Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power

CNBC article, no paywall: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/14/google-inks-deal-with-nuclea...

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn't cooperate for time T+1, you're in trouble.

Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar/wind. Battery backup postpones the "range anxiety deadline" but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.

Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-generation-capacity). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%.

Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.

Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (https://www.cameco.com/invest/markets/uranium-price), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant.

This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.

Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100/MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a "nuclear adjacent" data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun's unambiguous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41621097

In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).

Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cask_storage). Education will fix this.

Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

Research safety and disposal. Add funds to that research so that we can get over our fear. We did it for airlines its time to do it for nuclear power.

Renewables are intermittent and reliable; if a wind producer has bid into the day-ahead auction, you can expect with very high reliability they will deliver as bid.

Nuclear is great, so is zero-marginal-cost energy producers :)

[1] https://www.wipp.energy.gov/

No. This is a false dichtomy pushed, from what I can tell, by the gas lobby. It's solar and wind + nukes or gas.

Batteries work in theory but not in practice: production doesn't scale fast enough, and that was before LLMs brought a new and growing source of power demand to the table. (I'm ignoring that grid batteries compete with transport electrification. A combination of economies of scale and common bottlenecks in construction of battery plants, irrespective of chemistry, links the pursuits.)

Lots of people say either or. When nuclear comes up, someone will claim we should just go all in on solar, wind and batteries. That's unworkable, so we wind up burning gas.

For energy we obviously need all the options available.

If a major volcano goes off up and darkens the sky with clouds and high winds make wind farms unsafe to operate, then nuclear is probably our only reliable power source left. It's not like there weren't multiple ice ages and warming events in the history of our planet.

There is a reason sailboats were obsoleted by the steam engine: it could tug forward in windless waters and stll make it fast enough to deliver the mail. The base load power station is the steam engine. The sailboat is the wind turbine or the PV array. Most of them need a gas fired power plant to compensate for windless or cloudy days, like newer sailboats need an engine. We could use a load following SMR in place of the gas fired plant.

Yes, any finite quantity is less than infinity. The same is true for fuel deliveries.

Nonsense.

Such things can be regulated, but my point is that solar and wind are perfect for h2 generation. The sun shines? Produce. The wind blows? Produce.

The variability is irrelevant, and the result is the creation of a fuel source that can be stored.

Even better, we already have an immense network of Ng pipes, and there have been many tests and studies on injecting h2 into Ng lines, and pulling it out at the other end with molecular filters. There is no molecular reaction either.

The means low cost, massively deployed infra already exists.

And this massive network of Ng lines, with h2 injected, can in effect be an immense storage tank of h2.

We don't need some unified "batteries only" group think, but instead having multiple clean sources of energy is a boon. Just the cost of adding 3x the power transmission capacity, distribution is daunting, h2 can let a faster rollout of clean transport occur.

We should embrace all paths which the market can endure amd which can be green.

The Germans ended up focused on one only.

My point? H2 is perfect for solar.

Which is, hmm. Rather than impute motive, since I'm sure motives vary, I'm going to talk about why this doesn't work. Classic heat plants (coal, diesel, nuke, doesn't matter) get around 90% of the nameplate. Specifically they're running 90% of the time, and producing at the full capacity while running. That percentage is called the capacity factor.

Because for classic generators the capacity factor is high (hydro can vary a lot based on water available in the reservoir), nameplate capacity, which is what the plant yields under ideal conditions, is usually what we talk about. The problem is that the nameplate capacity of solar is what you get on a perfectly sunny day, with the sun shining directly on the panel.

What you want in order to assess cost is the nameplate capacity multiplied by the capacity factor, which is the averaged amount of power you can get out of the plant given real-world conditions. For solar, this can push 30% in an ideal location like Arizona, and be as low as 13% in a not-ideal location like Minnesota. Wind can push 50% capacity when well installed, but it is intermittent in an even less predictable way than solar. If the wind stops in the middle of the night, all wind and solar generation put together is bupkis.

We need nuclear. We could do without all of the other carbon-free electrical generation by use of nuclear energy. I don't think we should, mind you, solar in particular has a big advantage in that it's just about the only generating source which comes in small modules, so we can chip away at generation by adding whatever's affordable and build up over time.

But next time you hear that solar is cheaper, see if you can check the numbers and determine if the claim is being made on the basis of nameplate capacity. If it is, multiply that cost by four.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe

That isn't the only worry. If the fuel is smuggled out... https://spectrum.ieee.org/high-assay-low-enriched-uranium

In one sense it does exist (i.e. it's buried in salt beds 2,000 feet below surface), but is it safe?

In 2014 there was an explosion of a waste container and radioactive particles were spread throughout the facility and up to the surface by the air processing equipment in the mine.

It seems like it's not just a binary choice, but more of a continuum of how safe is the particular solution compared to others.

And the deadlines keep getting pushed because the fuel supplier is Russia. Nuclear is not immune to geopolitics or the weather as this comment suggests. It's one of the many issues comments like this ignore - like the spiraling construction costs (even in China), risk trade off when it comes to the catastrophic nature of accidents, viability and enormous costs of clean up and waste storage etc.

