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Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power
- andrewg4445 2y agoI feel like the article is not accurate and understandable to me, can somebody please explain me the background?
- atomic128 2y agoReuters article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/google-buy-power-small-modular-nuclear-reactor-company-kairos-ai-needs-2024-10-14/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/g... CNBC article, no paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/google-inks-deal-with-nuclear-company-as-data-center-power-demand-surges.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/google-inks-deal-with-nuclea... No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble. Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar/wind. Battery backup postpones the "range anxiety deadline" but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable. Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant. This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter. Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100/MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun's unambiguous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097 In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW). Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this. Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoYour link specifically states that no long term storage option exists, but it does so in a rather weaselly (“until {a future date}, there was not {safe long term storage}”) way that seems specifically crafted to confuse the reader.
- credit_guy 2y agoIn the US long term storage absolutely exists, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. It only stores nuclear waste of military origin (i.e. from the making of the nuclear bombs). But there is no technical reason this storage can't also accommodate civilian waste. By the way, the amount of military waste exceeds the civilian waste by a factor of 3 or so. [1] https://www.wipp.energy.gov/ https://www.wipp.energy.gov/
- RaftPeople 2y ago> In the US long term storage absolutely exists In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe? In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine. It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.
- credit_guy 2y agoI see some moving goal posts here. If long term storage exists, then it's not perfectly good long term storage. It's not a true Scotsman.
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable. > The only extant long term storage isn’t safe, clean, secure, or reliable > You’re moving the goalposts! You should be happy with imperfect storage!
- encoderer 2y agoFinally, 24 years in, it’s really starting to FEEL like a new century.
- create-username 2y agoWhatever. We’ve done too little, too late in order to tackle the climate threats. We’ve had the technology to build and deploy nuclear reactors for decades but we’ve been burning coal and fuel like there’s no tomorrow so well…
- toomuchtodo 2y agoWe're getting there. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10102024/inside-clean-energy-largest-coal-plants-retirement-dates/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10102024/inside-clean-ene... https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth-record-us-climate-china https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth... https://www.dnv.com/news/eto-energy-related-emissions-will-peak-in-2024/ https://www.dnv.com/news/eto-energy-related-emissions-will-p... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602799 (citations)
- create-username 2y agodaily temperatures consistently above +2 ºC the median average since 1970 in my region
- toomuchtodo 2y agoWe should probably prioritize getting there faster then, and taking fossil fuel supply chain infrastructure and generation offline.
- fwip 2y agoThe famous 4chan quote springs to mind. "The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now."
- preisschild 2y agoI'd think that just pooling the money from multiple consumers into large AP1000 power plants buildouts would be cheaper. So far economies of vertical scaling mostly led to cheaper energy than more smaller units. Ideally youd have one company with a lot of skilled labor building NPPs all the time instead of only every few decades, because that means experienced workers change jobs/retire, supply chains cease to exist and this leads to cost and time overruns. Still great to see finally more money being invested into this limitless technology (nuclear fission)
- yobid20 2y ago[flagged]
- thecrumb 2y agoI love the 'ideally' in the dry cask storage article... "Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel." Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions: "The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
- mistrial9 2y ago"Ideally, the heavy steel mills near Lake Michigan will produce minimal heavy-metals-laden effluent"
- jeffbee 2y agoSafety claims of novel, unproven fission designs always come with a crazy footnote. Pebble bed reactors are completely safe, if they are never exposed to water or oxygen, which is a pretty hilarious caveat for planet Earth.
- vlovich123 2y agoWhat are the disclaimers for molten salt reactors?
- jeffbee 2y agoConsidering that there are no commercial-scale operating MSRs, I am guessing there are some pretty significant difficulties. Like graphite pebble reactors, molten salts must be perfectly desiccated, which is impossible to guarantee under Earth operating conditions, and nobody knows what kinds of materials to use for the salt containment, or how it might be changed by a few decades of operation.
