I know certain sentiments are coming, so I’ll put this here: Three Mile Island wasn’t the unmitigated disaster that fearmongers would have you believe. It was an ultimately harmless accident that was highly publicized because of poor communication and irresponsible sensationalist journalism.
More on the topic: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA
“Nuclear” sounds scary but it doesn’t have to be and generally isn’t. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
IMHO, the correct take on “<blank> uses enormous amounts of energy” is “yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy”. Anyone who didn’t have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.
Small addendum, there’s 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid
But there’s a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States
It was actually a success story. It failed safe, as designed.
Unfortunately “The China Syndrome” really pumped up anti-nuclesr sentiment.
TMI was the opposite of Chernobyl.
Heh, you see my posts? That movie came out not 2-weeks ahead of 3-Mile. Freaky isn’t it?
Yep. And underscoring that more than almost anything else is the fact that the TMI facility continued to operate without incident for forty years after that accident.
Posted this earlier:
A poof of radioactive steam let loose. That’s it, the whole incident. People freaked out on March 28, 1979.
In totally unrelated news, The China Syndrome, a popular movie about a reactor meltdown, came out March 16, 1979.
A nuclear plant is not a bad thing, that’s one of the cleanest eneegy sources BUT being Microsoft I’m glad it’s at least on an island
It’s on an island, yes. In a river, ten kilometres from a dense urban region.
And it’s the site that an American president came closest to dying in a nuclear explosion! (I mean that’s not why it’s notable, but it’s a fun fact anyways.)
lol uh… you know about the location and history of that facility… right?
It’s a nuclear power plant that provided clean and safe energy for many decades.
While that is true, it was also the site of the worst nuclear disaster on US soil.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not scaremongering, and I support nuclear power. It’s just a bit darkly ironic, imo.
Edit: I gotta go down these Wikipedia rabbit holes you guys are pointing me towards, because I’m clearly somewhat misinformed here. Seriously, thanks for sharing!
It was partial meltdown and the failsafe worked. No one was injured or had their health negatively affected by the incident. The worst nuclear disaster still had less negative effects than even a single modern coal plant does.
Calling it “the worst nuclear disaster” is not just incorrect but stupid. Just off the top of my head, I can name a worse reactor accident and a worse non-reactor nuclear accident on US soil.
SL-1, a low-power reactor in Idaho, exploded because of poor design and human error. An operator retracted the manually operated control rod too far. The reactor went prompt critical, causing a steam explosion, destroying the reactor vessel and killing all three operators. To this day, SL-1 is the only fatal reactor accident on US soil.
Cecil Kelley, a worker at Los Alamos, was fatally irradiated when a plutonium reclaimer machine went critical. The machine contained an aqueous mixture of plutonium slag of a much higher concentration than it should have, causing an excursion when the stirring was turned on. He died two days later. His autopsy was performed by one Dr. Lushbaugh, who removed several organs for experiments without permission.
TMI had zero fatalities, minimal release of radiation, and no measurable effect on health. Area residents were exposed to less radiation than the yearly background dose.
2016 was my best-performing Presidential bid ever. My grandmother wrote my name in.
Wrong thread?
Oh sorry, I thought we were saying things that were technically true but imply something much larger.
There is nothing clean or safe about three mile island. The place had a meltdown and created tons of nuclear waste. Next you’ll be trying to tell me Fukushima and Chernobyl were safe, clean, and cheap.
TMI had zero fatalities, minimal release of radiation, and no measurable effect on health. Residents of the area were exposed to less radiation from the accident than the yearly background dose.
Some layers of safety failed, but the rest did their job. That’s why we call it an accident and not a disaster. The plant continued to operate for decades with no issues. The only reason it’s so prevalent in the public consciousness is because of faulty reporting and irresponsible, ignorant people (like you) parroting the first thing they hear from sensationalist media.
Why don’t you get back on Lemmy after you’ve actually looked into TMI
Three mile island is outdated tech.
Are there any nuclear power plants in the US that aren’t?
Cool. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
This thing can’t continue.
Why?
It had a proper “fail-safe” incident. It functioned as intended.
Yes, it’s safe and all but using a whole nuclear power plant for AI is a waste of resources.
They intended for it to partially melt down?
Don’t twist their words. The plant, when faced with a meltdown incident, was able to shut down safely with no injuries or detrimental effects to anyone, as intended. The plant then operated safely without incident for another 4 decades.
Don’t get me wrong, nuclear energy is good. It’s just being used to power AI. That’s a waste. It’s being used so a corporation can profit, not to power homes. It’s being used to potentially replace humans, who need less power to function and whose power consumption cannot already be avoided anyway.
I did not expect there to be so many “nuclear is scary!” idiots here.
I live in Italy. I may even trust nuclear power (even though I’m not sure if waste management has improved), I don’t trust actual human beings handling contracts, funds, and maintenance.
A bridge collapsed in Genoa, killing 43 people, splitting the city in two, and crippling the economy because Autostrade per l’Italia skirted the pesky issue of maintenance.
I hadn’t realized until I hung out on a Europe forum that anti-nuclear-power positions are very strong in Germany with the center-left.
Western Austria also has a history here. At one point, they infamously built an entire nuclear power plant – which is where the real costs of nuclear power come from – and then shut it down via a referendum driven by the anti-nuclear-power crowd before ever actually using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant
The Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant was the first commercial nuclear plant for electric power generation built in Austria, of three nuclear plants originally envisioned. Construction of the plant at Zwentendorf was finished but the plant never entered service. The start-up of the Zwentendorf plant, as well as the construction of the other two plants, was prevented by a referendum on 5 November 1978, in which a narrow majority of 50.47% voted against the start-up.[1][2]
The plant was purchased by Austrian energy company EVN Group in 2005; it is used as a security training centre[6] and leased for filming, photography, and other events.[7] In 2025, it will be used as the training ground for ENRICH European Robotics Hackathon.[8]
Unfortunately it’s like the lottery, and fear of flying. You can explain the odds and the history until you’re blue in the face but it doesn’t mean anything when somebody sees a documentary and it fills their whole psyche with terror. And you can try to explain that there are safer plant designs out there and that being careful about where you put a plant is a big deal, but the only thing they’re going to walk away from the conversation with is Chernobyl, Fukushima in Three Mile Island.
You can see the cooling towers from the highway. It’s not secluded.
ELI5 please why they don’t just put their server farms in a desert, roofed with solar panels and a big-bum battery?
The Susquehanna River that Three Mile Island sits on offers virtually unlimited fresh cold water for cooling the server farm.
Fucking up the temperature downstream; global warming baby! But who needs that ecosystem? It’s survive or die, and that includes the beavers! Down with trees, up with fleas(markets)!
Because you want data centers to be closer to the users for speed.
Transit latency is a tiny tiny fraction of the round trip time for AI processing tasks. Until AI tasks are in the order of milliseconds instead of seconds it’s a rounding error.
I live near enough to TMI that a catastrophic event would be severely detrimental to my health, but I see this as a good thing (if you can call AI good). Clean, safe energy, and jobs for people in an area that needs jobs, win-win.
ah yes nothing will go wrong no meltdowns whatsoever
