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

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589 points atomic128 | 8 comments | 14 Oct 24 19:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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atomic128 ◴[14 Oct 24 19:08 UTC] No.41840791[source]▶
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.

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Kon5ole ◴[14 Oct 24 22:17 UTC] No.41842672[source]▶
> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

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.

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onlyrealcuzzo ◴[14 Oct 24 23:19 UTC] No.41843237[source]▶
> Which other source has cleanup operations going for decades, 1000s of miles from where a single plant operated

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.

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1. sensanaty ◴[15 Oct 24 09:22 UTC] No.41846653[source]▶
And even then, it took a string of extreme circumstances for Fukushima to happen, and compared to Chernobyl/TMI wasn't nearly as disastrous. A strong earthquake AND a tsunami AND people once again ignoring the safety instructions to shut it down early.
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2. Kon5ole ◴[15 Oct 24 14:54 UTC] No.41849256[source]▶
Chernobyl and Fukushima both demonstrate that humans fail over time, and that when they do, nuclear is certainly not clean.

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

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3. onlyrealcuzzo ◴[15 Oct 24 15:04 UTC] No.41849369[source]▶
It is possible to build reactors that are physically incapable of melting down.

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.

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4. asdf000333 ◴[15 Oct 24 19:02 UTC] No.41851969[source]▶
Earthquakes and tsunamis often go together, and operator mistakes always happen.
5. asdf000333 ◴[15 Oct 24 21:59 UTC] No.41853544{3}[source]▶
If it's that easy, why didn't Fukushima's plant get the meltdown-proof reactor?
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6. onlyrealcuzzo ◴[15 Oct 24 22:04 UTC] No.41853578{4}[source]▶
The technology didn't exist yet.

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.

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7. asdf000333 ◴[15 Oct 24 22:22 UTC] No.41853737{5}[source]▶
That's very recent and not tested enough outside of China, so personally I'm going to wait and see what X-Energy does, but it'd be great if it works out.

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.

8. Kon5ole ◴[16 Oct 24 09:52 UTC] No.41857298{5}[source]▶
Pebble bed reactors are not safe, they fail for different reasons than other reactor designs but they can still fail.

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.