, but a significant portion of the power generated here is going to be going to the tech giants.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time on sites like this, and honestly, trying to manage something this big is a whole different level. You’ve got billions of dollars at stake and thousands of people trying to keep everything moving. Now, I’m not that old, but back when I first started out, we were stuck using systems that didn’t really talk to each other, and we never really had a clear picture of exactly what was happening.
So, even simple tasks became a bit of a headache. I guess that’s why I’m always so impressed by how much things are changing today. Innate, for example, is used by over 850 companies worldwide to keep even their toughest construction projects running smoothly. What really stands out to me is how you get everything, cost, scope, schedule, real-time reporting, all in one place.
There’s no jumping about between different apps that don’t sync with each other and waiting ages for the latest updates. You actually know what’s happening on your project as it’s happening. It just makes life so much easier. Now, if you’ve ever dealt with challenges like this on your own projects and you want to see how realtime reporting and better project controls could help make a real difference, then check out that link below.
Support from our video sponsors like Innate helps us keep making these videos. So, if it’s relevant to you, please check out that link down there in the video description. Now, let’s get back to Pennsylvania and find out why Microsoft is involved in a deal to relaunch a nuclear reactor. Well, it’s all because the company’s energy demands have gotten so great that it needs to find new sources of clean power, especially for its growing fleet of data centers. That’s right.
Despite the issue of waste disposal, nuclear is considered a clean form of energy because no greenhouse gases are produced during operation. What’s also making it attractive to big tech firms is that it delivers a lot of reliable power that isn’t dependent on how sunny or windy it is. They require large amounts of power both for their data centers and for cooling those data centers.
You need to make sure that you’ve got every megawatt for that data center again at every hour of every day. And so they’re really looking at how can you start to create these reliable relationships so you know you’ve got that power on demand. The relationship with Microsoft works by allowing the firm to purchase carbon-f free power directly from Conservation Energy once it has the plant operating again.
And it can do that for around 20 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s all going to Microsoft. The company is going to draw its electricity from the grid, which unit one will contribute more than 800 megawatts of power to. You see, tech giants like this need assurances they’re going to have enough energy for their future plans, which are now dominated by artificial intelligence.
It’s no secret that big tech is investing heavily in AI. But all of that is going to require huge amounts of data. And none of it can happen without a lot more electricity coming from somewhere. That all makes sense. But one big question is how on earth do you restart a nuclear reactor that’s been shut down for years? As you might imagine, it’s not easy.
But bringing 3mile island back online is actually a lot less of an ordeal than it would be on other plants. When it closed, it was done using a method called safe store. That meant not a huge amount was done other than the removal of fuel, water, and other procedures that placed the reactor in a sort of stasis.
Then over time, and we’re talking a very long time here, radioactive materials in the plant would have decayed, making it easier and safer to dismantle much later on. So when you turn off the nuclear power plant, instead of immediately starting to deconstruct it, you essentially put it into kind of a moth balled or layup state.
So you take all the plant systems, you maybe drain the water out of them, you put them into a very safe state, and you say, “Okay, now we’re going to wait.” and you essentially will wait several decades before you actually start the dismantlement and deconstruction activities. In other words, the process of restarting unit one isn’t as complicated as it would have been on a plant that was already being taken apart.
But there’s still a lot that needs to be done here. It’s a matter of going through and evaluating for plants that entered safe store what’s the condition of all the components. What types of systems need to be essentially retrofitted or upgraded to meet the operational requirements and what plant components maybe require some additional maintenance to go back to their original operating state.
Which is why the relaunch is set to take 4 years and cost more than $1.5 billion to complete. Looking at Three-Mile Island’s current systems, you’d be forgiven for thinking that teams here have got their work cut out. That control room doesn’t seem to have changed much since President Carter visited after the accident.
But believe it or not, it has. And there are now things like high-tech enunciators that alert workers if something isn’t right. In fact, the owners are very keen to stress that everything is going to be ship shaped when it’s powered up again, despite some bits looking like they belong in a museum. We constantly test every switch, constantly test every function, and it’s all monitored through those annunciators.
So, while it may look old because it doesn’t have digital screens everywhere, it’s functionally very, very reliable. They’re also having to restore all of the main equipment from the turbine and generator to the cooling and control systems. It’s going to be a massive effort, but it’s not the only reactor restart project that’s taking place in the US at the moment.
The Palisades plant in Michigan could reopen as soon as late 2025. And the Dwayne Arnold site in Iowa is aiming to come back online around the same time as 3M Island. As for whether we’re going to see any more announced, that’s probably unlikely. Those three were all put into Safe Store, whereas others that have recently closed weren’t.
Some of the other plants that have been decommissioned over the last several years, even ones that have been decommissioned more recently than TMI unit one, um have already undergone major deconstruction and decommissioning activities. And so it’s going to be a lot harder to go back and try to figure out how to bring those plants up to an operating state.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking, well, if restarting all these old power plants has its limitations, why not just build loads of new ones? Well, the thing is it all comes back to what happened in 1979 and the changes that were brought in afterwards. Workers had to have much higher levels of training and design and equipment requirements got a lot stricter.
