At last, we'll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don't kill everyone!
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Crazy how quickly we've gone from "Nuclear is a dead technology, it can't work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y'all have to use fossil fuels instead" to "We're building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing".
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
Well, once the AI hype calms down and people realize the current approach won't lead to actual intelligence or "The Singularity", there may be quite some nuclear plants left over. That or they will be used to mine shitcoins.
One of the things with AI is that it's a largely constant load factor. Nuclear is really good for that.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts. SMRs haven't even been proven in practice yet, and this is the first good news they've had in a while. Restarting Three Mile Island isn't expected to work before 2028. The hype bubble could easily burst in the next year, and even if it doesn't, keeping it going to 2028 is highly unlikely.
So we'll probably have some new nuclear around that isn't going into AI, because those datacenters will be dead when the hype passes. Might as well use them, I guess.
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I still think it's too expensive, and this contract doesn't change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said "if you get it working, we'll buy power from you." That isn't itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.
The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I'm aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it's the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what's the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
Nuclear should only be done by the state. Any commercial company doing nuclear HAS TO CARE FOR THE WASTE. It has to be in the calculation, but no on ecan guarantee 10000 years of anything. Same with fossils... execute the fossil fuel industry. They destroyed so much, they don't deserve to earn a single cent.
That funky startup is producing waste. Imagine a startup selling Asbestos as the new hot shit in 2024.
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Tax them enough that they don't have the cash to just up and build their own personal-use nuclear powered, nation spanning infrastructure.
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Use those taxes to build a nation spanning nuclear infrastructure that everyone can use.
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I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn't the cleanest either.
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Cyberpunk dystopias weren't supposed to be guidelines dammit
The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn't mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they'll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman's knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can't melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
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So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn't replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that...cool
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