42 ms·

Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy

208 points by mikece 1y ago

Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/world-nuclear-association-welcomes-microsoft-corporation-as-newest-member https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...

rhdhfjej 1y ago
Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? Well here we are building nuclear reactors to run our brute force "scaled" LLMs. Really, really dumb.
- DeepYogurt 1y ago
  Big O? More like Big H2O (heavy water).... I'll see myself out.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
  - rhdhfjej 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - logicchains 1y ago
      And you would have been mocked by your peers for being so concieted that you'd dare to look down on other people for not inventing an algorithm that doesn't exist and for which there's no evidence it's even possible for one to exist.
      - rhdhfjej 1y ago
        [flagged]
        oatsandsugar 1y ago
        Dig up
    - tootie 1y ago
      It's the difference between computer science and software engineering.
  - estimator7292 1y ago
    This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices. Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet. Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.
    - codingrightnow 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > it's so cheap as to be nearly free Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.) There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation. If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.
    - yannyu 1y ago
      > Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid This is a peculiarly USA-localized problem. For a large number of reasons, datacenters are going up all over the world now, and proportionally more of them are outside the US than has been the case historically. And a lot of these places have easier access to cheaper, cleaner power with modernized grids capable of handling it. > pollution from higher energy use Somewhat coincidentally as well, energy costs in China and the EU are projected to go down significantly over the the next 10 years due to solar and renewables, where it's not so clear that's going to happen in the US. As for the rest of the arguments around chip manufacturing and shipping and everything else, well, what do you expect? That we would just stop making chips? We only stopped using horses for transportation when we invented cars. I don't yet see what's going to replace our need for computing.
  - utyop22 1y ago
    "Which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs." Ermmm. what?
- infecto 1y ago
  Pretty exciting to me. Constraints breed innovation and it’s possible that the wave of AI leads to new breakthroughs on the green energy front. Edit: Amazing how anti-innovation and science folks are on HN.
- logicchains 1y ago
  There's no efficient algorithm for simulating a human brain, and you certainly haven't invented one so you've got absolutely no excuse to act smug about it. LLMs are already within an order of magnitude of the energy efficiency as the human brain, it's probably not possible to make them much more efficient algorithmically.
  - irjustin 1y ago
    I'm really sad the core argument for the Matrix's existence doesn't hold up (it never did, just for me as a kid is all).
    - juliangamble 1y ago
      They started with a different, more brilliant idea, of using human brains as a giant neural net, then backed away from that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832
      - irjustin 1y ago
        oh wow that's cool. I do understand why they moved away from it. Battery is waaaayyyyy easier to understand for the layman and lay-kid (me).
  - rhdhfjej 1y ago
    Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference, despite our semiconductors having a lithographic feature size that's also orders of magnitude smaller than our biological neurons. You should do some more research.
    - adrian_b 1y ago
      The TDP of a typical human brain is not 15 W, but 25 W, so about the same as for many notebook or mini-PC CPUs, but otherwise your argument stands. The idle power consumption of a human is around 100 W.
- wmf 1y ago
  There's a ton of research into more efficient AI algorithms. We've also seen that GPT-5 has better performance despite being no bigger than previous models. GPU/ASIC vendors are also increasing energy efficiency every generation. More datacenters will be needed despite these improvements because we're probably only using 1% of the potential of AI so far.
  - zekrioca 1y ago
    Interesting, if GPUS/ASICS have been improving in energy efficiency, then why is it that total consumption has been exponentially increasing?
    - bobthepanda 1y ago
      Because so many people want to run the models. You see this in other sectors where demand outstrips improvements in economy. Individual planes use substantially less fuel than they did 50 years ago, because there are now fewer engines on planes and the remaining engines are also more efficient; but the growth in air travel has substantially outpaced that.
- keepamovin 1y ago
  You have a point. But it doesn't make sense to seek for the next unrealized breakthrough (low energy, brain-comparable power consumption) AI leap yet, when existing products are already so transformative. It will come, give it time.
crinkly 1y ago
The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware. Nothing good can come of this. Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.
- nomel 1y ago
  Or, for another perspective, they're helping force capitalism to work: an opportunity exists to reduce prices. This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials. Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now. It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste. I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      We do not in fact need it.
      - nomel 1y ago
        Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are interested in it enough to put money into it. That suggests there is a market need for it, or at least interest, within the current context. We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?
hereme888 1y ago
Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Good for MS.
- cheema33 1y ago
  > Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not. It is a conspiracy I think.
  - nomel 1y ago
    China's nuclear growth definitely appears to be slowing: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927
    - maxglute 1y ago
