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

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593 points atomic128 | 4 comments | 14 Oct 24 19:06 UTC | HN request time: 1.496s | source
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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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pfdietz ◴[14 Oct 24 21:04 UTC] No.41841976[source]▶
Assuming only batteries are used for storage is one of the common bullshit arguments against renewables. It's bad strawman engineering.

What works much better is a combination of batteries and an e-fuel like hydrogen. Batteries handle most of the stored energy flow; hydrogen handles the rarer long term storage needs. They complement each other, in a way like cache memory and RAM complement each other.

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schainks ◴[15 Oct 24 05:01 UTC] No.41845104[source]▶
The cost per KW or hydrogen needs to be below $1000/Kwh for your statement to be true.

It’s not there yet. CAES is cheaper than hydrogen today at grid scale, generally speaking : https://www.ctc-n.org/technologies/compressed-air-energy-sto...

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1. pfdietz ◴[15 Oct 24 11:45 UTC] No.41847515[source]▶
CAES stores much less energy than hydrogen per unit of storage volume. So, for sufficiently long storage times, hydrogen is far better than CAES. For those long storage times, there are proportionally fewer charge/discharge cycles, so the cost of the hydrogen itself becomes proportionally less important.

CAES is likely going to be squeezed out by batteries, but hydrogen addresses the extreme storage use case (just a few cycles/year) where both batteries and CAES are unsuitable.

The pacing technology for green hydrogen is low capex electrolysers. China, as usual, is leading the charge on this. I understand 4% of hydrogen production in China is now from electrolysis.

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2. schainks ◴[28 Oct 24 07:01 UTC] No.41968398[source]▶
It's about cost per Kwh stored — hydrogen does indeed have better energy density, but if it costs 10 times more than CAES to store one megawatt hour of energy, no one will finance it. Do some money calculations with some basic assumptions for a utility, and you'll see why they are very hesitant to build anything that isn't a moneymaker immediately (CAES included!).

CAES is interesting because you can recycle some (keyword, SOME) existing mines for enormous energy stores, and the hardware needed to build CAES on said mine is not particularly special and easily understood for engineers, and therefore cheap, and also easy to handle safety-wise. Air that leaks makes only noise. Hydrogen that leaks tends to catch fire, and burn with a non-colored flame that is hard do see, and therefore a large safety challenge.

To compress hydrogen beyond the energy density of CAES or petroleum products, you still need comparatively expensive hardware. I think the price of these things will come down, as you pointed out, but I have a hard time seeing hydrogen electrolysis tech ever being grid scale. Maybe you'll have one attached to your house like the Tesla batteries, though, paired with solar panels.

> For those long storage times, there are proportionally fewer charge/discharge cycles, so the cost of the hydrogen itself becomes proportionally less important.

The key with large scale energy storage is to do price arbitrage — store energy when it is cheap (e.g. at night), sell it when energy is expensive. A utility won't sit on a large (say, 300 megawatt hours) hydrogen store for long, because once the cost to sell it exceeds the cost to store it, they are looking to put that energy back on the grid, even if it is for a specific use case like peak shaving. Grid scale projects need to be financed and paid off in 30-50 year timescales, usually. The main sources of cheap hydrogen (as in, cheaper than bulk liquid natural gas) are industrial processes that produce hydrogen as a byproduct.

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3. defrost ◴[28 Oct 24 07:23 UTC] No.41968506[source]▶
In current pragmatic engineering projects today green hydrogen alone is rarely the product, for many of the reasons you cite.

Ammonia and methanol are seen as better products from large scale PV farms as the storage and transport is easier than for pure hydrogen.

eg. In the container shipping domain: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/why-shipping-is-op...

( an article that highlights progress to date and challenges to overcome )

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4. schainks ◴[29 Oct 24 22:26 UTC] No.41990069{3}[source]▶
Yes, exactly! It seems like people overlook the tools and processes that currently exist and how we can integrate those into hydrogen ambitions.