https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...
> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.
The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."
It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.
The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."
There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
History:
- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.
- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.
Alternative reactor history:
- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
[3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn...
Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.
Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".
True story. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716
It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.
They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.
Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.
Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.
So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.
[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-react...
[2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-vallec...
Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/fuk...
[2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-island-...
Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.
The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.
The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.
South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.
"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"
"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"
"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
"...."
There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.
I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.
Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
That's why :)
Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".
Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.
Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.
They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.
Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.
Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.
Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...
> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2025/02/pge-reco...
PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
Where did the money go? Paying for wildfire damage.
There's not really any way around that. Capital expenditures are profit.
The costs come from the wildfires and a derelict grid requiring large infrastructure upgrades.
Grid fees pay for damage caused by wildfires.
Additionally, that economic might means that we have very high labor costs, and the ways of fixing things that are cheapest may be different for California than other parts of the country. But the utility is incentivized to spend as much as possible on these efforts (they take a fixed percentage of costs as profit), and the regulators have no clue what's going on. So proposing a method that's the cheapest elsewhere will get a rubber stamp.
It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.
It’s PG&E and regulatory capture. Santa Clara County is off PG&E and has normal energy tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...
The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.
Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".
It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.
California is raising rates to build out infrastructure for electrification and mitigation of the dangers that now exist due to climate change.
This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a new reactor in less than geologic time.
https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-3-reaches-initial-criticalit...
The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led to the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for securities fraud:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nrc-certifies-first-us-sm...
If you mean that the NRC holds back designs that are more exotic than plain old light water reactors, maybe so, but that isn't relevant to the "looming power crisis" mentioned by bpodgursky up-thread. Light water reactors are the most affordable and fastest to build everywhere in the world. Pressurized heavy water reactors (like CANDU) are also mature designs. Everything else is slower and more expensive to build, with very limited operational history compared to the dominant water based reactor designs.
I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
I am not against nuclear, but I do believe we would be fine without it too.
Plot twist: the computer's last act at the end of The Last Question was just an LLM's hallucination.
What if hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
What if the operating companies values profit over security?
What if an earthquake or Tsunami hits nuclear power plant?
> What if hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
https://www.missionsecure.com/blog/cyber-attack-india-larges...
The Iranian nuclear program was also air gapped.
Didn’t stop Stuxnet.
It’s interesting what you can do with USB drives.
And more power plants means more possibilities for human errors.
Wind has down sides like moving parts and requiring giant concrete poors. Birds strikes, noise as well as ground vibration are also issues.
Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of death, flying into windows.
Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
Edit: this should be Cats cause ~10,000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
Unless you're vegetarian, or vegan, how so?
There even are efforts to recycle existing ones: https://www.offshorewind.biz/2023/02/08/newly-discovered-che...
In most advanced nations landfilling them is prohibited, and many are now burnt in cement kilns.
The US produces hundreds of millions of tons of construction and demolition waste per year.
> Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's first mini nuclear power plant
So the starting stated price is only 20% cheaper than that train wreck. Will love to see how high this number gets given it's a first of its kind.
What's slightly different is the financial risk profile. Failing on a 1x 300WM $5B project is slightly easier than a $18B 1GW project.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear decisions are made almost entirely along financial lines, instead of the safety concerns that dominate most debate about nuclear.
Estimated 20B CAD for 4 x 300MW power stations.
Please get your prices to 2025.
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
On Earth, solar allows high energy use before we run into limits from direct thermal pollution, since it uses energy already hitting the planet rather than introducing new energy.
In space, the energy available from sunlight vastly exceeds any available from fusion, and the feasibility difference tilts even more toward solar.
For mobility in space, beamed power will be best, and solar works with that just fine, even out to interstellar distances.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
Unless, you mean renewable being "unstable" in the sense of no wind, no sun equates to no power. Then yes, but only until the fuel is spent.
However, renewables are stable when resources are available, stable in providing consistent clean fuel and stable in cost on upkeep than say one of a nuclear reactor.
Which is why you combine all three.
> Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
El Hierro, the smallest of the Canary Islands, holds a unique distinction as the only island to operate solely on wind and waterpower for 28 consecutive days.
The facility ingeniously combines wind generation with pumped storage hydroelectric generation. Now that's cool.
https://www.renewableinstitute.org/el-hierro-a-renewable-ene...
Those seemingly stuck on advocating nuclear power do not seem to understand the advances made both in storage technology and in system design to deal with intermittency.
