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

SMRs ain't it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima's clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers.

The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient.

Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it's varies in effectiveness geographically. That's true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3].

Data centers just don't need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn't sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It's otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure.

So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh/year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh/year per square foot. That's ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate.

[1]: https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-...

[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

[3]: https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/pdf/201_solar_leadership.p...

Fukushima is really the only outlier, and the lesson learned should be it's probably a bad idea to build nuclear reactors near active fault lines.

Most of the extremely pessimistic total cost estimates are around $750B for Fukushima, and that's not the present value. That's money spent so far in the future the discount rate is substantial. Japan's official estimate is $187B, with probably a $100B NPV.

Chernobyl was an inherently (and well known) unsafe design. When you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

The cost of burning fossil fuels is estimated to be well, well over $1T.

Nothing comes for free. Pick your poison.