Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).
Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const...
EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:
Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
> it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement
A frequent complaint from utilities has been AI companies refusing to sign PPAs. They want the option of picking up and leaving if someone else offers a better deal down the road, leaving the utility stuck with overbuilt infrastructure costs.
> virtue signalling
This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
This isn’t a binding contract like Elon Musk agreeing to buy Twitter. Google may be bound in some way to buy power from a future unbuilt powerplant that doesn’t yet exist in prototype form. If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages? Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
This is de-risking the other way. It allows the energy companies to build their infrastructure without worries that they will get undercut by a competitor and be stuck with overbuilt infrastructure and no one to sell to.
Without that commitment, the investment doesn't get made into the new power generation. Margins in that industry are much lower than in tech.
> isn’t a binding contract
It absolutely is. Don’t know the details. But there is usually a minimum purchase guarantee by the buyer.
> If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages
Probably. Though collecting might be difficult.
> Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
Damages, no. Concessions? Probably.
Why would they fissile? Nuclear is solved.
Look to NuScales near collapse last autumn for a recent nuclear power example:
NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
A power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
It's funny how many people think getting investments is as easy as just asking a bank or VC for money. If you want anything substantial besides scraps of angel/friends and family rounds, you need to prove your product first.
Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
All depends on the $/MWh figure.
And the belief that you will actually be able to deliver it. Try it. Go try to pitch Google a $/MWh figure that undercuts what they’re offered here and see how far you get.
The B-17 was developed in 1936 and initial orders were placed in 1938. The government bought hundreds of Douglas B-18 bombers before 1940.
Also the DC-3 / C-47 had its first flight in 1935. With over 10,000 built it showed the US aircraft industry was strong before WW2.
The B-18 Bolo was already obsolete by 1940. Too heavy. Too slow. Range was too short. They were relegated to ASW work.
The B-17, on the other hand, ably earned her nickname, the "Queen of the Skies."
True. But those orders supported the american aviation industry.
Uhh . . . source on that claim?
Which claim? Regarding investments, from the world bank, "The pricing mechanism [a component of a PPA] is the primary mechanism for allocating revenue and market risk in respect of the project between the public and private sectors and is central to the private project proponent’s and its lenders’ assessment of the commercial viability and bankability of the project."
I believe Jigar Shah, the director of the Loan Programs Office at DoE, also talked about the importance of PPAs in attracting outside investment in his book Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy
https://ppp.worldbank.org/public-private-partnership/sector/...
Again we’re not talking about an agreement to built a wind farm or solar or a big LNG turbine. A bank sees a PPA for any of those and knows if it cuts a check, it’ll happen with high probability. These tech PPAs are not much more than mutual handwaving by comparison.
This is a very far cry from the claim, which is that the American aviation industry would not exist were it not for some orders by Britain and France.
That one is hard to support, given that the American aviation industry was the first such industry, anywhere, and was doing quite well for itself prior to the outbreak of the war.
Did the orders help? Um. Yes? I mean they stopped paying for the planes after Lend-Lease so, mixed bag there, there was a war on and all. But I don't see how the gulf between "Without Britain and France paying for a few planes before the war started" and "$50 Billion in materiel provided free of charge with most of the debt written off and most of the production destroyed in combat" gets bridged. I'm calling shenanigans.
Yep. Exactly.
Do you think a weaker but more accurate claim would be :
"The US aircraft industry was considerably helped by French and British orders for World War II."
Yeah, its not much I agree. But it is an agreement the company can wave that they at least have future buyers for their non-existing power generators if they were to build them!
Would be extremely interesting to the the $/MWh for the deal to understand the viability.
Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.
A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.
All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.
> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-smr-a-...
> All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them.
History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.
PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.
The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.
Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
> The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment
MSRs are a costly distraction. They are not viable without literally hundreds of billions in research and development money. That's why all the MSRs startups are failing long before they even start the licensing process.
> For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
It was not unexpected. The _main_ issue with MSRs is that they have to contain fluoride salts that release elemental fluorine radicals as a result of radiolysis. So the reactor vessel walls will be eaten up by them, rather rapidly. Especially when reactors are scaled up to a level that makes them practical. And then you have all the fission byproducts that literally include almost all the Periodic Table.
Yeah I’m not going to lie, that’s quite disappointing. Google funding several AP1000’s would be huge.
seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
> using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades
We have nothing close to the battery fabrication pipeline to make that timeline true, certainly not at scale. If this move works, Google will have cemented its power needs and economics for decades to come.
Global battery manufacturing capacity was 2,600GWh in 2023 [1], and has probably already exceeded that this year. The IEA projects closer to 4TWh by 2025, and nearly 7TWh by 2030 [2].