      PRC nuclear isn't "slowing" it's on pace/steady relative to latest 5 year plan, but pace of renewables like solar have simply exploded relative to forecast. The TLDR is there was dicey 2010-2020 period post Fukushima reassessment and AP1000/EPR drama... where PRC realized even they can't build western nuclear tech economically due to foreign drama (technical issues, political issues i.e. sanctions, Westinghouse bankruptcy). Took them a few years to unfuck situation with indigenous nuclear tech stack, but then solar LCOE plummeted and industrial capacity made prioritizing solar no brainer. As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets, but far above trend for solar... party because after cracking down on real estate, resources went into industry, and solar factories went brrrt + a lot of excess labour redirected from building apartments to building solar farms. So not so much nuclear slowing, as it looks slowing relative to solar speeding. We'll know more if they scale down nuclear in next 5 year plan, which they may depending on status of storage.
      - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
        > As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets They’re not. The targets keeps being revised down and pushed into the future for every plan they make.
mclau157 1y ago
But fusion has never been proven to work at scale
- messe 1y ago
  On the contrary, I think it has only been proven to work at scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star
- tootie 1y ago
  From what I can tell, Helion energy has already broken ground on what would be a commercial fusion reactor connected to the WA grid despite their best prototype still not producing net positive energy. It's a gamble, but presumably everyone involved is willing to take the risks. A data center that runs on fusion would be a real watershed moment and everyone wants to be first.
  - philipkglass 1y ago
    If Helion delivers a working fusion reactor that produces net electricity, at commercially competitive rates, I think that's an even more significant event than the recent AI boom.
  - tim333 1y ago
    Helion is a odd one. They have picture of the site here https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-and-begins-building-site-of-worlds-first-fusion-power-plant/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-an... saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028" but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4 https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4) I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
    - antonvs 1y ago
      > I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power. There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.
winterismute 1y ago
I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-test-for-new-small-modular-reactors-smr https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-te...
- pfdietz 1y ago
  "there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."
  - mikestorrent 1y ago
    Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much. Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
    - pfdietz 1y ago
      But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity. If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
bryanlarsen 1y ago
Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.
- lazide 1y ago
  It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  I'm halfway certain it's for political optics. I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
- dopa42365 1y ago
  There're 0 new reactors being built in the USA currently. Not Microsofts fault obviously, but then again what's the point of these articles?
- keepamovin 1y ago
  The Gates Foundation has heavily invested in Thorium salt reactors.
jmyeet 1y ago
Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1]. And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor. I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle". I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate. [1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors/ https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro... [2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
- antonvs 1y ago
  > I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this: > Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor. As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible. While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons. And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective. Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.
deater 1y ago
dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time. I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
- deater 1y ago
  I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being. https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/onTQwSsI5zoJ https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...
- lumost 1y ago
  The funny part about our 1990s memes on big tech, is that today’s big tech is 100-1000x larger. NVidia is worth more than Germany.
  - krautsauer 1y ago
    We're not for sale, but still… numbers? Nvidia's stock price isn't even a 10th of the gold reserve, as far as I can see?
    - umeshunni 1y ago
      Also, comparing GDP (rate of production) to valuation (area under the curve) is silly. Like comparing velocity to distance.
yk 1y ago
The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.
- btown 1y ago
  "It looks like you're trying to insert some control rods. Would you like help with that?"
  - rising-sky 1y ago
    nuclear_power_run_book.doc
    - arthurcolle 1y ago
      K://nuclear_power_run_book FOR NEW JOINERS (v2 copy).docx (3) (SHARED)
    - btown 1y ago
      In all seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before an LLM makes a critical error in language-translating (or even being used to write) a reference manual for an industrial process, and escapes the attention of regulators. One can only hope that that process is not nuclear…
      - fernmyth 1y ago
        Hey, remember that time we used "an organic" kitty litter instead of "inorganic" kitty litter and the resulting explosion cost a half-billion dollars to clean up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#2014_container_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...
      - johncolanduoni 1y ago
        I’m not sure we’ll notice an increase of these kinds of things. There was a case well before AI where a process chemist replaced propylene glycol with ethylene glycol in over-the-counter medicine and a bunch of people died.
kfrzcode 1y ago
Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality. Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization. It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years. It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors. Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI. I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
- harimau777 1y ago
  The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.