You missed the part about molecular filters. No such issue exists.

Even in this thread someone is saying that the problem with solar is that "if a megavolcano darkens the atmosphere... thus we should go all in to nuclear", as if it was a guaranteed event in the next 100 years.

In the last few years, they have displaced a huge chunk of the natural gas power used in early evenings after sunset when solar drops off but demand is still high.

https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2024-08-25/b...

It is almost always implied. It seems so obvious that nuclear should be replacing fossil fuels it doesn't seem worth mentioning. Unless someone says they're aiming for an energy policy of nuclear plus fossil fuels, it's probably safe to say their goal is nuclear and solar/wind/etc.

Even the volcano comment you mention ends with "For energy we obviously need all the options available."

No, it wouldn't. Batteries + renewables is proven and it works. The problem isn't a technological barrier. The problem is we need batteries for a lot of things and production can't ramp up fast enough.

People picked tribes and decided it's all or nothing. I agree--that's stupid. There is a historical alignment between renewables backers and anti-nuke activists (see: Germany) that caused nuclear to polarise away from renewables. That doesn't really exist anymore. But you see its artefacts in the debate.

Unscheduled maintenance intervals exist everywhere. This is not a unique problem.

> They are intermittent and unreliable.

On a 24 hour ahead basis. On a year to year basis, they're always available, and are absurdly reliable.

> And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.

There is nothing that can save you from being required to hold a broad mix of power generation technologies. Building a monoculture here is completely counterproductive and probably hastens the destruction.

> despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained

That container is mechanical. It has a failure rate. Failures never occur when you _want_ them to. Again, a _depth_ of strategies is appropriate here.

"Send it by train then bury it under a mountain and just forget about it" is not an actual strategy. It seems to work, because we probably just don't know any better yet, but the people who are uncomfortable are right to be so. Pretending that they simply lack "education" is a pretty rude point of view.

What works much better is a combination of batteries and an e-fuel like hydrogen. Batteries handle most of the stored energy flow; hydrogen handles the rarer long term storage needs. They complement each other, in a way like cache memory and RAM complement each other.

I firmly believe battery production can scale up very fast. Indeed, that's exactly what's been happening.

Realize that to replace all the motor vehicles in the US with BEVs would need enough batteries to store at least 40 hours of the average US grid output. This is almost certainly much more than would be needed for the grid itself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841072

It needs to come down by 85% in cost to be equal to the renewable system.

Every dollar invested in nuclear today prolongs our reliance on fossil fuels. We get enormously more value of the money simply by building renewables.

> The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources. However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour. For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

How does that follow?

How does using nuclear for some of our energy needs bias the rest of our energy sources towards fossil fuels? As opposed to renewables or even more nuclear?

Which energy source has stricter safety and security regulations than nuclear? Surely the strictest security regulations are applied to the least safe and secure operations?

Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated? What other power source has the military guarding its waste?

The reliability seems great until unexpected failures drops a large percentage of the national power supply in a matter of minutes (as seen in France, Sweden and Finland for example). Such events are more disruptive than cloudy days are with Solar.

> Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years

But they keep costing money for longer than the US has existed after they close.

Surely investing in hydrogen or similar is way better for the future than nuclear.

Fixing climate change is both having enough energy to displace all fossil fuel we consume and being quick enough with the transition lessen the end state carbon content in the atmosphere.

Chernobyl is a bad example.

The Soviets knew it was an inherently unsafe design and built it anyway.

When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Fukushima is a better example.

The bottlenecks are in processing materials, forming anodes and cathodes and packaging them into cells. Processes preserved across most chemistries. There is a reason the guys who built Li-on plants are pretty good at building LFP plants, and why the guys building LFPs are making announcements about sodium.

> The only extant long term storage isn’t safe, clean, secure, or reliable

> You’re moving the goalposts! You should be happy with imperfect storage!

Nuclear energy is not perfectly safe for the obvious reason that we've had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. It is not perfectly clean, since it produces nuclear waste. It is not perfectly secure, just look at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. It is not perfectly realiable: there are times when a lot of French reactors went offline because the water in rivers was too warm.

What exactly is your argument?

It won't because people disagreeing with your view are not all uneducated morons. Their opinions are based on politics and ideology. And you can't deny that it's factually true that radioactive waste is generated. I personally don't think that this is problem compared to the alternatives, but others do and they're not just uneducated.

> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

Wasn't Fukushima a nuclear fission reactor? How is nuclear fission secure?

It’s not there yet. CAES is cheaper than hydrogen today at grid scale, generally speaking : https://www.ctc-n.org/technologies/compressed-air-energy-sto...

Technical barriers are always also resource availability barriers, since technics also condition both usage and availability.

(Sadly, we have to consider that long because the current climate change is also unprecedented on these timescales.)

I am appalled though that anyone is seriously considering the idea of container-sized reactors, for which we can be nearly certain, if this seriously takes off, and we make million(s) of them, that hundreds if not thousands will end up abandoned in random places, and weathering will pierce them before they become radilogically inert.

I would suggest reading the study I linked so you can see the difference in methodology when credible researches in the field tackle similar question.

