After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not… It’s a pretty outdated energy source already.
At last, we’ll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don’t kill everyone!
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking “why do we need to go to the moon?!”.Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.
Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.
GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.
This time it is commercial.
I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.
Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it’s Google. So… Kind of a win?
Those are the people that would sell your soul to the devil.
Crazy how quickly we’ve gone from “Nuclear is a dead technology, it can’t work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y’all have to use fossil fuels instead” to “We’re building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing”.
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
Plus time. My perspective was that building a new nuclear power industry and any significant number of reactors would take too long: we need to have fixed climate change in less time.
So seven “small” reactors over the next eleven years …… faster than I expected but still takes decades to make a noticeable difference.
So seven “small” reactors over the next eleven years ……
Is more than we’ve built in the last 40. And, assuming energy demands continue to accelerate, I doubt they’ll be the last seven reactors these companies construct.
To be fair here, no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either. The new techs make it worth trying though.
no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either
One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective. Very difficult to turn a profit on electricity when you’re practically giving it away. Nuclear energy functions great as a kind-of loss-leader, a spur to your economy in the form of ultra-low-cost utilities that can incentivize high-energy consumption activities (like steel manufacturing and bulk shipping and commercial grade city-wide climate control). But its miserable as a profit center, because you can’t easily regulate the rate of power generation to gouge the market during periods of relatively high demand. Nuclear has enormous up-front costs and a long payoff window. It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.
By contrast, natural gas generators are perfect for profit-maximzing. Turning the electric generation on or off is not much more difficult than operating a gas stove. You can form a cartel with your friends, then wait for electric price-demand to peak, and command thousands of dollars a MWh to fill the sudden acute need for electricity. Natural gas plants can pay for themselves in a matter of months, under ideal conditions.
So I wouldn’t say the problem is that we don’t know their cost-efficiency. I’d say the problem is that we do know. And for consumer electricity, nuclear doesn’t make investment sense. But for internally consumed electricity on the scale of industrial data centers, it is exactly what a profit-motivated power consumer wants.
It’s almost like the brand spanking new tech to make small nuclear reactors are extremely cost prohibitive and risky, and to lower the cost someone needs to spend money to increase supply.
If only that was the government that invested in the R&D and tech to make it happen.
Gaining funds from taxes (meaningful taxes), and investing that money in making their country better.Hopefully this decision is because carbon taxes that will make consumer products representative of the actual cost of the item (not the exploitative cost). >
No no, let the free market decide.
Fucking AI threatening to replace basic jobs (when it’s more suited to replace the C-Suite) gobling up energy and money, too-big-to-fail bailouts and loophole tax rules bullshit.So yeh, someone needs to spend the money and that should be the government.
Because they should realise that carbon fuel sources are a death sentence.I’m glad you don’t make the decisions because I don’t want my taxes, that I work hard for and pay money into, to be spent by the government on highly-likely dogshit experimental brand new nuke tech that may eventually cost more money later on to maintain, and I prefer they spend it renovating existing infrastructure or building tried/true legacy nuke plant designs.
Your taxes already go towards this.
That’s how governments leverage capitalism to placate the people. Grants for green energy initiatives.
Private companies get free money for taking some amount of risk because they are likely to profit massively from it.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/google-agrees-to-multi-reactor-power-deal-with-nuclear-startup-kairos
Kairos is getting free money (grants & tax breaks) and profits from this. Google is extremely likely (can’t find a source) to be getting free money for thisCompanies EXIST to extract profit.
Of one of the worlds most successful companies is doing this, it’s because “line goes up”.I’d prefer this happend so that “humans survive”.
But “humans don’t die faster” is fine for now.(I guess “humans” means “poor humans”. As in anyone that doesn’t outright own 2 homes.)
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.
Everyone pays for not using nuclear too, a thousand fold more so.
So um. What happens when the white supremacists attacking FEMA and electrical grids starts attacking these nuclear reactors?
There are already existing nuclear reactors. Why would these new ones be any different in regards to their ability to be attacked?
Privately owned, smaller, more locations, more news coverage
I guess I expect the national energy commission to still regulate the plant to ensure safety standards are the same between public and private.
Will energy prices become negative when the AI bubble bursts?
No, EVs alone require 10 times the current installed energy production. We’re not even close. Expect energy rates to quadruple. The price will increase until people can’t afford the commute with their entire day’s paycheck.
Cyberpunk dystopias weren’t supposed to be guidelines dammit
Glad they’re choosing nano-nukes and supplying their own juice.
So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn’t replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that…cool
The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.
Yes it’s obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody’s arguing that. What I’m talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.
No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It’s not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that’s just one of the problems. It’s the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).
It’s also that Google could have been taxed more(I’m sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.
Growing from a broad research effort at U.S. universities and national laboratories, Kairos Power was founded to accelerate the development of an innovative nuclear technology …
Kairos Power is focused on reducing technical risk through a novel approach to test iteration often lacking in the nuclear space. Our schedule is driven by the goal of a U.S. demonstration plant before 2030 and a rapid deployment thereafter. The challenge is great, but so too is the opportunity.
So basically academics finding people to fund a large scale lab experiment, they want to get working by 2030. It sounds like they sold Google on an idea (for funding) and now have to move their idea from the lab to the real world. It does sound safer than water cooled plants of old at least.
Thank goodness we can now get a little nuclear waste with our cat pics.
These are the small, buried reactors right? The ones that we tested on paper but haven’t gotten NRC/DOE to sign off on?
I know they are MSRs but still…
This makes it sounds like Google is building their own nuclear plants
Nope, they have a partner that’s doing that and the partner is going to be providing small modular reactors. Although we are not sure according to the article whether Google is going to be running them directly to their data centers or whether they are going to be providing energy to homes and buying renewable energy credits or something. Either way, small modular reactors should bring down the price of nuclear.
yeah, like cars are cheaper than buses
CorpoNations.
We have a city to burn?
Businesses generating their own power is not anything new. The big auto manufacturers used to do it back in the day, and if you scale down the concept, every windmill (the grain grinding kind) and waterwheel built and operated for profit is the same thing. I’m just happy that Google is seemingly having their own built, instead of getting taxpayers to build it for them.
We’re living in a cyberpunk nightmare
But without the cool neon aesthetic. ☹️
Elon Musk is working on the cars though. They look like they’ll handle like the 2077 cars as well.
Could get the nuclear power plant in Georgia off the ground for how long?
Did it ever get finished?
But when corporate wants it just fucking happens 🤡
Corporations > people
Legal people are just better!
Shiti Organics are easily replaceable ;)
