The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers, according to details of the application shared with The Washington Post. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company.
Microsoft, which declined to comment on the bid for a loan guarantee, is among the large tech companies scouring the nation for zero-emissions power as they seek to build data centers. It is among the leaders in the global competition to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity.
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“We find that trends in costs have varied significantly in magnitude and in structure by era, country, and experience. In contrast to the rapid cost escalation that characterized nuclear construction in the United States, we find evidence of much milder cost escalation in many countries, including absolute cost declines in some countries and specific eras. Our new findings suggest that there is no inherent cost escalation trend associated with nuclear technology.”
As you can see in this chart from the paper, after the Three Mile Island incident, the cost to build a nuclear reactor went up significantly in the US.
Clearly this is due to increased regulations after the anti-nuke movement gained so much influence after Three Mile Island, despite the very minor effects of the event itself.
“When the full cost experience of US nuclear power is shown with construction duration experience, we observe distinctive trends that change after the Three Mile Island accident. As shown in Fig. 3 in blue, reactors that received their operating licenses before the TMI accident experience mild cost escalation. But for reactors that were under construction during Three Mile Island and eventually completed afterwards, shown in red, median costs are 2.8 times higher than pre-TMI costs and median durations are 2.2 times higher than pre-TMI durations. Post-TMI, overnight costs rise with construction duration, even though OCC excludes the costs of interest during construction. This suggests that other duration-related issues such as licensing, regulatory delays, or back-fit requirements are a significant contributor to the rising OCC trend.”
Good enough for you?
No, you do not. I can be assured the sun makes things warmer by showing a graph of temperature based on the position of the sun in the sky. I don’t need to know precisely what fussion reactions are happening in the sun to know the cause. If you aren’t capable of that then that’s on you. No one else needs to know the exact cause to see correlations that point towards the cause.
Edit: Based on history you’re already responding, but I thought I should include the global trend graph from the paper too. In some other nations it’s gotten cheaper over time. The US is by far the worst of making it more expensive over time, despite technology and knowledge advancing.
I recommend going through the study yourself though.
So name one.
As we’ve established, you can’t. You’re not a serious person and so I’m not going to waste any more of my time on you.
You’re like every other nuclear bro I’ve interacted with; no amount of evidence, logic, or facts will persuade you because you didn’t use those to come to your present position. You’re a Japanese holdout, still flighting the war long after your side lost.
Oh, but it’s regulations, you say. That pesky red tape that I can’t cite even once even though it definitely 100% is because that’s what my feels tell me.
I expect to see you again in another nuclear discussion saying the same shit you’re saying now and you’ll probably still be saying it even after the last reactor on earth is decommissioned.
Read the paper. I’m not the unserious one. You will ignore all other information because anti-nuke must be right. You’ve cited Wikipedia, and that’s it. Fuck off dude. You aren’t the one in the right here.
Literally every piece of it increases cost. Do you disagree with that statement? If you do, which red tape has ever decreased cost? Do you think there aren’t regulations on nuclear? I don’t need to cite any specific one because it’s obvious they’re being created and it’s obvious they’d increase cost. Only someone who wants to sea-lion would ask to cite specific regs.
Check out the edit above. I wasn’t fast enough for you apparently, but nuclear can decrease over time. The US is the extreme of costs increasing. Why would this happen if knowledge and technology advances if some external force isn’t acting upon the price?
I like that you keep asking for evidence, I provide it, you cite Wikipedia, then you ignore all other information and act like others are being ignorant. You want anti-nuke to make sense. It does, if you accept that regulations are increasing price and that’s good. It doesn’t if you think artificially increasing the price is bad.
You have answered zero questions and have not responded to any information I’ve provided, yet you act like you’re winning this debate. You look like a fool.
Maybe one day you’ll come to appreciate the irony on display here but I somehow doubt it.
Last thing and then I’m done with you:
To recap, you asserted that red tape and regulations are preventing nuclear from being competitive.
OK, fair enough. I asked for just a single example of a regulation that could be done away with and that would reduce costs in a meaningful way as it’s pretty much your entire argument.
You haven’t been able to do this.
You lose, I’m done with you for real now. Have a nice weekend.
I’m not an expert. I posted a scholarly article showing this was the case. You promptly ignored it. You lose. You want proof that you wouldn’t accept anyway. I could waste my time citing regulations, and you’d just say that has a purpose, which it does is it required? I’m not wasting my time when you don’t accept the premise (until now) that regulations are increasing the costs artificially. This is done by groups with a goal to keep competition out and increase the price of their product. Why would you support that?