Although the intention was to prevent occurrences of what happened at 3M Island, it also made building new reactors a lot more difficult. It’s a problem, if you can call it that, which is still being felt today. Two recently completed reactors at the Vogal power plant in Georgia took 15 years to build and were the first to be constructed in America for more than three decades.
The long process was partly due to all the regulations that are coming in since the 1970s. For now, if the US is going to need more nuclear power to meet its wider energy demands, it’s going to have to make do with projects like the one in Pennsylvania. Few would ever have thought that the site of one of America’s darkest moments would become a possible case study for its future.
Huge thanks to Innate for sponsoring today’s video. It really helps us out when you check out our video sponsors. So, if you want more from the B1M, click that link below.
Why America is Restarting Three Mile Island – YouTube
Transcripts:
March 28th, 1979. The day the worst nuclear incident in US history unfolded. It was an accident at the 3mile Allen nuclear power plant. An unprecedented series of mechanical failures and human errors that took the reactor close to a meltdown. Monitors tried to determine exactly how much radiation was released.
One of the two reactors at 3-M Island in Pennsylvania suffered a cooling malfunction that caused part of the core to melt, releasing radioactive gas into the air. It became a cautionary tale of the dangers of atomic energy and remains a crisis the nuclear industry still hasn’t fully recovered from.
But now, decades later, this site is being given a remarkable rebirth. The plant is being switched back on for a purpose that few would ever have predicted. Powering a tech giant’s plans for the future of AI. Before there was Chernobyl, before there was Fukushima, there was this 3mile island.
On a now infamous night in the late ‘7s, this nuclear power station on the banks of the Susahana River experienced a catastrophic incident that shocked the world. In the early hours of the morning, the cooling pump on the unit 2 reactor suddenly failed, causing pressure inside the main system to increase. A safety relief valve was then activated to bring the pressure back down, which became stuck in the open position, but the instruments in the control room didn’t show this.
Operators were unaware pressure had dropped to dangerous levels despite alarms ringing and warning lights flashing. Meanwhile, the reactor core where the nuclear fishision takes place was becoming starved of cooling water, causing it to badly overheat and go into what’s called a partial meltdown. The uranium fuel rods were so damaged they began leaking radioactive material into the atmosphere, resulting in a vast evacuation zone being established around the site.
Some 140,000 people had to leave the area. Fear was already erupting around 3M island. fear that was to slither and jolt around for days to come. Amazingly, there were no injuries or deaths. According to the US Department of Energy, the exposure had no detectable health effects on the plant workers or surrounding public.
Even so, unit 2 was beyond repair and never worked again. But the wider impact was far greater. This event prompted a surge of tougher rules on the industry led by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or NRC. It didn’t help that things had gone wrong at other locations before 3M Islands. The accident that happened at 3M Island was not the first accident that had started in that way.
A lot of the precursors, a lot of the events and a lot of the conditions that led up to the nuclear accident had actually been seen at other nuclear power plants in the industry. Patrick White is research director at the Washingtonbased think tank, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance. And so that resulted in kind of a culture of trying to capture these lessons learned from what we call near miss events and other activities so that all folks in the nuclear industry can learn how to more safely operate their plants.
So presumably the damage done at 3M Island was so great that the plant was immediately closed and that was that. Well, no. Because it was entirely separate from the reactor that failed, unit 1 was able to continue and keep producing power for another 40 years. That was until 2019 when the station was shut down completely.
Like many other nuclear sites in the US, it had struggled to compete with cheaper forms of energy like natural gas and renewables. Hundreds of jobs were lost and the long laborious process of decommissioning the plant began. But 5 years later, the location of one of the world’s most notorious near disasters was thrown the most unexpected of lifelines.
Constation Energy, which acquired Unit One back in 1999, struck a deal with Microsoft that will see the site make a dramatic comeback. It’ll do so under a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center. Now, not only is that going to see Three Mile Island turn its last remaining reactor back on again, but a significant portion of the power generated here is going to be going to the tech giants.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time on sites like this, and honestly, trying to manage something this big is a whole different level. You’ve got billions of dollars at stake and thousands of people trying to keep everything moving. Now, I’m not that old, but back when I first started out, we were stuck using systems that didn’t really talk to each other, and we never really had a clear picture of exactly what was happening.
So, even simple tasks became a bit of a headache. I guess that’s why I’m always so impressed by how much things are changing today. Innate, for example, is used by over 850 companies worldwide to keep even their toughest construction projects running smoothly. What really stands out to me is how you get everything, cost, scope, schedule, real-time reporting, all in one place.
There’s no jumping about between different apps that don’t sync with each other and waiting ages for the latest updates. You actually know what’s happening on your project as it’s happening. It just makes life so much easier. Now, if you’ve ever dealt with challenges like this on your own projects and you want to see how realtime reporting and better project controls could help make a real difference, then check out that link below.
