Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers
Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers
Nuclear power startup Kairos Power is its partner.
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After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not... It's a pretty outdated energy source already.
The single most energy dense source of power we have that uses the least amount of land including mining and refining compared to everything else, and still preferred method by NASA for powering anything bigger than a camera... is outdated? Yeah okay.
While I agree with most of your statements, the RTGs that NASA uses (assuming that's what you are referring to) don't really have much of a connection at all to Nuclear power plants. They are very useful for small scale projects like rovers but really have no commercial uses for anything near people. Plus I think NASA generally prefers solar power whenever they can use it as it's far cheaper and safer to get into orbit.
Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They're also really useful in situations where renewables just aren't an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven't seen any nuclear container ships yet but that's mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn't be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
While! I love nuclear's possibilities. I've seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don't think that would be a good idea
Eh, it's honestly safer than you'd think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.
A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn't enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship's speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.
Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.
That's where you want your controls.
Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.
The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks... and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.
Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.
No, it isn't. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.
What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.
The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you're cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn't always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn't always shine.
Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn't want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we'd need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we're just making nuclear's up front cost issue worse; we can't amortize the cost as well when it's ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.
What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn't shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.
Add in HVDC lines to this, and you've really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like--there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn't need to build any other storage.
Just for another angle on the problem: baseload generation (nuclear) is most efficient at its highest possible output, but it has to maintain that output 24/7; it can't ramp up and down fast enough to match the demand curve, and it can't be ramped up above the minimum overnight demand.
To increase its efficiency, utilities push large scale consumers like steel mills and aluminum smelters to overnight shifts. This artificially increases the over ight demand, allowing the baseload generators to ramp up their relatively efficient production, and reduce the need for peaker plants during the day.
That overnight demand can't be met with solar, and wind generation tends to fall overnight as well.
What nuclear can do is help level out seasonal variation, between the short days of winter and long days of summer.
Pumped storage is also essential, but extraordinarily limited. We need to take a look at demand shaping rather than supply shaping. We need to shift load to times we can produce, rather than shift production to times of demand.
Sounds like demand shaping is already done, but not in a way that's helpful to renewables.