I am not fully detesting nuclear, but I do disagree it a cure to the environment crisis as Solar is plenty and free; as are Wind and Water too.
The risks of what if; and that now we live in such a volatile world. How are you going to convince me it's safe?
How do I know a drone won't strike it in the next war? Some sponsored hack?
Stuxnet was an organised hack that was created to aid destruction to nuclear hardware.
Chernobyl is still unsafe and that's many years ago and was recently damaged again by a drone.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
That's not fair.
Chernobyl was a reactor that failed to pass safety tests being put into production. Any failure should be considered expected.
I'm not worried about another Chernobyl. We've had one already, all reactor designs have been tested over and over again to avoid a repeat. The real risk is in all the small and seemingly insignificant things working together in unexpected ways. There will always be a nonzero chance of an incident, and due to the nature of nuclear reactors the impact of an incident is essentially unlimited.
Think of it like commercial airliners. Are they safe? Yes, absolutely. They are the safest method of travel available. I have zero worry about my safety when stepping on an airplane. But despite the tiny odds airplanes do crash from time to time, simply because there are so many of them.
An airplane crash has a smouldering crater and a few hundred dead as its result. Not great, but not terrible either: as a society we build a monument and move on. Would we still be flying airplanes if - no matter how unlikely - a crash meant that an entire city would become uninhabitable?
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
The same was said of Fukushima. And it was - until a tsunami fried all the backup local power keeping the control systems alive. Turns out the "passive cooling" still requires some valves to be controllable...
So it sounds like the view point of "deal with it when it happens then" and that's what puts me off nuclear.
Nuclear is too unstable when something does occur to be contained and as to when dismantled.
But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big tech companies like Google.
> […] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions across its operations and value chain, […]
Man, I remember when 2030 seemed like the future. But now it seems downright aggressive. Good luck Google.
If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes.
You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
But instead we have expensive electricity (at least here in Australia), where your mind is constantly loaded wit being aware of your energy consumption.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
You don’t get ”free electricity” with absolutely massive handouts to the nuclear industry.
Instead renewables and storage are delivering on the ”too cheap to meter” promise.
I have said it before, but in order for me to believe the claims that renewables and storage are delivering in places like europe, you first have to stop investing and building new natural gas power plants. Rather than classify natural gas as "green", as Germany pushed through in EU, we should have laws to prevent new natural gas power plants from being built and existing fleet should be slowly dismantled. If renewables and storage can deliver on the ”too cheap to meter” promise, they should do so in an environment without natural gas being used behind the scene.
*Yes, I understand it's inflation adjusted. There are so many possible explanations for the observed negative curve that go beyond the bold, broad claim that learning curve theory doesn't hold in nuclear.
In my mind, an (at least) equally reasonable explanation is that the conditions for the learning curve weren't met. (This probably sounds like "no true Scotsman". I admit that the learning curve is a function of scale and relative to mass-production examples, the "signal" for the learning curve is probably weaker to begin with given how many facilities of the same design were actually built.)
-Changes in design pull you backward on the curve. There were lots of changes in French design
-Unsteady expansion timeline messes with the workforce expertise part of the hypothesis. You want ideally an accelerated or at least constant build rate, not large gaps where the workforce either respecializes in another field or retires.
- regulations increase over time. Part of the conditions for the theory are implicitly "all else being equal".
-while inflation adjustment partially accounts for this, labor becomes more expensive as gdp per capital increases (see, for example, low skill manufacturing leaving China as it becomes wealthier). I don't know the details, but given the rapid post-war growth, I'm guessing gdp/capital was growing pretty quickly during the French build out
For relatively low volume manufacturing, the learning curve effects are probably smaller to begin with, so it's easier to get an effective negative learning rate. With so many confounding factors that violate the premise of theory, I find it rather unscientific to definitively claim the theory is just wrong in an entire industry.
But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options.
In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors:
- low seasonable variability of insolation in the north
- high wind speeds in the south
- land availability for solar
- high statistical diversification of renewables due to size
- higher than normal costs of nuclear due to first-of-a-kind costs dominating the total build-out costs due to the small energy needs of the country, and higher labor costs
The CSIRO studied this for Australia and released a report about it. Even when you factor in storage and transmission costs, renewables are significantly cheaper than nuclear.
We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.
Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.
And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.
AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.
CSIRO perfidy.
The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.
What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear waste storage works.
Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.
Hint: it isn’t.
There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.
Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
The real long-term effect of past nuclear accidents is a subject of debate, and the potential worst case a concern for all.
> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle
Not at industrial-scale.
> and believe in a technology we don’t have.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-fossil-renewa...
All these nuclear announcements are smoke screens to cover construction of large amounts of gas fired capacity. Anyone expecting dramatic near term increases in electricity demand will need to go with gas (or renewables, but tariffs make that less competitive); nuclear, especially new designs, cannot be rolled out quickly.
Excellent safety, if you ignore Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, the Tokaimura accidents, the Church Rock spill, the beaches near Dounreay, and dozens more.
Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up - if a cleanup is even possible at all. It is the only power source which has made entire cities impossible to live in.
I personally don't believe this is necessarily a dealbreaker with modern nuclear plants in rich countries, but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
> a completely closed fuel life cycle
Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem. We've been operating nuclear reactors for 80 years now, but permanent waste disposal and reactor decommissioning is still in its infancy. The current state-of-the-art is essentially "let it rot in place and hope nothing goes wrong while we figure out a way to deal with it". I think it can be solved, but unless we've done so you probably shouldn't make it part of your argument.
> If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example. 9% of global power is supplied by nuclear plants. There are over 400 plants currently operational, and 700 have been decommissioned. We aren't on "baby's first nuclear reactor" anymore.
> implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
> You’d just pay for amps, say 50 amp, 150 amp, 300 amp, all you can consume.
Not a chance. Although fuel would indeed be quite cheap, power still isn't going to be free: someone has to pay off the massive construction loans.
Consumer power consumption is also a lot more flexible than something like internet. People don't suddenly start to consume a lot more data when their internet gets faster - a single person is still only going to watch one Netflix stream at a time, and that'll work just as fine on a 100Mbps connection as on a 8Gbps one. And all the equipment is already prepared for the faster connection, so it's not like they are saving any money by keeping it slow.
But if your power is free, why bother with gas heating? Why go for a heat pump when resistive heating has cheaper equipment? Why bother isolating your home? Why shut off your lights when you leave your home? Making electricity free means we'll be using a lot more of it, which means having to build significantly more expensive nuclear power plants.
If this was an option, countries with abundant hydro would be providing free power. And they aren't.
> But instead we have expensive electricity
Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity. While building additional nuclear could get us (mostly) off fossil fuel, it is definitely not going to make your power bill any cheaper. Nuclear power is only viable with hefty subsidies - which in practice means turning off dirt-cheap solar and wind to run expensive nuclear plants.
no, these are included in the calculations of "deaths per kilowatt-hour"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
No it's not unsolved. There are burial sites. The spent fuel is kept on the power plant for years so it cools down.
Also even without nuclear power, there would still be nuclear waste to take care of because of the medical, defence, research, and other industries.
Nope, it's all included, how could it not be?
> Nuclear power rarely kills anyone, but when (not if) things go wrong, it tends to create a massive mess which costs billions to clean up
Yep, yet it's still the safest, which means your argument has to be wrong.
Just to show you the magnitude of your error, the Fukushima accident was directly caused by a tsunami which killed 20,000 people. But your main concern from that event is the cost of cleanup of radioactive material.
More people die from falling off roofs while installing solar panels than from nuclear accidents.
> but if you want to convince people of its safety you probably shouldn't be mentioning its historical record.
Well you're not technically wrong. As you've inadvertently demonstrated with your irrational arguments, since people didn't use reason to arrive at their conclusions, they would not be likely to be persuaded by it.
> Only if you completely ignore the huge amount of pollution and waste generated by mining, reprocessing, and disposal.
Do you mean to say the waste is significantly worse than for solar panels, wind turbines, etc.?
> Again, I personally don't believe this has to be a dealbreaker, but the waste generated by the nuclear industry is still an unsolved problem.
Inert solid waste sitting in a barrel somewhere is not a problem that is worth talking about.
Again, the magnitude of your error is outstanding. We've been simply releasing all the, radioactive mind you, products of burning coal into the atmosphere for the past few hundreds of years but you're concerned about a tiny amount of solid waste.
> > If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs
>
> We did. France hit 80% nuclear, for example.
You cherry-picked the single country with the biggest share of nuclear by far.
> > implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved
>
> We did. It made the plants too expensive to be commercially viable.
Ironically, that's because the standards for nuclear plant safety are determined by the sort of irrational thinking you're presenting here.
> Taking all costs into account, nuclear is currently the most expensive form of generating electricity.
And that's where the issue is buried, I don't believe you're taking all costs into account.
