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Plan would power new Microsoft AI data center with electricity from Pa.'s Three Mile Island nuclear reactor:

One of the two nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, the Pennsylvania site of a notorious partial meltdown 45 years ago, could be brought back online in the coming years to provide power to a new Microsoft artificial intelligence data center, officials said Friday.

Constellation Energy, the Baltimore-based provider that spun off Exelon two years ago, has signed a 20-year power purchasing agreement with the tech giant to draw electricity generated at the plant along the Susquehanna River outside Harrisburg and about 85 miles west of Philadelphia.

Pending regulatory approvals, the newly created Crane Clean Energy Center would become the first nuclear plant in the United States to return to service after being shut down.

The $1.6 billion project will restart Three Mile Island Unit 1, which stopped generating power five years ago because it could not compete with cheaper energy being produced by Pennsylvania's natural gas industry. The reactor can be run independently from Unit 2, where the plant's partial meltdown occurred resulting in the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history on March 28, 1979. That reactor is still in the process of being decommissioned by owner Energy Solutions.

"Before it was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics, this plant was among the safest and most reliable nuclear plants on the grid, and we look forward to bringing it back with a new name and a renewed mission to serve as an economic engine for Pennsylvania," Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation, said in a statement.

[...] In the race to develop artificial intelligence applications, tech companies are scrambling to build data centers, which require enormous amounts of electricity to operate. Such facilities are forecast to make up a growing share of the nation's electricity use in the years to come, prompting companies to look at tapping into existing infrastructure to help meet their needs.

Nuclear power is being touted as a cost-effective solution for these data centers that also limits reliance on carbon-producing power sources. Building and directly connecting data centers to nuclear plants is known as co-location, a strategy that industry leaders favor because it's cheaper and faster to do. Proponents also claim it reduces stress on the transmission grids.

During the years the 837-megawatt unit operated at Three Mile Island, the reactor powered about 830,000 homes and businesses. Constellation officials did not say how much of the reactor's power-producing capacity would be dedicated to powering Microsoft's AI data center, but it's not uncommon for such facilities to have energy demands of 1,000 megawatts – or 1 gigawatt.

An economic impact study commissioned by the Pennsylvania Building & Construction Trades Council estimates the restart of Three Mile Island would create 3,400 jobs directly and indirectly related to the plant and generate about $3 billion in state and federal tax revenue.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, but as datacenter footprints explode amid the AI boom, regulators fear even the Lone Star state's utilities won't be able to keep up for much longer.

The Texas' Public Utility Commission is now warning datacenter operators looking to set up shop in the US state within the next 12 to 15 months that they won't be able to rely entirely on the local grid and will have to supply at least some of their own power. As some of you will know, Texas has at times suffered blackouts from demand overload, and outages sparked by storms damaging infrastructure.

"We can't afford to lose any of our resources off the system at this point, especially given those load-growth projections," Thomas Gleeson, who chairs the commission, told Blomberg during the Gulf Coast Power Association conference in Austin this week.

Chief among Gleeson's concerns is datacenters setting up shop near existing power plants and buying up the supply of electricity, making it harder for the grid to keep the lights on for everyone else. Instead, Gleeson wants to see datacenter operators arranging and supporting their own generation facilities before putting strain on existing infrastructure.

[...] To ensure their bit-barn projects don't run out of juice, some operators are cozying up to operating and even defunct nuclear power plants. This northern spring, Amazon paid $650 million for Talen Energy's Cumulus datacenter located directly adjacent to the 2.5 gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear power plant. Under the deal, Amazon will have access to up to 960 megawatts of power.

[...] However, bringing retired nuclear plants back online isn't always as easy as it sounds. As The Register recently reported, many older facilities will require extensive repairs and modernization before they're ready to start turning steam into electricity again.

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The search giant will purchase small reactors to provide energy that will enable the growth of energy-guzzling AI technologies.

Google has signed a corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power in the US. The search giant claimed this deal will “accelerate the clean energy transition across the US”.

