A nuclear reactor shutdown in 2019 could be reactivated by 2028 now that Microsoft has cut a deal with Constellation Energy Corp. Big tech has been tapping nuclear power to feed the epic-sized power needs for its AI data centers. Microsoft has worked out an agreement with the US’s largest operator of nuclear reactors for exclusive power for 20 years to supply electricity to its data centers in Chicago, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia.
Per Reuters:
- “Sept 20 (Reuters) – Constellation Energy (CEG.O), opens new tab and Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab have signed a power deal to help resurrect a unit of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in what would be the first-ever restart of its kind, the companies said on Friday.”
- “This agreement is a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid in support of our commitment to become carbon negative,” Bobby Hollis, vice president of energy at Microsoft, said in a statement.
Even though Microsoft has cut a deal with Constellation Energy Corp. there are still multiple hurdles to overcome before the reactor shutdown in 2019 can be restarted. The 819 megawatts (MW), per Tom’s Hardware, was shut down due to it, at the time, no longer being economically sustainable. According to Reuters, no regulatory permits have yet to be filed nor has Constellation applied to restart the reactor with the federal nuclear regulators but the NRC is reading to engage with the energy supplier.
- “It’s up to Constellation to lay out its rationale for justifying restart, so we’re prepared to engage with the company on next steps,” said Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) spokesperson Scott Burnell.
The path forward
Constellation will invest $1.6 billion to restart the reactor and although it reportedly hoped to get federal assistance it has since chosen to move forward without assistance to expedite the restart process. Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez has indicated he wants to avoid delays in getting government approvals and said that most of the plant is in good working order and aside from upgrading equipment and hiring staff, it could be ready by 2027 if able to connect to the power grid which is operated by PJM Interconnection LLC. The reactivated reactor is expected to produce roughly 834 megawatts of power and Constellation is hoping to get an operating license through 2054.
Per Bloomberg:
- “Policymakers and the market have received a huge wake-up call,” Constellation Chief Executive Officer Joe Dominguez said in an interview. “There’s no version of the future of this country that doesn’t rely on these nuclear assets.”
Discussion (19 replies)
Join Discussion →Interesting. AI powered data centres are consuming as much powered as a medium sized town.
But the AI data centres aren't making money (this is mainly a scramble amongst Facebook/MS/Google to acquire a monopoly on users)
& the AI results aren't correct (wrong summaries of youtube videos for ex.) Or useful (Office 365 with AI had lesser value than regular office)
Yeah - this is Crypto all over again, only this time it isn't people in there garages, and the occasional "Oh someone got enough capital together to buy an old gas turbine plant". This is companies with serious cash.
As far as I understand, many of the data centers are actually not owned by the big cloud providers. DC specific companies lease the space to the cloud providers and provide the staff to rack and stack. So, there is actually quite a bit of money in the data centers themselves.
Yea these data centers are big business. But I assure you they are multi use. Or just for AI. And if they are contracting for power feeds chances are these are MS owned. There are a plethora or colo centers out there with business specific areas that are literally gated or walled off from each other. Just cheaper that way. In reality cloud services are eating these places unless they just sublet that space back to cloud services.
And don't get me started on cloud services good Lord they charge for everything at the enterprise level.
You want networking... Charge
You want to store data.. charge.
You want to move data.. charge
You want to delete data.. charge.
Oh those things also need to use cpu and ram.. charge.
Oh you want routes to destinations.. charge.
Literally anything you do in the cloud is monetized. If they did this with video games people would literally try to burn the buildings down.
Everything is monetized because everything has a cost. Hardware, software, licensing, rack space, bandwidth, power, man hours.
We charge for everything because we have to. Otherwise hosting is not profitable or sustainable.
I want the Earl Scheib one low price deal for my host.
That's doable, if your needs never change.
yes but when you're getting the advertisement to choose a hosting service it is never spelled out that even moving data is charged for, having data is charged for, deleting data is charged for... as an example. You basically need to get procurement out to actually see if it's a good deal with IT people that ACTAUALLY know what's going to happen on the servers.
Because good lord doing big data or AI in the cloud is just bonkers expensive for anyone other than the cloud host.
Yea the cost up front is painful to build your own environment for the same task but over 3-5 years... yea... it's a different game altogether.
It's bonkers expensive for the cloud host as well. Which is why we charge a lot for the services. It's not a "once and done" purchase of the equipment. We get, maybe, 3-4 years out of millions of dollars worth of equipment before we have to replace it due to a 5 year EOL cycle. Then we have to buy it all over again, plus some. So we have to charge for the use of that equipment and services to recoup that cost, plus X% on top to account for projected increased equipment costs, plus staff, plus rack space, plus power, plus bandwidth, plus........
No one is going to invest and operate at a loss.
A great example is Lyft. They were 100% cloud until their cloud spend was such that to go on prem would be a cost savings.
Also nobody in cloud offers five nines of guaranteed up time. My need for that is niche... Admittedly. But it's a need.
You'll pay a LOT for 99.999% uptime. That requires basically mirrored hardware, which very few do. Typical is maintaining N+1. And it still needs to be brought offline from time to time for maintenance/updates.
In a cloud sense, it really means a multi Availability Zone deployment, and ideally a warm standby in another region. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve worked with a company willing to spend that much for 5 9s of availability.
Knowing MS, they would cause a China Syndrome for real at Three Mile Island (see 1979).
I was talking about this earlier with some colleagues - we are all in the Power/Energy industry.
When it was Crypto - everyone was talking about how the massive power draw for mining was awful for the environment and how it's going to be the heat death of the Earth. I remember when thegas plant in upstate NY was purchased by a Crypto firm and everyone was talking about how it pollutes the lake.
But now it's not just some random Crypto Bros who are shucking out money to do this. Huge data centers, with Amazon/Microsoft money, are talking about nuke plants. And now everyone is just ok with it.
Even though all we did is change it from Crypto to AI - neither of them really serve useful purposes right now. And both take massive amounts of energy.
And I get notices from my public utility telling me I use too much electricity running my box fan over night and that I should just turn the thermostat up even further...
My companies environment I IT Engineer for specifically is decades of 100% uptime. Of course the redundancy level is beyond reason.
Each site is a active warm site for the other with replicated redundant systems at each site and redundant vmware clusters and the whole shebang. Basically everything in prod is at least 4x purchased simply to give us a reliable up time and purchased with integrated redundancies from network to power to power sources...
It's extreme but we wouldn't do it any other way.