Is coal really cheaper when you include the health and environmental damage it creates? It literally can't be, the costs of human created climate change will be eye-watering.
Are renewables really cheaper once you consider the end goal of a 90%+ renewable grid? The costs of accounting for the inherent intermittency of solar and wind go up exponentially as you increase the share of renewables in the grid.
Adding the first 10% of renewables is trivial, you need no extra storage since the grid itself will simply absorb the difference.
Adding the last 10% is horribly expensive and I don't believe you're accounting for that at all.
Solar power is great but intermittence is the main issue with it. If you look at 30 year historical weather data, many highly populated regions have two week periods with almost complete cloud cover. Storage and intercontinental power transmission are usually listed as the solutions to this, but the costs of these solutions are rarely included.
Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night.
So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quoting one price for solar energy is nonsensical when the same solar panel is going to give much more energy in Arizona than it is in upstate New York. The cost of a solar + battery system is going to be different in different places. In upstate NY we deal with a lot of retailers that are based in places like Bentonville, AK who just can't believe you might need an electric space heater in late April or otherwise your chickens might die. Since 95% of the world's population lives in a milder climate it's no wonder our needs don't get taken seriously.
The intermittency problem involves: (1) diurnal variation (overnight), (2) seasonal variation (do you overbuild solar panels 3x so you have enough generation in the winter or do you invest in very long term storage?) and (3) Dunkelflaute conditions when you are unlucky and get a few bad weeks of weather.
I've seen analyses of the cost of a grid that consider just smoothing out one day, but not one that covers seasonal variation. (So much of it comes down to: "how many days of blackout a year can people tolerate?")
With a significant overbuild or weeks worth of storage capacity costs are not going to be so favorable against nuclear energy. The overbuild offers the possibility that you could do something useful with the extra power but it is easier said than done because "free" power from renewables is like a free puppy. You have to build power lines to transmit it, or batteries to store it, or you have to feed it into some machine whose capital costs are low enough that you're not going to worry about the economics of only running it 20% of the time. (Go tell a Chemical Engineer about your plan to run a chemical factory 20% of the time and that's probably the last time you'll hear from them.)
The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...
Also it isn't as bad as it sounds. They had to throttle some nuclear power plants slightly. This lead to a loss of less than 0.2% of the total 2022 nuclear generation in france.
Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days.
That is how utterly truly insanely expensive new build western nuclear power is.
[1]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/23/chinas-new-energy-storag...
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
[3]: https://www.ess-news.com/2025/01/15/chinas-cgn-new-energy-an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"
If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]
So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One
which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.
[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME
We’ve just about hit peak coal.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/dec/18/coal-use-to...
Not sure that counts as "just about hit peak coal".
Assuming the projected 2025-2030 installation speed is realistic and flattens out - bit "if", but not completely unrealistic - that means we'd be looking at 75% renewables in 2040 and 90% renewables in 2045.
Nuclear reactors take 15 to 20 years to build, and it'd take an additional year or 5-10 to scale up construction capacity. If we go all-out on nuclear now, that means significant nuclear power starts coming online in 20-25 years - so 2045-2050. At that point there is no more renewables gap left to bridge. There might be a small niche left for it if there is going to be essentially zero innovation in storage and short-term peaker plants, but who's going to bet billions on that?
Nuclear would've been nice if we built massive amounts of it 30 years ago, but we didn't. But starting a large-scale nuclear rollout in 2025? It just doesn't make sense.
I just don't know if that assumption is true.
Looking at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/small-modular-reactor...
> The timeline is to finish construction of the first reactor by the end of 2029, and connect it to the grid in 2030.
Sure, let's add 100% buffer because it's a major project, that's between 8-10 years from now. Not bad.
Are we talking about different kinds of reactors maybe?
Will it be built before we have sufficient renewable capacity?
At this point optimising their electricity cost by load balancing their compute to where electricity is cheap, free or negative on a minute by minute basis would be a sizeable cost saving. Savings that would possibly offset the hardware overprovisioning that they would need.
Because of nuclear.
By comparison, Germany dropped its nuclear power industry in favor of focus on renewables. Now they import electricity generated by nuclear from France and buy fossil fuels from Russia despite recent Russian aggression.
Who isn't dependent on fossil fuel imports from Russia? France. Who is looking to ban all internal combustion engines from their largest city by 2030? France.
Because of nuclear.
> Residents of Andorra and parts of France bordering Spain were also reporting being hit by the blackout.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/28/spain-portugal...
Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).
