[HN Gopher] Google to back three new nuclear projects
___________________________________________________________________
Google to back three new nuclear projects
Author : aburan28
Score : 260 points
Date : 2025-05-08 13:36 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.esgtoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.esgtoday.com)
| perihelions wrote:
| Here's a better article:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...
|
| > _" Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its
| public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations--
| aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project
| development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet
| our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing
| benefit."_
|
| > _" The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a
| facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built
| any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-
| agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer,"
| signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."_
|
| > _" This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO
| and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO,
| COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."_
| ertgbnm wrote:
| > "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and
| maximizing benefit."
|
| Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases
| like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing
| risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
| IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's
| basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the
| sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a
| sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase
| means.
| conception wrote:
| Corporate equivalent of using a larger font and/or double
| spacing your term papers.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing
| benefit is not a need of most customers?
|
| I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk
| mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not
| every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a
| primary objective.
|
| The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective.
| Who has time for that?
| libraryatnight wrote:
| "We will appear to meet standards while extracting maximum
| profit"
| dkarl wrote:
| > Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing
| benefit is not a need of most customers?
|
| Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing
| risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our
| customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at
| least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when
| they've done the research."
|
| It's better that they say these things than that they don't
| say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but
| that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
| rdtsc wrote:
| >> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and
| maximizing benefit." > I love seeing example of phrases like
| this out in the wild
|
| I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is
| the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was
| just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing
| benefit".
| ethbr1 wrote:
| _' We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET
| feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs
| while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'_
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing
| benefit is not a need of most customers?_
|
| It's not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example,
| the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they're working
| for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if
| corporate speakified.
| agos wrote:
| this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they
| desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember
| when they announced contact lenses to help people with
| diabetes?
|
| Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's
| going around these days?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| You mean White Washing? How dare to think Google would think
| of such a thing. They're not evil after-all.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| > Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people
| with diabetes?
|
| For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web
| .archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...
|
| > Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated
| that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements
| of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose
| concentrations to support the requirements of a medical
| device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of
| obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-
| eye environment. For example, we found that interference from
| biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining
| accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of
| glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies
| have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state
| conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
| foota wrote:
| It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler
| announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup
| come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very
| little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and
| the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously
| pulls it off, so they might as well.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| You don't think Google is interested in getting more energy
| for less money?
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where
| charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few
| decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely
| fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their
| fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the
| ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through
| to construction completion so that nobody cared about the
| deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of
| estimates.
|
| The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously
| starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to
| questions or attempting to follow through.
|
| South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success
| building, and even they send people to jail for construction
| fraud.
|
| There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to
| build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after
| billions have been sunk and misallocated.
| cyberax wrote:
| > South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had
| success building, and even they send people to jail for
| construction fraud.
|
| That's why :)
|
| Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors.
| Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting
| shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory
| body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing,
| nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.
|
| But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and
| overbearing they are.
|
| "Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better
| get the same one from the same manufacturer"
|
| "They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery
| the fits perfectly, same specs"
|
| "Nope, not certified with that system. You can start
| recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
|
| "...."
|
| There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take
| responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
| nolist_policy wrote:
| Do you have a source?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I work for a company that provides electronics that end
| up in nuclear reactors. We don't do batteries, the story
| is just an example of the kind of headache it is.
| varjag wrote:
| Maybe it's true for the actual reactor control system I
| dunno. Our industrial phones ended up at a nuclear plant
| once (that we know of) and we only learned about it
| because the engineer called us for firmware reset
| procedure. The product doesn't have any nuclear energy
| certifications (although it is tested for rail and
| maritime use).
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where
| charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past
| few decades.
|
| I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in
| particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute
| golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again
| except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of
| information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever
| reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to
| _pretending_ it 's the 1980's.
| legulere wrote:
| It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate
| the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor.
| The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today:
| https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
| Animats wrote:
| Oh, it's the NuScale guy again.
|
| NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor
| at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere
| for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build
| it.
|
| The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is
| that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong,
| containment vessel because ... reasons."
|
| There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear
| reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety
| if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
|
| History:
|
| - Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major
| disaster.
|
| - Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large
| disaster.
|
| - Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel,
| plant lost but no disaster.
|
| Alternative reactor history:
|
| - Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to
| helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant
| converted to natural gas.
|
| - AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam,
| had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
|
| - Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
|
| - Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant
| that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
|
| Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve
| plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a
| century or so without maintenance. That's possible with
| distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried
| has not worked well.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
|
| [3]
| https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
| concordDance wrote:
| > Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large
| disaster.
|
| Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the
| scale of global power production.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You wouldn't call Fukushima a large disaster?
|
| The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.
| jenadine wrote:
| According to
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan ,
| Japan had about 300 TWh of nuclear for a year at the time
| of the accident. So $180 billion amount to $0.6/kWh over
| a year if I'm not mistaken. Not cheap. But if you spread
| over a few decades then that's reasonable.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" That's possible with distilled water as the working
| fluid_"
|
| Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures,
| isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-
| chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky
| topic.
|
| Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types
| of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water
| pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't
| make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the
| correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this
| key ingredient from foreign countries-- currently,
| _exclusively_ , China and Russia. Our top geopolitical
| adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if
| they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of
| "water is corrosive".
|
| True story. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Where did you see that the containment at Fukushima was too
| small? I thought that most of the release was done because
| there was not enough storage of contaminated water.
| Animats wrote:
| Fukishima containment.[1] The top of the containment vessel
| is shown in yellow, just above the red cylinder containing
| the reactor. The containment vessel was a heavy shell, but
| not much larger than the reactor. It had to contain any
| steam overpressure resulting from an accident, and didn't
| have enough volume that the steam pressure would decrease,
| and maybe condense. The surrounding building wasn't a
| pressure vessel and couldn't contain anything. Building
| panels blew out, leaving visible holes in the walls.
|
| Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete
| and steel building around the reactor and support equipment
| is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed,
| radioactive steam escaped into the large containment
| vessel, where it was contained.
|
| [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-
| library/appendices/fuk...
|
| [2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-
| island-...
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone
| in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along
| the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been
| quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut
| down the power factors after they discovered that the entire
| Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the
| calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from
| another, smaller fault called the positas fault.
|
| Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.
| Animats wrote:
| The long de-fueled reactor vessel was removed just last
| year.[1] Sent to Texas as a final resting place. The
| containment dome was still in place then. The next step is
| to restore the Vallecitos complex to "conditions suitable
| for productive reuse for other commercial or industrial
| purposes."[2]
|
| So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small
| nuclear power reactor.
|
| [1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-
| react...
|
| [2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-
| vallec...
| melling wrote:
| Do the "no nuclear, renewables are the future" people have any
| comments?
|
| We burned a few decades saying solar and wind are the solution.
| This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse
| emissions.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best method
| for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushed
| solar & wind as a distraction.
|
| Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method
| for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes
| nuclear as a distraction.
| adventured wrote:
| Replacement isn't remotely close to good enough. We need a
| massive increase in the supply of energy. Nuclear is the only
| viable path for that. We can do more than one thing at a
| time, we have the resources.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Yes, we need a massive increase in the supply of energy.
| Solar is the only way we're going to get it. We're adding
| solar at a 1TW / year rate. We're adding nuclear at a rate
| of ~30 GW / year.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| So why is Microsoft spending billions to restart three
| mile island rather than just installing some solar
| panels?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Because with IRA massively lowering the costs restarting
| a plant might actually be feasible.
|
| The problem is that new built nuclear power costs tens of
| billions.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'm honestly baffled by the persistent irrationality of
| nuclear supporters.
|
| This is a _solved problem._ The investment required to
| build grid storage for renewables, the TCO, the
| scalability, the capacity, and the build time, are all
| objectively better than nuclear.
|
| So what's the real story? What is this obsession with an
| outdated last-century technology really about?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| People think it is cool. Spicy rocks make heat.
|
| Which was followed by climate change denying
| conservatives who found their position untenable
| embracing nuclear power being able to create a culture
| war issue in debates about climate change.
|
| All in the name of preventing the disruption of their
| fossil assets by stymying renewables.
|
| Peter Dutton in Australia which now lost is the perfect
| example of this with his "coal to nuclear" plan leading
| to massively increased emissions for decades to come.
| mmooss wrote:
| Any large group is composed of different motives; here
| are a couple of possible ones:
|
| - Renewables are not, or not nearly as much, big profits
| for big business. They don't require the capital
| investment of fossil fuels or nuclear, and therefore they
| don't have the large moats of those businesses.
|
| - Anti-liberalism (or reactionaryism): Destroying
| liberalism is an openly stated goal for which many will
| sacrifice singificant wealth and cause significant harm.
| Nuclear is counter to anti-nuclear liberal campaigners of
| yesteryear (I think conservatives often have little idea
| of changes since the Cold War era; they still talk about
| 'Communists', etc.)
| pjc50 wrote:
| State capacity is a real problem. Often struggling to do
| even one thing. There's many places where companies are
| ready to go on renewables but the grid approval isn't.
|
| People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley
| Point C is approaching a decade.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| This seems to be working backward from having decided that
| we must handout untold trillions to the comparatively
| insignificant nuclear industry.
|
| In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new
| built nuclear.
|
| Let's compare to renewables:
|
| - 600 GW solar PV added [1]
|
| - 117 GW wind power [2]
|
| - ~100 GW battery storage
|
| Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely
| enormous. We're talking a ~50x differences and it is only
| getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
|
| But somehow the only technology which is "scalable" is new
| built nuclear power.
|
| [1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-
| report-w...
|
| [2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-
| record...
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >20 years ago nuclear was the fastest, cheapest and best
| method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry
| pushed solar & wind as a distraction.
|
| The histories of pretty much every green party in the western
| world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Reminder that anti-nuclear activism started against nuclear
| weapons and nuclear dumping, and then after Chernobyl the
| realization that it was possible to mess up agriculture
| across a continent from the failure of a single plant.