You need to pay attention because this is happening fast.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... [2] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b...
> nearly 7TWh by 2030
That's a big number. Here's a bigger one: 30,000 TWh, about our current electricity consumption [1]. 7 TWh in 2030 is less than 1/4,000th total electriciy production today. (You obviously don't need 1:1 coverage. But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge.)
Now consider EVs. Then add the tens of TWh of annual power demand AI is expected to add to power demand [2]. (And I'm assuming a free market for battery cells, which obviously isn't where we're heading. So add local production bottlenecks to the mix.)
Battery numbers are going up. But they aren't going up fast enough and never could have, not unless we ditch electrifying transportation. Nukes or gas. Anyone pretending there is a third way is defaulting to one or the other.
[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...
[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...
5 hours of storage and a 98.6% renewables system.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewable-gr...
Investing in nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed.
In Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy.
This will only worsen the nuclear business case as renewable expansion continues, today being a bonanza fueled by finally finding an energy source cheaper than fossil fuel.
Nuclear power is essentially pissing against the wind hoping the 1960s returns.
> nuclear power today is an insane prospect when the energy market is being reshaped at this speed
We’re still more than a decade away from having enough batteries to make this shift. Again, excluding EVs and AI. That’s why we’re reänimating coal plants and building new gas turbines.
I’d also love to see the numbers on that simulation going from 98.6% coverage to what we expect from a modern grid. (And if the balance is provided by gas or something else.) It should surprise nobody that going from 1 sigma to 2 can cost as much as 2 to 3, even if the percentage gap is much smaller.
> Europe old paid off nuclear plants are regularly being forced off the markets due to supplying too expensive energy
Europe has invested €1.5tn into new gas infrastructure. That doesn’t go poor without a fight and collateral damage.
A study recently found that a nuclear powered grid to be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
> Nuclear power needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Only if you don't care about reliability.
Seems like you didn’t read the quote from the abstract. Here’s the relevant part:
> with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
In this context, what is a "modern grid"?
We'll figure it out. There is too much at stake and there are already a gazillion engineers out there going to bed every night thinking about how to solve this problem.
Innovation is the grim reaper of analyst reports. No one at my company notifies an investment bank when we have a breakthrough internally (lol).
"But 2 hours in 2030 against a year's demand today is still a nudge."
How much battery storage do you think we need? Surely not a year's worth.
For solar, we'd likely need 10-16 hours of storage to power stuff overnight. Maybe a little more to cover a few cloudy days. Sounds like we are about 5% of that now?
Generally the worst case is two weeks. In the middle of winter you often get cloudy low wind days for that long. Of course how you handle those worse cases are days need not be how you handle typical. If you can handle 16 hours of no input this will over the typical cases this will be enough to max a massive dent in carbon emissions and we can fall back to existing gas (or even coal) plants for the rest. Plus a lot of power use can turn off when needed - give my company a discount and we can turn the factory off.
10-16 hours is not enough at all. On a cloudy day, solar output will only be 15-20%. On top of that, your panels really only generate for 8 hours on a very good day - the sun is a lot dimmer in the early morning and late evening. Really, you need 2x storage for a good day, if you want to deal with two cloudy days you'd want 50-60 hours of storage.
Could you possibly read the article you're replying to again?
Even skimming through it discusses the coverage of wind and a not 50/50 system particularly to cover winter & night time. There is also discussion of a ~2% from "other" and how much storage capacity is required.
The article even goes into using wind & solar data for the simulation and reducing further the output to be conservative.
> and never could have
I could just as easily assert the same of nuclear or gas. It doesn't make it true, although there seems to be evidence that nuclear cannot scale as fast as batteries/solar/wind.
That's per year right?
frequently asserted but not true.
Nobody claims renewables + battery doesn't work long term. (And not only work, but do so at rock-bottom costs.)
The problem is the timeline. Time out building that additional infrastructure, including expected demand growth, and you always need more power in the interim. Particularly if you're planning on taking coal offline.
If there is an arugment that we can ramp up battery production even faster than we are, the math changes. But we're already in a Herculean effort to mass produce more batteries faster.
nuclear literally takes 10x the time to build as renewables+batteries. That's like the whole reason why it doesn't get built.
Battery manufacturing capacity is greatly underutilized in China. That was battery cell prices there fell by nearly 1/2 in the last year. There is tremendous room for expansion of production.
Based upon?
Looked through the thread and it looks asserted but I don't see the counter not true point.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.is/DklaA ("Bloomberg: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
Maybe you just found a great place for a company like Google to invest in.
> edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B.
No, it's not. Right now it's probably more than $10B a GW if you want the same level of reliability as nuclear.
That is seemingly such an absurdly high number to get a nuclear planet up and running.
Is the majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
> Is that majority of that cost dealing with regulatory and legal nonsense that stems from the anti-nuclear hippy groups and laws they got passed in the 60s and 70s?
One part this, two parts the economics of a novel technology platform being deployed in a large size, three parts American labor costs and inexperience with megaprojects.
Similar to why we can't build ships [1]: high input costs, notably materials and labour, and a coddled industry that is internationally uncompetitive. With ships, it's the Jones Act and shipyard protectionism; with civilian nukes, it's misguided greenies. (Would note that we're perfectly capable of nuclear production if it happens under the military.)
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/constructionphysics/p/why-cant...
Nuclear is still much more expensive than renewables in China, where there aren't too many "misguided greenies" setting policy. Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable, not the other way around.
The faster people can internalize this lesson, the sooner we'll get to economically-viable nuclear power.
> Environmentalists were successful in opposing nuclear construction because it was expensive and unprofitable
As far as Europe is concerned, there seems to have been various political move and lobbying to affect energy independence (e.g. France): economy is transformed energy, so by nuking (…) energy independence, you're suffocating countries. The military role of nuclear is furthermore crucial; civil & nuclear must be correlated.
That's to say, giving up nuclear is not something a sane, well-driven country should do lightly, regardless of ideologies.
It's a tricky topic; what I regularly hear from economists is that wind & solar are still far from being able to compete with nuclear. And because of the previous two points, people can't but frown upon "green" arguments, even if the underlying intentions are honest and well-intended.
(China may not have misguided greenies, but it has a strong incentive to sell whatever it's offering).
IMO they only continue to exist because of the Jones Act not the way I think you're implying where Jones Act protectionism prevents them from flourishing. High material and labor alone are enough to explain why people wouldn't build ships in the US. What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea? Gone are the days when the US dominates on skill or capacity, and that's not because the US has lost something the rest of the world just caught up with us.
Whenever we're looking at the 1900s and wondering why the US used to be so dominant as an industrial power I think it's incredibly important to remember our industry got all the upside (an absolute torrent of money and demand) and none of the downside (bombing) of two world wars. IMO the US industrial base was riding high on that easily into the 80s and people mistake that dominance for skill and prowess rather than the waning boon of WW2's mobilization and destruction of every other extant industrial power.
The point is there are downstream costs to our moribund shipping industry. We have a internally-navigable waterways we barely use, offshore wind power gets stalled due to lack of ships, et cetera.
Post-WWII effects are one component. But another is that we want a protected shipbuilding industry for its own purposes, which is fine, but that curtails a lot of other production.
> What special capabilities could Us shipbuilders bring that would make the cost of labor here competitive with China or South Korea?
Energy. Our energy costs are much lower than theirs.
The rise of the US as an industrial power started in 1800. The US was already dominant before WW1.
The NRC is many things, but a front for "anti-nuclear hippy groups" is not one of them.
France, with all their nuclear base, just raised their estimate for new reactors (I'm so shocked!):
> State-owned Electricite de France SA has raised its estimate for the future construction costs of six new atomic reactors in France by 30% to €67.4 billion ($73 billion)
6 reactors, 1650MW each, $7B per 1GW vs Vogtle's $17B. Planned. In 2 decades, after it's finally built, it will have doubled of course lmao.
That right, blame the hippies. Nothing at all to do with nuclear power plants being the one thing that you really do want to be engineered well. But no, regulations are of course to blame!
The anti-nuclear hippy movements of the 60s and 70s are pretty directly responsible for a lot of the slow down in expansion of nuclear power.
>Between 1975 and 1980, a total of 63 nuclear units were canceled in the United States. Anti-nuclear activities were among the reasons, but the primary motivations were the overestimation of future demand for electricity and steadily increasing capital costs, which made the economics of new plants unfavorable.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement#Impact_o...
There was a lot scares and FUD about it at the time. To note, I am pro-nuclear.
That says pretty much the opposite of what you claim.
So using your numbers, it is solidly a little less than half the cost, not one tenth (26GWh seems around the necessarily amount for riding out ~14 hours of darkness. I'm assuming your factor of 3 makes up for seasonal variation and cloudy days). The panels take up 9 acres of land area, and need to be kept clean of snow and dust. The battery lifetime is small compared to expected life of a nuclear reactor, but the battery lifecycle is more straightforward. This seems like the territory of having a reasonable tradeoff between the two, not some unequivocal win for an Internet smackdown about how we should avoid one approach.
Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.
The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.
> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.
Hence the batteries.
The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.
[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...
I don't follow your sums. 50GWh of battery cycled once a day for a year is: 18,250 GWh
So you seem out by around 100x.
Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).
So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.
The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.
If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.
Having enough battery capacity to back up enough energy for a few minutes let alone days would require a lot of resources.
I think scaling nuclear power would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.
Cheaper? No, not even close. Environmentally friendly? Debatable, but wait for new tech.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew...
I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Here's the report for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...
There is no report for 2024 because they are building a new model to take into account even newer technologies: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press537.php
Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?
They have the capital, and are the ones who need the extra generation capacity now. They will share the cost along with the average consumer as EVs take up a larger proportion of total vehicles on the road.
And you are applying this equally across all American industry? The production of chlorine by electrolysis consumes twice as much electricity in America than Google consumes worldwide. But I don't see you up here calling for Olin Chlor Alkali to build nuclear power stations, for some reason. Are you suggesting that the American chemical industry lacks capital?
> 525 megawatts
:(
That's.. not very much.
So typical of Google. Dip their toes in a new field. Get lots of press. Move on to the next thing.
I love the 'ideally' in the dry cask storage article...
"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
The best thing about nuclear, IMHO, is that all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium. Compare that to coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
Safety claims of novel, unproven fission designs always come with a crazy footnote. Pebble bed reactors are completely safe, if they are never exposed to water or oxygen, which is a pretty hilarious caveat for planet Earth.
What are the disclaimers for molten salt reactors?
If you can contain the highly corrosive, very hot, molten salts, then they are fairly safe, but you do need to guarantee that the path to the dump-tanks is undisturbed by whatever disaster is necessitating their use.
A big non-safety disclaimer is that the proposed advantage of online refueling is still largely theoretical.
Considering that there are no commercial-scale operating MSRs, I am guessing there are some pretty significant difficulties. Like graphite pebble reactors, molten salts must be perfectly desiccated, which is impossible to guarantee under Earth operating conditions, and nobody knows what kinds of materials to use for the salt containment, or how it might be changed by a few decades of operation.
"Ideally, the heavy steel mills near Lake Michigan will produce minimal heavy-metals-laden effluent"
Finally, 24 years in, it’s really starting to FEEL like a new century.
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed..
Epochal "century" boundaries don't always line up with year % 100. One could argue that the 20th century didn't properly begin until some idiot shot an archduke. It likewise seems like the 20th century likewise overshot Y2K by a decade or two. Now things are accelerating in a different, new, and exciting direction.
It's the same thing with decades. People often say the "sixties" didn't really start till 1963. And when you think of the start of 1980's culture, a lot of people are really only talking about 1983-1984.
Like, 1960 itself clearly belonged to the 1950's, the same way 1980 still belonged to the 1970's -- culturally, that is.
Obviously, the question of what year a decade "really" started in, allows for endless argument. :)
The 90s ended on 9/11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_nineteenth_c... (I am linking like this because this version I read myself.)
Um, fission reactors are very much last century.
Sort of feels like we wasted a long time having our best and brightest figuring out how to optimize advertising algorithms. I think we're finally starting to recover from that phase.
These nuclear reactors are literally being built to optimize advertising algorithms.
Sort of, they are being built to power AI models which do all kinds of things, but yes definitely advertising is part of it. Ads are mature now though, these mega corps have fine-tuned their products and squeezed every last advertising penny out of their audiences that they can, there isn't as much new stuff to build in that area now.
Whatever. We’ve done too little, too late in order to tackle the climate threats.
We’ve had the technology to build and deploy nuclear reactors for decades but we’ve been burning coal and fuel like there’s no tomorrow so well…
We're getting there.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10102024/inside-clean-ene...
https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map
https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth...
https://www.dnv.com/news/eto-energy-related-emissions-will-p...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602799 (citations)
daily temperatures consistently above +2 ºC the median average since 1970 in my region
We should probably prioritize getting there faster then, and taking fossil fuel supply chain infrastructure and generation offline.
The famous 4chan quote springs to mind.
"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now."
4chan? Are you serious?
That proverb is ancient - it has been around for centuries (if not longer).
Pick your favorite wise quote source:
[1] Ancient Chinese proverb [2] Abraham Lincoln [3] Albert Einstein [4] 4Chat/Reddit/Twitter
Related:
Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal
We should have learned by now that as soon as things go south, be it a radioactive leak or worse, it won't be any company which will cover the costs related to solving the caused problem. It will be the taxpayer.
