Google goes nuclear in new deal to power AI

Axios ^ | October 14, 2024 | Ben Geman

[The_Media_never_lie]

Google announced a deal on Monday to purchase energy from small nuclear reactors that the startup Kairos Power plans to start bringing online in the U.S. by 2030.

Why it matters: It's Google's first nuclear foray as the tech giant — and its peers — hunt for zero-carbon power to fuel energy-thirsty AI data centers.

Google says it's the world's first corporate agreement to buy power from multiple small modular reactors. Driving the news: If successful, it will bring 500 new megawatts of power to U.S. grids, with the first SMR targeted to come online by 2030 and more through 2035, it said.

[The_Media_never_lie]

Climate hysteria is causing energy planners to go down the wrong road: big mistake.

There is an economy of scale for nuclear power, and these plants are too small. Having all these small reactors distributed all over the place is a bad idea and a terrorists dream.

This plan is about as dumb as the carbon capture schemes.

[null and void]

TMI (pun fully intended)

[libh8er]

I thought lefties were against nuclear. How quickly ideology goes out the window when it clashes with self interest.

[butlerweave]

AI is a waste of energy

[meatloaf]

One GE combustion turbine can crank out 500 MW. While there’s a lead time for production, the design doesn’t need licensing.

[meatloaf]

Microsoft already contracted for the restoration and power from the operable TMI unit for their AI project,

[dayglored]

> There is an economy of scale for nuclear power, and these plants are too small. Having all these small reactors distributed all over the place is a bad idea and a terrorists dream.

Yes and no. I believe the market will find a sweet spot between large-scale centralized and small-scale distributed.

There is economy of scale, but it comes with two costs: shutdowns (maintenance, upgrade) are much more disruptive; distributed generation is inherently redundant, with more effective overlap coverage. And when all your power comes from one location, you have transmission costs, energy losses, and vulnerability; generating power near the load is more efficient, etc.

As to terrorism, security is security, whether it's at a big plant or a small one. Yes, lots of small ones provide a larger attack surface. But presumably the smaller plants will have as good security as the larger ones -- there's no reason not to do so.

[calljack]

Ahhh...no.

[DesertRhino]

Actually, the future is very small nuclear reactors. They are a they are safer design, and cheaper.

[GenXPolymath]

Big reactors take ten plus years to build and bring online in the USA. Factory building modular nukes could cut that to under a year. Five 100 MW factory built could be trucked or barged to a site pour concrete and go. Assembly line allows for economy of scale too. One standard design or a few sizes that all use the same basic components. Size for a 300 MW core you can always load lower power density cores and upsize as the market needs rise. Have 100,150,200,250,300 cores in a standard sized containment and transport cask system. Even if you didn’t need all the 300 you could desal seawater with half the output or make methanol or ammonia too. Once you have factory made nukes you can crank them out. Getting Google and Microsoft to pay for the development and research dollars is better than taxpayers.

[curious7]

Also depends on what fuel cycle is used. Thorium cycle would provide orders of magnitude less usable uranium and plutonium to bad actors, to the point that all but the truly stupid or insane wouldn’t even bother to try.

[Dr. Sivana]

There is an economy of scale for nuclear power, and these plants are too small.

Even an "inefficient" nuke plant is more efficient that solar and wind. Also, the really small ones might be great for remote locations where extending the grid is impractical.

The payoff for terrorists gets small as the nuke plants get small.

[shotgun]

WPPSS (Washington Public Power Supply System) estimated back in the early 80’s that 5 nuke plants needed to be built to meet the power demands of the NW. They defaulted on $25 Billion on bonds and halted construction on Plants 3 & 5 PWR twin reactors being built in Satsop, Washington and Plants 1 & 4 PWR twin reactors on the Hanford site. Only Plant 2 BWR (Columbia Generating Station) was completed in 1984. One of the primary reasons was they had 3 different designs.

The lack of standardized plant design and construction nationwide drove the costs through the roof, coupled with the public no nuke frenzy and it killed the nuclear industry

WPPSS paid to dismantle the partially completed reactors and sold off the components. Only the concrete structures remain

[Hodar]

Bump - was doing some Thorium background research. This reactor doesn’t use Thorium (little disappointed), but the low-pressure Salt as a preliminary coolant, and the passive nature make this a long-overdue small reactor leap forward.

If it wasn’t for liberals screaming about a scary movie they saw (China Syndrome), we would be much further along the curve than we are now. We have 40+ year reactor designs in our war ships and subs. No reason that same old design, could not be used on land and tied into the grid. Our power bills would drop dramatically.

[rlmorel]

From the Kairos Power Website:

"...The Kairos Power FHR (KP-FHR) is a novel advanced reactor technology that leverages TRISO fuel in pebble form combined with a low-pressure fluoride salt coolant. The technology uses an efficient and flexible steam cycle to convert heat from fission into electricity and to complement renewable energy sources..."

I believe this is fully the way to go, but I need more specifics.

This is from their website:

First, it appears to be a "pebble bed" design which is inherently far, far safer. In this configuration, in their words: "...AUTOMATIC SAFE SHUTDOWN; PASSIVE COOLING UPON LOSS OF POWER..."

Secondly, it is using a low-pressure "fluoride salt coolant" which I don't fully know what that entails. The USA made reactors cooled with liquid Sodium, and because it can explode when exposed to water, it resulted in explosions during maintenance processes that became so frequent that they stopped calling the fire department when it happened in an earlier experimental plant if my memory serves me correctly. We built a submarine, the second nuclear submarine built at the time the USS Nautilus was (USS Seawolf) but it was difficult to maintain, and Admiral Rickover was fundamentally opposed to them.

Using these types of reactors as "breeder reactors" running on Thorium could produce more fuel than they consumed, but the technology could not be wrangled into practical use back then, and sadly, we gave up on it. Salt Cooled reactors were difficult to figure out, and we went with Boiling Water and Pressurized Water Reactors.

In this type of reactor being designed by Kairos, the fuel is contained in spheres called "pebbles" which can be monitored and replaced in a fully automated and safe way when their heat level drops due to lower isotopic action.

The isotopes are encased in indestructible spheres, so the danger of contamination is nearly zero, they will never achieve criticality (fission) in the way a conventional nuclear plant could. They produce heat, but an uncontrolled release is not likely, even if the small plant is hit by a bomb. The "pebbles" could be send out for recycling.

I am all in on this. This is the way we should be going. Smaller units that can power a town or city by municipal power. We should have been pursuing this decades ago.

I will be honest, my knowledge is a bit dated and I am going off memory here, so I hope others who understand this more clearly will chime in.

[vrwcregistered]

Just what we need - more butt ugly, electricity wasting, GD data centers. Need to stop using data services that store your every keystroke forever, and just say NO to offers to sell you more cloud.

[SpaceBar]

I second that.

[libh8er]

Go to gemini.google.com and ask it anything about anything in plain English. Then say what you think of AI.

[null and void]

That’s TMI, Three Mile Island -or- Too Much Information

That’s a pun, son...

[aquila48]

Bookmark