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-36112372
|
| Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at
| sea.
|
| In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for
| electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after
| decades of subsidized development and incremental
| improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Anti-nuclear power activism started before Chernobyl, see
| New Zealand banning nuclear powered ships at their ports
| in 1984 for one of many examples.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| In the United States, anti-nuclear activism predates both
| Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamshell_Alliance and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abalone_Alliance for two
| examples.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You ever notice how "green parties" are somehow so
| incredibly effective against nuclear and not effective
| against fossil fuels?
|
| Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the
| activism holding nuclear back.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Gas and oil based power generation is far simpler than
| nuclear. Regulatory barriers against nuclear power are
| far more detrimental to nuclear as a result because the
| issues compound.
| k_g_b_ wrote:
| Correct, it basically never was.
|
| E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits: -
| nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same
| companies - why would they fund activists to campaign
| against their own assets? - coal mining and plant
| employees were (around the first exit) part of a
| significant worker voter population, especially for the
| social democrats but to a lesser degree for the
| conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily
| dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians
| regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-
| dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the
| Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and
| discussions around that only seriously started after the
| second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit. -
| gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from
| Russia, from different Russian state companies - why
| would they cut into each other's business by funding
| activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them
| in any and all ways. - the second nuclear exit was a
| political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after
| Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear
| should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the
| previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming
| solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables
| activists. Just recently the reverse happened as part of
| conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as
| a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-
| dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't
| important enough for them to include in the government
| coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main
| conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree
| that nuclear is economically dead.
|
| The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead
| when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built
| plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build
| them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables
| transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and
| because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due
| to the conservatives it is much higher today than it
| needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese
| manufacturers, too.
|
| At most activists were somewhat involved in voter
| sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly
| crucial versus the actual economic and political
| realities.
| spookie wrote:
| Green Parties are such a farce for the most part. They
| serve other purposes, not aligned with what you really want
| or defend ;)
| mmooss wrote:
| Right-wing parties and the center-left have been highly
| effective allies in getting people to demonize and
| ridicule the progressive left.
|
| The reason is, I think, that the progressives have
| rationally better policies - ones that become mainstream
| decades later, including much of what is mainstream now -
| so by demonizing the progressives the center and right
| prevent people from actually considering the policies.
| Duwensatzaj wrote:
| Coercive eugenics used to be a progressive platform.
|
| More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried and
| the results are pretty clear they lead to increased
| crime.
|
| Consider perhaps the progressive policies have been
| considered and rejected for good reasons.
| mmooss wrote:
| > More recently progressive prosecutors have been tried
| and the results are pretty clear they lead to increased
| crime.
|
| Crime increases were across the country, regardless of
| the politics of the prosecutor. They are believed to be
| tied to the pandemic. In places where progressive DAs
| remain, crime has subsequently decreased to historic lows
| - just like the rest of the country.
| croes wrote:
| Nuclear energy was never cheap, it was always heavily
| subsidized. Just ask Joe Kaeser the former CEO of Siemens.
|
| He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable
| sebastialonso wrote:
| Never understood the "I'm solar" or "I'm nuclear" crowd. The
| issue is an engineering problem, not a baseball match.
|
| As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of
| available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-
| tuning weaknesses with strengths.
|
| Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team
| issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Lets face it deploying nuclear around the world will add
| other mayor headaches like nuclear profileration.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Let's ask people what the correct number of nuclear plants
| that should be built to decarbonize Iran is.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's happening anyway.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| What nuclear proliferation?
|
| How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30
|
| How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9
|
| What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states
| providing, exactly?
|
| How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear
| capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical
| anxieties about an unrealised future.
| mmooss wrote:
| > hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.
|
| Preventing nuclear war is just 'hypothetical anxieties'?
| We should wait for a war to happen and then do something?
| That's not persuasive.
| looofooo0 wrote:
| Ok, how many are democracies of those 21 without nukes or
| have or had a defense alliance with a country with nukes?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The nuclear boosters are particularly odd. I can engage in
| solar boosterism with my own money: I have 3.7kW on my house.
| I'm not going to have a backyard reactor, this isn't the
| Jetsons.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Roof top solar doesn't work in apartments, and it also
| doesn't work for renters.
|
| Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to
| optimise heir future cash flow.
|
| I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won't
| freeze in the dark.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Doesn't work how?
|
| If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in
| residence.
|
| If not producing enough power then that's a people's
| problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and
| for not enough resources on building efficiency.
|
| Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil
| organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for
| such technology to evolve.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Because apartments don't have roof tops.
|
| And why would a landlord sink $10,000+ in to a property
| for no return.
|
| Roof top solar only works for the user who has the roof
| top solar.
|
| For everyone else it makes electricity more expensive.
|
| Happy to be proven wrong. Show me a majority of places
| with high roof top solar penetration where per kWh
| electricity rates have _fallen_.
|
| And _who cares_ about carbon emissions, China and India
| have that covered - I don't need to worry about producing
| more or less CO2 emissions because it won't make any
| difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic
| climate change.
| mmooss wrote:
| That's an interesting point, but a much less costly
| option is to change policies to incentivize landlords,
| not build multi-billion dollar nuclear plants.
|
| > And who cares about carbon emissions, China and India
| have that covered - I don't need to worry about producing
| more or less CO2 emissions because it won't make any
| difference whether or not I believe in catastrophic
| climate change.
|
| That doesn't change the US's contribution, the ability of
| the US to form successful international agreements, and
| the influence of the US pulling its weight as a much
| wealthier country than China or India.
|
| Blaming your neighbor for your bad behavior - I sell
| drugs off my porch because my neighbor does - doesn't
| make you less criminal. Also unacceptable, from moral and
| practical perspectives, is saying 'there's nothing I can
| do'. It's time we stop letting that pass.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Roof top solar doesn't work in apartments, and it also
| doesn't work for renters.
|
| So it doesn't go on the roof.
|
| Doesn't mean you can't get PV, in an apartment, as a
| renter:
|
| https://www.kaufland.de/product/502008893/
|
| These are specifically intended for apartments, and
| Germany has a low home ownership rate.
|
| It may only be 800W, but it's also only EUR239, not
| $10,000 like you suggest in the other reply.
| opo wrote:
| In most places home rooftop solar systems are heavily
| subsidized by everyone else. Also, in almost all cases, the
| home installation doesn't have enough battery power to
| actually last through inclement weather and so is free
| riding on the reliability provided by the grid, putting
| more costs on the less well off. The whole thing is sort of
| a reverse Robin Hood scheme. One might argue that we should
| be subsidizing solar energy, but then the subsidies should
| go to utility grade solar. Money is limited and is fungible
| - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much,
| much further than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop
| residential solar.
|
| As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar
| photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and
| nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs
| of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for
| federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come
| with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per
| megawatt-hour.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-
| leveliz...
| melling wrote:
| Does the engineering problem have any time constraints? I
| suppose my sense of urgency comes from stated climate goals.
|
| An extra 50 years to solve the problem changes everything.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities. The
| technology is mature and marching up the exponential portion of
| the adoption S-curve. Nuclear isn't. This isn't even a value
| judgement: it's just a statement on the incredible advantages
| of a technology that can be produced in factories, vs one that
| currently can't.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Solar and wind are being deployed in enormous quantities.
|
| Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore,
| especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and
| efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known
| geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern
| is intermittence.
|
| Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable
| other than energy output is most useful in order to compare
| energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to
| intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from
| both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a
| problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent
| sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload
| source".
|
| Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm
| not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of
| education and communication.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'll consider apologizing when one of the Google plants comes
| on line, whenever that is.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| This seems to be revisionist history trying to position nuclear
| power as some underdog?!?!?
|
| We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20
| years ago.
|
| Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville
| 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and
| countless in the US.
|
| Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time
| nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.
|
| Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh.
| Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville
| 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years
| late on a 5 year construction schedule.
|
| The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage)
| deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
| melling wrote:
| Remember that time France went from 7% to 70% nuclear energy?
|
| https://youtu.be/1WNjyxeBsWc?si=kVa2qf0uBeFrAyYB
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Yes? That was half a century ago. The equivalent choice in
| 2025 is renewables with storage.
|
| Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as
| evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13
| years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
|
| Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually
| being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.
|
| Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and
| the first new reactor online by 2038.
|
| Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point
| reducing the area under the curve.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| EPR was so unbuildable that it could have been designed
| by Amory Lovins to eliminate nuclear power.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| It is not like it is going better for the AP1000 or
| NuScale. Including financing for the APR1400 bid in
| Czechia again leads to similar equivalent costs.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Many countries are rolling out TWhs per capita of renewable
| generation faster than France did at its peak of nuclear
| rollout.
|
| It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern
| renewables.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Many of us who care about the environment have hated the
| widely-held anti-nuclear stances. It's a very clean source of
| energy. Renewables ended up being the focus because they had to
| be. There was no chance of pushing nuclear forward when the
| general sentiment was that we needed to regress on nuclear.
| mmooss wrote:
| > This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse
| emissions.
|
| What set us back was and is resistance to action on climate
| change, led by fossil fuel corporations and US conservatives,
| which has continued for decades. It's a fundamental policy of
| the Republican Party. Trump is already taking drastic action in
| that regard; it was one of his higher priorities. To try to
| blame someone else is absurd, and probably a talking point from
| their playbook.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Personally I'm skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier
| it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure,
| intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by
| being cleverer).
|
| But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up
| long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big
| tech companies like Google.
|
| > [...] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions
| across its operations and value chain, [...]
|
| Man, I remember when 2030 seemed like the future. But now it
| seems downright aggressive. Good luck Google.
| melling wrote:
| US Net Zero is 2050. With 25 years remaining, I think shooting
| for 2030 seems reasonable.