No, it will most likely be an insurance company.
I believe that the Price Anderson act sets aside $10 billion from the nuclear operators as a kind of insurance fund. After that the government would foot the bill. Fukushima's cleanup costs are over $100 billion.
Small nuclear plants have been tried and failed multiple times.
Typical.
Should not even be allowed to finance nuclear reactors before the long term storage facilities and recycling facilities
SMRs ain't it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima's clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers.
The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient.
Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it's varies in effectiveness geographically. That's true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3].
Data centers just don't need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn't sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It's otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure.
So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh/year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh/year per square foot. That's ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate.
[1]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/pdf/201_solar_leadership.p...
Fukushima is really the only outlier, and the lesson learned should be it's probably a bad idea to build nuclear reactors near active fault lines.
Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima, and that's not the present value. That's money spent so far in the future the discount rate is substantial.
Chernobyl was an inherently (and well known) unsafe design. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.
Nothing comes for free. Pick your poison.
Reuters article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/g...
CNBC article, no paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/google-inks-deal-with-nuclea...
No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar/wind. Battery backup postpones the "range anxiety deadline" but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.
Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%.
Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.
Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant.
This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100/MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun's unambiguous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097
In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).
Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.
Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.
Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear? Surely the strictest security regulations are applied to the least safe and secure operations?
Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated? What other power source has the military guarding its waste?
The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.
> Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years
But they keep costing money for longer than the US has existed after they close.
Surely investing in hydrogen or similar is way better for the future than nuclear.
Your link specifically states that no long term storage option exists, but it does so in a rather weaselly (“until {a future date}, there was not {safe long term storage}”) way that seems specifically crafted to confuse the reader.
In the US long term storage absolutely exists, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [1]. It only stores nuclear waste of military origin (i.e. from the making of the nuclear bombs). But there is no technical reason this storage can't also accommodate civilian waste. By the way, the amount of military waste exceeds the civilian waste by a factor of 3 or so.
> In the US long term storage absolutely exists
In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe?
In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine.
It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.
> Bill Gates has a huge stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company.
And the deadlines keep getting pushed because the fuel supplier is Russia. Nuclear is not immune to geopolitics or the weather as this comment suggests. It's one of the many issues comments like this ignore - like the spiraling construction costs (even in China), risk trade off when it comes to the catastrophic nature of accidents, viability and enormous costs of clean up and waste storage etc.
Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity to displace fossil energy sources, not just to power the grid but also to synthesize all the chemical feedstocks that currently come from oil. The skills and resources needed to build out nuclear capacity and solar/wind capacity are quite different and needn't compete with each other.
> is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity
No. This is a false dichtomy pushed, from what I can tell, by the gas lobby. It's solar and wind + nukes or gas.
Batteries work in theory but not in practice: production doesn't scale fast enough, and that was before LLMs brought a new and growing source of power demand to the table. (I'm ignoring that grid batteries compete with transport electrification. A combination of economies of scale and common bottlenecks in construction of battery plants, irrespective of chemistry, links the pursuits.)
Batteries are radically transforming California's power grid.
In the last few years, they have displaced a huge chunk of the natural gas power used in early evenings after sunset when solar drops off but demand is still high.
https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...
Why doesn't battery production scale fast enough? Be specific on what limits it.
I firmly believe battery production can scale up very fast. Indeed, that's exactly what's been happening.
Realize that to replace all the motor vehicles in the US with BEVs would need enough batteries to store at least 40 hours of the average US grid output. This is almost certainly much more than would be needed for the grid itself.
No one has said it’s either-or. In fact the thread you responded specifically mentions how nuclear needs to be there as a “bad weather backup” of other clean energy sources.
> No one has said it’s either-or
Lots of people say either or. When nuclear comes up, someone will claim we should just go all in on solar, wind and batteries. That's unworkable, so we wind up burning gas.
I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable" (not intermitent).
Even in this thread someone is saying that the problem with solar is that "if a megavolcano darkens the atmosphere... thus we should go all in to nuclear", as if it was a guaranteed event in the next 100 years.
>I rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas.
It is almost always implied. It seems so obvious that nuclear should be replacing fossil fuels it doesn't seem worth mentioning. Unless someone says they're aiming for an energy policy of nuclear plus fossil fuels, it's probably safe to say their goal is nuclear and solar/wind/etc.
Even the volcano comment you mention ends with "For energy we obviously need all the options available."
I can't deduce "implied" when the comments are very, very explicit against solar and wind, not a single word about gas. But somehow I have to read between the lines that they actually meant to criticise fossils.
