Maybe the people running the data centers will also own the power plants but I doubt it. We've already seen how this is likely to work with Microsoft and Three Mile Island. A company looking to open a data center will look for places that are looking to build a nuclear power plant, or take an existing closed nuclear power plant back online. They will make some long term deal for the power that power plant would produce in order to secure their supply of power, such as sign a contract for 20 years of power to prove to those offering the loans that there's a good return on their investment.

What I'm seeing from history is that as there's threats of a local nuclear power plant closing, and with it a lot of jobs and tax income lost, the local politicians get really interested in keeping that nuclear power plant operating. As demand for electricity rises so will interest in building new nuclear power plants and expanding the capacity of existing nuclear power plants.

As it is now local governments will give out sweet deals on taxes and permits to attract big building projects like data centers. No greasing of palms required as that's a short term loss on tax revenue in exchange for a longer term income on property taxes and those working in these businesses spending money on homes, food, and so on. A data center might not attract many people working in the area since that's a bunch of computers humming away in a warehouse but a nuclear power plant will have a lot of people working there. With a reliable power plant largely paid for by the data center that can mean attracting light industry or such, people looking for low cost and reliable energy for any of a number of other uses.

I doubt the people running the data centers will own the power plants. That's excepting maybe data centers bringing in their own natural gas generators that can be trucked in and dropped on site, which is likely a temporary fix until new power plants and utility lines can be put in place a few years in the future. Once they have sufficient power lines run in then the natural gas generators can be picked up and trucked away, then that room where the generators sat can be used to expand the data center or leased for some other use.

When competing for market share, and your product or service is much like so many products and services, there will be a desire to stand out in some way. For a long time there was an advantage in advertising as being "greener" than the alternatives, and for data centers that meant showing your data center uses "greener" power than the competition. I suspect that the rolling back of green initiatives isn't as much about being "fair weather friends" as much as there's so many other companies that made the same promises on being green that it's not a differentiator any more. Once the costs on green energy started to rise then maybe "fair weather friends" applied to some extent, people wanted lower cost data services more than they wanted "greener" services. Going "green" costs money and once money got tight then there wasn't the same level of money for the luxury of being "green". I know people will push back on the idea that being "green" is a luxury but when it's a matter of surviving the winter and lower CO2 emissions to survive some global warming decades from now then people will choose surviving the winter because if they don't survive the winter then they don't much care what happens a decade later.

There's a renewed interest in nuclear fission for energy all over the world, and a need for stable "base load" power is certainly a part of that. With concerns on international trade growing there's a lot of nations looking for ways to be free of the near monopolies China has on commodities like solar PV and rare earth metals. There's nothing rare about rare earth metals, it's just a name they picked up for historical reasons. People like to point to China as some kind of leader on renewable energy, ignoring that China is on track to have more nuclear power capacity than the USA and France combined by 2030.

China is going big on nuclear fission while exporting solar PV panels, rare earth magnets for windmills, and other commodities to feed this desire to "go green" around the world. Nuclear power is as "green" as any other option available to us but all too often nuclear power has been ruled out as an option for bullshit reasons. Point that out in the "wrong" places and you'll find yourself shunned, such as on Slashdot where saying nice things about nuclear power gets your karma destroyed. That appears to be changing.

China is going big on nuclear power with efforts like thorium reactors and plans for nuclear powered civilian cargo ships. This is driving nations in the region to also invest in nuclear power, especially in their navy since China is looking to become a global naval power. Australia made a deal for nuclear powered submarines some time ago, and recently South Korea has made a similar deal. Neither nation *needs* nuclear powered submarines to defend their national interests, but if things get kinetic in the region then there will be difficulty in getting fuel for a navy. Nuclear powered submarines are likely the start, nuclear powered frigates and destroyers will likely follow soon.

This is getting beyond keeping the lights on. Nuclear fission is likely to quickly move to powering ships at sea. We've had nuclear powered submarines and aircraft carriers for decades so that's been a "no brainer" for a long time. There's been some aborted attempts at nuclear powered civilian ships and navy surface ships like frigates, cruisers, and destroyers. Expect to see those experiments get restarted. Russia has had nuclear powered icebreakers for some time, and it makes sense to start such experiments with icebreakers for many reasons. Russia has adapted the nuclear reactors used in icebreakers to make floating power plants, a means to bring power to remote areas without having to support construction crews in these areas then bring them back. Expect floating nuclear power plants to be another trend in the near future.

