David Pogue this morning tells us all about the surprising
resurrection of an infamous nuclear power plant and the tech
giant funding it's unlikely comeback.
It might have seemed like one of the weirder headlines
of 2024.
Microsoft is paying $1.6 billion to restart Three Mile Island.
Radioactive xenon gas is still being discharged.
That's the nuclear power plant whose reactor #2 had a
partial meltdown in 1979.
A government official said that a breakdown in an atomic
power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear
reactor accident to date.
There were no injuries and nobody died, but it set
the nuclear industry back years.
Only two new plants have been started since that accident.
This is hallowed ground in the nuclear industry.
This is a place where we learned and got better.
So they did make change in protocols and procedures as
a result of that accident.
Thousands.
Oh my God, yes.
One behind it.
That was the reactor where we had the problem.
Joe Dominguez is the CEO of Constellation Energy, which owns
about half of America's 54 nuclear plants, including Three Mile
Island.
But the thing that people forget is that there was
another reactor at the site, the one we're sitting at.
That site, that reactor continued to operate until 2019, when
it was closed for economic reasons, meaning because natural gas
got so cheap, cheap natural gas, low demand, subsidization of
different technologies in the business, no policy supporting nuclear caused
plants to start retiring.
So what is Microsoft's interest?
All the big tech companies have ambitious goals to fight
the climate crisis.
That includes Google.
Today, I'm proud to announce that we intend to become
the first major company to operate carbon free.
And Microsoft.
By 2030, Microsoft will be carbon negative.
They were making progress, too.
Each has invested billions in wind and solar energy.
And then artificial intelligence came along.
AI data centers require huge amounts of electricity.
Big tech realized that they wouldn't make their goals without
taking power into their own hands.
Microsoft is going to enjoy the benefit of the reliable
clean energy for 20 years.
Is restarting this facility quicker and less expensive than just
building a brand new nuclear plant?
Oh yeah, at least 10 times cheaper than building a
new plant.
And we think we could get it going in about
3 years versus the last plant that was built took
almost 10 years.
But if you are a tech company, what do you
do if you don't have a recently retired nuclear plant
handy?
You develop new ones.
Only weeks after Microsoft's announcement, both Amazon and Google announced
major investments in nuclear power.
This is a deal to bring the first advanced nuclear
reactor online by 20-30.
And we're not going to do just one reactor, but
we hope to buy from what will be a series
of reactors that follow that.
Michael Terrell heads Google's decarbonization efforts.
Google is supplementing it's already enormous green energy investments with
a new kind of nuclear called small modular reactors.
These are not the nuclear power plants of yesterday with
the very large cooling towers.
These are much smaller facilities, but because they're modular, you
can stack them together to make bigger power plants.
Nuclear power isn't perfect.
It still produces waste that has to be safely stored.
But unlike solar and wind, nuclear is always on, which
is essential to those AI data centers.
So Google is funding a company called Kairos Power to
design and build this new generation of reactors.
What we're building right now, and you can see the
construction for will be the facility that holds our third
engineering test units.
Kairos is building 3 small demonstration plants in Oak Ridge,
TN on the very spot where uranium was processed for
the first atomic bomb.
CEO Mike Laufer says that his reactors don't use fuel
rods, they use fuel pebbles like this mock up.
It's mostly graphite.
And then these little particles right here, these are the
basically the the tiny externals of uranium that have the
coatings.
And how much power capacity is there in one of
these pebbles?
This is about the same as 4 tons of coal,
4 tons of coal and and how much carbon dioxide
emissions compared to the coal 0.
The Kairos reactors also run at lower power and lower
pressure than traditional reactors, which means lower risk.
Well, this all sounds great.
What's the catch?
There's only one problem with small modular reactors.
They don't really exist.
George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni spent 15 years researching
nuclear safety for the government.
She thinks the big tech companies might be in over
their heads.
I think they're going to find out pretty quickly that
it takes way too long and it's way too expensive.
I think we're going to see just how strong their
commitments are to, you know, clean energy.
So you're saying they they may have to turn to
burning stuff?
I'm pretty sure they will.
You think there's a little bit of tech bro overconfidence
there And.
Oh, completely, completely.
So yes, it's really hard.
I will.
I totally agree with anyone.
Kairos is Mike Laufer, But we're doing it at smaller
scale to start and then building on that in the
future.
How much of what's here is still usable after all
these years?
Oh, it's all usable.
Joe Dominguez's team is getting Three Mile Island ready for
Microsoft.
It's it's this blend of old and new that's really
including renaming the plant the Crane Clean Energy Center.
And if AI is igniting a renaissance in American nuclear,
he says full steam ahead head.
Why do all new plants take so much longer and
cost so much more than projected?
Honest answer.
We don't build enough of them.
You don't want to build a unique design.
You want to do kind of a cookie cutter one
after another design.
Now, is it well understood in government and the industry
that dudes, if you start doing the same design over
and over, we can get there faster and cheaper?
It's probably the best understood idea.
It's understood by both Republicans and Democrats, which is a
hard thing to say about anything.
But sure, everybody understands that if you build a common
design, you build a bunch of them.
So you think we'll get there?
I do.
Google's Michael Terrell agrees as of 2030.
Does it look like you'll make the 0 Carbon goal
is an incredibly ambitious goal, 24/7 carbon free energy everywhere
we operate everywhere around the world.
But it's something we're working very hard to achieve and
we hope to get there.