|
| We've just about hit peak coal.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
| titzer wrote:
| > The world's coal use is expected to reach a fresh high of
| 8.7bn tonnes this year, and remain at near-record levels for
| years as a result of a global gas crisis triggered by
| Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
|
| Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".
| rcpt wrote:
| Renewables are only easy if you ignore regulations. For
| whatever stupid reason local busybodies lose their shit about
| windmills regularly and they are frustratingly hard to ignore.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| Doesn't revenue sharing often turn those frowns upside down?
| More inclusive business models might help?
| tough wrote:
| Usually what happens is they buy out one local government,
| pay them, and usually fuck up the neighbors as the local
| government being paid not only has the incentive of money
| but can say put that hazardous facility just at the
| circumvention to their neighboring places, which get 0.
| ryathal wrote:
| For the farmer that owns the land the windmill got built on
| it's great. The handful of houses in the area get fuck all
| though and actually have to deal with the externalities.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Nuclear has an _even worse_ local credibility problem, but I
| suppose you need fewer plants.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| Google can't have blackouts. So helps to have some nuclear in
| the energy mix.
| croes wrote:
| France has nuclear and had a blackout.
| ttfkam wrote:
| The last time France had a blackout on the scale of Spain
| and Portugal was 1978. France has been and remains one of
| the top electricity exporters for Western Europe.
|
| Because of nuclear.
|
| By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry
| in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import
| electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil
| fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.
|
| Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia?
| France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion
| engines from their largest city by 2030? France.
|
| Because of nuclear.
| croes wrote:
| Germany is a net importer since 2023, what was also 2023
| in France?
|
| >2023 when several reactors were switched off for longer
| unexpected maintenance periods.
|
| Who exploited Niger for four decades for its Uranium?
|
| France
|
| https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-
| decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...
|
| Who is the main buyer in the EU of Russian Uranium?
|
| France
|
| https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-
| us-re...
|
| If they aren't dependent on Russian fossile fuels why do
| they still buy from Russia?
|
| https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250414-greenpeace-report-
| reve...
| wewxjfq wrote:
| Germany does not receive Russian pipeline gas and has
| banned Russian LNG from its ports. It receives a tiny
| share of Russian gas from Dutch and Belgian ports, but to
| my knowledge Germany has no control over this. France on
| the other hand is the top destination for Russian LNG in
| the EU, sharing the lead only with countries that refuse
| to support Ukraine.
|
| Germany became a net importer of electricity in 2023, but
| it took the vast majority of its nuclear power plants
| offline long before that, when Germany still was a net
| exporter of electricity. Even in 2022, during the gas
| crisis with barely any nuclear power left, Germany net
| exported records amounts of electricity to other European
| countries, with France at the top of the receiving end
| because half of their nuclear reactor fleet was offline.
|
| Lastly, Germany has one of the most stable grids in the
| world, while France does issue blackout warnings when
| demand peaks.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| You do know that the French grid would crash during every
| cold spell without 30 GW of fossil fueled power
| production? With the majority coming from their
| neighbors, reversing said flow?
|
| What they have done is outsourced the management of their
| grid to their neighbors fossil fuel power plants, and
| then only when they truly have to they reduce the output
| of their nuclear power.
|
| Stick two French next to each other and they would in
| short order crash.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Misleading I'd say
|
| > Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain
| were also reporting being hit by the blackout.
|
| https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-
| portugal...
| croes wrote:
| My point is blackouts habe more to do with net stability
| then with the power source.
|
| A sudden rise in demand would have the same effect
| because nuclear power plants can't react that quickly.
| blitzar wrote:
| Why not?
|
| At this point optimising their electricity cost by load
| balancing their compute to where electricity is cheap, free
| or negative on a minute by minute basis would be a sizeable
| cost saving. Savings that would possibly offset the hardware
| overprovisioning that they would need.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, I would say of the organizations in the world that
| care about power outages, Google would rank among those
| most prepared to deal with them and the least flustered
| when they happen. If it has been too long between power
| outages Google will cause one intentionally, as an
| exercise.
| preisschild wrote:
| > given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable
| capacity
|
| The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more
| you add, because you will have too much when the weather is
| optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Skill issue, there's no such thing as too much energy, we
| need to get better at steering the stuff.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in
| 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30%
| of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer
| of insanity.
|
| Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then
| building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to
| enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new
| reactors for 10 days.
|
| That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build
| western nuclear power is.
|
| [1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-
| storag...
|
| [2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
|
| [3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-
| energy-an...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days
| enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out
| diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal
| variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a
| large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of
| storage. There is also this problem
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
|
| which means the storage requirements will be a bit more
| than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people
| to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts
| of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will
| people tolerate a year?"
|
| If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization
| efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical"
| manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid
| might become _less_ tolerant of variation rather than more.
| Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and
| they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting
| up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes
| dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance,
| there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that
| consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup
| you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and
| dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There
| are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but
| you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and
| cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable
| when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all
| sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it
| doing various operations opening up the possibility of
| human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In
| particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from
| syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin
| with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory
| 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-
| starter to begin with [1]
|
| So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if
| we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the
| same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more
| than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling
| free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a
| "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of
| "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years
| for those factories to figure out how to build the parts
| and sometimes when they got those parts they were built
| wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is
| because they can, politically, raise people's electric
| bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in
| the long term. The main build they are doing now is
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
|
| which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were
| building back when the French were building large numbers
| of reactors reliably.
|
| [1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably
| line up with ground transportation around some single
| entity fuel like methane or DME
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just
| like we've done for the past decades with the previous
| "base load and peaking" paradigm.
|
| Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total
| energy supply.
|
| When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas
| turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green
| hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting
| food waste. If they are still needed.
|
| Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on
| before attempting to solve a future issue today.
|
| Yes we already have a solution for all those industries
| which require stable power: buy an electricity future.
|
| But somehow we need to treat the grid differently and
| handout untold trillions to the nuclear industry.
|
| We have research on when we achieve learning effects.
|
| > If you look at the data specifically you're going to
| find learning but for that there's a several
| requirements:
|
| > - It has to be the same site
|
| > - It has to be the same constructor
|
| > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one
| construction to the next
|
| > - It has to be constant labor laws
|
| > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
|
| > When you add these five you only get like four or five
| examples in the world.
|
| From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power
| industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still
| sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists
| today.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k
|
| China is not succeeding? They have been averaging 4-5
| construction starts per year since 2020 which tracks to a
| 2-3% nuclear power in their electricity mix.
|
| From their 2011 target of building 300 GW nuclear power
| in the next 10-20 years they have so far managed to
| complete 46 GW. But surely those final 254 GW will show
| up before 2031.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| This reminded me of how France had to limit nuclear outputs
| because of the heatwave. New designs can probably mitigate
| the risk but it will inevitably add to the operational and
| construction costs.
|
| [1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-
| threa...
| dmm wrote:
| > intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it
| by being cleverer
|
| Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with
| it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly
| populated regions have two week periods with almost complete
| cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission
| are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of
| these solutions are rarely included.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
|
| Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized
| cost reports, like from the NREL.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Not in any realistic sense. This report
|
| https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcos
| t...
|
| just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of
| storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is
| certainly not going to get you through the night.
|
| So many things drive me nuts about that report and the
| discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people
| talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price
| for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel
| is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in
| upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is
| going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we
| deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like
| Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an
| electric space heater in late April or otherwise your
| chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population
| lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't
| get taken seriously.
|
| The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation
| (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar
| panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do
| you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute
| conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of
| weather.
|
| I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just
| smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal
| variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of
| blackout a year can people tolerate?")
|
| With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage
| capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against
| nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that
| you could do something useful with the extra power but it
| is easier said than done because "free" power from
| renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power
| lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have
| to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low
| enough that you're not going to worry about the economics
| of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical
| Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of
| the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from
| them.)
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| A case study for Denmark. Not even using the latest
| plummet in price of BESS.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626
| 192...
|
| Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in
| the 90s percent.
|
| Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX.
| Just like we've done for the past decades with the
| previous "base load and peaking" paradigm.
|
| Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the total
| energy supply.
|
| When it finally becomes the most pressing issue the gas
| turbines can trivially be fueled by green hydrogen, green
| hydrogen derivatives, biofuels or biogas from collecting
| food waste. If they are still needed.
|
| Lets wait and see what aviation and shipping settles on
| before attempting to solve a future issue today.
| ttfkam wrote:
| I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant
| and trivially easy to retrofit into existing
| infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are
| automatically considered infeasible by comparison.
|
| Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts
| hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere
| is... wait for it... nuclear power.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, hydrogen is clearly a much easier technology to make
| work than fast reactors. Why is this even a question? For
| example, fast reactors have the issue that in an
| accident, if fuel melts and rearranges, one can have
| potentially have a configuration that is prompt
| supercritical on fast neutrons. This is functionally an
| atomic bomb.
|
| Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is
| nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of
| today's global natural gas consumption goes to making
| hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia
| synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion
| people.
| ttfkam wrote:
| "Functionally an atomic bomb"?
|
| Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little
| about? Where did you get this nonsense?
|
| Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but
| causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen
| explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.
|
| Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get
| enough U-235 to clump together to do that without
| cancelling known basic laws of physics.
|
| To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear
| power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as
| 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to
| spontaneously explode.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The more detailed simulations have gotten the less bad a
| meltdown looks in a fast reactors. Usually some of the
| molten core flows away and no more critical mass. If it
| goes over critical there can be some energy release but
| over time it looks less and less and not a problem to
| contain.
|
| Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but
| the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the
| most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium.