Build time on a new nuclear power plant that can be a concern. As it is now it takes about 7 years to build a nuclear power plant, or nuclear powered submarine if looking for some analog to building a floating nuclear power plant. I expect that we will see that cut in half real soon. So much of the build time on nuclear power is from issues unrelated to the technology. It's a matter of regulation, funds, infrastructure, skilled labor, and so on. That's largely political, and that can change with the next election. Get the build time for nuclear power under 4 years, so a nuclear power plant can be completed inside the term for POTUS, and it will be far more difficult for politics to drag build times out beyond a decade like we've seen in the past. After that it will be far smoother sailing for lower CO2 emissions and similar concerns to be luxuries, the costs will come down and it will simply be the norm than something people would expect to pay extra to get.

I read the fine article and I'm not seeing what kinds of policies concerning AI these two individuals are fighting for and therefore why they are creating these PACs. What I see as an issue concerning people about AI is how much electrical power is expected to be used in the growth in AI, which is only being made worse with more manufacturing being brought back to the USA after a long time of so much manufacturing being sent overseas.

I had someone knock on my door a week or so ago that was doing some political campaigning where she brought up the concern on how much electrical power is going to data centers. Then is a video published this morning from Peter Zeihan that also brought up this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

To summarize the video there's a need for massive amounts of new electrical generating capacity due to the growth in AI use on top of growing manufacturing in the USA, because data centers run 24/7 they need electricity sources that run 24/7. There's only two options for electricity production that runs 24/7, coal and nuclear fission. While natural gas can technically be a 24/7 source of electricity there's more value in using natural gas for load following. I'd add to that by pointing out that there's a lot of natural gas used for heating and petrochemicals like fertilizers.

We will need more electricity production regardless of how this AI boom goes. If this AI boom goes bust then that just means we can have more electricity production for manufacturing, heat pumps to replace natural gas heating, electric vehicles, or so many other uses that are currently seeing growth. What other concerns on AI are there? I can think of a few but electricity demand seems to be the largest concern and one that impacts far more people than any thing else.

Will these PACs work on energy policy? What positions on energy policy will they hold? That's what concerns me the most, and it appears I'm not alone in this concern.

I didn't read the book but I can recall in interviews with Andy Weir that he kind of handwaved off some of the issues of radiation in living on Mars with The Martian in that the space suits and such had some lightweight material that could protect people from radiation. This discovery of melanin providing protections from radiation puts some science behind that claim. Weir knew this could be bullshit but to make the story interesting he made a few choices that contradicted known science at the time in the telling of his story.

If we are to put people on Mars then I'd expect a staged approach much like we are seeing now with the Artemis Program. We send an unmanned ship with sensors and such to test the technology, maybe sending a probe to Mars in the process to provide some kind of landing simulation. Then we send a manned mission to orbit Mars, maybe again sending an unmanned probe to Mars, but nobody yet sets foot on Mars. Then, maybe, on the third mission, we put people on Mars. If there's people going to Mars in 2026 then it will be to orbit Mars for a bit and then come back to Earth to test a mission abort scenario, as in something goes wrong and they have to return to Earth before the optimal return window in 18 months or whatever. That would be something like the setup for The Martian where an unusually powerful storm on Mars threatens the habitat and they have to leave quick and in a hurry.

This is an interesting development that shows that, as predicted by a certain Dr. Ian Malcolm, life finds a way. It shows we could develop better protections for people to survive high radiation environments, such as a trip to Mars. As unfortunate the accident at Chernobyl was it does appear that we could learn plenty from it in the coming years. One thing I expect people to learn is that there's not likely to be a need to contain spent nuclear fuel for thousands of years. As bad as the radiation may be still today that is the radiation from what we consider "medium-lived fission products" like cesium and strontium. These are isotopes with a half-life of about 30 years. It's been long enough now that the worst of this radiation has been more than halved by now. What happens to the threat of radiation in another 30 years? It will be halved again. The long-lived fission products have such long half-lives that they contribute little to the radiation around Chernobyl.