- vlovich123 2y agoI believe it depends on the salt used and why a lot of research is looking at fluorine - floride salts don't dissolve in water and thus don't have the same risks. Another MSR design seeing a lot of attention is SSR which similarly doesn't use any chemically reactive materials. SSR is also interesting from a cost perspective as it's projected to cost half of a modern coal power station and almost a third that of a modern large scale nuclear construction putting it in line with solar plants that don't have batteries (i.e. much more cost effective).
- philipkglass 2y agoBased on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400). Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-construction-hermes-reactor https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const... EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]: Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power. [1] https://kairospower.com/technology/ https://kairospower.com/technology/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108
- onepointsixC 2y agoYeah I’m not going to lie, that’s quite disappointing. Google funding several AP1000’s would be huge.
- iknowstuff 2y agoseeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades. edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
- dev1ycan 2y agoGenuine question: How will the US put the cat back in the bag? AI even if stuck to GPT 4~ levels has the potential to be usable in industries and outcompeted non AI users, as such, how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants? We'll sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself, is that the new model? It's no secret (I think?) that the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany as to avoid nuclear proliferation, for its own interests. But if nuclear becomes required, and we are decades away from nuclear fusion...? what is the solution here? I'm genuinely curious.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants? Who is doing this? Last I checked, America has been trying to sell its AP1000 reactor. > sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself Every economy that can is developing AI. > the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany Source? German greens have a veritable track record of being idiots all on their own.
- preisschild 2y agoWhut? Do you have any source to back this up? The US was exporting reactors all around the world. Most of those reactors are light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel, its not that big of a nuclear weapons proliferation concern.
- xnx 2y agoOfficial post: https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/google-kairos-power-nuclear-energy-agreement/ https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/goog...
- perihelions 2y agohttps://archive.is/fdSXf https://archive.is/fdSXf
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoThe typical reaction is I think supported by an efficient markets pov - in other words this is dumb, we know it’s dumb, but market failures make it look to the owners of capital that it’s a good investment 1. There is too much money in the world for the investments (Massive QE post 2008 and post covid). Hence people with money want returns on tokens that say 10 dollars in the front instead of say 5 dollars 2. The externalities of nuclear power are not properly priced in (see Chernobyl) 3. The price of tax compared to services received for wealthy is again out of whack and so any investment looks good because the whole chain is not paying enough tax All in all, I believe in efficient markets and price mechanisms - I just also believe people with power and influence bend the markets to their own needs and guess what they stop being efficient - hence the need for strong governments (not strongman governments)
- anon84873628 2y agoBased on other threads here, it doesn't seem like there is universal consensus that this is dumb.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoThat’s ok. They can be wrong :-) Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides and fairly limited upsides. It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to maintain a nuclear power station As any other form of (non-carbon) power generation - and the costs of catastrophic failure and orders of magnitude higher. This is just back of the envelope maths. Cost to maintain a power station of X GW for 100 years is X, cost to maintain solar panels of X GW for 100 years is Y. Cost of total catastrophic failure in fifty years of solar panels because the country fell apart is small y. Cost of total catastrophic failure of fission reactor is huge great X. The simplest analysis just comes up with huge downsides. Look I take the train past Battersea powerstation most days. It was built 100 years ago at the height (?) of the British Empire. It became disused as Britain fell into bankruptcy in the 70s and was left to fester for decades before people realised a vast shopping centre in the middle of London was quite nice. If it was nuclear it would still be sealed off, any slacking of maintenance, any cost saving too far, would fuck up the world’s greatest city . And if you think the worlds most powerful and richest country could always afford the very best maintenance - let me introduce you to political decision making in the 1960s, industrial policy in the 1970s and human beings who tend to hope as a strategy. It’s not hard to pretend the obvious won’t happen, and if you take the risk sometimes you will be right. And the cautious man will look silly. But in the end Warren Buffet looks more sensible than Dick Fuld. And even Warren is aware he pays far less tax relative to his maid. But it’s upto us to fix that just as it’s upto us to not make bad investment choices as a society that we will pay costly annual fees for centuries to come.
- pinewurst 2y agoIt’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B. Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
- joshmarinacci 2y agoA power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
- snapetom 2y agoIt's funny how many people think getting investments is as easy as just asking a bank or VC for money. If you want anything substantial besides scraps of angel/friends and family rounds, you need to prove your product first. Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
- ViewTrick1002 2y agoAll depends on the $/MWh figure.