  - kfrzcode 1y ago
    I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year. You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many. Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood. I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.
thakoppno 1y ago
is there a terraform module for a nuclear reactor yet?
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  I don't believe idempotency is as easy or safe to achieve with a nuclear reactor as it is with EC2 instances.
just_human 1y ago
This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.
- kfrzcode 1y ago
  Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.
  - just_human 1y ago
    Recommend starting here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/
  - defrost 1y ago
    As per just_human, more specifically, start- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/high-assay-low-enriched-uranium-haleu https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
- matthewdgreen 1y ago
  If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- windows2020 1y ago
  Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/world-nuclear-association-welcomes-microsoft-corporation-as-newest-member https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...
spamjavalin 1y ago
Relevant - worth a listen, changed my mind about nuclear, also beautifully and compellingly read by the author. 'Going Nuclear - How the Atom will save the world' by Tom Gregory https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe348f1e35482d https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe...
fooker 1y ago
Microsoft seems to be announcing random vaporware innovations every once in a while. Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!
- surfingdino 1y ago
  AI Santa next?
Animats 1y ago
The article mentions Helion. Those guys were supposed to have their Polaris demo machine running by now. But they've become very quiet about that. Press releases about it in 2024, but not much in 2025. Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.
- ted_dunning 1y ago
  Polaris has been operating at low power already. They have recently installed shielding in the walls to allow higher power operation. There seems to be a fair bit of progress notes from them. They aren't obligated to tell us anything, of course.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Here are their funding rounds.[1] Their funders, which include both YC and DoD, had better be getting info. [1] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bGN9zjK8uhT4s_uRFQXu4k0M8/funding-and-investors#funding-rounds https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bG...
jillesvangurp 1y ago
These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here. I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress. In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove. I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic. In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
- energy123 1y ago
  This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics. For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today. Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin. It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
jl6 1y ago
I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things! There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
- zozbot234 1y ago
  Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.
- preisschild 1y ago
  I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.
  - jl6 1y ago
    Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.
    - thrance 1y ago
      Which is why comparing mainframes and nuclear reactors is a bad analogy. A better one would be datacenters vs individual PCs. If the goal is efficiency, datacenters win everytime.
    - 1y ago
rswail 1y ago
We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet. The trouble is that: a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU [1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/electricity-transition/gencost https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...
- zozbot234 1y ago
  > "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" "Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
    One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no. The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet. There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM. So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland. Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
surfingdino 1y ago
Microsoft and nuclear reactors... what could possibly go wrong?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
flimflamm 1y ago
I wonder when Elon will go to nuclear business as green values have gone down (solar tiles anyone?)
emsign 1y ago
Oh, who would have thought. Fusion and nuclear is a money pit. Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway. Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.
Aleklart 1y ago
I am user of Microsoft Nuclear Cloud Plant Manager Xp SP3 and after update my control panel restarted causing power outage. Now every time i click power status it is crashing, while power output is rising, making pipes hot. I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area). Please help!
mecdu92 1y ago
Wonderful, the next CloudStrike bug will not be a joke
natmaka 1y ago
Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency. Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production. Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet. This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets. Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out. On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor). Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications. Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system. On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling. There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
- nemomarx 1y ago
  I think the most favorable context is China? the us is quite resistant to nuclear in comparison
  - 1y ago
talkingtab 1y ago
All I can think of is Microsoft === blue screen of death. Coming soon to your neighborhood.
panick21_ 1y ago
Fusion is dumb I don't understand why people care about it. Fission is save, has cheap inputs and the energy density is already absurdly high. Fusion adds 1000x the complexity for little gain.
LatteLazy 1y ago
Um… This seems like a nothing burger. Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of. If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”
user____name 1y ago
Probably a good idea to have sufficient nuclear reactors on time, before we geoengineer stratospheric albedo and the output of renewables drops as a result.
Gasbuggy 1y ago
[dead]

