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>That’s cheaper than a brand-new nuclear power plant would cost, but it’s a hefty premium over wind, solar, and geothermal, according to a comparison of energy costs from Lazard.

Nuclear is more expensive because there are extensive regulations. "Green" energy not only does not face so many regulations but it benefits from incentives.

Also, when comparing nuclear with "green" energy, most studies don't take into account the costs of energy storage.

Isn't M$FT a $Trillion dollar company? They can afford it on their own bootstraps

Maybe the loan is cheaper than using their own money.

You dont get a billion dollar loan if you have no money. You are still expected to pay it back in the end.

I wonder what the legal basis of the loan is. Congress controls the money; what authorization does the executive branch have for loaning $1 billion?

It's in the article.

> The debt facility is being made through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which was formed under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to foster the growth of clean energy technologies.

> The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed during the Biden administration, created another pot of money under the LPO known as the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. That program was created to restore existing power plants to operation provided they avoid or reduce pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration kept it largely in tact, rebranding it the Energy Dominance Financing Program.

Congress passed the Energy Policy act of 2005 and then the Inflation Reduction Act allocating money to the DoE to make these loans.

It's right in the article:

> The debt facility is being made through the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO), which was formed under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to foster the growth of clean energy technologies

and, more importantly:

> The Inflation Reduction Act, which passed during the Biden administration, created another pot of money under the LPO known as the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program. That program was created to restore existing power plants to operation provided they avoid or reduce pollutants or greenhouse gas emissions. The Trump administration kept it largely in tact, rebranding it the Energy Dominance Financing Program.

Learn all about it from the guy who ran the office in the last administration!

https://www.ms.now/msnbc-podcast/msnbc/discussing-explosion-...

Looks like this falls under existing congressionally appropriated spending for the DOE

https://archive.ph/YjljM

Maybe someone can elaborate on this, since I know basically nothing about chemistry or nuclear physics; isn't Three Mile Island still completely irradiated and unsafe for humans to inhabit?

Unit 2 is the reactor that melted down and it has been shut down ever since (and partially decommissioned). Unit 1, a separate reactor at the same site, was operated normally until 2019 when it was shut down due to high costs. It was originally scheduled to be decommissioned by 2079 (sic) but is now being brought back online.

If it wasn't profitable in 2019, why is profitable now? Because Microsoft is commiting to be a customer?

Microsoft committed to purchase the plant's capacity for 20 years. And US electricity demand grew very slowly from 2005 to 2020. It is growing rapidly now.

At around $110/MWh, according to the article. This is about 50% higher than what utility-scale PV or wind would cost. Guess they're using OpenAI accounting.

> utility-scale PV or wind would cost

Are you comparing cost against what electricity currently costs or what it would cost to add capacity? I feel like Microsoft is not acting on hype here, they're going to pay a premium just because it's cool to refire a nuclear plant? Surely they've done the math to decide the feasibility of building out a few acres of solar panels.

There could also be incentives beyond the loan or political pressure we’re not privy to. Such pressure is part of the reason Boeing ended up acquiring McDonnell Douglass even though it wasn’t exactly the financial best move for Boeing. If the US government is serious about restarting its nuclear industry then this is a small first step to build up the skills for building new reactors or refurbishing old ones.

It’s not really that farfetched, either. If the government expects a conflict in the next few decades, solar build out might become much more expensive or impossible since our domestic production might not be enough to support NATO’s growth.

The electricity cost is actually very low compared to the capital cost of the stuff the the electricity runs. But not having access to the electricity means that all that capital is going to waste.

So Microsoft is less price sensitive than other electricity customers.

Plus they get the PR and hype boost from saying they are using nuclear, which is huge right now. Which is big enough that the other hyperscalers thought they had to announce new nuclear projects, even though it will be a decade before those new nuclear projects could ever come on line.

Running a data center on unreliable energy would be shockingly stupid.

And unreliable energy sources routinely exclude the wildly uneconomical costs and environmental impact it would take to make them reliable.