Does this mean we should not fear spent nuclear fuel? Or fear another nuclear power plant meltdown? No, that's not what this means. What it means is that the plans to put up warning signs for radiation that will last more than 10,000 years around radioactive waste sites is bullshit. In as little as 100 years the radiation risks could be quite minimal. In 1000 years the risks of radiation from the fission products we produce today would likely be no more than that seen on a sandy beach rich with monazite sand.

Would it be expensive to keep guard on radioactive waste for 100 years? I guess so, but then that's a minimal cost compared to the value of the energy we can produce from nuclear fission. If we are to put a permanent colony of humans on Mars then we will need nuclear power. To get people to Mars will likely require use of nuclear power. If nuclear power works to keep people alive on Mars then it can work to keep people alive on Earth. If we can pick up a few tricks on minimizing risks from radiation from nature then that just makes nuclear power an even better option.

Nuclear fission for energy is a "need to have" than a "nice to have" for sustaining a nation's energy supply if they wish to have a modern economy. Pointing this out appears to upset some people in spite of the data supporting this. Maybe there's some places in the world blessed with a climate and geography that allows for ample supplies of hydro, geothermal, and onshore wind for a supply of energy that is low cost, reliable, and free from international entanglements but such places will be rare. Even then they'd likely reach a limit at some point in the future where that's no longer enough to keep up with nations that embraced nuclear fission for their energy supplies.

Australia is in a unique position here with nuclear energy. They have ample reserves of uranium to draw from for energy, and active mines to extract uranium for export. There's no issues in Australia on getting fuel for civil nuclear power plants. Those opposed to nuclear power will claim that there's no existing infrastructure or skilled labor to support a civil nuclear power program. That's a solved problem since they are in the process of buying nuclear powered submarines from the US and UK in their AUKUS agreement, from that will necessarily flow people trained in nuclear power as well as facilities for managing nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. So, where's the objection now?

The objection to nuclear power often lies in that nuclear power costs too much in comparison to other options like wind, solar, and hydro. If that were true then Germany would currently be the picture of low cost and abundant energy while France has the highest energy costs in Europe. That is not the case and so it would appear that excluding nuclear fission from Australia's mix of energy sources means they will continue to be reliant on fossil fuels in order to maintain a reliable supply of energy.

Maybe something new will come along in the future to change this but for now the options are fossil fuels, nuclear fission, or energy shortages. Again, there may be a few places in the world where that might not be the case but Australia is not one of them. Australia needs nuclear fission for energy. This isn't because of some need to lower CO2 emissions, though that would be a nice side effect. Australia needs nuclear power plants in order to remain an independent nation as the world fights for energy. A big reason for Australia wanting nuclear powered submarines is for protection against the Chinese navy. China is building nuclear powered submarines. China is building civil nuclear power plants. China is apparently building civilian nuclear powered cargo ships. Why would China do this? Almost certainly because they know that if cut off from energy imports they'd be reliant on what energy they can produce domestically. Is Australia any different from this? No, not really.

Australia needs nuclear power or they could be left in the dark should things get kinetic with China. Or any other adversary in the region. Maybe they can rely on energy imports from the USA and Canada but then that's just choosing who is pulling the strings in the puppet state of Australia. I'd suspect having the USA as the puppet master is preferable to having it be China but Australia can cut those strings by developing a civil nuclear power program.

The calculation should be more than a simple multiplication of weight and miles, experimentation shows a relationship of weight to the fourth power to road damage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I'd expect this to be a problem with over-the-road trucking paying fees based on this "fourth power law" as that could lead to crushing levels of fees, especially since it is more of a "rule of thumb" than something shown definitively. There's also the matter that even though there's more wear with more weight there's benefits to drivers of lighter vehicles than could be paid with a rule based on only the wear on the road. Also, there's wear on the road by just being exposed to the sun, wind, and precipitation that might not be taken into account if the "fourth power law" was applied so blindly. Maybe a simple weight times miles isn't such a bad idea. If paying by weight is in the calculation then that can discourage people buying large vehicles without penalizing those moving commercial cargo too much.

