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.
I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong.
Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses.
The core motor of capitalism.
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 this
Companies 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.)
One of the things with AI is that it’s a largely constant load factor. Nuclear is really good for that.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts. SMRs haven’t even been proven in practice yet, and this is the first good news they’ve had in a while. Restarting Three Mile Island isn’t expected to work before 2028. The hype bubble could easily burst in the next year, and even if it doesn’t, keeping it going to 2028 is highly unlikely.
So we’ll probably have some new nuclear around that isn’t going into AI, because those datacenters will be dead when the hype passes. Might as well use them, I guess.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts.
Given the military applications of the technology, I don’t think it is ever really going away. Consumer AI (those user facing image generators and chatbots, for instance) might lose funding. But Israel’s Lavender AI is going to become a permanent fixture in our lives, as it’s rolled out for the policing of more and more territory.
As it exists now, no. The models are reaching their limit, and they aren’t good enough. They can’t absorb any more information than they have, and more training iterations aren’t making them better. They’ll do some useful things; a recent find of the longest black hole jet ever found was done in part from AI classification of astronomy data. It’s going to get implemented into existing tools and that’s about it. It won’t be enough to justify the money that’s already been dumped in.
Historically, the field has been very bursty. Lots of money gets dumped into it, it makes some big improvements, and then hits a wall. Funding dries up because it’s not meeting goals anymore, and the whole thing goes into slumber for a decade or two. A new breakthrough eventually comes, and then money gets dumped in again. We’ve about maxed out what the last breakthrough can give us. I expect we’ll need at least one more cycle of this before AGI works out.
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.
One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.
I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.
For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.
So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.
As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.
It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.
Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.
Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.
That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.
There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.
So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.
NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.
Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.
And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.
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.
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.
I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.
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.
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 this
Companies 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.)
One of the things with AI is that it’s a largely constant load factor. Nuclear is really good for that.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts. SMRs haven’t even been proven in practice yet, and this is the first good news they’ve had in a while. Restarting Three Mile Island isn’t expected to work before 2028. The hype bubble could easily burst in the next year, and even if it doesn’t, keeping it going to 2028 is highly unlikely.
So we’ll probably have some new nuclear around that isn’t going into AI, because those datacenters will be dead when the hype passes. Might as well use them, I guess.
Given the military applications of the technology, I don’t think it is ever really going away. Consumer AI (those user facing image generators and chatbots, for instance) might lose funding. But Israel’s Lavender AI is going to become a permanent fixture in our lives, as it’s rolled out for the policing of more and more territory.
You don’t think there’s any chance that AI as it exists today might be just the start of a huge industry?
As it exists now, no. The models are reaching their limit, and they aren’t good enough. They can’t absorb any more information than they have, and more training iterations aren’t making them better. They’ll do some useful things; a recent find of the longest black hole jet ever found was done in part from AI classification of astronomy data. It’s going to get implemented into existing tools and that’s about it. It won’t be enough to justify the money that’s already been dumped in.
Historically, the field has been very bursty. Lots of money gets dumped into it, it makes some big improvements, and then hits a wall. Funding dries up because it’s not meeting goals anymore, and the whole thing goes into slumber for a decade or two. A new breakthrough eventually comes, and then money gets dumped in again. We’ve about maxed out what the last breakthrough can give us. I expect we’ll need at least one more cycle of this before AGI works out.
To be fair here, no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either. The new techs make it worth trying though.
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.
I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.
For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.
So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.
As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.
Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.
Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.
If you don’t get a high ROI, you’re not going to have lots of investors offering up their cash at low interest rates.
That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.
There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.
Not when the federal government was just building them to generate fissile material and giving the electricity away after that.
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh. Long term, nuclear is cheaper.
So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.
NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.
Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.
And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.
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.
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.