Nuclear has never been profitable without massive government subsidies and guarantees, and
GoogleKairos too will either manage to collect those or lose money.It’s unclear how Google and Kairos set up the deal — whether the former is providing direct funding or if it just promised to buy the power that the latter generates when its reactors are up and running. Nevertheless, Kairos has already passed several milestones, making it one of the more promising startups in the field of nuclear energy.
I guarantee you, they are shouldering on none of the risk (like the Chinese and French at Hinkley Point), and this startup will be going down.
Yay, more ads to pay for Google’s reactors.
Cyberpunk dystopias weren’t supposed to be guidelines dammit
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.
EVs alone require 10 times the current installed energy production.
No they don’t.
The UK national grid estimates there needs to be a 4-5% increase each year, for roughly 15 years. That’s achievable.
The US won’t be too different.
Expect energy rates to quadruple
Why quadruple. Where are you getting this from?
The price will increase until people can’t afford the commute with their entire day’s paycheck.
They obviously won’t.
Fossil fuel power plants don’t count. EVs running of fossil fuel make no sense. Remove them from the equation and my prediction becomes extremely optimistic.
In what world don’t they count?
They can power EVs. And running an EV on fossil fuel electricity is still far less polluting than running a petrol or diesel car.
One large generator at its most efficient setting is far more efficient than tens of thousands of small ones starting from cold multiple times per day, that aren’t necessarily maintained well, and are constantly going through their rev range.
Where are your sources for any of what you’re saying?
No , if you run EVs off a grid fossil fuel generator, that’s the difference between 33% and 40% efficient. It’s not enough to move the needle. It doesn’t even pay for itself in terms of emissions.
The energy source absolutely has to be ZERO emissions as well. If not then it’s just climate cope.
What the hell are you talking about? That’s not how people charge EVs.
EVs on their own are typically 90%+ efficient. Although some are as low as ~85%.
Even running on a generator, though, they’d still be more efficient than any ICE engine found in a car, aside from a Formula 1 engine.
EVs are far cleaner, even if ran on a fossil fuel energy grid.
fossil fuel power plant are tops 40% efficient while ice powered cars are around 33%.
If you power you EV off a fossil fuel power plant, then that difference, minus the grid losses, the charging losses and then the inverter and motor losses, is how much co2 emissions you are saving.
Of course that’s assuming your driving habits don’t change, with that high upfront investment and relatively lower per mile costs compared to using gasoline.
And that’s not to mention the one time emission from the production of that EV amortised on its 15 year hoped-for lifetime.
Beside capturing government subsidies and the arbitrage saving from using temporarily cheaper electricity as fuel, I don’t see EVs making much sense either from an economic or a saving the planet standpoint.
Without a zero emission energy production as the source, EVs don’t make sense beyond hype and cope.
All fossil fuel electrical generation, and that includes natural gas, has to be shutdown. Or else it will not make a lick of difference.
EVs are currently running partially on fossil fuel just fine and generating less pollution than ICEs because power plant efficiency is still better than combustion engine efficiency.
That is nowhere near enough. It’s 33% versus 40% difference between co2/kWh . we need zero co2/kWh or else it’s all a waste of time.
It’s only acceptable if we are transitioning to zero emission grid. If we stay on natural gas then it won’t even move the needle.
We are transitioning towards it, but in the meantime, switching to EVs still reduces CO2 output and because the grid is getting cleaner, that means EVs get cleaner even after being manufactured and sold, whereas ICEs can only get cleaner through R&D and only get worse over time as they age (once they start burning oil, etc)
A few percentage points reduction in co2 emission isn’t going to move the needle. The whole grid has to shutdown fossil fuel energy production for this transition to make sense.
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.
Had me excited there for the first half, ngl…
The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn’t mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they’ll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman’s knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can’t melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
The meltdown that happened in Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement. Yes, there were design flaws in the system, but lots of rules had to be broken before the design flaws were triggered.
A safer design is insurance against bad management long after all of us are dead.
Nah, mismagement happened yes, but any other nuclear plant wouldn’t have exploded, they used a old technology even for that age, for cust cutting or faster to build idk that’s why it exploded
If development continues on this path
If we continue down the path of wasting energy and polluting to produce useless shit humanity is screwed.
There is a whole universe of resources and our needs for them will never be fully satisfied. Every step towards cleaner, more sustainable energy is a good one.
We fixed the glitch.
The power required for this level of AI won’t be used for faster delivery of pizzas. It will be used for surveillance and control. For world domination shit.
I’ll be amazed if this ever comes to fruition.
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power. After that there’s nuclear power and it’s much, much more expensive:
After that, and even more expensive are SMRs. Also, they don’t actually exist yet as a means of generating power.
From the article, “For example, it has already received the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Registry Commission (the first one to do so) to build its Hermes non-powered demonstrator reactor in Tennessee. Although it still doesn’t have nuclear fuel on-site, this is a major step in its design process, allowing the company to see its system in real life and learn more about its deployment and operation.”
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.
At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you’re going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren’t exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.
