Posted on 10/20/2024 8:21:47 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Big tech is going big on nuclear, with Amazon becoming the newest addition to the club with a $500 million deal, joining Microsoft, Google, and Oracle by investing in nuclear projects to support surging data-center energy demand.
With powerful advances in generative AI, the US has become the fastest-growing market for data centers, according to McKinsey, which forecasts demand to more than triple by 2030 to 80 gigawatts. The boom has sent stock prices of nuclear-energy companies soaring, briefly making utilities the best-performing sector of the S&P 500 Index this year.
As commercial nuclear-power plants went global in the 1970s and ’80s, you’d have been forgiven for forecasting that nuclear output would’ve continued to grow, but globally it has plateaued for much of the 21st century, with disasters like Fukushima diminishing the appetite for new reactors.
Now companies like Amazon and Google are turning to nuclear for its reliability and scale. Unlike wind and solar, nuclear power generates clean energy around the clock, and a single nuclear plant provides energy equivalent to having millions of solar panels, offering the gigawatts of power required for AI data centers and simultaneously fulfilling big tech’s ambitious green promises.
But big tech isn’t building giant nuclear power plants; instead, they’re turning to what are known as small modular reactors, which need less space, are cheaper, and can be deployed incrementally to meet rising electricity demand, according to the IAEA.
In the US there was essentially a halt in new facility constructions for more than 30 years, until 2013. The question now is whether big tech’s leadership will kickstart a new age for nuclear. Pointing to renewed attention following the growing demand from AI, Mohamed Al Hammadi, head of the Emirates Nuclear Energy Corp., said, “We have witnessed a step change in momentum across the nuclear sector.”
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Reliability depends on reliability of people doing the work.
All sizes of nuclear power generators, require reliability.
There are many proposed versions of “small” / “small modular” [factory built modules] . . . nuclear reactors. They all include technical, durability and reliability problems.
Government is not established as being reliable nor wise about the decision-making that pronounces approval. Government, now, being obsessed with funneling all decisions thru the leftists’ DEI thresher that re-allocates work on the basis of whomever progressives consider to be entitled.
That, meaning, that merit is missing, and therefore durability and reliability . . . and truth . . . are missing.
That, meaning, that government and all of DEI, are “oriented” toward fleeing from every failure that is a consequence of progressives replacing merit with DEI.
This is inevitable. Eventually the fraud of renewables will run its’ course and nukes will be the last man standing.
Fusion is still but 10 years away?
If you look at the popular science magazines of the late 1940s, early 1950s, there was a fairly widespread expectation that small-scale nuclear reactors would provide such cheap and abundant power that they’d be ubiquitous very soon. There was even speculation that tiny reactors might directly power homes and automobiles. Let’s fact it... It could have happened, but for a lot of reasons (bad PR due to accidents, stifling of innovation by traditional power companies eager to maintain the status quo, etc) it didn’t happen. It may happen yet, though.
Big Tech still a step ahead again.
That’s funny...
Then where are all our record energy exports going...? 🤔
Most likely they realized that Fusion power will always be 20 years away.
The math is easy to see that Solar and wind will never be a major player.
Free beer tomorrow ???
Even AI realizes that technological advances depend on reliable inexpensive sources of energy.
To me it is a dam shame that a movement to nuclear is only getting traction now because “Big Tech” wants in on it.
Someone needs to YELL at “Big Tech” and say - NO NUCLEAR POWER FOR YOU, YOU have to get your energy from all those windmills and solar panels you have invested so much in telling the rest of us that’s what we need.
Our power cooperative publishes a monthly magazine, and some months ago they had a short write-up on how small-scale nuclear reactors are on the power industry’s radar. They would power anything from apartment buildings to neighborhoods, even down to individual homes.
A reactor in the back yard or the basement with years worth of fuel in it, no long transmission lines to worry about or repair...it has definite maybes.
If that’s actually happening and in development there could be interesting times ahead as far as where we get our power.
When I wuz a kid in the 50s/60s, I was promised unmetered electricity starting real soon……
Where my flying car and my robot maid?
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