Microsoft’s plan to use the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to help grow its data centers reflects the industry’s hope that nuclear technology could be a quick, climate-friendly answer to growing electricity needs.
But it will be very difficult to meet the huge power demand from data centers behind artificial intelligence with new or restarted nuclear reactors, because companies will face high regulatory barriers, potential fuel supply constraints, and sometimes stiff local and environmental opposition. .
Microsoft and Constellation Energy announced a deal to restart a unit at a plant in Pennsylvania on Friday, which will be a restart for the data center.
In the announcement, Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez called nuclear power the only available energy source that is climate-friendly and reliable enough to support Big Tech’s needs, meaning weather-dependent wind and solar power may not be up to the task.
The announcement follows a similar agreement in March in which Amazon.com bought a nuclear-powered data center from Talen Energy, and another nuclear contract for data centers is in the works, power industry sources said.
The need that the deal has created is immense. US data center power use is expected to roughly triple between 2023 and 2030 and require about 47 gigawatts of new generation capacity, according to Goldman Sachs estimates, which assume natural gas, wind and solar will fill the gap.
Climate-conscious investors and regulators want to ensure this surge does not lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
For Microsoft and Constellation, at least, the deal may prove difficult to pull off.
“No one has done this before,” Kate Fowler, global nuclear energy leader for Marsh, an energy insurance broker and risk adviser, said of the Three Mile Island re-effort. “There will be challenges that will arise.”
The Three Mile Island plant made global headlines in 1979 with the partial meltdown of its Unit 2 reactor, the worst nuclear incident in US history.
The reopening plan includes the Unit 1 reactor at the Pennsylvania plant, which operated safely for decades before it was shut down five years ago. The $1.6 billion plan would restart Unit 1 in 2028 to offset the power consumption of Microsoft’s data centers in the region.
But a key permit for the plant’s new life has yet to be submitted, regulators said.
Getting them can be difficult, especially against local opponents who remember the partial crisis of 1979.
Resuming use of equipment and infrastructure that has been inactive for five years could be difficult, said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Constellation should expect to encounter problems that will be expensive and time-consuming to fix,” said Lyman.
Three Mile Island also needs modified surface and water permits, said Stacey Hanrahan, spokeswoman for the Susquehanna River Basin Commission.
“Any modification requests will be carefully reviewed, and the project’s expected water demand will be evaluated for sustainability and potential negative impacts on the environment and other users,” Hanrahan said.
Another HURDLES
There are broader issues that could affect some of the US’s other nuclear-tech-connection efforts
For example, Washington is restricting imports of enriched uranium after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Securing a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission can be difficult for any nuclear project.
“The NRC now really has its plate full,” said Sola Talabi, a nuclear engineer and president of energy risk consultancy Pittsburgh Technical, noting license applications for many types of reactors that had never been considered before, including high-tech modular plants and restarting other reactors that were not active.
Although President Joe Biden recently signed legislation to speed up the NRC’s licensing process, considering new project queues with company-provided timelines will challenge the NRC’s personnel and technical resources, Talabi said.
For the Talen project, the pocket problem has become a problem. Although the plant is operating, Amazon’s data center is facing challenges at the federal level from two regulated utilities that predict possible increases in transmission costs that will increase electricity bills.
Talen disputed predictions that the public would face higher electricity bills or reliability issues from the data center, which could use enough electricity to power all the homes in New Mexico.
In general, only buying power from a nuclear plant to run a data center just means diverting it from other consumers, creating competition for supply in the grid that can lead to higher electricity bills.
In the meantime, the Three Mile Island project is a major test of the public’s appetite for expanded nuclear power.
Talabi said four years could be enough for Constellation to overcome technical problems at Three Mile Island, which can become major when sensitive components such as steam generators and reactor vessels are shut down for years.
But he stressed the importance of dealing with environmental and community issues that may arise around the site.
“Maybe more than anywhere else in the country, the need for community engagement to make sure that we accept the community will be critical to restart,” Talabi said.
Published – September 25, 2024 09:58 IST
