Thanks for posting this good collection of links. HN has as hard-on for SMRs and as a first-order approximation that means they're wrong, but it's good to have something more than vibes backing it up.
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I got a lot of them from very pro-nuclear guys too, but ones who can count
I am 100% in support of deploying nukes to Google and Amazon
You need to deploy them around the same time else contingency plans have it that everything just boots back up in another region, at least Google. us-east-1 otoh...
I don't claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I've seen, smaller reactors don't seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant's footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.
If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I'm interested.
The hypothetical benefit is that prefabricated parts are a lot less dependent on the site. This will make the reactor cheaper to build.
There's also a perception sleight of hand - "modular" doesn't mean the reactor is a module you ship in on a big truck, put some uranium in and away you go. You're building a power station in a fixed location.
Also you still need a shitload of water.
square-cube law is in full force there
one argument in favour of SMRs i've seen is that while less efficient than regular sized reactors, these are cheaper per unit (but not for MW) so some of them can be built earlier than bigger reactors. which doesn't matter because these things don't exist
If these nuclear plants manage to come to fruition, it'll be the sole miniscule silver lining of the bubble. Considering its AI, though, I expect they'll probably suffer some kind of horrific Chernobyl-grade accident which kills nuclear power for good, because we can't have nice things when there's AI involved.
even if you're ardently pro-nuclear, SMRs are just a failure purely on the economics and always have been. And that's before wind/solar/battery made them just obsolete. So SMRs are the perfect tech when you don't want to do anything useful.
BRB making a video for a cold fusion based kickstarter. I smell money
Remember to say it's optimized for net zero datacenter operations
how come all these botfans talking points are just repackaged cryptobros talking points
it keeps happening
you'd almost think they were literally the same fucking guys
coincidence?? yeah probably
just one more SMR bro
BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
Well acthtually we prefer to be called fission/fusion nerds
"greenwashing is cheaper than action" indeed. (edit2) On that note, storytime about the clownshow that is Dutch politics. So our radical right wing government is pro nuclear power, of course, and they want to build more powerplants. So what are they planning on doing? They are going to start a study on which locations are best. Which is maddening, as these studies have already been done before (so it prob is just an attempt to hopefully have the study finish when it isn't them in power anymore so they are not at risk of starting an too expensive megaproject). But it gets worse, the absolute clowns of our farmers party just went 'fuck the studies' and they just pointed at a province where there are a lot of farmers and went 'we will put a powerplant there'. And this is how they discovered nuclear powerplants need running water and they picked one of the areas without a major river. ('im ignoring the clownshow re 'the immigration crisis' (not a crisis) as this post is already too long, and there is a big risk of honk overdose if I go into that).
Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher ("utredning") who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.
It's gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.
[1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair
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I swear they looked at Bill Gates failing to launch SMRs and thought: "he's a smart guy"
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