- vlovich123 2y agoAnd the belief that you will actually be able to deliver it. Try it. Go try to pitch Google a $/MWh figure that undercuts what they’re offered here and see how far you get.
- bobthepanda 2y agoIIRC Nuscale was supposed to be doing a demo SMR project in Idaho until the costs blew out and nobody wanted to pay for the new costs. So we’ll see what comes of this.
- twilo 2y agoGood.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoRelated: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601443
- elcritch 2y agoIt'll be a "wow I didn't see that coming" moment if it's AI (training) that inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change by all the big tech funding a resurgence of nuclear power.
- defrost 2y agoDitto. Caveat. I did pencil in data centres using nuclear as highly probable some years ago (I worked in geophysical energy+mineral exploration for decades then moved to resource intelligence presentation). Won't I don't see is the "inadvertently saves us from catastrophic climate change" part .. sure, that might happen but it doesn't follow that it will - the more probable outcome is that overall we humans just consume even more energy with some of that addditional energy coming from nuclear.
- asdf000333 2y agoThe assumption is that AI builds momentum in nuclear power to the point where it can be used elsewhere. I've kept hearing that nuclear is very expensive mainly due to lack of scale.
- defrost 2y agoThe reality is that human energy consumption is expanding faster than nuclear is likely to be built out. It's a tall ask for nuclear to cover projected additional demand (see: global energy consumption data over time), it's even more of an ask to expect it to make inroads on existing demand also. The closest thing we have for examples of nuclear at scale is Korea in recent past decades and currently China right now: https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-china-in-nuclear-power/ https://itif.org/publications/2024/06/17/how-innovative-is-c... Nuclear is also expensive in comparison to alternatives (depending upon local expertise): Australia's costings (cold start on nuclear power tech) are that the better ROI over next four decades on energy investment now is not nuclear (2024 CSIRO energy report).
- golergka 2y agoCan someone more informed than me comment — is it me, or does it seem that Situational Awareness essay rings more and more true?
- BlueTemplar 2y agoThis one ? https://situational-awareness.ai/parting-thoughts/ https://situational-awareness.ai/parting-thoughts/ There are some big differences with the atom bomb though : A lot of people have been talking about AGI / the Singularity for decades, and that essay is yet another example. Not sure if it's the hindsight talking, but the situation with (un)controlling fission was much clearer ? We knew it was at least theoretically possible. And the first test was very precisely engineered (in fact switching at the last minute to a more complex design because the calculations showed that the material wasn't pure enough to work). And the very first test worked. Meanwhile, despite for AGI it (almost) all being out in the open, nobody can define what AGI exactly is, and it's all extremely empirical : throw compute at the wall, try another algorithm, see if the black box seems smarter, or not. Nobody knows even in theory when (or even if) AGI will be reached, and for how long scaling up compute will keep providing the very impressive results we have seen so far.
- progrus 2y ago[flagged]
- qwertox 2y agoWe should have learned by now that as soon as things go south, be it a radioactive leak or worse, it won't be any company which will cover the costs related to solving the caused problem. It will be the taxpayer.
- dyauspitr 2y agoNo, it will most likely be an insurance company.
- jhp123 2y agoI believe that the Price Anderson act sets aside $10 billion from the nuclear operators as a kind of insurance fund. After that the government would foot the bill. Fukushima's cleanup costs are over $100 billion.
- williamDafoe 2y agoAt current rate of once in 1,000 year accidents (3 in 70 years) we will make all the land on rarth radioactive in 250,000 years ...
- preisschild 2y agoThat assumes that we don't learn from accidents, which isn't really the case. Nobody builds extremely-unsafe RBMK reactors anymore, for example. And the TMI accident didnt really make any land radioactive and Fukushima seems cleanup-able.