> rarely, if ever, read pro-nuclear saying that they aim to replace oil, coal and gas. It's always "wind and solar is unreliable"
People picked tribes and decided it's all or nothing. I agree--that's stupid. There is a historical alignment between renewables backers and anti-nuke activists (see: Germany) that caused nuclear to polarise away from renewables. That doesn't really exist anymore. But you see its artefacts in the debate.
It sounds like they're talking about the difference between baseload power and intermittent power. Replacing fossil fuel baseload power plants can be done now. Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology.
> Replacing them with variable renewable energy sources would require some sort of breakthrough in energy storage technology
No, it wouldn't. Batteries + renewables is proven and it works. The problem isn't a technological barrier. The problem is we need batteries for a lot of things and production can't ramp up fast enough.
It’s not ideal to have solar/wind and nuclear though. Nuclear doesn’t throttle well (or at least, economically). And Even building gas peak plants to cover still cloudy days is an order of magnitude lower in capital cost and risk than nuclear. The problem is we don’t have a coordinated enough system to properly reward mostly- turned off gas peak plant owners.
Whatever your plan for a nuclear grid without burning fossil gas is (massive overprovision, syngas production, batteries, demand response, just ignoring the issue) it'll work better and cheaper with renewables.
Nuclear is absolutely not necessary to complete the clean energy transition. It's dubious that new construction nuclear power plants are even useful for it, compared to alternatives.
> Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind?
For energy we obviously need all the options available.
If a major volcano goes off up and darkens the sky with clouds and high winds make wind farms unsafe to operate, then nuclear is probably our only reliable power source left. It's not like there weren't multiple ice ages and warming events in the history of our planet.
There is a reason sailboats were obsoleted by the steam engine: it could tug forward in windless waters and stll make it fast enough to deliver the mail. The base load power station is the steam engine. The sailboat is the wind turbine or the PV array. Most of them need a gas fired power plant to compensate for windless or cloudy days, like newer sailboats need an engine. We could use a load following SMR in place of the gas fired plant.
which is why no sailboats exist today....
They're mostly used for recreational sailing or racing and are also equipped with an engine (diesel or electric sail drive) for maneuvers and in case there's no wind. Sailing has also advanced a lot since the nineternth century, but commercial shipping is now done with bunker oil and diesel engines and was previously done with steamers.
And recently found the be vastly more expensive than a renewable grid when looking at total system cost.
It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.
Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.
> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...
> Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels.
How does that follow?
How does using nuclear for some of our energy needs bias the rest of our energy sources towards fossil fuels? As opposed to renewables or even more nuclear?
We get vastly more bang for the buck when investing in renewables.
Fixing climate change is both having enough energy to displace all fossil fuel we consume and being quick enough with the transition lessen the end state carbon content in the atmosphere.
> doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Unscheduled maintenance intervals exist everywhere. This is not a unique problem.
> They are intermittent and unreliable.
On a 24 hour ahead basis. On a year to year basis, they're always available, and are absurdly reliable.
> And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.
There is nothing that can save you from being required to hold a broad mix of power generation technologies. Building a monoculture here is completely counterproductive and probably hastens the destruction.
> despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained
That container is mechanical. It has a failure rate. Failures never occur when you _want_ them to. Again, a _depth_ of strategies is appropriate here.
"Send it by train then bury it under a mountain and just forget about it" is not an actual strategy. It seems to work, because we probably just don't know any better yet, but the people who are uncomfortable are right to be so. Pretending that they simply lack "education" is a pretty rude point of view.
Intermittent and unreliable are two different things.
Renewables are intermittent and reliable; if a wind producer has bid into the day-ahead auction, you can expect with very high reliability they will deliver as bid.
Nuclear is great, so is zero-marginal-cost energy producers :)
Does nuclear fission avoid the issue of meltdowns? Genuinely curious. The only downside I see to nuclear power is geopolitics/war (like we're seeing in Ukraine) so we don't cause even bigger catastrophes due to instability.
> so we don't cause even bigger catastrophes due to instability
That isn't the only worry. If the fuel is smuggled out... https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-assay-low-enriched-uranium
3rd and 4th gen fission reactor designs have many safeguards against meltdown, yes.
Did you mean to say fusion? In which case yes.
There are designs which avoid meltdowns, yes. Because the fuel is already molten. Like FliBe. It has a safety plug which if melts, the fuel flows in a contained reservoir and solidifies.
Nuclear fission is the reaction that has had meltdowns. There are fission technologies/strategies that are supposed to be meltdown-proof, but I do not know the science well enough to say whether that is true.
