Editor’s Note: We’re coming up quick on Jeff’s big launch of the Perceptron…
This artificial intelligence is designed to pick up on “invisible” patterns in the markets… and it’s so effective that it’s discovered a hidden pattern of profit windows in one of the most unpredictable markets of all: crypto.
These windows pop up roughly every 60 days and can offer huge gains if you know when to get in… and when to get out.
You can hear more from Jeff about the Perceptron – and three opportunities it’s flagging right now – this Wednesday at 8 p.m. ET. You can go here to sign up.
At 4 a.m. on a cool Wednesday morning in March 1979, a Pennsylvania-based nuclear reactor began experiencing a mechanical/electrical failure.
The failure prevented the main feedwater pumps from sending water through the system to remove heat from the reactor core.
Automatically, the reactor began shutting down.
A relief valve opened to release pressure from the system. And as the pressure was released, the valve was supposed to close.
But it didn’t.
Making matters worse, the plant’s operators didn’t realize the relief valve was still open. The control panel indicated the valve had closed.
That meant that the cooling water, now steam, was pouring out of the open valve. This led to a series of conditions that caused the overheating of the TMI-2 reactor core.
It was a nuclear meltdown – the worst accident in U.S. history for nuclear power generation.
Animation of Three Mile Island Reactor Failure | Source: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
TMI stands for Three Mile Island. It’s an island on the Susquehanna River not far from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – a location I’ve driven past on the highway more times than I can remember.
Three Mile Island
For many of us, it’s a name that probably evokes feelings of fear and danger.
I remember it as a child. And the event’s repercussions had a lasting impact – good and bad – on the nuclear power generation industry.
The timing of the event was absolutely terrible.
Just three weeks before the meltdown, the movie The China Syndrome debuted.
The movie is complete fiction – a thriller – whereby safety coverups at a nuclear power plant result in a meltdown, and the reactor core melts through the containment vessels deep into the Earth’s crust.
The press and media worldwide had a heyday in 1979, ignoring the scientific facts and setting the industry back decades.
But the reality was quite different than what was portrayed.
It reminds me a lot of the kinds of narrative-pushing propaganda and censorship we are seeing so much of today.
No one died in the incident.
There were no radiological disasters to the public in the area. The actual radiation exposure for the surrounding 2 million people that lived closest to Three Mile Island was about 1 millirem above what normal exposure would have been had the event not occurred.
A single dental x-ray will expose us to 1.5 millirems.
The total radiological impact of Three Mile Island was less than an x-ray at the dentist.
While Three Mile Island was the worst accident at a nuclear power plant in U.S. history, it also demonstrated that the accident could be safely controlled without risk to the surrounding public.
The event also resulted in major changes in regulatory oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as many improvements in nuclear engineering, reactor operator training, and nuclear power plant operations.
And this may come as a major surprise to many, but the entire plant wasn’t shut down in the aftermath.
The second nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island, TMI-1, remained in operation, producing clean energy until 2019 when it was decommissioned due to the high continuing costs of operation.
By 2021 and 2022, energy production through coal and natural gas increased to offset the absence of TMI-1’s carbon-free electricity production.
That was supposed to be the final story for Three Mile Island. TMI-1 was scheduled to complete its decommissioning by 2079. It appeared to be done for good, to the elation of those opposed to the plant.
But hell froze over for them a few days ago.
The owner of TMI-1, Constellation Energy (CEG), announced that it had signed a power purchase deal with a partner to bring Three Mile Island back to life.
The partner has agreed to purchase 100% of the output of TMI-1 when it comes back online for 20 years. That’s about 835 megawatts of annual clean electricity production – enough to fuel about 700,000–800,000 homes.
That partner, of course, is none other than Microsoft.
What will Microsoft do with so much power?
It needs that carbon-free clean energy to feed its AI factories – the massive data center facilities that are training and running artificial intelligence.
Microsoft positions itself as operating 100% carbon neutral, and it has goals to remove all of the carbon that Microsoft has ever produced in its history through carbon offsets.
It’s a bold claim, but as noble as it may appear, it’s important to understand that this is largely a marketing tactic. A corporate practice known as greenwashing.
