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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Nuclear energy had always been a way to funnel public money into private pockets. It never has and never will work without massive subsidies.
I don’t support most new nuclear projects, but saying “it never has and never will work without massive subsidies” is asinine. I live in Ontario where roughly half our electricity comes from Nuclear, and that helped keep the cost reasonable for over a generation. France has also seen great success.
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.
In the US. Where we run all energy production that way. That’s a pretty big asterisk. Because other countries realize it’s a public good that they cannot function without. So it’s owned and operated by the government.
It has many times. It’s cheaper in other nations. The only reason it’s so expensive and takes so long to start in the US is because dirty energy companies have gotten laws passed that make it harder “in the name of safety” or whatever they claim. Most anti-nuke groups are funded by oil companies. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, reliable, produces insignificant waste that is easily managed, and provides a baseline power that other clean sources can’t do alone.
You’re being downvoted, as is tradition, but you’re right.
You say they’re right, but you didn’t counter any opposition. Great input. You do realize that the anti-nuke movement is largely funded by oil companies, right? If they weren’t a good alternative, why would they need to do this? They would just fail regardless. Instead we’ve passed a ton of laws increasing the cost and time to build a nuclear facility to protect them, and then people like you just repeat that it’s too expensive, or that it’s unsafe despite being essentially tied in safety with solar, and better than everything else.
Meanwhile you just trot out the usual nonsense about how we would all be living in a glorious nuclear utopia if it wasn’t for those pesky oil companies while providing no proof yourself.
The bottom line is that if nuclear could compete on price then we would be building more nuclear but it’s just not competitive. If you have any regulations that could be done away with in a safe manner and would make a sizable difference to the cost then cite them.
I never claimed it’d be a utopia. Stop being a jackass.
Nuclear is
cheapclean and safe:https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charted-safest-and-deadliest-energy-sources/
Nuclear waste isn’t an issue:
https://youtu.be/4aUODXeAM-k?si=o6YA2XthpOg6MwV6
https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU?si=K0Drxo0xxe_Q7gFe
Anti-nuclear groups funded by oil companies:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2016/07/29/cafe-standards-the-next-big-political-battle-over-energy/?
Regulatory burden dramatically effects nuclear profitability:
https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/putting-nuclear-regulatory-costs-context/
I can get more receipts if you want. Anything you still don’t believe?
Your sources don’t mention anything about price, unless I’m missing something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
It was a typo. It was meant to say clean, and it was fixed shortly after posting. The one about regulation does discuss cost.
If you notice on the graph you posted nuclear gets more expensive over time. Why? Everything else gets cheaper over time, until recently where they all increase together. Clearly there’s a temporal link increasing the price of nuclear and it isn’t just expensive always. What has been happening over time to make it more expensive? We pass laws to force it to be unprofitable. It used to be one of the cheapest, and it still is in many places around the world. The US has purposefully made it expensive at the behest of the oil industry.
Edit: I like that you down voted me for disagreeing but also responding with what you wanted. You’re not a very good person are you?
As I said, “If you have any regulations that could be done away with in a safe manner and would make a sizable difference to the cost then cite them.”
If you can’t do that, just say so.
Sea-lioning. Nice. I’m not an expert in the field. I don’t know which regulations do what. I don’t need to prove that to you. The fact that it costs more and takes longer in the US than any other nation, and also that nuclear accidents are extremely rare and safety is high, proves that we have needless regulations. I don’t need to know which ones those are to know that’s true. If you somehow can’t see that without specific regulations being cited, maybe you need to work on your deduction skills.