> Running a data center on unreliable energy would be shockingly stupid.

For the right kind of workloads and at sufficient scale, I wonder if this is actually true. (It probably is, but it's fun to hypothesize.) I'm assuming the workloads are mostly AI-related.

AI training presumably isn't super time-sensitive, so could you just pause it while it's cloudy?

AI inference, at least for language models, presumably isn't particularly network-intensive nor latency-sensitive (it's just text). So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.

Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy. Maybe in a world where hardware somehow got way cheaper but energy usage remained high we'd see strategies like this get used.

> So if one region is currently cloudy... spin it down and transfer load to a different region, where it's sunny? It's kind of like the "wide area grid" concept without actually needing to run power lines.

> Yes, I know that in reality the capex of building and equipping a whole DC means you'll want to run it 24/7, but it is fun to think about ways you could take advantage of low cost energy.

There's some balance between maximizing capex, business continuity planning, room for growth, and natural peak and trough throughout the day.

You probably don't really want all your DCs maxxed out at the daily peak. Then you have no spare capacity for when you've lost N DCs on you biggest day of the year. N might typically be one, but if you have many DCs, you probably want to plan for two or three down.

Anyway, so on a normal day, when all your DCs are running, you do likely have some flexibility on where tasks run/where traffic lands. It makes sense to move traffic where it costs less to serve, within some reasonable bounds of service degradation. Even if electricity prices are the same, you might move traffic where the ambient temperature is lower, as that would reduce energy used for cooling and with it the energy bill.

You might have some non-interactive, non-time sensitive background jobs that could fill up spare DC capacity... but maybe it's worth putting a dollar amount on those --- if it's sunny and windy and energy is cheap, go ahead ... when it's cloudy and still and energy is expensive, some jobs may need to be descheduled.

One big problem is you have a bunch of expensive GPUs sitting around doing nothing during these outages

Nuclear power plants go down for an entire month at a time for refueling.

Sure - at scheduled, predictable times. That matters.

I imagine data centers make the best economic sense when they can run full tilt 24/7. You’ll double your payoff time if you can only run work when the sun shines.

In most parts of the country, solar plus batteries to get through 24 hours will be cheaper than $110/MWh.

Do you have a source for that, when i googled it came up closer to $200/MWh for new york, but that was from older sources. The only thing i saw approaching this price point was if you were somewhere like las vegas.

I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.

I also wonder what time horizon we are talking. solar and batteries presumably have to be replaced more often than nuclear.

> I also think you would need more than 24 hours battery. You have to prepare for freak weather events that reduce system capacity.

In general, yes. Not really in the context of utility generation for a DC, though. A DC should have onsite backup generation, at least to supply critical loads. If your contracted utility PV + storage runs out, and there's no spare grid capacity available (or it's too expensive) you can switch to onsite power for the duration. The capex for backup power is already required, so you're just looking at additional spending for fuel, maybe maintenance if the situation requires enough hours on backup.

Nuclear power is reliable 24/7 while wind and solar are not and handling this costs money. Microsoft has said that they have more GPUs than electricity to run them so even at $110/MWh it makes sense for them.

I don't know where this '24/7' stuff comes from; they have maintenance outages like anything else. Refueling takes months every couple years, so you're going to have to "handle this" even with nuclear.

France’s nuclear fleet has an average capacity factor of ~75%… so less “24/7” and more like 18/7 or 24/5.25 or something..

The US fleet was at 93% capacity factor in 2023.

https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/us-nuclear-generati...

As for France's capacity factor, that has a lot to do with the presence of intermittents on the continental grid, combined with the EU's Renewable Energy Directive making France liable to pay fines if they use nuclear power in preference to wind/solar.

"they have maintenance outages like anything else"

not often and most importantly they are PREDICTABLE. You do understand why being able to control when a power plant is operating is a very important thing, right?

i thought the conversation was regarding utilization of capital, in which case 80% is 80%, predictability doesnt change the fact you have to let GPUs sit idle 20% of the time.