See my comment here:
The high price of nuclear power comes from it being a stagnant and obsolete technology for 30 years.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
I hear this a lot. Can you give an example of a regulation that could safely be removed that would lead to a significant reduction on the cost of new nuclear?
Well one easy one, in my country it is that nuclear plants need to emit zero radiation from their core, like nothing. This is incredibly expensive to achieve, a more sensible value would have been similar or less than normal background radiation.
Nuclear has a lot of advantages that are really low hanging fruit of producing safe clean energy that is perfect for a grids baseload.
Interesting, can you provide more info? Which country? Link?
Wouldn’t emitting radiation, even at background levels, lead to an increase in radiation as it’s in addition to background stuff?
Also, there are strong arguments that we no longer need baseload generation and in fact it’s detrimental:
"No new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States….
Wellinghoff said renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.
“I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism,” he said. “Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch that first.”…
“What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it,” he added. “And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.
“So if you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they’re very inflexible. You can’t ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism.”"
https://energycentral.com/c/ec/there-really-any-need-baseload-power
Wouldn’t emitting radiation, even at background levels, lead to an increase in radiation as it’s in addition to background stuff?
Yes. But a single flight across the US exposes people around 4 times ground level background radiation.
Sure, it’s a negligible amount but OP was saying that nuclear would be competitive on cost if only red tape wouldn’t keep pushing the price up. Their contention was that less shielding would substantially lower the price of new nuclear but so far I’ve not seen anything to support this argument.
South Africa, you can read up on us if you want to learn about a country that really fucked up its energy supply, but that is a different story.
You do need a baseload, this is not something an argument of saying we do not really need a baseload can wish away, industries that run 24/7 like a smelting operation where if you cannot shutdown, or hospitals or traffic lights, there is a certain percentage of baseload that has to be generated.
Solar and wind are amazing and I really wish to see these systems play a major role in power generation, but you say the nuclear and coal plants are very inflexible. I do not know who this guy is but Nuclear and coal can very easily ramp up their power generation, both these are basically steam engines, both nuclear and coal can very quickly heat up and generate a lot more steam that powers generators, like an car engine but more accurately a steam train that you give more power to go faster. Solar and wind cannot ramp up on their own, cannot ask the wind to blow harder or the sun to shine brighter suddenly when the system requires it, they need costly backup systems like methane peaker plants or energy storage, be it batteries, pumped hydro, hydrogen electrolysis the list goes on. These things added to solar and wind plants are usually not allocated to the cost of generation, a total cost of generation including these additional backup systems are a better indicator of solar and wind systems cost.
Now what about waste. I agree coal is messy and is causing global warming and needs to be phased out. But nuclear waste is a solved problem, it has been for decades, the spent fuel is usually stored deep underground where it will never interact with the world again. Solar on the other hand, if it costs about $20-$30 to recycle a panel but like $1-$3 to send it to a waste dumps, what do you think will happen to the solar panels. https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power Harvard business did an article about how solar recycling has really been a point of weakness, where nuclear we have set guidelines on how to environmentally and safely dispose of nuclear waste currently. I am willing to bet you the environmental impact from pollution from nuclear, including all the disasters will be negligible compared to the waste impact from solar panels and batteries currently.
So my point is not to dismiss solar or wind, really where wind and sunshine are naturally plentiful it will be a waste not to harvest these resources, just like where geothermal resources are available it will be wasteful not to utilise it.
But nuclear, even with its high initial capital cost and long build time, still does provide energy cheaply and will last for a lot longer than solar panels and wind turbines, nuclear can be easily and quickly ramped up or down depending on the load required.
No, red tape is death by a thousand cut. Each one sensible and modestly priced.
Glad they’re choosing nano-nukes and supplying their own juice.
I have no issue with the safety of nuclear power plants, however: fissile material is no more renewable than fossil fuels even if it’s much greener. Also, in terms of more localized ecological damage, uranium mining is a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
Maybe Google should focus on building its plants near geothermal hotspots instead if it’s forced to suck up vast amounts of power for AI no one wants.
This makes it sounds like Google is building their own nuclear plants
What could go wrong?
Emergency shutdown link hidden behind UI menu after UI menu and constantly changing locations weekly.
They will suddenly stop supporting them after a few years
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
Boy are they gonna look stupid when they realize that no one outside their little bubble has a use for AI.
It’s not even close to ready for launch and why are we wasting energy on it?
because idiots like me who have no marketable skills can use it to fool ourselves into thinking we can do code/art/literature/etc.
Hey don’t be so hard on yourself
You can also use it to fool the rubes around you
sadly, I have a moral compass. I’m not sure where I put the damn thing, but I have one.