I want to add to this that I routinely see solar plants compared on a cost basis with other forms of energy by using the nameplate capacity.
Which is, hmm. Rather than impute motive, since I'm sure motives vary, I'm going to talk about why this doesn't work. Classic heat plants (coal, diesel, nuke, doesn't matter) get around 90% of the nameplate. Specifically they're running 90% of the time, and producing at the full capacity while running. That percentage is called the capacity factor.
Because for classic generators the capacity factor is high (hydro can vary a lot based on water available in the reservoir), nameplate capacity, which is what the plant yields under ideal conditions, is usually what we talk about. The problem is that the nameplate capacity of solar is what you get on a perfectly sunny day, with the sun shining directly on the panel.
What you want in order to assess cost is the nameplate capacity multiplied by the capacity factor, which is the averaged amount of power you can get out of the plant given real-world conditions. For solar, this can push 30% in an ideal location like Arizona, and be as low as 13% in a not-ideal location like Minnesota. Wind can push 50% capacity when well installed, but it is intermittent in an even less predictable way than solar. If the wind stops in the middle of the night, all wind and solar generation put together is bupkis.
We need nuclear. We could do without all of the other carbon-free electrical generation by use of nuclear energy. I don't think we should, mind you, solar in particular has a big advantage in that it's just about the only generating source which comes in small modules, so we can chip away at generation by adding whatever's affordable and build up over time.
But next time you hear that solar is cheaper, see if you can check the numbers and determine if the claim is being made on the basis of nameplate capacity. If it is, multiply that cost by four.
While I don’t doubt that’s true in some discussions, HN is not Reddit and I don’t see this confusion so much here.
I see it all over the place.
Are you certain of that?
India currently has 9 nuclear plants slated for completion by 2026.
> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.
Yes, any finite quantity is less than infinity. The same is true for fuel deliveries.
Assuming only batteries are used for storage is one of the common bullshit arguments against renewables. It's bad strawman engineering.
What works much better is a combination of batteries and an e-fuel like hydrogen. Batteries handle most of the stored energy flow; hydrogen handles the rarer long term storage needs. They complement each other, in a way like cache memory and RAM complement each other.
Totally agree. The move away from research in nuclear technology towards unreliable "green tech" is a colossal mistake. I'm not sure why Germany did it. Reliable power is the life blood of an economy. With electric cars (and possibly trucks) more will depend on power capacity a country is able to reliably produce.
Research safety and disposal. Add funds to that research so that we can get over our fear. We did it for airlines its time to do it for nuclear power.
A lot of people knock h2 as a fuel, but 1/2 the time these complaints seem to not be of a technical merit, but some blather about how it will all come from Ng.
Nonsense.
Such things can be regulated, but my point is that solar and wind are perfect for h2 generation. The sun shines? Produce. The wind blows? Produce.
The variability is irrelevant, and the result is the creation of a fuel source that can be stored.
Even better, we already have an immense network of Ng pipes, and there have been many tests and studies on injecting h2 into Ng lines, and pulling it out at the other end with molecular filters. There is no molecular reaction either.
The means low cost, massively deployed infra already exists.
And this massive network of Ng lines, with h2 injected, can in effect be an immense storage tank of h2.
We don't need some unified "batteries only" group think, but instead having multiple clean sources of energy is a boon. Just the cost of adding 3x the power transmission capacity, distribution is daunting, h2 can let a faster rollout of clean transport occur.
We should embrace all paths which the market can endure amd which can be green.
The Germans ended up focused on one only.
My point? H2 is perfect for solar.
Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive. I don't think most things that burn natural gas will work properly on H2. So, you're looking at a big-bang switchover, in which every appliance connected to the natural gas "grid" in the area will need replacing at the same time. In the Northeast at least, it's common for houses to use natural gas for heating, water-heating, and/or cooking.
Using the excess power to synthesize hydrocarbons using atmospheric CO2 sure would be nice.
Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive
You missed the part about molecular filters. No such issue exists.
Kairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel.
While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.
First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.
Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)
Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.
Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
Can someone more informed than me comment — is it me, or does it seem that Situational Awareness essay rings more and more true?
Good.
I'd think that just pooling the money from multiple consumers into large AP1000 power plants buildouts would be cheaper.
So far economies of vertical scaling mostly led to cheaper energy than more smaller units.
Ideally youd have one company with a lot of skilled labor building NPPs all the time instead of only every few decades, because that means experienced workers change jobs/retire, supply chains cease to exist and this leads to cost and time overruns.
Still great to see finally more money being invested into this limitless technology (nuclear fission)
Genuine question: How will the US put the cat back in the bag?