Support from our video sponsors like Innate helps us keep making these videos. So, if it’s relevant to you, please check out that link down there in the video description. Now, let’s get back to Pennsylvania and find out why Microsoft is involved in a deal to relaunch a nuclear reactor. Well, it’s all because the company’s energy demands have gotten so great that it needs to find new sources of clean power, especially for its growing fleet of data centers. That’s right.
Despite the issue of waste disposal, nuclear is considered a clean form of energy because no greenhouse gases are produced during operation. What’s also making it attractive to big tech firms is that it delivers a lot of reliable power that isn’t dependent on how sunny or windy it is. They require large amounts of power both for their data centers and for cooling those data centers.
You need to make sure that you’ve got every megawatt for that data center again at every hour of every day. And so they’re really looking at how can you start to create these reliable relationships so you know you’ve got that power on demand. The relationship with Microsoft works by allowing the firm to purchase carbon-f free power directly from Conservation Energy once it has the plant operating again.
And it can do that for around 20 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s all going to Microsoft. The company is going to draw its electricity from the grid, which unit one will contribute more than 800 megawatts of power to. You see, tech giants like this need assurances they’re going to have enough energy for their future plans, which are now dominated by artificial intelligence.
It’s no secret that big tech is investing heavily in AI. But all of that is going to require huge amounts of data. And none of it can happen without a lot more electricity coming from somewhere. That all makes sense. But one big question is how on earth do you restart a nuclear reactor that’s been shut down for years? As you might imagine, it’s not easy.
But bringing 3mile island back online is actually a lot less of an ordeal than it would be on other plants. When it closed, it was done using a method called safe store. That meant not a huge amount was done other than the removal of fuel, water, and other procedures that placed the reactor in a sort of stasis.
Then over time, and we’re talking a very long time here, radioactive materials in the plant would have decayed, making it easier and safer to dismantle much later on. So when you turn off the nuclear power plant, instead of immediately starting to deconstruct it, you essentially put it into kind of a moth balled or layup state.
So you take all the plant systems, you maybe drain the water out of them, you put them into a very safe state, and you say, “Okay, now we’re going to wait.” and you essentially will wait several decades before you actually start the dismantlement and deconstruction activities. In other words, the process of restarting unit one isn’t as complicated as it would have been on a plant that was already being taken apart.
But there’s still a lot that needs to be done here. It’s a matter of going through and evaluating for plants that entered safe store what’s the condition of all the components. What types of systems need to be essentially retrofitted or upgraded to meet the operational requirements and what plant components maybe require some additional maintenance to go back to their original operating state.
Which is why the relaunch is set to take 4 years and cost more than $1.5 billion to complete. Looking at Three-Mile Island’s current systems, you’d be forgiven for thinking that teams here have got their work cut out. That control room doesn’t seem to have changed much since President Carter visited after the accident.
But believe it or not, it has. And there are now things like high-tech enunciators that alert workers if something isn’t right. In fact, the owners are very keen to stress that everything is going to be ship shaped when it’s powered up again, despite some bits looking like they belong in a museum. We constantly test every switch, constantly test every function, and it’s all monitored through those annunciators.
So, while it may look old because it doesn’t have digital screens everywhere, it’s functionally very, very reliable. They’re also having to restore all of the main equipment from the turbine and generator to the cooling and control systems. It’s going to be a massive effort, but it’s not the only reactor restart project that’s taking place in the US at the moment.
The Palisades plant in Michigan could reopen as soon as late 2025. And the Dwayne Arnold site in Iowa is aiming to come back online around the same time as 3M Island. As for whether we’re going to see any more announced, that’s probably unlikely. Those three were all put into Safe Store, whereas others that have recently closed weren’t.
Some of the other plants that have been decommissioned over the last several years, even ones that have been decommissioned more recently than TMI unit one, um have already undergone major deconstruction and decommissioning activities. And so it’s going to be a lot harder to go back and try to figure out how to bring those plants up to an operating state.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking, well, if restarting all these old power plants has its limitations, why not just build loads of new ones? Well, the thing is it all comes back to what happened in 1979 and the changes that were brought in afterwards. Workers had to have much higher levels of training and design and equipment requirements got a lot stricter.
Although the intention was to prevent occurrences of what happened at 3M Island, it also made building new reactors a lot more difficult. It’s a problem, if you can call it that, which is still being felt today. Two recently completed reactors at the Vogal power plant in Georgia took 15 years to build and were the first to be constructed in America for more than three decades.
The long process was partly due to all the regulations that are coming in since the 1970s. For now, if the US is going to need more nuclear power to meet its wider energy demands, it’s going to have to make do with projects like the one in Pennsylvania. Few would ever have thought that the site of one of America’s darkest moments would become a possible case study for its future.
Huge thanks to Innate for sponsoring today’s video. It really helps us out when you check out our video sponsors. So, if you want more from the B1M, click that link below.
