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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It only looks cheap because the real cost is never fully accounted for. Research and development are paid for by governments. Construction is massively subsidised. Then the corporations reap the profits during regular operation and the tax payer is left holding the bag again for decommissioning. This is how it happened in Germany and what is happening right now in France. The French are in such deep shit it’s not even funny any more. And I’ll bet it’s a similar situation in Canada.
I think you need to read up on shit because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Électricité_de_France owns and operates all the large domestic reactors and they’re fully owned by the government. We can talk about how financially efficient they are - sure - but it’s a very different setup from the US where utilities, bizarrely, absolutely must be privatized.
Power is a service that costs money - it’s essential and naturally forms local monopolies… the fact that private power utilities in the US exist is the issue - not that they use nuclear reactors.
This comment is getting downvoted, and I don’t oppose nuclear, but I do think it’s worth noting that the nuclear energy sector has still under-priced the costs of nuclear waste management, transportation, and storage. Engineers don’t have practical methods of building storage containers and buildings that can last as long as the half-life of nuclear waste (1,000-10,000 year), and the long tail of storage costs has not been priced into the cost. Typically, this does end up being paid for by taxpayers over the course of many years. No energy generation system is without downsides, but it’s worth acknowledging them.