208 points by mikece 1y ago

rhdhfjej 1y ago

Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? Well here we are building nuclear reactors to run our brute force "scaled" LLMs. Really, really dumb.

DeepYogurt 1y ago
Big O? More like Big H2O (heavy water).... I'll see myself out.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
- rhdhfjej 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - logicchains 1y ago
    And you would have been mocked by your peers for being so concieted that you'd dare to look down on other people for not inventing an algorithm that doesn't exist and for which there's no evidence it's even possible for one to exist.
    - rhdhfjej 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - oatsandsugar 1y ago
        Dig up
  - tootie 1y ago
    It's the difference between computer science and software engineering.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices. Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet. Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.
  - codingrightnow 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > it's so cheap as to be nearly free Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.) There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation. If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.
  - yannyu 1y ago
    > Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid This is a peculiarly USA-localized problem. For a large number of reasons, datacenters are going up all over the world now, and proportionally more of them are outside the US than has been the case historically. And a lot of these places have easier access to cheaper, cleaner power with modernized grids capable of handling it. > pollution from higher energy use Somewhat coincidentally as well, energy costs in China and the EU are projected to go down significantly over the the next 10 years due to solar and renewables, where it's not so clear that's going to happen in the US. As for the rest of the arguments around chip manufacturing and shipping and everything else, well, what do you expect? That we would just stop making chips? We only stopped using horses for transportation when we invented cars. I don't yet see what's going to replace our need for computing.
- utyop22 1y ago
  "Which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs." Ermmm. what?
infecto 1y ago
Pretty exciting to me. Constraints breed innovation and it’s possible that the wave of AI leads to new breakthroughs on the green energy front. Edit: Amazing how anti-innovation and science folks are on HN.
logicchains 1y ago
There's no efficient algorithm for simulating a human brain, and you certainly haven't invented one so you've got absolutely no excuse to act smug about it. LLMs are already within an order of magnitude of the energy efficiency as the human brain, it's probably not possible to make them much more efficient algorithmically.
- irjustin 1y ago
  I'm really sad the core argument for the Matrix's existence doesn't hold up (it never did, just for me as a kid is all).
  - juliangamble 1y ago
    They started with a different, more brilliant idea, of using human brains as a giant neural net, then backed away from that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508832
    - irjustin 1y ago
      oh wow that's cool. I do understand why they moved away from it. Battery is waaaayyyyy easier to understand for the layman and lay-kid (me).
- rhdhfjej 1y ago
  Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference, despite our semiconductors having a lithographic feature size that's also orders of magnitude smaller than our biological neurons. You should do some more research.
  - adrian_b 1y ago
    The TDP of a typical human brain is not 15 W, but 25 W, so about the same as for many notebook or mini-PC CPUs, but otherwise your argument stands. The idle power consumption of a human is around 100 W.
wmf 1y ago
There's a ton of research into more efficient AI algorithms. We've also seen that GPT-5 has better performance despite being no bigger than previous models. GPU/ASIC vendors are also increasing energy efficiency every generation. More datacenters will be needed despite these improvements because we're probably only using 1% of the potential of AI so far.
- zekrioca 1y ago
  Interesting, if GPUS/ASICS have been improving in energy efficiency, then why is it that total consumption has been exponentially increasing?
  - bobthepanda 1y ago
    Because so many people want to run the models. You see this in other sectors where demand outstrips improvements in economy. Individual planes use substantially less fuel than they did 50 years ago, because there are now fewer engines on planes and the remaining engines are also more efficient; but the growth in air travel has substantially outpaced that.
keepamovin 1y ago
You have a point. But it doesn't make sense to seek for the next unrealized breakthrough (low energy, brain-comparable power consumption) AI leap yet, when existing products are already so transformative. It will come, give it time.

crinkly 1y ago

The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware. Nothing good can come of this. Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.

nomel 1y ago
Or, for another perspective, they're helping force capitalism to work: an opportunity exists to reduce prices. This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.
- crinkly 1y ago
  Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials. Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now. It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste. I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    We do not in fact need it.
    - nomel 1y ago
      Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are interested in it enough to put money into it. That suggests there is a market need for it, or at least interest, within the current context. We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?

hereme888 1y ago

Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Good for MS.

