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

Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).

Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const...

EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:

Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.

[1] https://kairospower.com/technology/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108

Yeah I’m not going to lie, that’s quite disappointing. Google funding several AP1000’s would be huge.

seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.

edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)

Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.

The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.

> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

Hence the batteries.

The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.

[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...

Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).

So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.

Citation for my sibling comment and that which you replied to:

https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)

https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)

(~2 years from planning to commissioning)

1.2gw of storage means in 4hr it's gone if solar and wind are weak

And can be recharged as soon as the wind or the sun comes back.

The sizing of batteries and power sources is highly region specific, and the places where it makes sense today with current manufacturing capacity, don't have to be "everywhere" for it to be fine where it's actually done; and given the roll out rate of renewables, we also don't need to wait until battery output per year can totally displace the existing and currently running gas plants, just back up the newly installed renewables themselves - 4h in this case is how fast the PV farm would recharge those batteries in the best case, the average output of a PV plant is about 10% of the peak, so this is really a 40 hour battery pack not a 4 hour pack.

I mean, look at Germany's grid yesterday& today and tell me, with such overcapacity, how much more overcapacity it would need and how much storage it would need to cover such events with low wind and solar?

I use the approximation of annual capacity factors for PV being 10%, which means 10x. Wind has a higher capacity factor IIRC between 35% and 85% and that heavily depends on location.

A realistic answer would need me to spend at least a month dealing with finding historical satellite cloud cover data, wind records, correlations leading to nationwide dunkelflaute, the planning options for where new stuff can be built, etc.

And even then, that varies depending on international grid connections, and how much storage is on the grid.

cf yearly are good for some purposes but bad for others. Again, look at Germany's coal/gas use yesterday vs today as well as wind/solar generation and imports. If you don't want fossils, how would you cover such events? France was outputting towards Germany equivalent of 3-4 npp and 2 additional from Switzerland, max being about 12+GW from neighbors. How would it be financially viable considering there are many other days when demand will be met for day hours? New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies. Germany already spends 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables

Today's values, from what I've seen, this country could run on just wind if it had 10x more than now, but it doesn't really need that in isolation, it's just that PV was harder to judge because the graph wasn't even close to a flat line.

https://www.energymonitor.ai/power/live-eu-electricity-gener...

> New solar/wind will not be able to sell energy at negative prices unless they get subsidies.

They already do, in good weather.

> 20bn/yr for price subsidies and their grid is far from overcapacity

And how much of that was for a guaranteed price made way back when the stuff was still expensive?

New PV is, by itself, the single cheapest source of electricity; even adding on batteries only takes it up to somewhere between gas and nuclear depending on the specifics.

> and that doesn't account for other subsidy types like for transmission for renewables

How's that a subsidy? I've not seen the breakdown of bill costs here, but back in the UK there was a split between connection cost and use cost.