Microsoft is actually a profuse user of fossil fuels. In fact, its business couldn’t survive without it.
But it “achieves” carbon neutrality by purchasing carbon credits to offset its own carbon emissions. For example, if a farmer in Brazil owns forests and agrees not to clear the forests, he has carbon credits. And the farmer can sell those carbon credits, through a financial middleman, to Microsoft… which needs to offset its own carbon emissions to stay politically “clean.”
Scenarios like these are widespread. In the real-world example I used above, there has been no actual carbon removal. The use of electricity from fossil fuels has not been reduced, and somehow Microsoft is carbon neutral through the “magic” of carbon credits.
Another tactic that Microsoft, and many others, use is to establish some kind of “sustainability” fund to invest in “sustainable” projects for renewable energy. Doing so earns them more carbon credits to offset carbon emissions, to be able to market itself as being “carbon neutral.”
It’s interesting to note that the production of solar panels and wind turbines is immensely carbon-intensive due to the amount of rare earth metals required to build this technology. (And the industry to find and excavate rare earth metals is immensely carbon-intensive.)
Meanwhile, solar panels and wind turbines are both very difficult and sometimes impossible to recycle.
The point is: None of the calculations made by corporations who greenwash include the amount of carbon emitted in the production of this “clean” energy technology. This is the same cognitive dissonance that exists in the electric vehicle (EV) industry.
These points are worth noting here, because this landmark deal between Microsoft and Constellation Energy, which actually will produce electricity with zero carbon emissions, is more than just a greenwashing grab.
It’s driven by sheer necessity.
Microsoft needs power. Massive amounts of power to fuel its data centers.
There is a shortage, and given that hyperscale data centers gobble up massive amounts of energy, their operators are absolutely scrambling to figure out where they can find enough.
The industry must find scalable sources of energy – preferably carbon emission-free energy – as quickly as possible. There is no other way. There is too much at stake.
I particularly liked the refreshingly honest quote from the CEO of Constellation Energy when referring to Three Mile Island and the agreement with Microsoft…
The energy industry cannot be the reason China or Russia beats us in AI. This plant never should have been allowed to shut down… It will produce as much clean energy as all of the renewables [wind and solar] built in Pennsylvania over the last 30 years.
These are striking words that encapsulate the geopolitics of both AI and clean energy production. His comments are accurate.
If our goal is to produce clean energy and reduce carbon emissions at scale, there is only one choice…
Nuclear power. Both fission and fusion (the longer-term goal). (Readers can catch up on the important differences right here in Outer Limits – The Path Towards Limitless Clean Energy.)
This was a topic that I covered in more detail in Outer Limits – Has the Tide Turned on Nuclear Power? this March.
In that issue, we explored a similarly interesting development where the U.S. Department of Energy would provide a $1.52 billion loan guarantee to restart the Palisades nuclear power plant, which had been shut down in 2022.
Palisades Power Plant | Source: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
The owner of the Palisades, Holtec, had intended to recommission the site with new small modular reactors (SMR), the next generation of nuclear fission technology.
But the regulatory process proved to be far too difficult and expensive. The easier and cheaper path forward was to simply recommission the existing nuclear fission power plant with the support of the Department of Energy.
These two examples highlight an urgent need for change in nuclear regulations.
SMR technology is the fourth generation of nuclear power.
SMR power plants have smaller footprints, empower a clean decentralized base load power grid, and are extremely safe.
One would think that developed countries would be embracing this new technology for clean energy…
And yet, it is proving to be a far more difficult and expensive path to clean energy. And it’s all due to the expenses of the permitting process and hefty legal support needed to work through the regulatory process.
The answer is right in front of us. The path forward to clean energy production is clear.
And there is an urgent necessity for the regulations to be rewritten for the realities of today’s third and fourth-generation nuclear fission reactor technology, not for the technology of the 1970s.
The time is now. The path is clear. This is the way.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
The Bleeding Edge is the only free newsletter that delivers daily insights and information from the high-tech world as well as topics and trends relevant to investments.
