Microsoft to Purchase All Energy of Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant for AI
TapTechNews September 21, the news that Is the end of AI nuclear power? The Washington Post reported yesterday (September 20) that Microsoft Corporation and Constellation Energy have reached an agreement to purchase 100% of the energy of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in the next 20 years.
Introduction to the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant is located near the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, USA. A core meltdown accident occurred on March 28, 1979. In the 7-level system of the International Nuclear Event Scale, this accident was rated as level 5.
The Three Mile Island nuclear leakage accident is the most serious nuclear accident in the United States so far, but compared with the subsequent Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, the Three Mile Island nuclear leakage accident is still within a controllable range.
Residents around the nuclear power plant and several neighboring states have not experienced large-scale pollution like that in Ukraine or Fukushima, Japan. In addition, the popularity of this incident is not as widely known in the world as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant is held by Constellation Energy, which announced the permanent closure of the nuclear power plant in 2019 due to financial stress.
Microsoft hopes to restart the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant
According to the agreement signed by Microsoft and Constellation Energy, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant is planned to go back online in 2028.
If approved by the regulatory agency, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant will provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent to that of 800,000 households, that is, 835 megawatts.
Before this, in the United States, no nuclear power plant has ever been put back into use after decommissioning, and no entire output power of a commercial nuclear power plant has ever been allocated to one customer.
TapTechNews quoted sources as reporting that although it is not explicitly mentioned in the agreement between the two parties, it is obvious that Microsoft is buying this electricity to meet the increasingly huge power consumption of AI data centers.
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The energy consumption cost of AI is too high, and Microsoft considers using nuclear power to supply power to the data center