Back to the future. Three Mile Island.
Our insatiable desire for digital services (AI, streaming etc.) is adding significant load to the grid. Data centers need reliable around the clock power, but also want to be sustainable and zero carbon. The only really feasible solution is nuclear, but these plants take too long to build and data center growth is exploding today.
Solution: recommission and restart idled nuclear plants, such as Three Mile Island. Yes, that is actually being considered. In today’s article in Energy Central:
this is seriously being considered.
Quoting from the article: “The dormant power plant renowned as the site of the worst nuclear accident in US history — Three Mile Island — may be switched back on, driven in part by the ravenous energy appetites of artificial-intelligence developers. The plant along the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, where a partial reactor meltdown in 1979 sent the nation into a panic and the nuclear industry reeling, is part of a broader push backed by the White House to bring mothballed nuclear facilities back to life, a new for the US.”
I am totally in support of zero carbon baseload nuclear power and hope to see Three Mile Island back up and operational. I am interested to see how the environmentalists will weigh in on a zero carbon solution with such a storied history.