| The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that
| dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the
| sodium. Either way they stay put and don't go into the
| environment.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem is you need to ensure it's not bad in any
| possible configuration from an accident. This is hard to
| do. Will the energy release at criticality drive the
| material into an even more critical configuration? Such
| "autocatalytic" systems were considered for bomb design,
| but weren't chosen because of the large amounts of
| plutonium needed. But a fast reactor might have the
| plutonium of hundreds of atomic bombs.
|
| Edward Teller famously warned about this is a nuclear
| industry trade publication in 1967.
|
| The only fast reactors I'd trust would be ones with fuel
| dissolved in molten salt; it's hard to see how that could
| become concentrated in an accident that doesn't boil the
| salt. But such reactors have their own problems, in
| particular exposure of reactor structures to intense fast
| neutron fluxes (not as bad as in fusion reactors, but
| worse than LWRs.)
| ttfkam wrote:
| Increasing the heat past a certain threshold reduces the
| nuclear reactivity. Read up on "passive safety".
|
| Teller may have warned about this in 1967, but nuclear
| technology hasn't been stagnant since 1967. Folks read
| his stuff and designed systems specifically to fail safe,
| not run away. Stop fear mongering based upon a 60-year-
| old supposition. Stop assuming everyone working in the
| nuclear industry is an idiot that hasn't thought about
| safety.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The main hang ups for fast reactors in the US are: (1)
| our regulators are less sanguine about occupational
| safety for plutonium workers then the French and Russians
| (carcinogenic Pu nanoparticles --- the high energy ball
| mill can make sand deadly, just think what it can do for
| Pu) and (2) fear of nuclear proliferation if the
| "plutonium economy" expands. There is also (3) the
| economics will never be attractive with a steam turbine
| and all the heat exchangers that entails, but a power set
| like
|
| https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-
| genera...
|
| could fit in the employee break room of the turbine house
| of an LWR and could make it competitive. It's a big if
| though.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive
| amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the
| atmosphere is... wait for it... nuclear power.
|
| No, that isn't the easiest way.
|
| The easiest -- not best, easiest -- way to produce
| massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical
| power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.
|
| If you want the _cheapest_ , well, in most cases PV is
| the cheapest source of electricity -- there's variance,
| sometimes it's wind.
|
| Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of
| prices as PV _plus batteries_. And when you 're using the
| electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the
| storage system, batteries are redundant.
| ttfkam wrote:
| Since PV _needs_ batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve
| and all that), it 's perfectly reasonable to have both.
|
| And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make
| batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You
| are talking about using electricity to split water
| molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and
| store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the
| losses associated with converting back to electricity in
| a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through
| combustion.
|
| A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of
| ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only
| get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in
| gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
|
| Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like
| hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of
| security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
|
| Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to
| even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and
| logistics apparatus around it.
|
| I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of
| decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty
| theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length
| of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy
| density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad
| bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more
| toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Since PV needs batteries to be grid-useful (duck curve
| and all that), it's perfectly reasonable to have both.
|
| Needs _storage_ *, what that storage is depends on other
| factors.
|
| (* there's a "well technically" for just a grid, in that
| China makes enough aluminium they could build an actually
| useful global power grid with negligible resistance, but
| it doesn't matter in practice)
|
| As it happens, I agree with your final paragraph -- hard
| to store for any length of time, comparatively low
| combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc.
|
| I favour batteries for that because battery cars beat
| hydrogen cars, and the storage requirements for a power
| grid are smaller than the requirements for transport, so
| we can just use the big (and expanding) pile of existing
| factories to do this.
|
| But hydrogen has other uses than power, and where it's an
| emergency extra storage system you don't necessarily need
| a huge efficiency. That said, because one of the main
| other uses of hydrogen is to make ammonia, I expect
| emergency backup power to be something which burns
| ammonia rather than hydrogen gas -- not only is it much
| more stable and much easier to store, it's something
| you'd be stockpiling anyway because fertiliser isn't
| applied all year around anyway.
|
| But you _could_ do hydrogen, if you wanted. And some
| people probably will, because of this sort of thing.
|
| > A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of
| ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only
| get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in
| gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
|
| This is completely irrelevant for countries that aren't
| tiny islands or independent cities.
|
| Even then, and even with lower 20% efficient cells, and
| also adding in the capacity factor of 10% that's slightly
| worse than the current global average, Vatican City has
| the capacity for 11.1 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha
| .com/input?i=0.5km%5E2+*+1kW%2Fm%5E2...
|
| > Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight.
|
| That's what the storage is _for_
|
| > Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels.
|
| Panels are as strong as you want them to be for the
| weather you get locally. If you need bullet-proof (FSVO),
| you can put them behind a bullet-proof screen.
|
| > Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to
| cripple the grid.
|
| The grid isn't the source; if you want to cripple a grid,
| doesn't matter if it's nuclear, PV, coal, or hamster
| wheels.
|
| > Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious
| to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and
| logistics apparatus around it.
|
| Really isn't 24/7, it's 70-80%: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/File:Worldwide_Nuclear_Power_C...
| bee_rider wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is mostly bullshit I think, but for
| whatever reason people keep buying it. That could be a
| nice endlessly-dispatchable economically rewarded
| (despite all reason) workload.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| That report you say has 1 hour of storage has four hours
| of battery in all the systems it compares.
|
| It's a bit of a weird measure anyway, since it's just the
| ratio of storage to inverter, so it's the time it could
| run for when working flat out.
|
| For your wider point, if anyone, anywhere was really
| contemplating a near full nuclear grid they'd have the
| exact same issues. Do you overbuild and curtail? Export?
| Store in batteries? The problems and solutions are
| incredibly similar now batteries have basically solved
| the daily variation for solar.
|
| The fact that no one is even bothering to think that far
| ahead for nuclear is a recognition of how totally out of
| the race it is.
| titzer wrote:
| Solar can still generate up to 25% of their peak power with
| full cloud cover.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| The issue is renewables are not a complete solution no
| matter how good it feelz
| titzer wrote:
| I was just injecting facts into the discussion without
| taking a side. I know that's confusing behavior.
| linhns wrote:
| Yes, and people have been as clever as possible dealing with
| this issue. There is just no good way to solve it.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| You're skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent
| safety record, the only power generation that has a completely
| closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don't
| have.
|
| If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our
| electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it
| improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have
| mobile / home internet planes.
|
| You'd just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you
| can consume.
|
| But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in
| Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being
| aware of your energy consumption.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| You do know that nuclear power has experienced negative
| learning by doing throughout its entire life?
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014.
| ..
|
| You don't get "free electricity" with absolutely massive
| handouts to the nuclear industry.
|
| Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the "too
| cheap to meter" promise.
| dporter wrote:
| Renewable power is cheap because it also receives massive
| government handouts in the form of tax credits.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Still built at absolutely massive scale around the world
| without subsidies. With many countries phasing out their
| renewable subsidies because they aren't needed anymore.
|
| Unsubsidized solar and storage is today in much of the
| world cheaper than coal and fossil gas.
|
| The renewable subsidies stil existing simply add fuel to
| the already raging fire that is renewable buildout.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| What storage? Where? At what price?
|
| Where are all these 14 day full load capable storage
| plants being built?
|
| I'm not saying they aren't, I am saying I don't see the
| data.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| We are at the point in the S-curve where storage goes
| from nowhere to everywhere in the blink of an eye.
|
| Here BESS for $63/kWh installed and serviced for 20
| years.
|
| https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-
| energy-an...
|
| https://www.ess-news.com/2024/12/09/powerchina-receives-
| bids...
|
| China installed 74 GW comprising 168 GWh in 2024. In
| increase of 250% compared to 2023.
|
| https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-
| storag...
|
| After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive
| reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
|
| - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
|
| - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw
| 3hs...
|
| In the US in 2025 storage was expected to make up 30% of
| all grid additions. Before Trump came with his
| sledgehammer of insanity.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
|
| No one generally expects more than a couple of hours of
| storage to be needed. But for the fun exercise let's
| calculate what spending Vogtles $36.8B on equivalent
| renewables, as in TWh delivered, and the storage gives.
|
| That makes the renewables come out to about $9B.
|
| With storage costing $0.063B GWh and having $28B to spend
| we can build 444 GWh storage.
|
| That is the equivalent to running Vogtles two new
| reactors for 10 days straight.
|
| In this calculation we don't even bother with Vogtles O&M
| costs compared to near zero for renewables and storage.
|
| Do you now understand how incredibly expensive new built
| western nuclear power is?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Never, because we don't need 14 days of full load capable
| storage. Most models say we need about 3 days to get
| 99.99% coverage with a reasonable amount of overbuild &
| interconnect.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Renewable suffers a little bit from having renewable
| infrastructure costs considered a new subsidy, while
| fossil fuel costs are just kind of baked in.
|
| If we included the cost of cleaning up fossil fuel
| byproducts... well, we don't even know how much it will
| cost to clean up all that carbon.
|
| Then we will have to work out how we bill the
| international relations cost of having to deal with
| petrochemical producers...
| belorn wrote:
| It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should had
| been operated under green hydrogen. Instead we had
| yesterday in Sweden news the opening of a freshly new built
| natural gas power plant as the solution to that
| intermittence problem. Of course, those natural gas power
| plants are paid through subsidizes as grid stability is the
| government responsibility, and thus the bill for that
| natural gas is put on taxes and connection fees.
|
| I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the
| claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places
| like europe, you first have to stop investing and building
| new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural
| gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should
| have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from
| being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled.
| If renewables and storage can deliver on the "too cheap to
| meter" promise, they should do so in an environment without
| natural gas being used behind the scene.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Love how the goalposts magically shifted to "green
| hydrogen deployed today!!" even though many grids still
| don't even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or
| green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland
| given their grid composition.
|
| That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions
| being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example
| of many:
|
| - Coal has gone from 150 TWh to _zero_. - Fossil gas from
| 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
|
| Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity
| production of course "extends the life" of these plants.
| All those plants that were shut down had their "life
| extended".
|
| You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California,
| South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables
| offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage.