Is avoiding HW underutilization really worth going nuclear? The most expensive energy source of all?
We burned a few decades saying solar and wind are the solution. This set us back greatly in the struggle to reduce greenhouse emissions.
As an system-oriented person, give me a healthy combination of available, battle tested, new and promising solutions, fine-tuning weaknesses with strengths.
Go to the stadium to solve your local team/visiting team issues. You are all falling to Big Fossil antics.
Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow.
I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.
As the statista.com report says >...Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If it wasn't for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 122 and 284 U.S. dollars per megawatt-hour.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
An extra 50 years to solve the problem changes everything.
How many nuclear electricity states are there? 30
How many nuclear weapons states are there? 9
What headaches are those nine nuclear capable states providing, exactly?
How has the world been made worse by having nine nuclear capable states? Practically, not just hypothetical anxieties about an unrealised future.
Yes, but that's not what's concerning the skeptics anymore, especially for solar (thankfully - the cost reductions and efficiency gains have been great). Aside from the well known geographical variance, I think the biggest legitimate concern is intermittence.
Let me try to turn that into a decent question: What variable other than energy output is most useful in order to compare energy sources? For context, all I've seen when it comes to intermittence is flame war with weak arguments thrown from both sides of the debate, i.e. "intermittence is not a problem at all, we just need batteries" to "intermittent sources are worth a fraction of an equivalent baseload source".
Honestly, I've not been convinced of either side, and (if I'm not alone in that sentiment), it may be a problem of education and communication.
We threw absolutely massive handouts at the nuclear industry 20 years ago.
Only look to Vogtle, Virgin C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3 and all other projects. Moorside, Oldbury, Wylfa and countless in the US.
Had new built nuclear power delivered on budget and on time nuclear power would definitely have been part of the solution.
Instead Vogtle provides electricity costing 19 cents/kWh. Virgil C. Summer is a $10B hole in the ground and Flamanville 3, which is not finished yet, is 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The true underdog from that time, renewables (and storage) deliver energy cheaper than even fossil fuels.
Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs.
Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid 2026 and the first new reactor online by 2038.
Until 2038 we should of course stop decarbonizing. No point reducing the area under the curve.
It was impressive, but it's been overshadowed by modern renewables.
In France about 60% of final energy is produced thanks to fossil fuel.
Moreover the cost of this 'nuclearization' was huge (France debt is abyssal, and taxes are very high)
Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
What set us back was and is resistance to action on climate change, led by fossil fuel corporations and US conservatives, which has continued for decades. It's a fundamental policy of the Republican Party. Trump is already taking drastic action in that regard; it was one of his higher priorities. To try to blame someone else is absurd, and probably a talking point from their playbook.
Don't try to position yourself as the majority voice. Nuclear energy is all but clean and I don't understand the odd push in the last few years to go all in on nuclear even though there was a common understanding that it should not be the future.
Today solar & wind are the fastest, cheapest and best method for carbon free electricity, so the fossil industry pushes nuclear as a distraction.
He said no nuclear power plant was ever profitable
When you say nuclear was never cheap, what are you comparing it to? The impossible to compete with subsidization of coal plants? How can you compete with plants that are allowed to dump toxic radioactive waste into the atmosphere that kills hundreds of thousands annually, but your plants have to go through regulatory hell to prove they're 99.99999999% safe before even being approved?
The histories of pretty much every green party in the western world and their anti-nuclear activism suggests otherwise.
Why do you think that is? Somehow I'm not convinced its the activism holding nuclear back.
Greenpeace spent years campaigning against dumping waste at sea.
In a reasonably free market, which doesn't exist for electricity, solar would win handily.. but this is after decades of subsidized development and incremental improvement by Chinese wafer factories.
In 2024 we, as in globally, completed about 5 GW of new built nuclear.
Let’s compare to renewables:
- 600 GW solar PV added [1]
- 117 GW wind power [2]
- ~100 GW battery storage
Even when adjusting for TWh the disparity is absolutely enormous. We’re talking a ~50x differences and it is only getting larger as renewables continue to scale.
But somehow the only technology which is ”scalable” is new built nuclear power.
[1]: https://www.solarpowereurope.org/press-releases/new-report-w...
[2]: https://www.gwec.net/gwec-news/wind-industry-installs-record...
People overlook how long nuclear takes to build. Hinkley Point C is approaching a decade.
But, in all seriousness, this could realistically be saving lives if you go with the assumption that Google was going to use this energy either way, and it otherwise would be coming from anything other than solar.
