5 ms·
Eventually a power source can power anything, but choosing good first customers is important. Usually, v1 of the product is expensive and flaky. So you need fir
by tlb 5y ago
Eventually a power source can power anything, but choosing good first customers is important. Usually, v1 of the product is expensive and flaky. So you need first customers who are willing to pay extra for the privilege of being early adopters, or for PR value. Data centers seem like a good bet here.
As you get better at mass producing the machines, the cost will come down and you can make money selling power to the grid at much lower prices.
- jiggawatts 5y agoData centers absolutely do not go for unproven and flaky electricity sources! They go for the most boring, proven, and even downright inefficient sources. They need robustness above all things. Untested nuclear reactors (fusion or fission) are about as far away as possible from what they want as it is possible to get. Not to mention that many data centres are bang in the middle of high density urban areas, or at least reasonably close to them, typically in some industrial area on the outskirts of town. No council in their right mind would approve any kind of nuclear power without years and years of environmental impact studies, justifications, reams of paperwork, etc... You might argue that it's "safe", but the bureaucrats won't care about your opinion. They'll be worried about perception in an era where people set communication towers on fire because they want to stop 5G "radiation". Fusion is precisely the kind of technology that is best implemented as base load in a standard power plant type configuration. Far away from big cities and scaled for efficiency. It makes zero sense to plop something this esoteric down somewhere downtown to occasionally power a data centre during a rare power outage. This "suggested" use case is 100% intended to appeal to people like you, the "YC News" crowd type. It is absurd on its face. Hilariously improbable. But it sounds cool and it got you talking, so a successful marketing trick, I suppose.
- tlb 5y agoGoogle is big on solar power for its data centers, despite being intermittent. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-1-6-million-solar-panels-will-power-these-new-data-centres/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-1-6-million-solar-panel... They also have grid connections, of course, so it's no problem if the energy source has frequent downtime. Some data centers are in cities but there are many remote ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prineville%2C_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prineville%2C_Oregon is a small town with large Apple and Facebook centers. Fusion reactors wouldn't be used just during outages, but for base load, reducing consumption from the grid. They already have this sort of power supply/demand matching to support their solar arrays. Appealing to cost-insensitive early adopters is an excellent way to start. The Tesla roadster is a well-known example. I don't see the absurdity.
- idlewords 5y agoThe sun is not intermittent
- conradev 5y agoSolar power itself is intermittent, yes. But it is not a risky investment – quite the opposite actually. You can buy panels and inverters with 25yr manufacturer warranties. Maintenance costs are low and predictable (cleaning panels, replacing equipment). Energy output is as predictable as the sun, and in certain regions it is pretty constant. It is also not "costly" in the sense that the bulk of the cost of installing solar is the labor.
- glenstein 5y ago>You might argue that it's "safe", but the bureaucrats won't care about your opinion. They'll be worried about perception in an era where people set communication towers on fire because they want to stop 5G "radiation". I agree with all the other stuff you said, and I would accept this as a fair characterization of what is in store for nuclear plants historically. I wonder though how much of that experience would transfer in the event that we have real fusion reactions, given climate considerations and a novel technology that won't necessarily become entangled in the same narratives, and (maybe?) comes with a different set of environmental implications than traditional nuclear power plants.
- jiggawatts 5y agoAll practical (but not yet viable!) forms of fusion are moderately "dirty" in that they produce sufficient neutron radiation to make the reactor itself dangerously radioactive. Compared to fission, it's much better overall, but you're still talking about remote manipulation, robots, lead shielding, etc... There is just no way that a shipping container-sized fusion reactor will be allowed to be "plopped down" anywhere without a metric ton of paperwork and justification. It wouldn't be safe to go anywhere near it while it is operating! It couldn't possibly have sufficient shielding in that form factor. Even if it had solid lead walls it would still be dangerous. Fusion would be perfectly fine as base load in dedicated power plants similar to nuclear power plants. There would be thick concrete shielding, containment buildings, etc... Less than you'd need for fission, and also less waste, but there's still nuclear waste that needs to be handled in much the same way.