|
| After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive
| reductions in fossil gas usage in California:
|
| - Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24
|
| - Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw
| 3hs...
|
| Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW
| comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their
| yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at
| installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid
| additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of
| insanity.
|
| Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency
| reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our
| existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing
| issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation
| and shipping settled on.
|
| Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen
| or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create
| biogas from it.
|
| Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of
| total energy demand.
|
| I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown
| up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power
| into the conversation.
| belorn wrote:
| Lets then have a ban on all new natural gas power plants
| until its down to a single percent. That should not be a
| problem if that is all that is needed.
|
| Using UK as an example, the majority of energy is not
| renewables. Why should they build new natural gas power
| plants? Natural gas produce more energy than any other
| source in the UK. They are not going from 98% renewables,
| 2% natural gas. (https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-
| uks-electricity-was-cle...)
|
| UK should increase the production of renewables energy,
| but they should also decommission their fossil fuel
| plants. If they want to use non-fossil fuel solutions,
| then they should do so and compete fairly and without
| subsidizes. Same goes for nuclear.
|
| The cost of intermittence should not be paid by the
| environment or subsidizes, otherwise they are just hiding
| the true cost that society have to pay.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| You seem to advocate for some holier than thou perfect
| path rather than the messy reality that is a transition
| of the entire energy system to a new cheaper source while
| upholding our modern society.
|
| Let's look at the area under the curve?
|
| You know, we need to decarbonize agriculture,
| construction, transportation etc. as well.
|
| Let look at what the UK has done:
|
| - Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero.
|
| - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh.
|
| - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.
|
| Would you say this reduction in fossil fuel usage is
| insignificant because they obviously aren't done yet?
| crote wrote:
| > It was promised that by now half the grid of EU should
| had been operated under green hydrogen
|
| The only one promising that was the fossil industry,
| trying to stay relevant by pushing hydrogen as "green"
| and doing a switcheroo to "blue" fossil-derived hydrogen
| when green hydrogen inevitably turns out to be nonviable
| for silly things like mid-term energy storage.
|
| > If renewables and storage can deliver on the "too cheap
| to meter" promise, they should do so in an environment
| without natural gas being used behind the scene.
|
| No. Remember, the goal is to minimize the total
| greenhouse gas emissions! We're in a transition phase, if
| that means operating on 97.5% renewables and 2.5% natural
| gas until we figure out those last 2.5%, then that is
| _totally fine_. At the moment natural gas is _excellent_
| for peaker plants - especially if you implement carbon
| capture. Would you rather stay on the current ~50% fossil
| mix, solely because the transition mix isn 't "green
| enough"? We're trying to save the environment, not trying
| to be holier than the pope.
| belorn wrote:
| If you want to present the plan as renewables and
| subsidized natural gas as being better than nuclear than
| be open about it and present it as that. It is not the
| same as a subsidize free renewables and storage solution.
|
| Those 97.5% sounds very nice. Denmark has well over 100%
| renewables production from wind and solar, but in terms
| of consumption only get around 50%. The rest they need to
| import. 97.5 vs 50 means there is some work to be done.
|
| I recently posted this link
| (https://svensksolenergi.se/statistik/elproduktion-fran-
| solen...) that illustrate how much energy that solar
| farms produce in Sweden. Getting 97.5% from that would be
| a nice challenge, especially around the winter months.
| December and January had around 3% production compared to
| the best previous month (which we could use as a stand-in
| for 100% capacity but that would be incorrect).
|
| Natural gas is not fine. The geopolitical consequences
| are terrible, the environmental impact are not
| sustainable, and the cost are carried almost exclusively
| through subsidizes. Trying to sell natural gas as "saving
| the environment" is a political message that I do not
| agree with.
| derriz wrote:
| You're including a bunch of different generation
| technologies which have vastly different operating
| characteristics which means they are not substitutes for
| each other.
|
| For example, nuclear takes days to start from cold and is
| really only economic if operating at a constant output.
| Thus you need complimentary sources to help meet changes
| in demand. These days, typically this means gas turbines.
|
| Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also
| have natural gas capacity.
| chermi wrote:
| Are you really denying the learning curve based on one
| paper about France? You don't think maybe there's other
| confounding factors*? A single survey of a single country
| isn't counterfactual. Are you really certain that with a
| relatively fixed design the learning curve wouldn't apply
| at sufficient scale, all else being equal. The learning
| curve is one of the most time-tested laws in construction.
|
| *Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so
| many possible explanations for the observed negative curve
| that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve
| theory doesn't hold in nuclear.
|
| In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is
| that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met.
| (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that
| the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to
| mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning
| curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many
| facilities of the same design were actually built.)
|
| -Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There
| were lots of changes in French design
|
| -Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce
| expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an
| accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps
| where the workforce either respecializes in another field
| or retires.
|
| - regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions
| for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".
|
| -while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this,
| labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases
| (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as
| it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given
| the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was
| growing pretty quickly during the French build out
|
| For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve
| effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier
| to get an _effective_ negative learning rate. With so many
| confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I
| find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the
| theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| It also includes the US seeing the same negative learning
| by doing.
|
| We have research on when we have achieved learning
| effects.
|
| > If you look at the data specifically you're going to
| find learning but for that there's a several
| requirements:
|
| > - It has to be the same site
|
| > - It has to be the same constructor
|
| > - It has to be at least two years of of gap between one
| construction to the next
|
| > - It has to be constant labor laws
|
| > - It has to be a constant regulatory regime
|
| > When you add these five you only get like four or five
| examples in the world.
|
| From a nuclear energy professor at MIT in a nuclear power
| industry podcast, giving an overly positive but still
| sober image regarding the nuclear industry as it exists
| today.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzaSucDg7k
|
| In the meantime renewables and storage have gone from
| nascent industries to today be the vast majority of all
| new energy production in TWh and while costing a fraction
| of new built nuclear power.
| energy123 wrote:
| Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd
| have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid
| by a previous generation. Is that surprising?
|
| But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy
| decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and
| time-to-build of the various options.
|
| In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of
| multiple factors:
|
| - low seasonable variability of insolation in the north
|
| - high wind speeds in the south
|
| - land availability for solar
|
| - high statistical diversification of renewables due to size
|
| - higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind
| costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small
| energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs
|
| The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report
| about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission
| costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming
| there's no point thinking about deploying nor researching &
| developing solar / wind because we don't have the expertise
| nor technology.
|
| We still don't. Australia doesn't manufacture solar panels,
| and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we
| don't manufacture wind turbines either.
|
| Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power
| industry commits future generations from having that
| knowledge and skill base.
|
| And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a
| straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though
| more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices
| in Australia cheaper.
|
| AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to
| China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper
| (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and
| nuclear.
|
| CSIRO perfidy.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| How did nuclear slip into your list of power sources that
| dominate the Chinese grid? You skipped over two other
| sources that generate double what nuclear does and are
| growing faster:
|
| Coal 58.2%
|
| Hydro 13%
|
| Wind 9.8%
|
| Solar 8.3%
|
| Nuclear 4.4%
|
| https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
| hannob wrote:
| > the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel
| life cycle
|
| What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it
| describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear
| waste storage works.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with.
|
| Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the
| atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades
| which are entirely waste with no recycling value.
|
| Hint: it isn't.
|
| There's so little of it, it's still all predominantly
| stored on site at the power plants.
|
| Highly radioactive reactive waste isn't highly reactive for
| very long. And long lasting waste isn't very reactive at
| all. Vitrified it's chemically non-reactive.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if
| there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel
| disappear it would not materially change the prospects
| for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear
| were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of
| spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine
| and economical solution.
|
| The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an
| issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start
| running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing
| and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is
| also why thorium is a non-solution.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| The comment they were replying to went out of its way to
| say "completely closed" which is, of course, not correct.
|
| If we want to say nuclear generates not much in terms of
| byproducts, that seems like a potentially viable
| argument. But then, renewables don't consume any fuel
| (but the installations are a lot less durable). We're
| rapidly approaching the point where we might have to
| admit that sweeping dramatic statements about either one
| being universally superior are hard to justify and the
| differences are complicated...
| GolfPopper wrote:
| I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical
| that the current business ecosystem in the United States is
| capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power
| infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular
| but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small
| Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.
| XorNot wrote:
| Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity,
| and has projects for SMRs in the works too.
|
| The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, we have political issues around infrastructure in
| the US, but those probably aren't going away. If we can
| do nuclear with just technology (no politics), then it
| might be viable. So, as I said, good luck Google!
| derriz wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "a lot" when you put it into
| perspective.
|
| China has about 60GW of nuclear generation capacity -
| this is after 70 years of building their first nuclear
| plant. It has about 1600GW of wind and solar after about
| 10 years.
|
| In 2024, China added 80GW of wind capacity and 277GW of
| solar. In the first 3 months of 2025 alone, 60GW of new
| solar capacity and 15GW of new wind capacity were added.
| In 2024, 4.3GW of nuclear was added.
| Propelloni wrote:
| You mean like France?