I guess if I knew there would be two months with less power I might design my data center to fit into 40 foot containers so I could deploy wherever power and latency are cheapest

The Wikipedia page makes it seem like it's been largely cleaned up for decades:

> In 1988, the NRC announced that, although it was possible to further decontaminate the Unit 2 site, the remaining radioactivity had been sufficiently contained as to pose no threat to public health and safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

No.

Chernobyl (which was a far worse accident) continued to produce power at other units on the same site for 14 years after the meltdown of unit 4.

The article says the reactor they are bringing back on was active until as recently as 2019, so it's safe to say it's probably not uninhabitable.

How much would it cost to build a new reactor with comparable power output?

Cost varies with the site conditions. It's one of the many things that push nuclear construction costs up; every build needs to take into consideration the geographic nature of the site (bedrock levels, etc) and so every location requires customizations to the design.

With that said, while it doesn't provide numbers, the article does say the refurbishment (costing $1.6 billion, estimated) will be cheaper than a new build. It'll also likely be much faster, projected to open in 2028.

A quick google search puts construction costs of new nuclear of a Unit 2 size in the $5-10 billion range. 3 Mile Island itself was constructed for $2 billion in 2024 inflation-adjusted dollars. All in all, refurbishing sounds like a good bargain compared to a green field build.

There's not much to go off of on this subject in the US - only two successful reactor projects have been started since the 70s: Units 3 and 4 at Vogtle in Georgia*. They cost $15 billion each and bankrupted the remnants of Westinghouse (in combination with a similar project in South Carolina which was never finished).

*Many reactors started construction in the 70s and were finished in the 80s or 90s, plus Watts Bar Unit 2 which was started in 1972 and finished in 2016 for a total of $5 billion. The US also of course builds many naval reactors.

> There's not much to go off of on this subject in the US

The main problem is that things cost more per unit if you do them less. The first new reactor in decades is going to be stupid expensive because you have new people doing it who are learning things for the first time, which often means doing them over again, which is expensive. And then we didn't even get to see if the second unit at Vogtle could improve on the first because then COVID hit and made everything cost even more.

Whereas the interesting question is, how much do they each cost if you build them at scale?

Beat for beat it would probably be cheaper to get the Chinese to do it.Cost per watt charts [1] show US builds still high while they are decreasing for the rest.

Apart from the obvious labour costs difference , theres also the skills at scale.Chinese have been on a continous buildout of new plants , so at this point they have designs/skilled teams for whom this is another routine at this point(i think 30+ under construction concurrently).The US builds are almost artisinal at this point.

And yeah at $1B , given prior examples , it expect them to be late and costs to baloon.Unless they use this as a template to upskill/retrain a workforce that will lead a new buildout so economies of scale take over and put downward pressure on the costs.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/22/climate/china...

Most of the cost is not in building -- it is in planning, wrestling with capricious government agencies, and rebuilding when said agencies come up with "improvements".

Actually building it? Peanuts. Getting it through planning approval and the inevitable environmental etc. lawsuits? Infinite time and money.

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they will be dependent on their allies for fuel sources..

in a list of countries with uranium resverves 1-59 they're number 55!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

Number 55 when sorted alphabetically, if you're talking about the USA.

The U.S. is ranked #17 in that list at 101,900 tonnes, not #55.

Do you have any idea how little Uranium reactors use?

And in any case Australia host a LOT of uranium and is a very close ally and is happy to sell it to the US.

And we're even happier if you keep it!

Nuclear power is great and Australia is foolish for having 1/3 of all uranium in the world and not using it.

100%. We have this thing where every 10 years or so we collectively admit that if we started nuclear 10 years ago it would be fine, but we need it now, so it should remain illegal because its too expensive. Its some of the most insane doublethink in human politics.

Did you honestly not look at the numbers in the chart? It's sorted alphabetically by default lol.