My brother knows one of those "crazy guys" that runs his diesel vehicle from vegetable oil. He somehow got on the radar of the DOT and was accused of not paying the road tax. I don't know if he paid any penalties for that but since then he's had to take his vegetable oil fuel someplace to get measured out and pay a road tax on it. I'm not sure how they track this, that wasn't made clear in the retelling, but there's apparently a system laid out for enforcement on paying the road taxes on fuel.

A common problem here in rural America is people buying "red diesel" for burning in their over-the-road vehicles. Red diesel is just regular diesel fuel with some red dye in it to mark it as low tax fuel for off-road use such as for agricultural tractors, backup generators, and so forth. Small time users that will have a diesel tractor for mowing a large lawn, small time construction work, and whatever, will just get higher taxed fuel without the dye at a truck stop as the extra cost isn't worth the effort to seek out a place selling red diesel. Those that burn a lot of red diesel will have it delivered to them by a fuel truck. It would be tempting to fuel up their diesel truck off this lower cost fuel from a tank they keep on site than go to a truck stop for higher priced fuel. If caught then that can mean hefty fines, fines far higher than just making up for the road taxes not paid.

The idea of using a GPS tracker to count miles for accurate taxation just sounds like an excuse to put GPS trackers on vehicles. We have odometers, and tampering with the odometers is severely penalized already. Part of this is the odometers are made to be difficult to be tampered with. There will be seals on the odometer that will indicate tampering. There are mechanisms that cause the odometer to self destruct if there's an attempt to roll them back. With so much electronics in a vehicle now there's likely multiple odometers, with one being mechanical and another electronic somewhere. There's ways to compare the two and if there's a mismatch, and no records indicating a repair or something to explain the disparity, then that can lead to fines.

I agree that fees need to be paid for road repair. Charging a per mile fee on electric vehicles, based on the odometer readings, sounds like a logical means to resolve that. Claims of being unfairly charged for miles driven in another state, or country, or for miles driven off-road, such as a farmer or rancher that might drive many miles on their own property in their diesel truck, might just mean having to eat those fees for the convenience of not having to explain the time spent driving someplace other than where the taxes go to pay for the roads. This is routine already where people pay the fees on diesel fuel from a truck stop than seek out red diesel. Is this such a big fee that we should go through the expense of paying for a GPS tracker to avoid them when not in the country or not on roads paid for by the taxes?

I can recall hearing about how truck drivers that cross state lines often will keep some kind of log to make sure they are paying the correct taxes on fuel. Drivers in the Midwest USA know that fuel taxes in Illinois are quite high and so will do their best to avoid filling up in the state. Illinois knows this and so they will track commercial drivers to collect on those taxes than tolerate trucks filling up in neighboring states to avoid the fees. The non-commercial drivers aren't tracked because it isn't worth the trouble. Are they going to track passenger cars driving across the state without stopping for fuel? That level of enforcement would likely cost more than what they could collect, so they don't bother.

In short, we already figured this out without resorting to GPS tracking. If people want to avoid the fees then they should keep good logs on their driving and odometer readings. If they want some GPS tracker to do this for them then they should have to pay for it from their own pocket. It's that or they can simply pay the fees to avoid the bother of tracking the miles.

The idea of odometer tampering isn't new. We've pretty much solved that issue. Maybe this per mile fee will encourage more effort into tampering with odometers but I'm fairly certain existing efforts to detect this tampering are sufficient to prevent this being some widespread issue.

I have a suspicion that what Europe calls "long distance" trucking is quite different than what the USA calls "long distance" trucking. Pick a random European nation and tell me the longest drive a citizen would have to make to get to their nation's capital city. 3 hours? Maybe 4 hours? Certainly trucks can drive more than 4 hours in Europe to reach some destination but I have a suspicion this is rare given that moving cargo by water or rail would be cheaper. We have rivers and rail in the USA but with people spread so thin over such a large area there's not the same kind of volume of cargo headed in the same direction to make moving cargo by water or rail feasible.