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's proven to not be competitive.
|
| All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover
| construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone
| expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand
| will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make
| that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs,
| cannot be rolled out quickly.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Due to political issues, the US doesn't have the capacity to
| engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2
| years to complete, unfortunately.
| crote wrote:
| > a proven technology with excellent safety record
|
| Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three
| Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill,
| the beaches near Dounreay, and _dozens_ more.
|
| Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things
| go wrong, it tends to create a _massive_ mess which costs
| billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all.
| It is the only power source which has made entire cities
| impossible to live in.
|
| I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker
| with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want
| to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be
| mentioning its historical record.
|
| > a completely closed fuel life cycle
|
| Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution
| and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
|
| Again, I personally don't believe this _has_ to be a
| dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry
| is still an unsolved problem. We 've been operating nuclear
| reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and
| reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current
| state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope
| nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with
| it". I think it _can_ be solved, but unless we 've done so
| you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument.
|
| > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our
| electricity needs
|
| We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global
| power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400
| plants currently operational, and 700 have been
| decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor"
| anymore.
|
| > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
|
| We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially
| viable.
|
| > You'd just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all
| you can consume.
|
| Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap,
| power still isn't going to be free: _someone_ has to pay off
| the massive construction loans.
|
| Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than
| something like internet. People don't suddenly start to
| consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a
| single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream
| at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps
| connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is
| already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like
| they are saving any money by keeping it slow.
|
| But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why
| go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper
| equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your
| lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free
| means we'll be using a _lot_ more of it, which means having
| to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants.
|
| If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be
| providing free power. And they aren't.
|
| > But instead we have expensive electricity
|
| Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most
| expensive form of generating electricity. While building
| additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it
| is _definitely_ not going to make your power bill any
| cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies -
| which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind
| to run expensive nuclear plants.
| blibble wrote:
| > Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima,
| Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock
| spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
|
| no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per
| kilowatt-hour"
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-
| d...
| jenadine wrote:
| > the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an
| unsolved problem
|
| No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent
| fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.
|
| Also even without nuclear power, there would still be
| nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical,
| defence, research, and other industries.
| ttfkam wrote:
| "...by being cleverer."
|
| Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per
| unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes!
| Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable,
| so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the
| next 150 years).
| barbazoo wrote:
| We're not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling
| with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not
| if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which
| seems to be what's happening. Maybe after everyone has turned
| their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back
| and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.
| mmooss wrote:
| > We're not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling
| with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap.
|
| Will it be built before we have sufficient renewable
| capacity?
| crote wrote:
| The deployment of solar is growing exponentially, with its
| total capacity doubling roughly every three years. Wind is
| growing at a similar rate. Renewables currently already
| account for 30% of the global electricity production, and
| we're seeing projections of over 45% in 2030.
|
| Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is
| realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely
| unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in
| 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045.
|
| Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take
| an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity.
| If we go all-out on nuclear _now_ , that means significant
| nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so
| 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left
| to bridge. There _might_ be a small niche left for it if
| there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage
| and short-term peaker plants, but who 's going to bet
| billions on that?
|
| Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it
| 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale
| nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Every compute company knows that power shortage is a looming
| crisis. They don't have nuclear expertise in-house and are
| desperately looking for somewhere to put their money that seems
| to have experience and capability
|
| This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC
| modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a
| new reactor in less than geologic time.
| delusional wrote:
| Ignoring AI (don't @ me) what are we doing with all that
| compute? Google (the search engine) hasn't meaningfully
| changed. Shopping is still largely the same as when Amazon
| first started out. Websites are pretty much the same. I don't
| understand what we're doing with all those operations.
|
| I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of
| compute?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| More people and more companies engaging in digital services
| which are backed by Google cloud or another cloud?
| philipkglass wrote:
| The NRC isn't the bottleneck. For the recently completed Vogtle
| Unit 3 reactor, construction work and permitting work ran in
| tandem. Early construction work started in 2009 and all NRC
| approvals were completed by 2012. Neither NRC regulations nor
| lawsuits ever halted construction. Vogtle 3 was originally
| supposed to be ready in 2016. It suffered enormous cost
| overruns and delays due to the companies actually building it
| before finally entering service in 2023.
|
| https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-3-reaches-initial-criticalit...
|
| The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer
| in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and
| delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The
| construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project
| that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led
| to the largest business failure in the history of South
| Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for
| securities fraud:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
| pitaj wrote:
| NRC is holding back new designs, not existing ones.
| philipkglass wrote:
| The AP1000 was a new design when Vogtle 3 and 4 were
| planned. It was certified by the NRC in 2005. NuScale had
| its small modular reactor design certified by the NRC just
| a couple of years ago:
|
| https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-
| sm...
|
| If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more
| exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but
| that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned
| by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most
| affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world.
| Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also
| mature designs. Everything else is slower and more
| expensive to build, with very limited operational history
| compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.
| Hilift wrote:
| Ludicrous. You can't build a reactor in the US for less than
| $10 billion. Combine that with natural gas at prices five times
| less than Europe and that means that no-one will loan money for
| a project. If they do, it is usually subsidized by naive
| taxpayers. Meanwhile a windmill can transported on the
| Interstate in Kansas unattended and installed in two days.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible
| way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know
| of). Fear of nuclear waste isn't irrational, but highly overblown
| because catastrophic events are more emotionally compelling than
| the slow degradation of either living standards and/or
| environment caused by competing technology.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| What happens in such case were a reactor was to blow. What
| then? Or are you saying we just deal with it when it occurs?
|
| I am not fully detesting nuclear, but I do disagree it a cure
| to the environment crisis as Solar is plenty and free; as are
| Wind and Water too.
|
| The risks of what if; and that now we live in such a volatile
| world. How are you going to convince me it's safe?
|
| How do I know a drone won't strike it in the next war? Some
| sponsored hack?
|
| Stuxnet was an organised hack that was created to aid
| destruction to nuclear hardware.
|
| Chernobyl is still unsafe and that's many years ago and was
| recently damaged again by a drone.
| XorNot wrote:
| Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs
| are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit
| there. They do not require active cooling.
|
| The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe:
| literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail
| (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk
| for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Hacks, cyber espionage?
|
| So it sounds like the view point of "deal with it when it
| happens then" and that's what puts me off nuclear.
|
| Nuclear is too unstable when something does occur to be
| contained and as to when dismantled.
| robotnikman wrote:
| To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design
| in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
|
| Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in
| Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a
| combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear.
| These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and
| necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a
| necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
|
| The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and
| provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since
| its not located near a body of water, it uses treated
| wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor
| design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much
| safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of
| which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure.
| Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the
| reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my
| concerns.
|
| I believe the future will need to be a combination of
| renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish.
| Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the
| ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data
| centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's
| power demands are constantly growing.
| crote wrote:
| On the other hand, assuming the industry doesn't
| _completely_ stagnate, "X was an older and unsafe reactor
| design in comparison to the newer ones we have today" will
| always be true.
|
| I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one
| already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over
| again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small
| and seemingly insignificant things working together in
| unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of
| an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the
| impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.
|
| Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes,
| absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available.
| I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an
| airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes _do_ crash
| from time to time, simply because there are so many of
| them.
|
| An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few
| hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible
| either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would
| we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely -
| a crash meant that an entire city would become
| uninhabitable?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Good hypothesis, I would like to believe the general
| census would be no. Just because the impact of thought of
| it occurring is more devastating than the pro of flying
| to destination in one. I wouldn't want to fly even if
| there was a .1% of failure whereby it could
| catastrophically destroy many lives.
|
| I don't refute that we couldn't move on. as we can take
| the result, analyse and not repeat. Learn from it and
| move on. Next plane crash causes less crater.
|
| However a nuclear implosion you can't move on and nor is
| it over once it's occurred. How do you move on from a
| nuclear imposition? Japan and Hiroshima? They're still
| fighting the aftermath today and that was a nuclear bomb
| the same significant difference.
|
| But if the reactor is a protected to 99.9% efficiency and
| that 1% could cause a aftermath that lasts forever, sure
| you can take the data like the plane crash and ensure it
| doesn't make the same sized crater but the results of the
| first are still devastating. Unlike the plane which is
| now old news.
|
| If nuclear was a requirement and that other sources of
| energy were a scarcity then it would be different. But
| where by we have acres of desert we are not researching
| enough in to how to harness the energy, have oceans where
| winds blow, water is nearly endless, do we research that
| on a large scale for data centres?
|
| It doesn't make sense for nuclear. Technically yes, you
| are making clean energy but at what expense and on a very
| dirty political basis.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor
| design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
|
| That's not fair.
|
| Chernobyl was a reactor that failed to pass safety tests
| being put into production. Any failure should be considered
| expected.
| leoapagano wrote:
| 30 years ago, I would have said the same thing. But right now
| solar is seeing technological advances at an exponential rate,
| such that by the time we build a nuclear power plant, get it
| approved, and get it running, solar will be both cheaper and
| safer while using less space.
| 7e wrote:
| Solar isn't dispatchable and adding 24 hour storage doubles
| the cost. Adding seasonal storage increases the cost by 150x.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only
| plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we
| currently know of).
|
| This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been
| sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should
| have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying,
| it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the
| truth.
| 7e wrote:
| Solar and wind aren't reliable energy sources. They're not
| dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales.
| Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost.
| Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any
| place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy
| production 24x7.
|
| At this point, that's sufficiently well known that you should
| have known it. If you're not deliberately lying, it's only
| because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Life spans of reactors can cause instability. Nuclear
| requires unstable mines for unstable materials which are
| unstably finite. Controlled by unstable governments and
| where by a nuclear explosion causes a very unstable
| aftermath. I see nothing stable about nuclear.
|
| Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of
| no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only
| until the fuel is spent.
|
| However, renewables are stable when resources are
| available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and
| stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.
|
| Which is why you combine all three.
|
| > Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for
| baseline energy production 24x7.
|
| El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a
| unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on
| wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.
|
| The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with
| pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.
|
| https://www.renewableinstitute.org/el-hierro-a-renewable-
| ene...