Oh damn
I guess you’re normal
actually this (yes, I’m replying to myself). I’m an idiot with no marketable skills. I put boxes on shelves for a living. I want to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, an author. I am so bad at all of these, and between having a full time job, a significant other, and several neglected hobbies, I don’t have time to learn to get better at something I suck at. So I cheat. If I want art done, I could commission a real artist, or for the cost of one image I could pay for dalle and have as many images as I want (sure, none of them will be quite what I want but they’ll all be at least good). I could hire a programmer, or I could have chatgpt whip up a script for me since I’m already paying for it anyway since I want access to dalle for my art stuff. Since I have chatgpt anyway, I might as well use it to help flesh out my lore for the book I’ll never write. I haven’t found a good solution for music.
I have in my brain a vision for a thing that is so fucking cool (to me), and nobody else can see it. I need to get it out of my brain, and the only way to do that is to actualize it into reality. I don’t have the skills necessary to do it myself, and I don’t have the money to convince anyone else to help me do it. generative AI is the only way I’m going to be able to make this work. Sure, I wish that the creators of the content that were stolen from to train the ai’s were fairly compensated. I’d be ok with my chatgpt subscription cost going up a few dollars if that meant real living artists got paid, I’m poor but I’m not broke.
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
Certainly doesn’t sound like an idiot with no marketable skills to me. You’re coming up with creative ideas and finding ways to try to prove them out in disciplines that you aren’t terribly familiar with. You’re really selling yourself way too short here and should be A LOT more compassionate towards you.
Really, it sounds like you are in a similar place to Product Management.
The way that you are approaching things is about diametrically opposite to the sort of problematic behavior that the corpos using LLMs to bludgeon labor are participating in.
Makes sense. Sometimes only once out into reality then only we’ll know if it is a great idea, or not. But it doesn’t hurt to have the tools to try. Those who want really high quality stuffs can go to the humans (and pay them good money) to make it even better.
If I find any degree of success, then absolutely I will hire real humans to help me with my vision.
I wish you the best of luck with your endeavours!
checks notes Shareholders?!
Because they have successfully lied and manipulated their current marketing material to make a sizeable portion of the population believe some kind of technological rapture is imminent, and that all we need is to invest, invest invest in AI tech. It’s a full-on cult now. The people they have roped in are fanatical, unpaid marketing mobs who don’t sleep, don’t waver, and can’t be reasoned with. They are the engine that is driving the hype train.
They had a legit, non-satirical post on reddit the other day making their plans for what they’re going to do when Artificial Superintelligence comes and changes the world and makes every human rich and immortal without the need to work. I am not even exaggerating, this is what they believe and there are probably millions of them.
Currently over 80% of AI startups fail, and the remaining ones are often bought up by larger companies trying to control intellectual property and future patents. And we have ZERO useful models in our hands. I still don’t use my copilot app for anything other than setting a 30-minute timer for my lunch break. I tried to activate an AI helper on Adobe to see if it could help my productivity. The thing can’t read graphs and charts and has zero contextual awareness and can’t do math. WTF GOOD IS IT?
!remind me in 1 year
Actually this going to be great news when the AI Bust happens because we’ll still have more clean power and we won’t be wasting it on stupid bullshit.
immediately turns AI datacenters into Bitcoin mining centers
Imagine a future 2032 where all BTC has been mined ahead of schedule and Alphabet is the world’s largest lender after reorganisation into a banking platform.
Bitcoin is dead it’s all about digital pogs now
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.
What’s the grand scheme of things mean to you? If we average it out over 40 years? How does nuclear even fit in when solar and wind are cheaper? Nuclear plants don’t provide on demand energy to fill in the gaps, they provide energy constantly.
The only reason it works for microsoft is because they plan to use all that energy consistently. But besides that why should we trust a for-profit company to do anything safely in the first place? Do we have a long history of companies being regulated well or self-regulating well?
The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.
Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn’t?
Do they store wind turbines after EOL? I thought they’d just get scrapped and recycled.
The turbine blades are made of carbon fiber. There is no process in effect to deal with them. Too big to crush, not worth scraping or recycling. They all go landfilla.
There currently are processes to deal with them, multiple companies are working on the problem.
Current solutions include shredding them and reconstituting into some sort of alternative building material, chemically separating the parts of the composite and creating recycled resin, and mechanically separating and sorting apart the different materials which are then recombined for alternative use.
This is a good place to look at recent american efforts, but there is more recent information available elsewhere: https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-turbine-materials-recycling-prize
I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
Expecting corporations to “solve important problems in the world” is foolish though. You should expect your government to tax them fairly so that they can work on people problems and maybe it takes corporations a few years longer to afford their own fleet of nuclear power stations.
Man imagine a world where that could have been what we were voting on next month.
Governments aren’t going to solve these problems either because they’re 100% for sale. Only we can solve them, through direct action.
Why? It just sounds nice bouncing around your head for a few seconds?
I would love to see large and small scale nuclear reactors become more common.
So because it makes you feel happy when you think about it?
You did reply with the reason you support these reactors right?
I would like to see nuclear power grow in use.
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?I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources
Is nuclear not?
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…
AI seems perfect for renewables load balancing. Got extra power to burn because it is windy at night? Train your models
AI power cost has quickly outscaled increases in power production. AI Datacenters alone are projected to consume more power than Japan sooner than 2030.
