Microsoft to Revive Nuclear Plant on Three Mile Island to Handle AI Processing
Microsoft to Revive Nuclear Plant on Three Mile Island to Handle AI Processing
I know certain sentiments are coming, so I'll put this here: Three Mile Island wasn't the unmitigated disaster that fearmongers would have you believe. It was an ultimately harmless accident that was highly publicized because of poor communication and irresponsible sensationalist journalism.
More on the topic: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA
82It was actually a success story. It failed safe, as designed.
Unfortunately "The China Syndrome" really pumped up anti-nuclesr sentiment.
TMI was the opposite of Chernobyl.
44Heh, you see my posts? That movie came out not 2-weeks ahead of 3-Mile. Freaky isn't it?
3
Yep. And underscoring that more than almost anything else is the fact that the TMI facility continued to operate without incident for forty years after that accident.
35Posted this earlier:
A poof of radioactive steam let loose. That's it, the whole incident. People freaked out on March 28, 1979.
In totally unrelated news, The China Syndrome, a popular movie about a reactor meltdown, came out March 16, 1979.
24"Nuclear" sounds scary but it doesn't have to be and generally isn't. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
IMHO, the correct take on "<blank> uses enormous amounts of energy" is "yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy". Anyone who didn't have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.
17Small addendum, there's 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid
But there's a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States
10
I thought the Netflix show was pretty clear it wasn't as bad as popular history made it out to be.
5
Don't get me wrong, nuclear energy is good. It's just being used to power AI. That's a waste. It's being used so a corporation can profit, not to power homes. It's being used to potentially replace humans, who need less power to function and whose power consumption cannot already be avoided anyway.
50A nuclear plant is not a bad thing, that's one of the cleanest eneegy sources BUT being Microsoft I'm glad it's at least on an island
43It's on an island, yes. In a river, ten kilometres from a dense urban region.
25And it's the site that an American president came closest to dying in a nuclear explosion! (I mean that's not why it's notable, but it's a fun fact anyways.)
5
A nuclear plant is not a bad thing
This specific one famously is.
3Lol I didn't know that
2
Three mile island is outdated tech.
-2Are there any nuclear power plants in the US that aren’t?
3
I did not expect there to be so many "nuclear is scary!" idiots here.
29I live in Italy. I may even trust nuclear power (even though I'm not sure if waste management has improved), I don't trust actual human beings handling contracts, funds, and maintenance.
A bridge collapsed in Genoa, killing 43 people, splitting the city in two, and crippling the economy because Autostrade per l'Italia skirted the pesky issue of maintenance.
6I hadn't realized until I hung out on a Europe forum that anti-nuclear-power positions are very strong in Germany with the center-left.
Western Austria also has a history here. At one point, they infamously built an entire nuclear power plant -- which is where the real costs of nuclear power come from -- and then shut it down via a referendum driven by the anti-nuclear-power crowd before ever actually using it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plant
The Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant was the first commercial nuclear plant for electric power generation built in Austria, of three nuclear plants originally envisioned. Construction of the plant at Zwentendorf was finished but the plant never entered service. The start-up of the Zwentendorf plant, as well as the construction of the other two plants, was prevented by a referendum on 5 November 1978, in which a narrow majority of 50.47% voted against the start-up.[1][2]
The plant was purchased by Austrian energy company EVN Group in 2005; it is used as a security training centre[6] and leased for filming, photography, and other events.[7] In 2025, it will be used as the training ground for ENRICH European Robotics Hackathon.[8]
5Yeah and lemmy is more European leaning than I'm used to. There's a huge European contingent
3
Unfortunately it's like the lottery, and fear of flying. You can explain the odds and the history until you're blue in the face but it doesn't mean anything when somebody sees a documentary and it fills their whole psyche with terror. And you can try to explain that there are safer plant designs out there and that being careful about where you put a plant is a big deal, but the only thing they're going to walk away from the conversation with is Chernobyl, Fukushima in Three Mile Island.
1
The fucking timeline we’re in
11Welcome to Full Dystopia.
11I live near enough to TMI that a catastrophic event would be severely detrimental to my health, but I see this as a good thing (if you can call AI good). Clean, safe energy, and jobs for people in an area that needs jobs, win-win.
10This is just begging for a kernel memory space access joke...
8ELI5 please why they don't just put their server farms in a desert, roofed with solar panels and a big-bum battery?
6The Susquehanna River that Three Mile Island sits on offers virtually unlimited fresh cold water for cooling the server farm.
9And it flows into Chesapeake bay after passing by Peach Bottom nuke plant, where unannounced inspections have revealed everyone sleeping.
At one time, farmers used to grow popcorn on 3MI. Post-incident, pets were born with deformities on the York County side, harder to tell with the humans there.
We won't go into the time I drove into Indian Point during the day and found no one in attendance. No guards, gates open, etc.
I drove all over the plant. Took a while to find anyone, and that person was annoyed at my needing to make a delivery, but there was no one at the dock.
I'm not on either side, but if you read an article about nukes, someone paid for it, pro or con.
It's not that simple.
-5
Because you want data centers to be closer to the users for speed.
0Transit latency is a tiny tiny fraction of the round trip time for AI processing tasks. Until AI tasks are in the order of milliseconds instead of seconds it's a rounding error.
8Doesn't that depend on the application?
3
Turning off the server farm once the sun goes down would be inconvenient.
-3
Knowing the incompetence of Microsoft is making me re-think my pro-nuclear stance...maybe it should be banned.
6You can see the cooling towers from the highway. It's not secluded.
5Cool. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
2ah yes nothing will go wrong no meltdowns whatsoever
0