ELI5 please why they don’t just put their server farms in a desert, roofed with solar panels and a big-bum battery?
The Susquehanna River that Three Mile Island sits on offers virtually unlimited fresh cold water for cooling the server farm.
Fucking up the temperature downstream; global warming baby! But who needs that ecosystem? It’s survive or die, and that includes the beavers! Down with trees, up with fleas(markets)!
Total ecological collapse is a small price to pay to boost shareholders’ wealth by 0.1%!
line must go up
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
“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.
Small 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
And then there’s like 80 reactors moving around the world, docking in our ports.
A 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
lol uh… you know about the location and history of that facility… right?
It’s a nuclear power plant that provided clean and safe energy for many decades.
While that is true, it was also the site of the worst nuclear disaster on US soil.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not scaremongering, and I support nuclear power. It’s just a bit darkly ironic, imo.
Edit: I gotta go down these Wikipedia rabbit holes you guys are pointing me towards, because I’m clearly somewhat misinformed here. Seriously, thanks for sharing!
Calling it “the worst nuclear disaster” is not just incorrect but stupid. Just off the top of my head, I can name a worse reactor accident and a worse non-reactor nuclear accident on US soil.
SL-1, a low-power reactor in Idaho, exploded because of poor design and human error. An operator retracted the manually operated control rod too far. The reactor went prompt critical, causing a steam explosion, destroying the reactor vessel and killing all three operators. To this day, SL-1 is the only fatal reactor accident on US soil.
Cecil Kelley, a worker at Los Alamos, was fatally irradiated when a plutonium reclaimer machine went critical. The machine contained an aqueous mixture of plutonium slag of a much higher concentration than it should have, causing an excursion when the stirring was turned on. He died two days later. His autopsy was performed by one Dr. Lushbaugh, who removed several organs for experiments without permission.
TMI had zero fatalities, minimal release of radiation, and no measurable effect on health. Area residents were exposed to less radiation than the yearly background dose.
It was partial meltdown and the failsafe worked. No one was injured or had their health negatively affected by the incident. The worst nuclear disaster still had less negative effects than even a single modern coal plant does.
Three mile island is outdated tech.
Are there any nuclear power plants in the US that aren’t?