cheema33 1y ago
> Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not. It is a conspiracy I think.
- nomel 1y ago
  China's nuclear growth definitely appears to be slowing: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927
  - maxglute 1y ago
    PRC nuclear isn't "slowing" it's on pace/steady relative to latest 5 year plan, but pace of renewables like solar have simply exploded relative to forecast. The TLDR is there was dicey 2010-2020 period post Fukushima reassessment and AP1000/EPR drama... where PRC realized even they can't build western nuclear tech economically due to foreign drama (technical issues, political issues i.e. sanctions, Westinghouse bankruptcy). Took them a few years to unfuck situation with indigenous nuclear tech stack, but then solar LCOE plummeted and industrial capacity made prioritizing solar no brainer. As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets, but far above trend for solar... party because after cracking down on real estate, resources went into industry, and solar factories went brrrt + a lot of excess labour redirected from building apartments to building solar farms. So not so much nuclear slowing, as it looks slowing relative to solar speeding. We'll know more if they scale down nuclear in next 5 year plan, which they may depending on status of storage.
    - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
      > As in they're still on trend for nuclear targets They’re not. The targets keeps being revised down and pushed into the future for every plan they make.

mclau157 1y ago

But fusion has never been proven to work at scale

messe 1y ago
On the contrary, I think it has only been proven to work at scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star
tootie 1y ago
From what I can tell, Helion energy has already broken ground on what would be a commercial fusion reactor connected to the WA grid despite their best prototype still not producing net positive energy. It's a gamble, but presumably everyone involved is willing to take the risks. A data center that runs on fusion would be a real watershed moment and everyone wants to be first.
- philipkglass 1y ago
  If Helion delivers a working fusion reactor that produces net electricity, at commercially competitive rates, I think that's an even more significant event than the recent AI boom.
- tim333 1y ago
  Helion is a odd one. They have picture of the site here https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-and-begins-building-site-of-worlds-first-fusion-power-plant/ https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-an... saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028" but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4 https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4) I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    > I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power. There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.

winterismute 1y ago

I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-test-for-new-small-modular-reactors-smr https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-te...

pfdietz 1y ago
"there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."
- mikestorrent 1y ago
  Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much. Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
  - pfdietz 1y ago
    But solar isn't built like nuclear. Solar involves parallel exploration of device designs at very small scale, installed with massive redundancy and resilience. Many billions of PV cells have been manufactured. The real cost decline driver is manufacturing automation. Nuclear, even SMRs, have orders of magnitude coarser granularity. If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942

bryanlarsen 1y ago

Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.

lazide 1y ago
It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
I'm halfway certain it's for political optics. I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
dopa42365 1y ago
There're 0 new reactors being built in the USA currently. Not Microsofts fault obviously, but then again what's the point of these articles?
keepamovin 1y ago
The Gates Foundation has heavily invested in Thorium salt reactors.

jmyeet 1y ago

Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1]. And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor. I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle". I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate. [1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors/ https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro... [2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

antonvs 1y ago
> I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this: > Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor. As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible. While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons. And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective. Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.

deater 1y ago

dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time. I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.

deater 1y ago
I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being. https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/onTQwSsI5zoJ https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...
lumost 1y ago
The funny part about our 1990s memes on big tech, is that today’s big tech is 100-1000x larger. NVidia is worth more than Germany.
- krautsauer 1y ago
  We're not for sale, but still… numbers? Nvidia's stock price isn't even a 10th of the gold reserve, as far as I can see?
  - umeshunni 1y ago
    Also, comparing GDP (rate of production) to valuation (area under the curve) is silly. Like comparing velocity to distance.

yk 1y ago

The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.

btown 1y ago
"It looks like you're trying to insert some control rods. Would you like help with that?"
- rising-sky 1y ago
  nuclear_power_run_book.doc
  - arthurcolle 1y ago
    K://nuclear_power_run_book FOR NEW JOINERS (v2 copy).docx (3) (SHARED)
  - btown 1y ago
    In all seriousness, it’s only a matter of time before an LLM makes a critical error in language-translating (or even being used to write) a reference manual for an industrial process, and escapes the attention of regulators. One can only hope that that process is not nuclear…
    - fernmyth 1y ago
      Hey, remember that time we used "an organic" kitty litter instead of "inorganic" kitty litter and the resulting explosion cost a half-billion dollars to clean up? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#2014_container_explosion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant#20...
    - johncolanduoni 1y ago
      I’m not sure we’ll notice an increase of these kinds of things. There was a case well before AI where a process chemist replaced propylene glycol with ethylene glycol in over-the-counter medicine and a bunch of people died.

kfrzcode 1y ago

Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality. Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization. It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years. It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors. Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI. I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?

harimau777 1y ago
The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.
- kfrzcode 1y ago
  I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year. You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many. Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood. I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.

thakoppno 1y ago

is there a terraform module for a nuclear reactor yet?