Electric trucks are hardly a new thing. There were electric milk trucks ages ago, when milk deliveries to homes were a thing. This worked because the routes the trucks took were often short, they ran quietly which was a bonus as they'd often run their routes while people were still sleeping, and the weight of the truck batteries weren't an issue because they'd not be carrying so much milk at a time that they'd overload the road.

With a typical long haul truck it might carry something like 300 pounds/kg/whatever of diesel fuel which if electric would mean more like 3000 pounds/kg/whatever of batteries for getting anything similar in range. With short haul trucks like milk delivery or mail delivery that extra mass isn't a big deal because they just don't carry as much weight on a short distance. With long haul trucks that extra weight will impact how much cargo they can carry, and that will impact profits for having less cargo to meet road weight limits and longer stops to recharge the batteries.

Europe is very different than the USA in so many ways so comparisons on trucks, railroads, public transit, and similar matters do not follow. When any point in your nation is at most a 6 hour drive away that makes things very different than a nation where it could be a 2 day drive from one point to another, assuming no stops to sleep. To follow DOT rules on how many hours allowed driving in a day this can be 6 days than 6 hours.

I don't know how truck driving works in China but there could be some parallels with the USA given that the USA and China are of similar area. But then things could be very different given population distribution and that there's considerable restrictions on movement inside China that don't exist in the USA. That could explain why electric trucks work so well in China but continue to fail in catching on in the USA.

What is China moving towards as they move away from coal? I'll see plenty of mention on how much China is building wind and solar power but rarely does nuclear fission get a mention. I believe that is important, it's China giving the world a clue that wind and solar alone isn't enough to be rid of coal, there must also be nuclear power.

The failure in the Unit 2 was in the standard operating procedures, and in the relatively primitive control systems in place at the time. I expect both would be updated before Unit 1 is brought back online in 2027 to meet current standards on safety.

You understand that this is called Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station because it sits on an island in a river? There's no shortage of water for cooling here. Water shortages will be a local issue, as in where there's no freshwater rivers nearby from which to draw water for drinking and irrigation. There's places on the East coast and Left coast where there's a lot of water nearby but this is briny seawater that's not suitable for drinking and irrigation. Maybe they could turn this into water suitable for drinking if they built some nuclear power plants to power desalination facilities. That appears to be the plan for a handful of nations in the Middle East to resolve their water shortage issues.

i don't follow how you can argue that restarting TMI unit 1 would make electricity prices any worse. Sure, Microsoft is effectively funding this effort with a 20 year contract for electricity. If Microsoft didn't make this contract with TMI then that doesn't mean they would not have built their data center any way. I expect that there will be some excess power produced than this data center will consume, and that means a net gain on low-carbon energy being added to the local electrical grid.

Where's the downside to all of this? Sure, there's some risk that the loan would not be paid off in full but that appears to be a very low risk. We can't look only at the risks though, there's benefits to taking these risks.

Is this "fair" to the woman in this relationship? He stated he fears living alone after having an illness that left him with limited mobility for a few days. Okay, that happens to people as they age. When that happens the usual thing to do is move in with one of their adult children, hire some kind of caretaker or maybe just a housekeeper than can clean up the house and check in on them once in a while, move to a kind of 55+ village that will have services for the elderly, or something along those lines. It seems a bit odd to seek a girlfriend while holding on to the hope of a dead wife being resuscitated in the future.

Does this girlfriend understand the relationship she's entered? He's looking for a caretaker, not a wife. Maybe she's fine with having this relationship. If he's providing financial support, friendship, but not any hope for marriage, then maybe a woman that's presumably of similar age to this man (I'm thinking 55 to 60) might be fine with that.

I'm thinking that someone with enough money to keep his dead wife on ice would have enough money to hire someone to help with housekeeping or whatever than seek a girlfriend to take care of him during his next gout attack. They live something of a different kind of life in China so I'm not sure of the social norms there. With so few Chinese having children it could be that this man has no kids to help him as he's reaching old age. Or maybe he has a child but this child has his or her own financial or other problems to deal with dear old dad at the moment.

There's a lot of questions about the specific case here. I also understand the problems of the general case of someone seeking a relationship while their spouse is legally dead but technology may find a way to revive them. If this is a guy seeking a friend and caretaker then maybe there's no problem here. If either person in this relationship sees this as more than that then there could be an issue to resolve.