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels
| of our energy needs in the future.
|
| If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah
| renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly
| energy intensive applications and then further if we want to
| pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
| dhruv3006 wrote:
| Woooah! Times are changing.
| floxy wrote:
| I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are
| the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to
| the rest of the U.S.)?
|
| https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
|
| Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs
| down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they
| are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar?
| Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or
| environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or
| maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of
| generation?
| neural_thing wrote:
| It's because the California government doesn't believe in
| markets, prices as incentives or anything like that. California
| govt believes in state mandates
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| California famously deregulated its electricity market at the
| end of the 20th century, becoming the first state to do so.
| https://paylesspower.com/blog/deregulated-energy-states/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e.
| ..
| ryan93 wrote:
| Wow no regulations in California. First I'm hearing of this
| jppittma wrote:
| Can we get an updated opinion in light of the facts being
| the exact reverse opposite of the initial hypothesis?
| lantry wrote:
| on the Internet? never!
| ryan93 wrote:
| Wow no regulations in California. First I'm hearing of this
| chermi wrote:
| You understand there are multiple types of regulation,
| right? The deregulation you're referring to was with
| respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.
|
| The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees
| on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves
| basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need
| to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what
| they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs.
| infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count
| as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a
| rate of return on infrastructure projects.
|
| Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure
| improvements" were actually due to poor management and
| maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are
| required purely to meet demand (for example) or from
| "normal wear and tear".
|
| It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty
| broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its
| obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record
| profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system,
| particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA,
| regulation.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| I understand that. I'm simply stating that GGP's
| assertion that California "doesn't believe in markets" is
| at odds with the reality that Pete Wilson signed a law
| that made California the very first state with an
| electricity market.
| selfselfgo wrote:
| And there's no richer state in the union.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| The average wholesale prices in California is nothing special.
|
| The costs come from the wildfires and a derelict grid requiring
| large infrastructure upgrades.
| olalonde wrote:
| I can see a derelict grid and wildfires increasing power
| outages but how does it increase the cost of electricity
| itself?
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Those costs include grid fees?
|
| Grid fees pay for damage caused by wildfires.
| cryptonector wrote:
| That's all? California has the economic might to not have
| that problem.
| ruined wrote:
| california electric rates are so high because the state board
| keeps raising them
|
| https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2025/02/pge-reco...
|
| PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated
| action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on
| power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look
| away from the record profits
| chermi wrote:
| PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit
| margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame
| falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must
| decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements
| them, and I think it almost always does.
|
| I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly
| negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a
| state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less
| punishment for failure to operate effectively.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Spending more money on infrastructure means profits will
| increase.
|
| There's not really any way around that. Capital expenditures
| are profit.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Well, no, capital expenditures _can_ create _future_
| profit. Emphasis on _can_ and _future_.
| Aloisius wrote:
| No. Capital expenditures _are_ profit (or really, count
| towards earnings).
|
| They're long-term investments in fixed assets, not
| expenses that get subtracted out when calculating net
| income. You're just swapping cash with assets of
| equivalent value, so profits don't change.
|
| I'm not sure how PG&E would possibly not increase their
| profits if they got a rate increase meant to cover
| infrastructure investments. If they spend 100% of that
| increased revenue on infrastructure, then 100% of that
| counts towards profit - not in the future - immediately.
| jandrese wrote:
| My impression was that the California utilities were being
| operated in revenue extraction mode for decades and
| prioritized paying shareholders over infrastructure
| maintenance leading to the crisis situation we are in today.
| The enormous costs today are due to the need to keep paying
| owners as well as catching up on the deferred maintenance,
| and in classic fashion the owners are still gobbling up most
| of the money and starving the operations budgets.
| skybrian wrote:
| The dividends were probably ok until they went bankrupt,
| which resulted in not so great a deal for shareholders after
| all.
|
| Where did the money go? Paying for wildfire damage.
| outside1234 wrote:
| If anything the renewable sources are keeping rates in check.
|
| California is raising rates to build out infrastructure for
| electrification and mitigation of the dangers that now exist
| due to climate change.
| guywithahat wrote:
| It's largely forest fires and regulation. Electricity prices
| are regulated by the state, and at the same time they mandate
| certain green energy goals. To hit these goals, electric
| companies have to ignore infrastructure to build renewable
| energy sources. If the infrastructure gets too old, it risks
| starting a fire, which could cost the company billions. When
| the state sees them lose money after a fire, the state lets
| them raise prices.
|
| It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either
| removing green energy goals so they could improve
| infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly
| liable for all damage from a fire.
| muth02446 wrote:
| I view nuclear as a prudent diversification of energy sources:
| What happens if some supervolcano erupts, and because of the
| ashes significantly less sunlight reaches the surface of the
| earth. Presumably, there will also be less wind then.
| sschueller wrote:
| Even without I think wind will become too expensive eventually
| to make it worth while. Especially when solar gets more
| efficient and cheaper.
|
| Wind has down sides like moving parts and requiring giant
| concrete poors. Birds strikes, noise as well as ground
| vibration are also issues.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >Birds strikes...are also issues.
|
| Unless you're vegetarian, or vegan, how so?
| aziaziazi wrote:
| There's plenty meat eaters that care of birds for multiple
| reasons and perceive their diminution as an issue. One of
| them might be other animal (that they care less)
| regulation, like mosquitos and mouses. Another one is the
| delight to see them flying and singing around. And another
| one: seeds dispersions that contribute to the flora health.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| You can add (no) recycling of huge composite balades.
| pfdietz wrote:
| So what? Even if every wind turbine blade were landfilled
| it would add only slightly to waste streams already in
| existence.
|
| The US produces hundreds of millions of tons of
| construction and demolition waste per year.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| That's fair. Most demolition waste can be crushed and
| used as stabilisation for new constructions instead of
| mined rocks, and that's also often cheaper. However you
| are right to point out the quantity which is small, for
| now because we didn't really scale yet.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It will be comparatively small even when scaled out. PV
| waste too.
|
| My biggest concern with wind is not the blades, it's
| concrete foundations and perhaps steel. Concrete
| inherently releases CO2 when produced (from calcining of
| limestone), even if the energy source is non-fossil.
| Nuclear also faces this issue, of course. PV doesn't
| typically use concrete footers these days, instead using
| steel anchors that go directly into the ground.
|
| There are plans to make lime from silicates, but this is
| not a mature technology.
| megaman821 wrote:
| That just isn't a real problem. A single large American
| landfill could take 100 years worth of wind turbine blades
| and not even be 25% full. If we were so inclined, we could
| also shred them and add them to concrete for sidewalks or
| the like.
| bhelkey wrote:
| > Wind has down sides like ...Birds strikes
|
| Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the
| leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four
| times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of
| death, flying into windows.
|
| Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind
| turbines.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-
| not-k...
| gcheong wrote:
| By sheer numbers, yes, but the kinds of birds killed are
| different. Larger, slower reproducing birds such as eagles,
| condors, etc. are more at risk being killed by wind
| turbines because deaths in those groups have a much larger
| effect whereas cats kill a much larger number of birds but
| they tend to be smaller, faster reproducing species and as
| such their numbers overall aren't as much at risk.
| biophysboy wrote:
| I think we would have a harder time finding food and clean
| water in this scenario
| delusional wrote:
| Even on a dead earth the AI must consume and indescribable
| amount of power.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Shades of Isaac Asimov's The Last Question.
|
| Plot twist: the computer's last act at the end of The Last
| Question was just an LLM's hallucination.
| croes wrote:
| Are we playing What-if?
|
| What if hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
|
| What if the operating companies values profit over security?
|
| What if an earthquake or Tsunami hits nuclear power plant?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Am I stupid or naive to ask: > What if
| hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
|
| Are most power plants in 2025 air-gapped? I assume yes.
| croes wrote:
| And hackers can't beat air gaps
|
| https://www.missionsecure.com/blog/cyber-attack-india-
| larges...
|
| The Iranian nuclear program was also air gapped.
|
| Didn't stop Stuxnet.
|
| It's interesting what you can do with USB drives.
|
| And more power plants means more possibilities for human
| errors.
| frollogaston wrote:
| It's not even a what-if, it's just cheaper than solar for what
| you get. Especially compared to residential solar, which is
| also quite dangerous.
| brrwind wrote:
| How is residential solar dangerous?
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Mostly people falling of roofs I think. When you have
| lowest bid contractors going up and down millions roofs
| each for a measly 10kw of power. The aggregate deaths per
| kw are worse for residential than other power sources.
| frollogaston wrote:
| That's the reason. Overall, family homes don't make for
| very safe or efficient power plants.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Very efficient for distribution though which is expensive
| (check your utility bill).
|
| Don't need to run power lines for hundreds of miles if
| you have a generator on your roof.
| p1mrx wrote:
| > Don't need to run power lines for hundreds of miles if
| you have a generator on your roof.
|
| To remove the need for power lines, you also need
| batteries, and enough solar to make it through winter.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Even if the power lines are already a given and you're
| just looking at the operational cost, home solar still
| uses them a lot to send power back. Peak usage hours are
| in the evening when the sun is already down.
|
| Also, home solar is still subsidized, even in Arizona
| where it makes the most natural sense. I doubt it'd be a
| thing otherwise, even if the only alternative were
| utility solar. But I understand the argument that
| pollution is an overdue emergency and any clean energy is
| better than nothing.
| jenadine wrote:
| I believe the opposite is true. You still need these
| hundreds of miles of power line to get you the power
| during the night or cloudy days. And it is actually more
| expensive to handle such network because the power
| distribution is unpredictable and one need to size the
| network for the worst case.
| YokoZar wrote:
| If your worry is volcanoes, geothermal power can remove energy
| from them before they explode. On a sufficient scale they could
| even prevent them.
| seatac76 wrote:
| If that is your concern, then the thing to worry about is
| dramatic loss in food production before energy becomes an
| issue.
| raron wrote:
| Plats survive some time (days) without light. If there is not
| enough backup power source (peaker gas plats, not nuclear
| though) the grid could quickly collapse causing a continent-
| wide blackout from what it would be really hard and it would
| take a long time to bring the grid up. Cities would be
| uninhabitable within a few days (no water, not sewage
| processing, no heating).
| hansvm wrote:
| This is about to give "Killed by Google" a whole new meaning.
