A reactor in the decommissioned Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the United States is being restarted to supply power to Microsoft’s data centers. The software giant has agreed to purchase the energy produced for 20 years, the operating company Constellation Energy announced. It would be the first time that a decommissioned nuclear power plant in the United States has been put back on the grid.
Microsoft is currently a pioneer in the use of artificial intelligence. The Windows and Office company has joined forces with ChatGPT inventor OpenAI and is integrating the technology behind the chatbot into practically all of its products. However, AI requires a lot of energy in data centers. This clashes with the climate goals of the tech companies.
Microsoft has big climate protection promises
So far, companies have tried to switch to renewable energies and otherwise offset their emissions of climate-damaging CO2, for example by planting trees. At the beginning of 2020, Microsoft announced that it would more than offset its CO2 emissions by 2030. By 2050, Microsoft promised, it would even offset the company’s entire carbon dioxide emissions since it was founded.
But the AI boom that has since occurred has caused the energy requirements of the tech giants to rise. Experts from the bank Goldman Sachs referred in an analysis to estimates that a query on ChatGPT can consume six to ten times more energy than a classic Google search.
In a conversation with financial service Bloomberg, Microsoft manager Bobby Hollis also pointed out that the energy production of wind turbines and solar plants can fluctuate, while it remains the same at nuclear power plants – and requires a customer who can buy the electricity. “We run around the clock, they run around the clock,” said Hollis.
Reactor could be running again in 2027
Constellation CEO Joe Dominquez told Bloomberg that the plant could be up and running again in 2027 if the feed-in to the power grid is resolved by then. The company shut down the reactor in 2019 on the grounds that its operation had become uneconomical.
In 1979, an accident occurred in the other reactor at Three Mile Island, resulting in a partial meltdown. The radiation from the radioactive cloud was measured several hundred kilometers away from the accident site, and more than 200,000 people had to leave their homes. To this day, the incident is considered to be the most serious in the commercial use of nuclear energy in the USA.
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