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.

Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind? We need massive amounts of clean electricity to displace fossil energy sources, not just to power the grid but also to synthesize all the chemical feedstocks that currently come from oil. The skills and resources needed to build out nuclear capacity and solar/wind capacity are quite different and needn't compete with each other.

> Nuclear is absolutely necessary to complete the clean energy transition, but is it really an either-or with solar and wind?

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.

which is why no sailboats exist today....

They're mostly used for recreational sailing or racing and are also equipped with an engine (diesel or electric sail drive) for maneuvers and in case there's no wind. Sailing has also advanced a lot since the nineternth century, but commercial shipping is now done with bunker oil and diesel engines and was previously done with steamers.