LarsDu88 1y ago
I don't believe idempotency is as easy or safe to achieve with a nuclear reactor as it is with EC2 instances.

just_human 1y ago

This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.

kfrzcode 1y ago
Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.
- just_human 1y ago
  Recommend starting here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/ https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/
- defrost 1y ago
  As per just_human, more specifically, start- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/high-assay-low-enriched-uranium-haleu https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
matthewdgreen 1y ago
If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
windows2020 1y ago
Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

spamjavalin 1y ago

Relevant - worth a listen, changed my mind about nuclear, also beautifully and compellingly read by the author. 'Going Nuclear - How the Atom will save the world' by Tom Gregory https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe348f1e35482d https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe...

fooker 1y ago

Microsoft seems to be announcing random vaporware innovations every once in a while. Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!

surfingdino 1y ago
AI Santa next?

Animats 1y ago

The article mentions Helion. Those guys were supposed to have their Polaris demo machine running by now. But they've become very quiet about that. Press releases about it in 2024, but not much in 2025. Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.

ted_dunning 1y ago
Polaris has been operating at low power already. They have recently installed shielding in the walls to allow higher power operation. There seems to be a fair bit of progress notes from them. They aren't obligated to tell us anything, of course.
- Animats 1y ago
  Here are their funding rounds.[1] Their funders, which include both YC and DoD, had better be getting info. [1] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bGN9zjK8uhT4s_uRFQXu4k0M8/funding-and-investors#funding-rounds https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bG...

jillesvangurp 1y ago

These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here. I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress. In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove. I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic. In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.

energy123 1y ago
This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics. For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today. Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin. It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.

jl6 1y ago

I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things! There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

zozbot234 1y ago
Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.
preisschild 1y ago
I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.
- jl6 1y ago
  Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.
  - thrance 1y ago
    Which is why comparing mainframes and nuclear reactors is a bad analogy. A better one would be datacenters vs individual PCs. If the goal is efficiency, datacenters win everytime.
  - 1y ago

rswail 1y ago

We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet. The trouble is that: a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU [1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/electricity-transition/gencost https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...

zozbot234 1y ago
> "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow" "Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
- deleted 1y ago
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- MrBuddyCasino 1y ago
  One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no. The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet. There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM. So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland. Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.

surfingdino 1y ago

Microsoft and nuclear reactors... what could possibly go wrong?

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flimflamm 1y ago

I wonder when Elon will go to nuclear business as green values have gone down (solar tiles anyone?)

emsign 1y ago

Oh, who would have thought. Fusion and nuclear is a money pit. Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway. Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.

Aleklart 1y ago

I am user of Microsoft Nuclear Cloud Plant Manager Xp SP3 and after update my control panel restarted causing power outage. Now every time i click power status it is crashing, while power output is rising, making pipes hot. I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area). Please help!

mecdu92 1y ago

Wonderful, the next CloudStrike bug will not be a joke

natmaka 1y ago

Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency. Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production. Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet. This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets. Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out. On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor). Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications. Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system. On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling. There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...

nemomarx 1y ago
I think the most favorable context is China? the us is quite resistant to nuclear in comparison
- 1y ago

talkingtab 1y ago

All I can think of is Microsoft === blue screen of death. Coming soon to your neighborhood.

panick21_ 1y ago

Fusion is dumb I don't understand why people care about it. Fission is save, has cheap inputs and the energy density is already absurdly high. Fusion adds 1000x the complexity for little gain.

LatteLazy 1y ago

Um… This seems like a nothing burger. Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of. If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”

user____name 1y ago

Probably a good idea to have sufficient nuclear reactors on time, before we geoengineer stratospheric albedo and the output of renewables drops as a result.

Gasbuggy 1y ago

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