Every other source causes more deaths per energy produced. Coal is by far the worst, but natural gas, and even hydroelectric cost more lives than nuclear.
As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of any power source), I'm wondering how localities are going to react. Are people who are local to nuclear plants just going to be OK with these gigantic corporations consuming all this power in their backyard with no benefit to them while they take all the risk and impact of that power generation? I'm also wondering how these companies are going to deal with the excess nuclear waste. Ultimately it won't be Google or Meta dealing with the waste. How do we ensure that all the nuclear waste from AI is dealt with responsibly?
26MW is a fraction of the primary power consumed by a single passenger aircraft, by the way. It is an absolutely trivial energy input.
Figures I can find suggest that a 737 uses approximately 7MW to stay aloft.
So a couple things I learned -- I think it's still a notable amount of power, enough to power ~6,000 homes for a year just to train a single model. But also, I learned that planes use a whole lot more power than I thought!
Training a single model is essentially consuming one plane-year's worth of power, or 3-4 flights continuously while it trains. I had no idea planes used so much energy.
But also, I bet most of these companies aren't training one model and calling it done. There's probably 1s or 10s of models being trained per year per company. That's a material amount of energy use. If we could power tens or hundreds of thousands of homes, that isn't 'trivial' energy input.
I think it's useful to put it into context next to other things we take for granted, but I don't think it's fair to diminish it as nothing either.
"The Dongfang Electric Corporation's 26 MW offshore wind turbine is the largest in the world, surpassing previous models like the Mingyang 20 MW turbine. This turbine's larger size and capacity enable it to generate about 100 GWh of electricity annually, potentially powering 55,000 Chinese homes or 9,200 American homes."
Edit: more info here, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-cent...
Your claim: 50-100 liters per second to cool a 26MW workload.
Actual water consumption, according to Google annual report: 730 liters per second, globally, for an average 3GW load.
The best estimate I can find is 7.2GWh.
Which would be...7 hours of output from a 1GW powerplant.
In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.
Look at what was deployed last year, in GW terms:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586#:~:tex...
but note that gas produces at a capacity factor of ~50%, and solar at 25%, so scale solar down by half to better compare gas to solar.
Batteries are also here in great force. The average cost of battery-backed solar is cheaper is comparable to gas, and cheaper than new nuclear.
The main barrier to new solar and batteries are grid expansion to ship the electricity places. Putting a datacenter next to a proposed site for building solar + batteries that's waiting for its turn to get connected to the grid would probably be the fastest way to scale, if fiber can go there.
Energy is what matters when training a model.
Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.
I don’t think a reply like this is in the spirit of this site.
> Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform.
Actually the amount of power available matters because you are consuming energy in time. If I have a 1MW plant and a battery, I can generate 1GWh in about 3 weeks. This seems a little silly though. A Hyperscale DC campus is ~150MW to 200MW. If you plot the larger ones, they are almost all near power stations with >1GW capacity (not all).
The industry trend is towards building 1GW datacenters. Last I checked these would consume ~8.7TWh (assuming PUE of 1). However, the 8.7TWh while relevant is meaningless unless the power to the DC can be 1GW. Since the plant itself has to generate more than 1GW (the plant has a cap ratio so more than this, plus other demand, etc..) for such a site, then it follows that there are limited number of sites in the US (this is public info see EIA.gov or Wikipedia).
Grok3 is already at 140MW (100 days of training ==> 336GWh) at ~10^26 FLOP. Model FLOP is increasing at ~5x per year so by 2030, we are expecting to be ~10^28 and that would take ~10GW (24PWh). If I am optimistic and say that the efficiency can improve by 1.3x per year, then we still need a very large generating station to meet the demand or we need to distribute among many smaller sites.
You can push the numbers around however you like but the conclusion is the same, the timing may be different.
There's a reason why all the hyperscalers are investing in nuclear, large generating capacity and the highest cap factor of any form of energy.
My 2nd comment still stands, and you left unaddressed (remember the forest?)..
- You get free cooling, but if you use too much you melt the permafrost, which has huge environmental cost.
- Building in remote locations is enormously expensive, especially with the requirements of a nuclear generating station.
- Now you have to run a city for the operators to live in and ship in everything they need (not to mention hardware to the DC.
- Denmark (and so presumably Greenland) has a law against building nuclear generating stations.
Besides, building nuclear power stations with the concept that we accept an accident will happen is crazy. Better to invest in preventing them than mitigating them.