Microsoft Makes Deal To Restart Three Mile Island

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: This is Science Friday. I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.

IRA FLATOW: And I’m Ira Flatow.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: It’s Climate Week in our home base of New York City, so we’re celebrating with a whole hour of climate stories. We’ll hear from game changers who are leading climate solutions like demilitarization and how to make anesthesia greener.

IRA FLATOW: And later, I’ll talk with climate activists Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood about Third Act. That’s an organization that encourages people aged 60-plus to step up for the climate.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: But first, Hurricane Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 storm, one of the most powerful to ever hit this region. It knocked out power to millions and created what the National Weather Service called an “unsurvivable storm surge” along the coast. The storm caused flooding across the Southeast and multiple deaths. Storms like these have become more common and more powerful in recent years, in part due to the effects of climate change.

Here to talk about some of the other biggest climate stories of the week is my guest, Casey Crownhart, a climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday, Casey.

CASEY CROWNHART: Hey, Anna. Great to be back.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: All right, Casey, so you reported this first story for us about Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history. Why is this in the news again?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so some people might be surprised to hear that there’s interest in opening back up a nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island. Some important context here– so like you said, in 1979, one of the reactors at Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown, the worst US nuclear accident in history. But there’s actually a second reactor there that started back up in the 1980s and ran consistently through 2019, when it was shut down due to economic reasons. Now there’s interest in opening that plant back up.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: So who is interested in opening it up?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so the news that came out this week was that Microsoft is making a deal to purchase all of the electricity that will be generated at Three Mile Island. It’s a long-term power purchase agreement. So the owner of that plant is going to try to open it back up within the next couple of years. And then Microsoft is going to be buying all the power.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: What might Microsoft need that power for?

CASEY CROWNHART: A lot of big tech companies are seeing a big increase in power demand, partly because of the need to run data centers, including those that power AI. And so that’s what a lot of this electricity will probably be going to, is these data centers that are in the region.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: So if the plant works as it’s meant to, how much power could it generate?

CASEY CROWNHART: It’s a lot. This is a pretty big reactor. So it’s about 800 megawatts of power. That’s about enough to power 800,000 homes, if it were powering residential homes.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Wow, that’s a lot.

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. And this just goes to show that power demand from data centers is really becoming a big topic of conversation, for sure.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, definitely. You know, some people still have a lot of safety concerns when it comes to nuclear power. How justified do you think that is?

CASEY CROWNHART: It’s so understandable, I think, especially in the context of this facility, the home to that accident. I would say that the US has very tight and careful regulation of nuclear. Also, one thing I like to bring up is that coal has the highest rate of deaths from accidents and air pollution of any energy source. So I think it’s very fair to be cautious about nuclear energy, 100%. But I also think that sometimes there are concerns that can be overblown. And we need to also consider safety issues from other power sources as well.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: So let’s move on to another story that you reported this week. This one is about electric vehicles. So some countries are ending their support for EVs. Tell us about this.

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, so electric vehicles are still kind of an early entry to the car market in a lot of countries. But for some places, they’re inching towards the mainstream, and countries are starting to end incentives for them. So a lot of countries have programs like direct discounts or tax credits or rebates that are designed to lower the price of electric vehicles, which still tend to be more expensive than gas-powered ones in much of the world.

And so by making EVs cheaper, the thinking goes that more people will buy them. Recently, we’ve seen countries, including Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, end their EV subsidy programs, though.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Right. Do you think that this support is ending too soon?

CASEY CROWNHART: It totally depends on the place, and this is kind of a really tricky question. And that’s kind of what my story was about, is how do you decide when it’s time to end these programs? EVs are getting closer to cost-parity with gas-powered cars. These programs can be really expensive, especially as sales become a bigger chunk of total vehicle sales.

In Sweden, EVs make up something like 35% of the EV market. So I think in some countries it can be time to end these incentive programs. But in other places like Germany, which ended their program at the end of 2023, we’ve seen the market really take a hit, and sales have dropped after incentives ended. So I think, in some places, it’s maybe a little too soon, according to the experts I’ve spoken with.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: How’s government support doing for EVs here in the US?

CASEY CROWNHART: So currently there’s a tax credit available for new EVs, up to about $7,500, and that’s currently scheduled to run through 2032. And so we’ve got a long runway for that, but that might depend on how this election goes. Former president Donald Trump has made public comments about wanting to roll back that incentive. The US is currently at around 10% EVs, if you include full electric and plug-in hybrids. So it’ll be interesting to see kind of how this credit works out in the next year or so.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Let’s move on to our next story, which is honestly pretty bananas. Scientists want to refreeze Arctic sea ice, and the first tests seem pretty promising. This sounds like it’s out of that Kurt Vonnegut book with ice-nine.

CASEY CROWNHART: (LAUGHING) Oh, my gosh.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: (LAUGHING) Yeah. Not to scare everyone, but– so how does this process work?