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938125
| nfriedly wrote:
| Hah!
|
| But, in all seriousness, this could realistically be saving
| lives if you go with the assumption that Google was going to
| use this energy either way, and it otherwise would be coming
| from anything other than solar.
|
| Every other source causes more deaths per energy produced. Coal
| is by far the worst, but natural gas, and even hydroelectric
| cost more lives than nuclear.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927371
|
| > Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's first mini
| nuclear power plant
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| $20B for 300MW, and that's before the inevitable massive cost
| overruns. Continuing the Ontario provincial government's
| history of lighting taxpayer money on fire for electricity.
| chickenbig wrote:
| > $20B for 300MW
|
| Estimated 20B CAD for 4 x 300MW power stations.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Is that competitive compared to solar/wind + battery? I
| doubt it.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The press release claims it is. But other jurisdictions
| can build 1GW of solar + battery for $2B.
| christina97 wrote:
| Keep in mind that 1 GW solar does not equate to 1 GW firm
| production.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Then build 10x for the same sticker price as these 4
| SMRs. You'll have it done in less time, and likely even
| cheaper than the final cost of these 4.
| coryrc wrote:
| How much solar does Ontario get during the heating
| season?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| As much as you care to build for.
| rjsw wrote:
| How much solar does it get at night?
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Not much, but thankfully we've invented wind turbine,
| batteries, hydro, and a sleep cycle that means our
| overnight energy usage is much lower than when the sun
| and us are up.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| It isn't even competitive with other nuclear reactors.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| 4x300 MWe for 20.9B CAD for this vs Vogtle 3 and 4 are 2x 1117
| MWe for 36.8B USD.
|
| So the starting stated price is _only_ 20% cheaper than that
| train wreck. Will love to see how high this number gets given
| it 's a first of its kind.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the
| locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US),
| there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data
| center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like
| the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing
| at that rate.
|
| As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power
| (it has the highest up time of any power source), I'm wondering
| how localities are going to react. Are people who are local to
| nuclear plants just going to be OK with these gigantic
| corporations consuming all this power in their backyard with no
| benefit to them while they take all the risk and impact of that
| power generation? I'm also wondering how these companies are
| going to deal with the excess nuclear waste. Ultimately it won't
| be Google or Meta dealing with the waste. How do we ensure that
| all the nuclear waste from AI is dealt with responsibly?
| steren wrote:
| GW is power. Gwh is energy.
|
| Energy is what matters when training a model.
|
| Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Upvoted for dimensional analysis pedantry.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.
|
| I don't think a reply like this is in the spirit of this
| site.
| oijaefiojoijaw wrote:
| But very in line with their bio...
|
| > Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| I think you missed the forest for the trees. I did
| incorrectly cite GPT-4 as I was going from memory and that's
| suspect sometimes. I also didn't elaborate and maybe I should
| have given the snarky comments I'm seeing.
|
| Actually the amount of power available matters because you
| are consuming energy in time. If I have a 1MW plant and a
| battery, I can generate 1GWh in about 3 weeks. This seems a
| little silly though. A Hyperscale DC campus is ~150MW to
| 200MW. If you plot the larger ones, they are almost all near
| power stations with >1GW capacity (not all).
|
| The industry trend is towards building 1GW datacenters. Last
| I checked these would consume ~8.7TWh (assuming PUE of 1).
| However, the 8.7TWh while relevant is meaningless unless the
| power to the DC can be 1GW. Since the plant itself has to
| generate more than 1GW (the plant has a cap ratio so more
| than this, plus other demand, etc..) for such a site, then it
| follows that there are limited number of sites in the US
| (this is public info see EIA.gov or Wikipedia).
|
| Grok3 is already at 140MW (100 days of training ==> 336GWh)
| at ~10^26 FLOP. Model FLOP is increasing at ~5x per year so
| by 2030, we are expecting to be ~10^28 and that would take
| ~10GW (24PWh). If I am optimistic and say that the efficiency
| can improve by 1.3x per year, then we still need a very large
| generating station to meet the demand or we need to
| distribute among many smaller sites.
|
| You can push the numbers around however you like but the
| conclusion is the same, the timing may be different.
|
| There's a reason why all the hyperscalers are investing in
| nuclear, large generating capacity and the highest cap factor
| of any form of energy.
|
| My 2nd comment still stands, and you left unaddressed
| (remember the forest?)..
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Put all of it in the Greenland tundra. Free cooling. No humans
| to irradiate.
| barbazoo wrote:
| The data centers too then? Because those need to be connected
| to the grid.
| advisedwang wrote:
| Some challenges:
|
| - You get free cooling, but if you use too much you melt the
| permafrost, which has huge environmental cost.
|
| - Building in remote locations is enormously expensive,
| especially with the requirements of a nuclear generating
| station.
|
| - Now you have to run a city for the operators to live in and
| ship in everything they need (not to mention hardware to the
| DC.
|
| - Denmark (and so presumably Greenland) has a law against
| building nuclear generating stations.
|
| Besides, building nuclear power stations with the concept
| that we accept an accident will happen is crazy. Better to
| invest in preventing them than mitigating them.
| XorNot wrote:
| GW is a unit of power, not a unit of energy.
|
| The best estimate I can find is 7.2GWh.
|
| Which would be...7 hours of output from a 1GW powerplant.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Bzzt, wrong units, this isn't Facebook. Go find some data to
| back up your obviously incorrect claim and fix your post.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Training GPT-4 used (claimed) 62GW-h over 100 days, for an
| average of 26MW. Rest of your comment follows from this error.
|
| 26MW is a fraction of the primary power consumed by a single
| passenger aircraft, by the way. It is an absolutely trivial
| energy input.
| freshpots wrote:
| It is not trivial at all, it's the same energy used as about
| 9,000 homes and roughly 50-100 L/s of water wasted to
| evaporative cooling of said hardware.
|
| "The Dongfang Electric Corporation's 26 MW offshore wind
| turbine is the largest in the world, surpassing previous
| models like the Mingyang 20 MW turbine. This turbine's larger
| size and capacity enable it to generate about 100 GWh of
| electricity annually, potentially powering 55,000 Chinese
| homes or 9,200 American homes."
|
| Edit: more info here,
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-
| cent...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Your water use estimate is high by a large factor. Order of
| magnitude.
|
| Your claim: 50-100 liters per second to cool a 26MW
| workload.
|
| Actual water consumption, according to Google annual
| report: 730 liters per second, globally, for an average 3GW
| load.
| energywut wrote:
| An average US home uses ~10,000 KWh over a year, resulting in
| about 1 kilowatt average power use.
|
| Figures I can find suggest that a 737 uses approximately 7MW
| to stay aloft.
|
| So a couple things I learned -- I think it's still a notable
| amount of power, enough to power ~6,000 homes for a year just
| to train a single model. But also, I learned that planes use
| a whole lot more power than I thought!
|
| Training a single model is essentially consuming one plane-
| year's worth of power, or 3-4 flights continuously while it
| trains. I had no idea planes used so much energy.
|
| But also, I bet most of these companies aren't training one
| model and calling it done. There's probably 1s or 10s of
| models being trained per year per company. That's a material
| amount of energy use. If we could power tens or hundreds of
| thousands of homes, that isn't 'trivial' energy input.
|
| I think it's useful to put it into context next to other
| things we take for granted, but I don't think it's fair to
| diminish it as nothing either.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| What is the alternative though? I think it's fair to question a
| decision but if people put their foot down when they don't see
| the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the
| status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing
| (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If
| all the housing projects are squashed for some decent
| alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which
| is potentially worse. City's that have massive sprawl, people
| relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.
|
| In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear
| power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I'm not sure you can scale
| "clean energy" at the rate we are moving.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The world added 600GW of solar last year, and is adding at a
| 1TW annualized rate. We do not have the capacity to add any
| other power source at that rate.
| epistasis wrote:
| Clean energy is scaling far faster than gas. Coal is dead.
| Nuclear takes 10+ years, and the US industry is so small that
| it can not scale to meet future needs.
|
| Look at what was deployed last year, in GW terms:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#:~:tex.
| ..
|
| but note that gas produces at a capacity factor of ~50%, and
| solar at 25%, so scale solar down by half to better compare
| gas to solar.
|
| Batteries are also here in great force. The average cost of
| battery-backed solar is cheaper is comparable to gas, and
| cheaper than new nuclear.
|
| The main barrier to new solar and batteries are grid
| expansion to ship the electricity places. Putting a
| datacenter next to a proposed site for building solar +
| batteries that's waiting for its turn to get connected to the
| grid would probably be the fastest way to scale, if fiber can
| go there.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| The main problem with renewables is their capacity factor
| (amount of time they can produce their max capacity). In
| the US this is ~24%, in Germany I think it's ~12% (can be
| wrong here). The reason for nuclear here is that it has the
| highest capacity factor of any form of energy (see
| EIA.gov).
| abetaha wrote:
| Ignoring what Elementl is developing as their material is
| confusing, what would be some of the practical energy sources for
| power hungry AI workloads other than nuclear?
| anon6362 wrote:
| While I was going to community college in the late 90's, I had an
| IT consulting biz where I serviced mechanical engineers and folks
| in the US nuclear industry who were ex-General Electric (GE NE).
| I learned nuclear was heavily-regulated (rightfully so) and
| costly but the main barriers to new sites were insurance, the
| huge capital investment, and the very long project cycles. As
| such, these are just too risky for most business people and
| investors. Nowadays, even with SMRs, the ROI still doesn't make
| sense given the massive, massive advances in renewables and
| regional grid storage. Very few Americans want an unproven, fly-
| by-night startup SMR in their neighborhood or in their county.
| I'd be okay with just a few mega reactors in fixed sites in very
| remote areas that would be heavily defended with perimeter
| security and anti-aircraft/-drone emplacements. I'm not okay with
| SMRs on flatbed trailers with minimal security in urban areas.
| EasyMarion wrote:
| The AI arms race really is literally heating up...I nuit.
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