- Moldoteck 2y agothat's why we should build new reactor designs so that things don't go south
- pfdietz 2y agoKairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel. While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues. First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel. Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.) Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant. Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
- perihelions 2y agoI'm inferring from this that their current plan is to import lithium-7, from either Russia or China? - "The Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor requires highly enriched lithium-7 to support operations. The high enrichment requirements complicate quality and process control due to lack of qualified standards and instrumentation capable of meeting the required precision and accuracy. Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities." https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2023/10/KairosPower_Abstract_23-3.pdf https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2023/10/KairosPower_A... - "Due to environmental concerns and relatively low demand for enriched lithium, further use of the COLEX process is officially banned in the USA since 1963, which strengthens China’s near unanimous [sic] hold over the market of enriched lithium, followed by Russia.[7]. [...]Although US nuclear industry relies heavily on Chinese and Russian enriched lithium, ecological concerns over the process may impede its future domestic use at industrial scale." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLEX_process#COLEX_separation_facilities_in_the_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLEX_process#COLEX_separation... (Tangentially, the Chinese FLiBe reactor also uses enriched lithium-7, so I guess they're self-sufficient in that, as both supplier and consumer). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1 edit: Found an additional reference, https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716 https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716 ("Managing Critical Isotopes: Stewardship of Lithium-7 Is Needed to Ensure a Stable Supply" (2013))
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- KQ4PGT 2y ago[dead]
- ThinkBeat 2y agoSmall nuclear plants have been tried and failed multiple times.
- theultdev 2y agoElaborate. China and Russia use them quite effectively. You dock them right on the shore and it powers an entire remote village / small city. As another user pointed out, they've also been used by the US military for many decades to power carriers and subs without incident.
- silver_silver 2y agoThe US and Russian navies use them very effectively
- ThinkBeat 2y agohttps://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-us-nuscale-canceled/ https://www.wired.com/story/first-small-scale-nuclear-plant-...
- jmyeet 2y agoSMRs ain't it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima's clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers. The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient. Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it's varies in effectiveness geographically. That's true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3]. Data centers just don't need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn't sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It's otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure. So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh/year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh/year per square foot. That's ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate. [1]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors/ https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-... [2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-... [3]: https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/pdf/201_solar_leadership.pdf https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/pdf/201_solar_leadership.p...
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y agoFukushima is really the only outlier, and the lesson learned should be it's probably a bad idea to build nuclear reactors near active fault lines. Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima, and that's not the present value. That's money spent so far in the future the discount rate is substantial. Japan's official estimate is $187B, with probably a $100B NPV. Chernobyl was an inherently (and well known) unsafe design. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T. Nothing comes for free. Pick your poison.
- sylware 2y agoTypical. Should not even be allowed to finance nuclear reactors before the long term storage facilities and recycling facilities
- theultdev 2y agoYucca Mountain.
- EasyMark 2y agoThat’s off the table currently
- theultdev 2y agoBecause of politics and nothing else. That's the only issue with nuclear, politics.
- atwrk 2y agoBut politics are real, and thus are it's consequences.
- theultdev 2y agoIt sure does have consequences. Easy to split the atom, not so easy to vote (correctly) apparently. I guess we'll keep shipping it around and storing it onsite, even though a massive facility is already built to house all of it. Maybe one day people will realize the establishment you keep voting in doesn't want cheap and unlimited energy. Until then, let's keep talking in circles about it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- preisschild 2y agoWhy not? Its the governments responsibility by law to create a long term repository. They made it their problem by law and forced the power plant operators (and thus the end consumers) to pay for it, but never delivered.
- ConanRus 2y ago[dead]
- tehjoker 2y agoMan, this wide scale deployment of LLMs is gonna wreck the environment. Why do we even need this?
- williamDafoe 2y agoBecause Sundar loves AI ...
- wahnfrieden 2y agoShareholders need it
- dyauspitr 2y agoBecause in-spite of all the FUD on here, it’s magical, I use it everyday and I don’t believe we’re anywhere close to the limit of what they can deliver yet.
- fulafel 2y agoIt's encouraging that people are starting to think critically about energy usage in the US and worrying about LLMs is as good introduction as any. The main problem is that US needs to ramp down fossil fuel extraction and usage, and bring down per capita general electricity usage to levels resembling the rest of the western world. See eg this map: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use
- CaptainFever 2y agoBecause AI is awesome, and nuclear power is awesome.