CASEY CROWNHART: Yeah, great question. So basically, how this works is there’s a startup that’s trying to refreeze sea ice. And what they’re doing is they’re drilling down, they’re drilling holes into the ice. They take water from the ocean, pump it up, and then spread it out across the snow on top of the ice. That snow layer freezes into an ice sheet. And it also lowers the temperature so that more ice can freeze underneath the ice sheet as well.

So the idea here is that they want to really boost this ice. Which we’re starting to see, especially in the summer, sea ice is shrinking because of climate change, because of rising temperatures. Scientists say there could be no sea ice in the summer by the 2030s, even if we cut emissions now.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Wow, yeah, that’s huge. How scalable is this? Could it actually save Arctic sea ice?

CASEY CROWNHART: Oh. [SIGH] That’s a really great question. I mean, with these kind of efforts to prop up some of these ecosystems, it can be really difficult, really large, and really expensive to really do this at the scale you would need. So these trials were going on, on around the size of a soccer field. This would need to be done over thousands of square kilometers to actually have a big impact.

The startup that did these tests wants to use underwater drones in the next iteration of this. They say they would need 500,000 drones, and it would cost something like $6 billion a year to do this at the scale that they would want to.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: You know, geoengineering projects like this can often be a bit controversial. Are there naysayers to this plan?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. There are some scientists that say this isn’t feasible, just from an engineering or an economic standpoint. And I think you also see a lot of people just concerned about who gets to decide what we’re doing in these places, especially places where maybe a lot of people don’t live. And so, yeah, but the governance of these sorts of programs is really interesting and I think really thorny.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: All right. So for our next story, we’re talking about cement. The biggest producers of cement are betting on a green alternative. Just how big of an impact does cement have on our climate?

CASEY CROWNHART: It is one of those problems that I think a lot of people aren’t aware of, but it’s a big deal. So cement, depending on who you ask, makes up about 7% to 8% of global emissions.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Wow, that’s huge!

CASEY CROWNHART: I know. You wouldn’t think it just from, like, walking on your sidewalk. But it’s all about the process used to make cement. So today when you make cement, usually you’re putting things in kilns that get hotter than lava does. And you’re also seeing there’s a lot of chemical reactions that also kickoff carbon dioxide.

And so there has been a lot of effort around how we can clean up this process, whether by capturing some of those emissions or totally reinventing it, like we’re seeing from some startups, including Sublime Systems. So this is a Boston-based company. And basically what they’re doing is a totally new process, totally new way of making cement. It involves basically zapping crushed up rocks with electricity in order to make something that can be used in cement to make concrete.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: How scalable is that?

CASEY CROWNHART: Again, one of the biggest questions is always about scale with these sorts of solutions. Concrete is, I think, the second-most used substance by humans, after water. It’s just this huge problem. So I think it’s really encouraging to see the giants in this industry showing interest in this technology and putting money towards it. But what will be really crucial is whether this can be cost-competitive. Because cement is really important, and we need it to be really cheap so that we can build things.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Right. All right, for our last story, it can be overwhelming to talk about the climate crisis. And individual actions can feel like they’re just not making an impact, you know? But it turns out that changes that all of us can do can actually make a really big difference, right?

CASEY CROWNHART: Absolutely. So I’m the first to say that we shouldn’t put the burden of climate change on individuals. We’ve talked about things like cement. I’m not going to be able to do anything to change cement, for example. But researchers say that things that individuals and households can do to cut down on climate impacts can get us about 25% of the way towards avoiding the worst impacts of climate change.

So it’s not the whole problem. We still need these big systemic changes, new products that need to get to the market. But there are definitely things that we can do to start inching our way towards the progress that we need to make.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: What are some of the most impactful individual actions?

CASEY CROWNHART: This is a great question. I would love to shout-out– Heatmap News just put out a great package this week. It’s called Decarbonize Your Life, which really goes through some of these evidence-based, best actions that you can take.

A few of them– if you are in the market for a new car, you should buy an EV. In general, try to drive less, making changes to your home to make it more energy-efficient, moving towards electric appliances. So love to talk about heat pumps, things like induction stoves. And then something that anybody can do is look at what you’re eating. So wasting less food and eating less beef are two great ways to start to work on your individual contributions.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Great. Well, thank you, Casey. That’s all the time we have, for now. But I’d like to thank my guest, Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, based in New York. Thank you so much for joining us.

CASEY CROWNHART: Thanks for having me. Always great to be here.

ANNA ROTHSCHILD: Speaking of climate solutions, we have a brand-new short-run newsletter that highlights some of these stories, called ‘Tiny Nature Triumphs.’ Every two weeks, you can get a story in your inbox about creative efforts to preserve and protect nature at the local level and some inspiration for how you can join in. Sign up at sciencefriday.com/triumphs.

Copyright © 2024 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/