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

Reuters article, no paywall: https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/g...

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

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

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

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

Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Totally agree. The move away from research in nuclear technology towards unreliable "green tech" is a colossal mistake. I'm not sure why Germany did it. Reliable power is the life blood of an economy. With electric cars (and possibly trucks) more will depend on power capacity a country is able to reliably produce.

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

A lot of people knock h2 as a fuel, but 1/2 the time these complaints seem to not be of a technical merit, but some blather about how it will all come from Ng.

Nonsense.

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

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

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

The means low cost, massively deployed infra already exists.

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

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

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

The Germans ended up focused on one only.

My point? H2 is perfect for solar.

Using the existing natural gas lines for hydrogen would be pretty disruptive. I don't think most things that burn natural gas will work properly on H2. So, you're looking at a big-bang switchover, in which every appliance connected to the natural gas "grid" in the area will need replacing at the same time. In the Northeast at least, it's common for houses to use natural gas for heating, water-heating, and/or cooking.