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Here's a better article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_nuclear_deal/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_

Here's a better article: https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_nuclear_deal/ https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_... > "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design." > "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."

ertgbnm 1y ago
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
- conception 1y ago
  Corporate equivalent of using a larger font and/or double spacing your term papers.
  - moffkalast 1y ago
    Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.
- kayodelycaon 1y ago
  > Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective. The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
- libraryatnight 1y ago
  "We will appear to meet standards while extracting maximum profit"
- dkarl 1y ago
  > Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research." It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
- rdtsc 1y ago
  >> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
- ethbr1 1y ago
  'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
agos 1y ago
this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes? Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
- doublerabbit 1y ago
  You mean White Washing? How dare to think Google would think of such a thing. They're not evil after-all.
- neuronexmachina 1y ago
  > Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes? For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-program-with.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri... > Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
- foota 1y ago
  It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.
- rockemsockem 1y ago
  You don't think Google is interested in getting more energy for less money?
epistasis 1y ago
I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates. The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through. South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud. There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
- cyberax 1y ago
  > South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud. That's why :) Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc. But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are. "Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer" "They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs" "Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like" "...." There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
  - nolist_policy 1y ago
    Do you have a source?
Animats 1y ago
Oh, it's the NuScale guy again. NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it. The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons." There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem. History: - Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster. - Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster. Alternative reactor history: - Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas. - AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission. - Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3] - Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt. Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor [3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/technical-papers-and-articles/2019/overview-of-liquid-sodium-fires/ https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
- concordDance 1y ago
  > Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster? The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.
os2warpman 1y ago
>Elementl Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play". Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market. Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks. They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed. Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases. The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again. Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.

ertgbnm 1y ago

> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.

conception 1y ago
Corporate equivalent of using a larger font and/or double spacing your term papers.
- moffkalast 1y ago
  Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.
kayodelycaon 1y ago
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective. The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
libraryatnight 1y ago
"We will appear to meet standards while extracting maximum profit"
dkarl 1y ago
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research." It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
rdtsc 1y ago
>> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
ethbr1 1y ago
'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.

agos 1y ago

this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes? Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?

doublerabbit 1y ago
You mean White Washing? How dare to think Google would think of such a thing. They're not evil after-all.
neuronexmachina 1y ago
> Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes? For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.verily.com/2018/11/update-on-our-smart-lens-program-with.html https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri... > Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
foota 1y ago
It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.
rockemsockem 1y ago
You don't think Google is interested in getting more energy for less money?

epistasis 1y ago

I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates. The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through. South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud. There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.

cyberax 1y ago
> South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud. That's why :) Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
Workaccount2 1y ago
It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc. But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are. "Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer" "They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs" "Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like" "...." There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
- nolist_policy 1y ago
  Do you have a source?

Animats 1y ago

Oh, it's the NuScale guy again. NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it. The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons." There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem. History: - Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster. - Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster. Alternative reactor history: - Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas. - AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission. - Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3] - Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt. Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor [3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/technical-papers-and-articles/2019/overview-of-liquid-sodium-fires/ https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

concordDance 1y ago
> Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster. Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.
- lostlogin 1y ago
  You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster? The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

os2warpman 1y ago

>Elementl Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play". Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market. Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks. They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed. Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases. The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again. Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.