AI even if stuck to GPT 4~ levels has the potential to be usable in industries and outcompeted non AI users, as such, how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants?
We'll sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself, is that the new model? It's no secret (I think?) that the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany as to avoid nuclear proliferation, for its own interests.
But if nuclear becomes required, and we are decades away from nuclear fusion...? what is the solution here? I'm genuinely curious.
> how can the US tell people that they shouldn't get nuclear power plants?
Who is doing this? Last I checked, America has been trying to sell its AP1000 reactor.
> sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself
Every economy that can is developing AI.
> the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany
Source? German greens have a veritable track record of being idiots all on their own.
Whut? Do you have any source to back this up?
The US was exporting reactors all around the world. Most of those reactors are light water reactors using low enriched uranium fuel, its not that big of a nuclear weapons proliferation concern.
The typical reaction is I think supported by an efficient markets pov - in other words this is dumb, we know it’s dumb, but market failures make it look to the owners of capital that it’s a good investment
1. There is too much money in the world for the investments (Massive QE post 2008 and post covid). Hence people with money want returns on tokens that say 10 dollars in the front instead of say 5 dollars
2. The externalities of nuclear power are not properly priced in (see Chernobyl)
3. The price of tax compared to services received for wealthy is again out of whack and so any investment looks good because the whole chain is not paying enough tax
All in all, I believe in efficient markets and price mechanisms - I just also believe people with power and influence bend the markets to their own needs and guess what they stop being efficient - hence the need for strong governments (not strongman governments)
What about the positive externalities of nuclear power? It’s unfair to only complain about negative externalities - any action whatsoever always has a negative side-effect which can be used as a cynical excuse to block it.
Downthread I go on (much) longer, but honestly I see the maths as simple
1. We want to generate electricity with minimal carbon output. 2. Nuclear is part of this equation (along with solar, wind and tidal. Maybe one day fusion) 3. Nuclear has large capital upfront, a maintenance cost that requires us to always be on the A game, and the cost of catastrophic failure is fucking huge. 4. The other options have downsides of course, but their ongoing maintenance is basically lower because the catastrophe cost is much much much lower. 5. It’s really hard to quantify things like “major urban area made uninhabitable”, because it has almost never happened. But it can and it will if we keep chucking risk around like this.
6. The way to stop this, no the way to align investment, is to correct price externalities - positive and negative.
If we want to re- start places like Indian Point (a relative well Managed successful nuclear plant whose history reads like a series of disasters) then we ask what if Indian point failed like Fukushima.
That’s Westchester, and most of Manhattan that suddenly looks like a disaster movie. No Fukushima was not actually as deadly as feared (1 person kinda), but the evacuation and knock on effects. Try that on the Hudson and see what the cost of evacuating New York is - I mean, shipping, finance everything.
Honestly I struggle to see what’s crazy anymore.
How about every bond raised to fund a nuclear plant has a 100 year lien attached that no payments can be made till a century of safe operation and closure has occurred.
If the financials make sense after that I will take another look.
Based on other threads here, it doesn't seem like there is universal consensus that this is dumb.
That’s ok. They can be wrong :-)
Nuclear power has almost unlimited downsides and fairly limited upsides.
It’s at least as expensive (and mostly more) to maintain a nuclear power station As any other form of (non-carbon) power generation - and the costs of catastrophic failure and orders of magnitude higher.
This is just back of the envelope maths. Cost to maintain a power station of X GW for 100 years is X, cost to maintain solar panels of X GW for 100 years is Y. Cost of total catastrophic failure in fifty years of solar panels because the country fell apart is small y. Cost of total catastrophic failure of fission reactor is huge great X.
The simplest analysis just comes up with huge downsides.
Look I take the train past Battersea powerstation most days. It was built 100 years ago at the height (?) of the British Empire. It became disused as Britain fell into bankruptcy in the 70s and was left to fester for decades before people realised a vast shopping centre in the middle of London was quite nice.
If it was nuclear it would still be sealed off, any slacking of maintenance, any cost saving too far, would fuck up the world’s greatest city .
And if you think the worlds most powerful and richest country could always afford the very best maintenance - let me introduce you to political decision making in the 1960s, industrial policy in the 1970s and human beings who tend to hope as a strategy.
It’s not hard to pretend the obvious won’t happen, and if you take the risk sometimes you will be right. And the cautious man will look silly.
But in the end Warren Buffet looks more sensible than Dick Fuld.
And even Warren is aware he pays far less tax relative to his maid. But it’s upto us to fix that just as it’s upto us to not make bad investment choices as a society that we will pay costly annual fees for centuries to come.