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.

I want to add to this that I routinely see solar plants compared on a cost basis with other forms of energy by using the nameplate capacity.

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.

While I don’t doubt that’s true in some discussions, HN is not Reddit and I don’t see this confusion so much here.