The Department of Energy is weighing a $1.6 billion loan guarantee for a plan to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear plant with Microsoft as its sole customer.

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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    • CethinEnglish
      12·
      3 hours ago

      It was a typo. It was meant to say clean, and it was fixed shortly after posting. The one about regulation does discuss cost.

      If you notice on the graph you posted nuclear gets more expensive over time. Why? Everything else gets cheaper over time, until recently where they all increase together. Clearly there’s a temporal link increasing the price of nuclear and it isn’t just expensive always. What has been happening over time to make it more expensive? We pass laws to force it to be unprofitable. It used to be one of the cheapest, and it still is in many places around the world. The US has purposefully made it expensive at the behest of the oil industry.

      Edit: I like that you down voted me for disagreeing but also responding with what you wanted. You’re not a very good person are you?

      • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        3 hours ago

        As I said, “If you have any regulations that could be done away with in a safe manner and would make a sizable difference to the cost then cite them.”

        If you can’t do that, just say so.

        • CethinEnglish
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Sea-lioning. Nice. I’m not an expert in the field. I don’t know which regulations do what. I don’t need to prove that to you. The fact that it costs more and takes longer in the US than any other nation, and also that nuclear accidents are extremely rare and safety is high, proves that we have needless regulations. I don’t need to know which ones those are to know that’s true. If you somehow can’t see that without specific regulations being cited, maybe you need to work on your deduction skills.

          • IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 hour ago

            The fact that it costs more and takes longer in the US

            Not a fact. Hinckley C in the UK is facing similar cost and time overruns.

            I don’t need to know which ones those are to know that’s true.

            You absolutely do if you don’t want anyone capable of rational thought to think you’re full of shit.