I assume the woman wasn't sliced and breaded like the fish sticks. I would expect doing so would kind of defeat the purpose of the cryogenic preservation.

The public benefit might be in that with this loan we see a data center powered with low carbon nuclear fission than a fossil fuel power plant.

Why take the risk of a default on the loan? Maybe because the risk was considered quite low. TMI was closed in 2019 due to not having buyers for the energy they were producing, not because of any safety issues, and they had a license at the time to continue operating until 2034. If we assume they did a shutdown into a state which would allow for a future restart then it would seem to me that getting this back online should be an almost trivial process. Just because the process is trivial doesn't mean it won't cost a lot of money. They will need people to crawl around the plant looking for any kind of rust and decay that could have set in since being in operation. They will have to redo wiring, update the computers, just generally check out systems that could be anywhere from 16 to 60 years old and perform any requisite repairs or replacements to make the systems safe again for powering up.

Getting the reactor up and running might take a billion dollars and three years to happen but that's apparently less time and money to get more than a gigawatt of low carbon power production online than any other options available today.

If the goal is low carbon energy then we will need nuclear power. That can mean the federal government taking on some risk for loans in restarting existing nuclear power plants, and in the construction of new nuclear power plants. If we leave this only to private industry to work out then we might not see any one company, or even group of companies, large enough to take on a loan of the size needed for nuclear power.

I just watched a YouTube video over on the Decouple Media channel where they spoke of a kind of restored interest in "BBR", "big boring reactors", to provide low carbon energy in the future. Part of this is because the new-ish reactors being built, generation three plus, are much like the old plants we know about but with some new "tricks" to make them lower cost to produce and much safer to operate. I don't know how many of these "tricks" can, or will, be added to TMI Unit 1 but I believe we can assume that some of these "tricks" will be put in place as part of this refurbishment and restoration to operation.

The core in Unit 1 may be 60 years old once returned to operation but we've learned from experience that there's a very long life in these cores. We don't know yet how long they can last because we haven't operated these "big boring reactors" long enough to know when they've reached end of life. These power plants designed in the 1960s were overbuilt by a very large degree because they didn't yet know what the limits were on nuclear reactors, and because steel and concrete is cheap. This reactor is expected to operate for at least another 20 years, likely get a 20 year extension after that, and maybe even another 20 years more. Maybe this reactor will run for more than 100 years total before being considered either too worn out or too outdated to keep running. That would mean a lot less in fossil fuels burned for reliable 24/7 electricity generation.

Consider that the federal government might take on the risk of this loan only to use TMI Unit 1 as a test case to see how many years a nuclear reactor can be run. That's worth something, is it not? Maybe the government doesn't get the loan paid back but they will get data on how to restart old reactors, how long reactors of this type can be run, and so much else that can guide regulations and policy in the future. Is that worth a billion dollars? If the loan is paid back then it cost nothing.

What they achieved might be the equivalent of a car that had the engine start but nobody has touched the throttle yet to get it above idle or put the transmission in gear to get the car to move. Or rather the car isn't built yet but this is like the 1890s and someone just proved that a diesel engine can run. The next step for the diesel engine is to put some kind of load on it and turn up the throttle, which for the nuclear reactor might be something like putting a heat sink of some sort on it and seeing if it can boil water without bursting some pipes or something. After that the reactor would be ready for producing power, at least as a prototype or demonstrator.

Getting to zero power criticality proves the physics are sound, that all the pieces are in place to have a sustained chain reaction without going into a meltdown or something. The part where this is a "dawn of a new era" is that this is a company that hasn't done nuclear power before. This is like seeing spacecraft built by companies that weren't making parts for Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo.

I believe this is noteworthy. No doubt there's a way to go on making this into a profitable power plant but it shows they have a high probability of turning this technology into that profitable power plant. Before criticality is reached its all theory. Cold criticality made the theory real, or at least halfway real as they would still need to turn up the throttle and see if it breaks.

There's zero profits if the prices are so high that there's no sale. Either people don't buy the product, or they buy from someone willing to take on a lower profit margin.