- williamDafoe 2y ago2010 - don't be evil 2013 - uhhhhhh never mind! 2024 - be evil!
- asdf000333 2y ago"Don't be evil," from the very beginning, actually meant "focus on revenue more than profit for the time being."
- exabrial 2y agoSadly, read the fine print before applauding too hard
- khana 2y ago[dead]
- aucisson_masque 2y agoNever in my life I would have think I would once read 'nuclear energy' and 'startup' in the same sentence. First line of the article is about how the company is trying to avoid spiraling costs. Yeah, seems like a great idea with nuclear energy. So where's going to be the next Chernobyl? I read they have clearance to build one in Tennessee.
- PeterStuer 2y ago"startup" + "nuclear", what could go wrong
- Nemo_bis 2y agoA public company couldn't get away with the creative accounting needed to get these headlines...
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoHow would google insure this reactor?
- Mashimo 2y agoWhy would they do that?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoCause its titan[ICK]technically unthinkable?
- InDubioProRubio 2y agoLooked it up- coal power/ gaspower plants are also uninsureable - if you consider the longterm fallout.
- Mashimo 2y agoBut why would the electricity consumer insure the power plant?
- sensanaty 2y agoGod I'm so conflicted. On the one hand, I'm glad we're finally slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we're still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me. On the other, a nuclear startup, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.
- DrBazza 2y ago> cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut Do you think SpaceX cut every conceivable corner to make money? Nuclear (and space), are heavily government regulated. It isn't perfect a safety net but it works.
- sensanaty 2y agoIf SpaceX cuts corners, some rockets fall over a field in Texas/the ocean somewhere. Not a great thing to have happen, but the damage is pretty minimal all things considered. If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century. These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.
- DrBazza 2y agoThere are meltdown-free designs as engineers have learnt from previous problems. That's exactly the point of government regulation, want to build a privately developed and operated commercial nuclear reactor? Requirement #1: it cannot be physically possible to have a meltdown. Pretty much the same way jet liners have black boxes, round windows, no smoking, seat belts, etc. The FAA regulates and legislates that. The irrational fear of nuclear power is just that.
- keepamovin 2y agoA step towards realignment with their OG motto. Good.
- ninalanyon 2y agoThe selling point of modular reactors is that they are built on a production line and that the next one is identical to the one before. But why not apply this principle to large reactors? After all there are plenty of reactors that operate reliably so why not just dust off the drawings and build another one just like the one before?
- kieranmaine 2y agoIn this podcast (1) Jigar Shah (head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office) said: "...the first one will be more expensive, the second will be cheaper, the third one is cheaper, the fourth one's cheaper. So it is objectively the case that if you went to a 1200 MW coal site, which by definition only has 1200 infrastructure around it, and you built one AP1000, that would be more expensive than building four 300 MW reactors, because the second, third and fourth one will be cheaper than the first one." 1. https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps https://www.volts.wtf/p/nuclear-perhaps said that
- ninalanyon 2y agoAre you implying that building a copy of an existing PWR would be more costly (in real terms) than building the first one? After all the world has quite a variety of first ones already built. Also claiming certain knowledge of the financial outcome of a large engineering project before one has even a prototype is pretty much the definition of hubris. The podcast also says that there are 92 reactors operating in the US now and that one of the reasons why the US is so far behind other countries in the nuclear industry is that 'no four are the same'. So why not pick the most successful one and build a copy? The word cheaper is doing a lot of work here. How much cheaper? I'm not arguing that modularity is bad just that there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence yet that they will be truly modular, certainly not in the same sense as washing machines coming off a production line are. Look at how many rockets SpaceX built before they got it right. Even production lines for much simpler things generally take some time to settle down. The idea that the second one will be noticeably cheaper than the first seems rather unlikely because it will have to incorporate fixes for the things that didn't quite work right on the first one. Also a 300 MWe reactor is still very large machine and has to dump huge amounts of heat somewhere so the site is still important so making the individual reactors cheaper does not make the whole project correspondingly cheaper.