpenAI accounting.

> utility-scale PV or wind would cost

Are you comparing cost against what electricity currently costs or what it would cost to add capacity? I feel like Microsoft is not acting on hype here, they're going to pay a premium just because it's cool to refire a nuclear plant? Surely they've done the math to decide the feasibility of building out a few acres of solar panels.

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#46

Post by jazzyjackson »

UltraSane wrote: post #41
stonogo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.

"they have maintenance outages like anything else" not often and most importantly they are PREDICTABLE. You do understand why being able to control when a power plant is operating is a very important thing, right?

i thought the conversation was regarding utilization of capital, in which case 80% is 80%, predictability doesnt change the fact you have to let GPUs sit idle 20% of the time.

I guess if I knew there would be two months with less power I might design my data center to fit into 40 foot containers so I could deploy wherever power and latency are cheapest

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#47

Post by [deleted] »

comrh wrote: post #9
daemonologist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unit 2 is the reactor that melted down and it has been shut down ever since (and partially decommissioned). Unit 1, a separate reactor at the same site, was operated normally until 2019 when it was shut down due to high costs. It was originally scheduled to be decommissioned by 2079 (sic) but is now being brought back online.

If it wasn't profitable in 2019, why is profitable now? Because Microsoft is commiting to be a customer?

[deleted]

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#48

Post by ipdashc »

abtinf wrote: post #25
dreamcompiler wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At around $110/MWh, according to the article. This is about 50% higher than what utility-scale PV or wind would cost. Guess they're using OpenAI accounting.

Running a data center on unreliable energy would be shockingly stupid. And unreliable energy sources routinely exclude the wildly uneconomical costs and environmental impact it would take to make them reliable.

> Running a data center on unreliable energy would be shockingly stupid.

For the right kind of workloads and at sufficient scale, I wonder if this is actually true. (It probably is, but it's fun to hypothesize.) I'm assuming the workloads are mostly AI-related.

AI training presumably isn't super time-sensitive, so could you just pause it while it's cloudy?

AI inference, at least for language models, presumably isn't particularly network-intensive nor latency-sensitive (it's just text). So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.

Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy. Maybe in a world where hardware somehow got way cheaper but energy usage remained high we'd see strategies like this get used.

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#49

Post by peterfirefly »

CivBase wrote: post #3

How much would it cost to build a new reactor with comparable power output?

Most of the cost is not in building -- it is in planning, wrestling with capricious government agencies, and rebuilding when said agencies come up with "improvements".

Re: DOE gives Microsoft partner $1B loan to restart Three Mile Island reactor

#50

Post by chickenbig »

mikeyouse wrote: post #42
stonogo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.

France’s nuclear fleet has an average capacity factor of ~75%… so less “24/7” and more like 18/7 or 24/5.25 or something..

The US fleet was at 93% capacity factor in 2023.

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

As for France's capacity factor, that has a lot to do with the presence of intermittents on the continental grid, combined with the EU's Renewable Energy Directive making France liable to pay fines if they use nuclear power in preference to wind/solar.

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