The credible studies are focused on simulating the energy system and market with real world constraints. Which unsurprisingly works out to be way cheaper when not involving nuclear in the picture.

As these pipelines become empty, they could then be repurposed for H2 ?

If California simply continues their current storage rollout they will have 10 hours of storage at peak demand and 20 hours of storage at average demand when the warranties for what they build today run out in 20 years.

This would coincide with any new nuclear power plant project starting today beginning commercial operations.

If Vogtle, Flamanville 3 and friends had delivered on their promises in the 2000s nuclear power might have been part of the solution. They did not do it, and thus nuclear power never became part of the solution.

https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-batteries-apr-2024/

> h2 production is a pipedream for foreseeable future

When we get to the final percent in the 2030s we can utilize akin to todays peaker plants financed on capacity markets [1] but zero carbon.

Peaker plants today already run too little to be economical on their own, essentially what in our current grids constitute seasonal storage and emergency reserves.

Simply update the terms for the capacity markets to require the fuel to be zero-carbon. It can be synfuels, biofuels or hydrogen. Whatever comes out the cheapest.

As we electrify transportation we can shift over the massive ethanol blending in gasoline in the US to be our seasonal buffer. [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_market#Capacity_ma...

[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=27&t=10

You could also buy a medium-sized lithium package now and already help with the transition, if you have the means, and then buy a full pack once the new hype tech becomes production-ready in 30 years (perhaps sooner but, with current warming, that's not something I'd wait on)

Realize that global H2 production is enormous -- 75 million tons/year for pure H2, another 24 MT for hydrogen in mixed gas streams -- and much of this needs to be produced even when we're entirely off fossil fuels. Green hydrogen is not an optional thing. So all the problems of making and storing it are going to have to be solved. Once that's done, adding some turbines (very much like existing ones; it's likely possible to just retrofit existing NG turbines with new combustors) is not a large additional step. These turbines already have an after stage that reduces NOx back to N2.

CAES is likely going to be squeezed out by batteries, but hydrogen addresses the extreme storage use case (just a few cycles/year) where both batteries and CAES are unsuitable.

The pacing technology for green hydrogen is low capex electrolysers. China, as usual, is leading the charge on this. I understand 4% of hydrogen production in China is now from electrolysis.

That's a failure mode common to all large centralized power plants, not exclusive to nuclear. For instance, an unexpected failure (a triple fault on one of the transmission lines coming from the power plant) of a single hydroelectric power plant caused a country-wide power outage in two countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Brazil_and_Paraguay_black...).

Building nuclear doesn't prevent or slow the rest from transitioning to renewable. If anything, it can get us off of fossil fuels faster because it handles the base load.

Claiming it is safe and clean when it requires demonstrably superhuman effort to keep it both safe and clean is a weird argument IMO.

So to throw out the entire nuclear industry just because seems like a weird argument IMO.

Three Mile Island was a relatively safe reactor with a (partial) meltdown, which didn't cost that much, and is going to go back into production decades later. Fukushima, too, was a relatively safe reactor that caused a (partial) meltdown, but a massive financial burden.

It's debatable how much of that cost is truly necessary.

If this would've happened in the fossil fuel world, the cleanup would've been in the low billions instead of >$100B.

I would argue deep horizon was ecological a disaster several orders of magnitude worse than Fukushima, yet it cost several orders of magnitude less in cleanup.

It's almost as if we apply different scales to different energy sectors.

A better question is why nuclear needs that much regulation, it's all just political difficulties. Nuclear technology itself don't need this much.

I thought the answer was going to be a coal plant until I read the rest

And I don't want to hear the Fukushima partial-meltdown was operator error and we just need people to not make mistakes. I'd rather be told that accidents will happen, radioactive substances will leak, and we have ways to deal with that.

The first one was built in 2021 and went into commercial operation in 2023: https://www.ans.org/news/article-6241/china-pebblebed-reacto...

It was conceptualized in the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble-bed_reactor

But there were a number of limiting factors that led to people building reactors that could meltdown, but were incredibly unlikely - see Fukushima - it didn't technically meltdown - even in a VERY bad scenario with a good bit of human error.

Meltdowns are also not the only risk. That Wikipedia article says the PBR concept was used in the AVR reactor and still resulted in a non-meltdown accident that contaminated the groundwater with radioactive substances. Again they couldn't attribute deaths to it, but the main article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor makes it look like an expensive mess with many accidents and protocol breaches. 1966 though; hopefully they've learned.

They don't need fanatical attention to active cooling, but they do instead need fanatical control of the atmosphere near the reactor to prevent fires, for example.

The first prototype was built in Germany in the 60s. It was closed in 1988, had to be bailed out by the German government in 2003 and has of course been a continuous money drain on German taxpayers ever since.

Nice summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

From basic principles one might consider that anything that generates enormous amounts of power in a concentrated area can never be truly safe. All that energy is always a potential disaster.

Power plants that generate less power but are cheaper to make and can be distributed over a large area to ensure redundancy is a better strategy for both safety and reliability.

This is the glory of industry: if the process is profitable, you can stamp out factories and generate ever larger profits, up to the point the market is saturated.