According to Google, Kairos will bring its first SMR online “quickly and safely” by 2030, with more reactors to be deployed by 2035. “Overall, this deal will enable up to 500MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to US electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power,” said Michael Terrell, Google’s senior director for energy and climate. The financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The move by Google and other tech companies to find more and bigger sources of energy to power their data centres is in large part due to the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. AI models require huge computing power. An industry report estimates that the proportion of power used for AI in data centres globally will grow to 10pc next year, up from about 2pc this year.

“Overall, our total GHG emissions increased by 13pc [year over year] – highlighting the challenge of reducing emissions while compute intensity increases and we grow our technical infrastructure investment to support this AI transition,” Google said at the time.

“Predicting the future environmental impact of AI is complex and evolving, and our historical trends likely don’t fully capture AI’s future trajectory.”

[...] Kairos Power was founded in 2016 with the goal of developing “innovative nuclear technology”. The company only secured permission to build a test reactor in December last year. The reactor is called Hermes and will be based in Tennessee. In February, the US Department of Energy agreed to provide up to $303m to help build Hermes.

It is possible that Google’s SMRs will face delays. The completion date for Hermes has already slipped to 2027 in the time since permission to build was granted, according to an article in MIT Technology Review. The issue of sourcing uranium was also highlighted in this article. After Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, the US banned uranium imports from Russia and now has just three years’ supply left. Kairos says it is working with a European consortium to source uranium.

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Bees Reportedly Stopped Meta From Building A Nuclear-Powered Ai Data Center

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Meta had plans to build an AI data center in the US that relies on nuclear power — it even already knew where it wanted the facility to be built. According to the Financial Times, though, the company had to scrap its plans, because the a rare bee species was discovered on the land reserved for the project. Company chief Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly ready to close a deal with an existing nuclear power plant operator that would provide emissions-free energy to the plant. The Times said he told staff members at an all-hands last week that pushing through wouldn't have been possible, because the company would encounter numerous regulatory challenges due to the bees' discovery.

Zuckerberg reportedly told his staff that Meta would've had the first nuclear-powered AI if the deal had gone ahead. It still might come true if the company could find a way, but it has to move quickly because its biggest rivals are investing in nuclear energy, as well. In September, Microsoft revealed that it intends to revive the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to provide energy for its AI efforts. Meanwhile, Google teamed up with startup Kairos Power to build seven small nuclear reactors in the US to power its data centers starting in 2030. And then there's Amazon, which announced three agreements with different companies to build small modular reactors in mid-October.

The Times didn't say whether Meta is looking for a new site — one that doesn't have rare bees living in its vicinity. One of its sources only said that Meta is still exploring various deals for emissions-free energy, including nuclear, to power its future AI data centers.

Regulators Reject Power Deal For Nuclear Amazon Datacenters

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Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued an order on November 1 rejecting an amended Interconnection Service Agreement (ISA) that would have increased the amount of co-located load from 300 to 480 MW, and to "make revisions related to the treatment of this co-located load."

Co-located load means the Cumulus datacenter complex that Talen Energy built next to the 2.5 GW Susquehanna nuclear plant in Pennsylvania which it operates, and which Amazon acquired in March via a deal worth $650 million.

The online megamart announced plans in May to expand the site with more than a dozen new datacenters for its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud subsidiary over the next decade.

Soon after that, official objections were filed by two utility companies, American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon. They argued that the revised agreement between Talen and PJM Interconnection, the regional power grid operator, would give the Cumulus site preferential treatment and may result in less energy going to the grid in some circumstances.

Exelon and AEP also argued that the amended ISA should be subject to an official hearing because "it raises many factual questions," and, in the absence of any such hearing, that FERC should reject the amended ISA. It seems a majority of the commissioners agreed.

Specifically, Exelon and AEP said the amended ISA had not been adequately supported, meaning no good reason was given as to why the amendments were necessary.

The FERC ruling notes that PJM says up to 480 MW of power could be delivered to "the co-located load" without a material impact on the grid, and any additional load beyond that would result in "generation deliverability violations" and require installation of system upgrades.