The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers, according to details of the application shared with The Washington Post. Get a curated selection of 10 of our best stories in your inbox every weekend.
The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company.
Microsoft, which declined to comment on the bid for a loan guarantee, is among the large tech companies scouring the nation for zero-emissions power as they seek to build data centers. It is among the leaders in the global competition to dominate the field of artificial intelligence, which consumes enormous amounts of electricity.
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As a former resident of Washington, fuck that noise.
Sick of all this corporate welfare
I’m just concerned that if we don’t give them the money they’ll make windows 11 worse.
Linux time!
If you get a paywall, a paywall-free link is here: https://archive.ph/hoaIs
My take on this story: dragging this reactor out of mothballs is expensive and risky, and operating at 50+ year old reactor is risky. The company that owns admits it isn’t even solvent enough to run it, much less ensure the risks of operating it. Microsoft and the 3 Mile Island owner are basically asking for a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer subsidy for an enterprise—so-called AI—that eliminates jobs and is used more for revenge porn and deepfakes than it is for any societal good. This is a bad deal.
…no. Sincerely, a taxpayer P.S. have you considered budgeting and not paying for expensive coffee to pay for your expensive hobby?
So they can have an exclusive deal giving Microsoft power?
I’m pretty sure they’re going to make enough money doing that.
Nonono, you don’t get it! Microsoft is a small, low-profit business that we absolutely need to help protect cuz SoCiEtY NeEdS tHeM.
(Okay so there’s probably some military/national security angle they will push to justify it. And then bill us exorbitantly for that ai tool anyhow)
sure! I’ll make the check out to, “eat shit and die inc”, and for the amount of “fuck you”.
I didn’t read the article but I’m for any safe use of nuclear energy. Bringing an old reactor online might be significantly easier than building a new one.
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Nuclear energy had always been a way to funnel public money into private pockets. It never has and never will work without massive subsidies.
In the US. Where we run all energy production that way. That’s a pretty big asterisk. Because other countries realize it’s a public good that they cannot function without. So it’s owned and operated by the government.
You’re being downvoted, as is tradition, but you’re right.
