Amid the heated debate over Bitcoin’s environmental impact in the mining space, nuclear power could be the perfect renewable energy source to power mining operations.
It’s no secret that bitcoin mining takes a massive amount of electricity. It’s estimated that energy consumption exceeds the power consumption of countries like the Netherlands and the UAE.
With the push towards ESG-Friendly bitcoin mining operations, US power company Talen Energy has been given the green light to mine cryptocurrencies using nuclear power from Susquehanna Steam Electric Station based in Allentown, Pennsylvania, according to Datacenter Dynamics.
A spokesperson for Talen said Cumulus, a subsidiary of Talen Energy, has two separate businesses: Cumulus Data, focused on hyperscale data center; and Cumulus Coin, focused on digital currency mining.
“As the demand for energy increases among data center and cryptocurrency processing clients, so does the call for decarbonizing these energy sources. Talen Energy is constructing a hyperscale data center campus adjacent to its Susquehanna nuclear generation facility,” read a company presentation. “It will provide low-cost, reliable, carbon-free power to the data center clients on campus. This allows clients to benefit from carbon-free, 24/7 power being supplied directly to the campus, without the intermittency that renewable energy can experience, or requiring fossil fuels.”
Here’s the layout of the nuclear-powered cryptomining facility adjacent to the power plant. The mining facility could be open as early as the first half of 2022.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been at the forefront of pushing mining operations into using “renewable energy” instead of fossil fuels. The issue behind crypto space is that computational power available to mine requires an enormous amount of energy.
Days ago, a historic hydroelectric plant near Albany, New York, decided to begin cryptomining than selling its power to the grid because it could make more money.
El Salvador has pitched miners of the world to flood the Central American country to embrace “cheap 100% clean, 100% renewable, 0 emissions” energy from a state-owned geothermal electric company that is powered by a volcano.
The “greening” of Bitcoin also comes amid China’s crackdown on miners, resulting in the hash rate —the computational power available to mine the cryptocurrency, reflecting the efficiency of the bitcoin blockchain network, plunging since mid-May.
Nuclear-powered cryptomining could be the top “ESG-friendly” energy source that the crypto community and tech billionaires have been searching for. This could be a positive for uranium stocks.
