Three mile island to reopen?
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With MSFT buying 100% of its output for the first 20 years.
"You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from."
-Cormac McCarthy -
All goes back to the same thing.
You know, a good friend of mine was a master electrician. Nuclear power plant controls, coal-fired electric plant fire systems, high voltage splicing, etc.
When working with architects on commercial or residential projects, he always pushed for at least a third more outlets and higher capacity panels. Even back in the day, the average building was requiring more and more energy.
Fast forward to today...From car chargers, A/C, bigger appliances, more all electric households, 24/7 workweeks...Now pile all the stuff from a more electronic economy and the coming AI...The need for more electricity is really accelerating.
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With MSFT buying 100% of its output for the first 20 years.
@jon-nyc said in Three mile island to reopen?:
With MSFT buying 100% of its output for the first 20 years.
Really? Not the Thr Mile Island reopening, but MSFT buying 100%? That's nuts.
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@jon-nyc said in Three mile island to reopen?:
AI consumes as many GPUs as Nvidia can make and as much power as it can find.
Doesn’t distance play a role, though? Their AI Data Centers are in Wisconsin, Mexico, Spain, and Ashburn, VA. Even Ashburn is hundreds of miles away…. Or is MSFT going to build new data centers in PA?
By the way, they are just reopening Unit 1, which never shut down till 2019. Unit 2 was where the incident occurred.
The Brad
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Worth dropping a couple of dollars on Constellation…
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Electricity? Feh...
Let's talk about water:
Roughly a quarter of Americans have used ChatGPT since the chatbot’s 2022 release, according to the Pew Research Center — and every query exacts a cost.
Chatbots use an immense amount of power to respond to user questions, and simply keeping the bot’s servers cool enough to function in data centers takes a toll on the environment. While the exact burden is nearly impossible to quantify, The Washington Post worked with researchers at the University of California, Riverside to understand how much water and power OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the GPT-4 language model released in March 2023, consumes to write the average 100-word email.Let’s look first at water.
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By the way, in 1994, at the age of 25, I flew into Harrisburg for a meeting with a potential client. In the morning the local NPR station had lots of programming about the TMI accident. At some point I realize it’s the 15th anniversary.
Next day I fly out and we happen to fly over it. There were four cooling towers, two were belching steam, two were not. Seemed eerie in the moment.
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@jon-nyc said in Three mile island to reopen?:
AI consumes as many GPUs as Nvidia can make and as much power as it can find.
Doesn’t distance play a role, though? Their AI Data Centers are in Wisconsin, Mexico, Spain, and Ashburn, VA. Even Ashburn is hundreds of miles away…. Or is MSFT going to build new data centers in PA?
By the way, they are just reopening Unit 1, which never shut down till 2019. Unit 2 was where the incident occurred.
@LuFins-Dad said in Three mile island to reopen?:
Doesn’t distance play a role, though? Their AI Data Centers are in Wisconsin, Mexico, Spain, and Ashburn, VA. Even Ashburn is hundreds of miles away…. Or is MSFT going to build new data centers in PA?
I wonder if Microsoft can "trade" electricity with someone in the area, giving "their" electricity from Three Mile Island, and in return, getting electric credits from a provider by where Microsoft need it.
I know in Thailand with solar projects that is how it is done.
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Yeah electricity is fungible.
But my guess is they’re ready to build massive data centers in the region. It’s inexpensive and we’re talking 2028-2048. That’s a long planning horizon.
They probably envision the energy needs increasing by orders of magnitude in that time.
