6 ms·

Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - e

by 6r17 9mo ago

Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - even if it's just so that FB servers are off-grid ; it's still a huge win, I just hope Mark realize he has much more potential than what he is doing rn

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
idiotsecant 9mo ago
They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results
- epistasis 9mo ago
  Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives. Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors. Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
  - fuzzfactor 9mo ago
    >Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment. What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates? To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else. Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
    - halJordan 9mo ago
      I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
  - fooqux 9mo ago
    > Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence. But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
    - epistasis 9mo ago
      Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs. Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity. Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job. Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers. In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
      - idiotsecant 9mo ago
        A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
- shimman 9mo ago
  Thank you for stating things so plainly, it's sorely needed on this site. The idea that success for big tech means a better society for workers or citizens is laughable and should soundly be rejected. They need to be broken apart yesterday.
  - boringg 9mo ago
    Alternatively a more optimistic and high potential future is more plentiful and cheaper more reliable power and transmission is a huge win for society. So Id say its a perspective issue.
    - paulryanrogers 9mo ago
      We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in. And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical. Maybe PA situation is different
- n_u 9mo ago
  > Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032. > Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region. It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants". Perhaps I'm misreading it though.
  - yndoendo 9mo ago
    If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
    - philipallstar 9mo ago
      Well, private investment is a great way to avoid subsidy nonsense.
      - intrasight 9mo ago
        You know that there's no actual private investment in nuclear in the US. The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
        philipallstar 9mo ago
        Taxpayers are private. They earn money and give some of it to the state.
  - 9mo ago
- loeg 9mo ago
  It's a purchase commitment, which enables the generators to secure loans to build out additional capacity.
Fazebooking 9mo ago
The progress on 'nuclear' is so slow, that the same investment in Batterie and renewable would actually help a lot more around the globe. We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive. Other forms are so far away from being useful, that the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete. And the benefit? Every 3th world country and person can invest in small and big Storage + Renewable but they can't do the same with nuclear.
- Moldoteck 9mo ago
  we don't do it because we forgot to do it cheap. At 3bn/unit like GE's ABWR or chinese hualongs/cap's it's a steal. At 20+bn/unit it's not that fun.
  - cperciva 9mo ago
    We didn't forget how to do it cheap. The ALARA (As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable) policy simply made it illegal to do it cheaply.
    - epistasis 9mo ago
      Since you say ALARA made things expensive, maybe you can tell me how you foresee cheaper designs without it? There's a lot of talk and some very shady science about getting rid of ALARA but nobody says what will change on the build that is causing the cost. Meanwhile China has adopted the same designs as in the West, without abandoning ALARA. Those who advocate for changing ALARA see to be mostly trying to shift the Overton window on the public opinion of radiation rather than trying to pursue engineering and cost goals. I hope I am wrong on that!
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis. Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago. I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.
croes 9mo ago
How is more nuclear waste a huge win for society?
- SquareWheel 9mo ago
  Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.
  - croes 9mo ago
    The same is true for solar and wind energy but without nuclear water. She cause far less harm than nuclear waste, even bigger win. Our main problem isn’t energy production it‘s storage and quick reaction to consumption spikes. Nuclear energy doesn’t help with that.
- davnicwil 9mo ago
  the waste isn't a win, of course, but is a downside of a tradeoff that is massively weighted to the upsides for society -- that is (otherwise) completely clean always-on high capacity energy production. We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
  - croes 9mo ago
    Completely clean? Where does the nuclear fuel come from? How do we get it? Does the handling of nuclear waste consider foul play by terrorists and such? I didn’t he many worries about russian rockets hutting wind turbines in the war in Ukraine.
    - davnicwil 9mo ago
      looking backwards in the supply chain for other externalities is a good point, but I'm not sure any energy production method is exempt from this? Also, by the way, my perspective isn't about nuclear Vs X (wind turbines etc) - I like all the ones that are net clean and useful in different circumstances as part of a mix. I'm just addressing the narrower point about whether nuclear per se is a net benefit for society, which I believe it is, massively.
mihaaly 9mo ago
Mark is doing much more than should already, and not the good kind, no at all! This have a slight potential of becomeing a good one, if we only dream good things. Very limited details here, pure corporate self paise dominantly, can become anything. Another bad for example.
penguin_booze 9mo ago
Are there targeted investment vehicles for the general public, like an ETF?
tootie 9mo ago
The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.

