Three Mile Island to Host New Disaster in Exclusive Deal to Power Microsoft AI

By Dave Levitan | September 20, 2024 | 8:45am

Photo by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

Technology Nuclear Power

Three Mile Island to Host New Disaster in Exclusive Deal to Power Microsoft AI

The home of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history is back on the map. One reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, decommissioned in 2019 after 45 years of service featuring one partial meltdown to its other reactor in 1979, will theoretically be restarted in order to send all 835 megawatts of its electricity to Microsoft’s ballooning AI needs.

In debates over nuclear energy and climate change, even some of the power source’s critics contend that keeping existing plants running longer than planned is a reasonable solution. Building a new plant these days is incredibly expensive and time consuming, generally running billions of dollars and years beyond projections — but a nuclear reactor currently online provides huge amounts of steady baseload power without emitting greenhouse gases, at least from the actual electricity generation process.

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The problem is that almost all of U.S. reactors are decades old. The building boom in the 1970s petered out by the 1980s and 1990s, and now the fleet still providing just under 20 percent of all electricity in the country is puttering along on fumes, pushing off retirement deadlines like someone who made some bad bets with their IRA. From an emissions perspective, it’s a conundrum.

And as climate change has worsened and emissions trajectories look a bit tougher to stomach without continuing nuclear input, there has even been discussion of restarting plants that have already been turned off. “I do think they can come back,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in June of this year. And earlier, in March, the Department of Energy announced a $1.52 billion loan to restart the Palisades plant in Michigan, which shut down in 2022; if successful, it would be the first restart of a nuclear reactor in U.S. history, one that Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has explicitly tied to the state’s climate change and emissions goals.

So okay, it might be tough and only a few decommissioned plants are even candidates for a restart, but from a climate perspective it makes sense; what Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy are suggesting is, what if we did it for much, much worse reasons?

The boom in so-called AI from big tech companies has come with an associated boom in electricity needs. Power-hungry data centers are cropping up all over the place, and at the same time as the U.S. and every other country are trying to bring their emissions under control, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and every other big tech firm banking on this particular “revolution” are demanding more and more of the grid’s resources. Meltdown, schmeltdown.

To be clear, Three Mile Island’s 1979 partial meltdown was in the reactor known as TM-2; TM-1 continued to run just fine up until 2019’s planned decommissioning. But let’s just say the optics here are a tad off: powering up the U.S. nuclear industry’s symbol of potential world-ending catastrophe in order to power the plagiarism machines and 12-fingered image generators while oil and natural gas production continues to expand and temperature records fall and the world floods is… a choice.

And it doesn’t stop there. Restarting Three Mile Island is contingent not just on Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval but on federal tax breaks aimed at juicing clean energy production. According to the Washington Post, Constellation Energy says it will cost $1.6 billion to fire up TM-1 once more, a number only approachable with help from the Inflation Reduction Act’s nuclear energy provisions. The point of those provisions was to improve the economics of a low-carbon power source; not to help Microsoft try and steal the internet.

The plan to restart the reactor is far from a done deal, and would take at least four years to come to fruition. The ongoing global meltdown will continue apace.