Posted on 03/18/2024 8:42:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Hello from London, where I am, as a recent American transplant, still adjusting to English understatement (it turns out “you might send me that draft soon” was not just a suggestion).
I’m very excited to join this team. This week’s controversy over new climate reporting rules in the US shows that the push for cleaner, fairer capitalism is becoming ever more fiercely contested. And while this debate may not always be moral, it is certainly material. I hope to help readers see which way it will tack next.
Today, I have a story on two big themes that may be converging: Big Tech’s energy hunger, and the long-heralded, yet-to-arrive resurrection of nuclear power. Please send me tips and story ideas, or just say hi, at lee.harris@ft.com.
Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing unit, bought the centre from US power generator Talen Energy, which developed the site adjoining a nuclear power station.
AWS will buy electricity from the Susquehanna nuclear power station, which is 130km north-west of Philadelphia, under a 10-year power-purchase agreement. The $650mn deal is Amazon’s first-ever agreement with a nuclear power facility.
It comes amid a rally in public sentiment towards nuclear energy. At last year’s COP28 conference in Dubai 22 countries, including the US, UK and UAE, signed a pledge to triple nuclear generation capacity by 2050. Meanwhile, at US environmental non-profits, many of which were set up by anti-nuclear activists, a new generation is challenging the old guard’s stance.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Artificial intelligence consumes gobs of power. The International Energy Agency projects that combined demand from data centres, AI and cryptocurrencies could more than double from 2022 to 2026 to hit 1,000 TWh, roughly equivalent to the entire electricity usage of Japan.
Several tech moguls are already nuclear converts. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has long been a fan of the technology, and is a founding investor in nuclear engineering firm TerraPower.
Well, the simple fact is that if we’re serious about using electricity for things that have always relied on petrolium, the first step is building a LOT of nuclear plants. Duh.
They realize that wind and solar just cannot provide the power, the reliability, the up time as nuclear
the astounding part is the sheer confidence of the fusion people that they’ll be able to deliver the first fusion power plants in just a couple years.
fusion power is so cheap that it will be a step change similar to the change from horses to horseless carriages/cars.
They can if the world population is reduced to the 500 million they keep calling for.
They can if the world population is reduced t
—
Not part of the story - that’s just a strawman.
be able to deliver the first fusion power plants in just a couple years.
—
They said the same thing back in the 70s - still waiting.
They said the same thing back in the 70s - still waiting.
//////
agree. that’s conventional wisdom.
Jeff Bezos funded a company that is making iron air batteries at the grid scale of 100hour’s of discharge time with 3 megawatts per acre of land in single stack configuration every 9 feet you stack is another three megawatts these are shipping container sized units in ISO containers themselves. Containers stack 6 high natively without any support structure like a parking deck or a steel building frame. The key factor is the LCOS that’s total cost of storage over the lifetime of the system they say they have the capex down to $20 kWh and a 20,000 cycle life bringing that to commercial scale will change the power equation dramatically. There is another group that is also using Iron technology they are a liquid redox storage with capacities only limited by how.large your iron chloride salt water tanks can be think gigawatt hours in a oil refinery sized ground level tank two side by side with months worth of energy stored in salt water as FE3+ ions in nontoxic Iron chloride solutions. That group for 12 hour power cycles says 2 cents per kWh LCOS that also changes the demand supply equation using no toxic or limited resources. Iron is one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust and chloride is available in unlimited amounts from the oceans.
Will it be too cheap to meter.🙄
That was the heady promise of the 1960’s. But theoretical and high energy physics died in the 1970’s with string theory. Practical nuclear power died with the stillborn death of thorium reactors in the early 70’s. And Three Mile Island about 1980 killed any chance that American light water technology would ever be too cheap to meter. Americans gave up on nuclear power too cheap to meter. I have heard that the Koreans make nuclear power plants that will produce electricity for .03@kwh. That’s not bad. I don’t know if it’s true.
The fusion guys are saying that in the first generation —they can deliver fusion-based electricity for .01@kwh.
That fall in price/power output is about like going from horses to horseless carriages.
A Washington-based fusion company has contracted with Microsoft to deliver that power in 2028. A couple of other fusion companies are promising to deliver subsequently.
It looks like some key technological advances have come together to accelerate the rate of development of fusion reactors from 20 years in the future —and always will be— to something very different.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.