by 6r17 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

idiotsecant 9mo ago

They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results

epistasis 9mo ago
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives. Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors. Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
- fuzzfactor 9mo ago
  >Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment. What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates? To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else. Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
  - halJordan 9mo ago
    I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
- fooqux 9mo ago
  > Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence. But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs. Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity. Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job. Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers. In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
    - idiotsecant 9mo ago
      A MW of nuke capacity is not replaced by a MW of solar or wind. New generation is much cheaper, but only because we are neglecting the parts of it that are hard and expensive - storage and transmission. Renewables without those things are worse than nuke - they are undispatchable like nuke and they are uncontrollably variable. We should build more renewables, but it is essential that we either tolerate intermittent system outages or massively improve transmission and storage, the generation is the least important part right now .
shimman 9mo ago
Thank you for stating things so plainly, it's sorely needed on this site. The idea that success for big tech means a better society for workers or citizens is laughable and should soundly be rejected. They need to be broken apart yesterday.
- boringg 9mo ago
  Alternatively a more optimistic and high potential future is more plentiful and cheaper more reliable power and transmission is a huge win for society. So Id say its a perspective issue.
  - paulryanrogers 9mo ago
    We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in. And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical. Maybe PA situation is different
n_u 9mo ago
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032. > Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region. It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants". Perhaps I'm misreading it though.
- yndoendo 9mo ago
  If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
  - philipallstar 9mo ago
    Well, private investment is a great way to avoid subsidy nonsense.
    - intrasight 9mo ago
      You know that there's no actual private investment in nuclear in the US. The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
      - philipallstar 9mo ago
        Taxpayers are private. They earn money and give some of it to the state.
- 9mo ago
loeg 9mo ago
It's a purchase commitment, which enables the generators to secure loans to build out additional capacity.

Fazebooking 9mo ago

The progress on 'nuclear' is so slow, that the same investment in Batterie and renewable would actually help a lot more around the globe. We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive. Other forms are so far away from being useful, that the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete. And the benefit? Every 3th world country and person can invest in small and big Storage + Renewable but they can't do the same with nuclear.

Moldoteck 9mo ago
we don't do it because we forgot to do it cheap. At 3bn/unit like GE's ABWR or chinese hualongs/cap's it's a steal. At 20+bn/unit it's not that fun.
- cperciva 9mo ago
  We didn't forget how to do it cheap. The ALARA (As Expensive As Reasonably Achievable) policy simply made it illegal to do it cheaply.
  - epistasis 9mo ago
    Since you say ALARA made things expensive, maybe you can tell me how you foresee cheaper designs without it? There's a lot of talk and some very shady science about getting rid of ALARA but nobody says what will change on the build that is causing the cost. Meanwhile China has adopted the same designs as in the West, without abandoning ALARA. Those who advocate for changing ALARA see to be mostly trying to shift the Overton window on the public opinion of radiation rather than trying to pursue engineering and cost goals. I hope I am wrong on that!
- epistasis 9mo ago
  There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis. Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago. I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.

croes 9mo ago

How is more nuclear waste a huge win for society?

SquareWheel 9mo ago
Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.
- croes 9mo ago
  The same is true for solar and wind energy but without nuclear water. She cause far less harm than nuclear waste, even bigger win. Our main problem isn’t energy production it‘s storage and quick reaction to consumption spikes. Nuclear energy doesn’t help with that.
davnicwil 9mo ago
the waste isn't a win, of course, but is a downside of a tradeoff that is massively weighted to the upsides for society -- that is (otherwise) completely clean always-on high capacity energy production. We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
- croes 9mo ago
  Completely clean? Where does the nuclear fuel come from? How do we get it? Does the handling of nuclear waste consider foul play by terrorists and such? I didn’t he many worries about russian rockets hutting wind turbines in the war in Ukraine.
  - davnicwil 9mo ago
    looking backwards in the supply chain for other externalities is a good point, but I'm not sure any energy production method is exempt from this? Also, by the way, my perspective isn't about nuclear Vs X (wind turbines etc) - I like all the ones that are net clean and useful in different circumstances as part of a mix. I'm just addressing the narrower point about whether nuclear per se is a net benefit for society, which I believe it is, massively.

mihaaly 9mo ago

Mark is doing much more than should already, and not the good kind, no at all! This have a slight potential of becomeing a good one, if we only dream good things. Very limited details here, pure corporate self paise dominantly, can become anything. Another bad for example.

penguin_booze 9mo ago

Are there targeted investment vehicles for the general public, like an ETF?

tootie 9mo ago

The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.