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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.
[...] When Constellation signaled interest in restarting Three Mile Island in July, doubts surfaced about the technical feasibility of the project. Not only would it be the first of its kind, but it will have to be accomplished next to another reactor whose clean-up and decommissioning is expected to continue through 2078.
The site also remains politically contentious due to the lasting memory of the 1979 accident, which displaced surrounding communities and left a legacy of fear over whether the radiation released contributed to increased cancer rates in the vicinity. About 2 million people were exposed to radioactive fallout as a result of the meltdown.
Public health researchers from Temple, Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh published a report last year finding that long-term studies into the impact of the meltdown were limited by research flaws.
Despite these concerns, Constellation cited a statewide poll showing strong support for restarting Three Mile Island. The poll conducted by Susquehanna Polling & Research found Pennsylvania residents approve of restarting Three Mile Island by more than 2-1 and 70% favor the ongoing use of nuclear energy in the state.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday September 23 2024, @11:34AM (3 children)
Technically accurate in a strict legalistic sense but highly misleading.
For some decades now, it's been an empty building with a sign out front and its not worth the lawyers fees to adjust the paperwork to decommission just part of the overall plant.
Remember you can't simply shut off the security guard's camera to the empty reactor room because that security monitoring plan is deeply integrated into the security plan for the currently operating plant. Likewise you can't simply shut off the radiation monitoring system in that part of the plant because its decommissioned because its part of the active monitoring system on the other side of the plant. In a similar manner you can't shred or deep archive blueprints because some apply to one reactor, some apply to the other, some apply to both, and it would be a legalistic and safety nightmare to have to 100% accurately classify everything 100% perfectly, so its safer and cheaper to just keep the old wiring diagrams laying around even if the old wiring was literally shipped out and disposed of decades ago. The nightmare scenario would be something "happens" in the working plant and then someone has to write up an explanation of how they decided to throw away the first aid kit or the pipe leak kit or whatever because it was "part of the old reactor so we threw it out" although it wasn't.
It is, as I understand the situation, an empty-ish building. Everything "reactor" was shipped out and disposed of a long time ago.
I wonder if they store stuff for the other reactor in the empty building. It's a secured monitored area, may as well take advantage of the free space. In that way unless someone here has a security clearance and site access we don't 'know' if the building is literally empty, someone could have dropped a pallet of equipment in there last night. But it is correct that all the old stuff was physically removed decades ago, so whatever is in there this morning was moved in long after the accident.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2024, @12:12PM
There are different approaches to take in decommissioning a reactor. For multi-reactor facilities, they typically put each unit in a "Safe Storage" (Saftor) mode where they get out most of what they can, and they sit on the rest and let it naturally decay while the other unit(s) are still in operation. This way they can do the final removal of everything at the same time and have the place re-habitable on the order of a decade or two. TMI Reactor 2 was done in this manner, and unless they change their minds, presumably its decommissioning is now further delayed since they are going to turn Reactor 1 back on.
Safstor can take many many decades [bbc.com]. But I'd wager that it is the most common method because it allows the company running the reactor to kick the can down the road for many decades and make it someone else's problem.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2024, @01:57PM (1 child)
> In a similar manner you can't shred or deep archive blueprints because some apply to one reactor
I'll bet there are some blueprints that the TMI owners would like to shred.
As I've posted before, an engineer friend worked for a company that had quite a bit of equipment in Three Mile Island. At the time of the accident, he was sent down to track their equipment, make sure it was working as designed.
It turned out that some critical sub systems that were supposed to have on-site backups (things like pumps, air-handlers), and even had storage rooms called out on the blueprints, were never ordered. Nice way to save on costs, eh? To repeat, safety critical backup equipment that was part of the original design was never ordered, and the storage rooms for it were empty.
Draw your own conclusions. My conclusion is that the non-engineers that run electric utilities are not competent to operate nuclear power plants.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Monday September 23 2024, @10:39PM
> non-engineers that run
electric utilitiesany technical operation are not competent to operatenuclear power plantsthat technical operation.FTFY.