this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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I've been hearing a lot more interest in on site power generation, which would be nice except it will probably end up being natural gas.
I keep hearing about micro nuclear reactors, and I hear there are some in testing in my general area (I'm in Utah, and I hear there are some projects in Wyoming and Idaho). So here's hoping that'll become a thing.
Also, solar panels should work pretty well. I'm thinking:
So, basically like a massive UPS with some physical, local energy storage. Here's hoping these will become practical in the near future.
They are not becoming a thing and they are an asinine idea from the start. It's basically decentralizing something that can only profit from centralization as it requires massive amounts of infrastructure for safety and security reasons in each location.
Nuclear is the most expensive way to make electricity and that will not change anytime soon.
They are practical, and they are already being built.
I don't think that's true, but it depends on what metrics you're taking into account (startup costs, energy storage, etc). In pretty much every study I've seen, nuclear is competitive, with the main issue being time to build a new reactor and arrange waste disposal, not long term running costs.
If small nuclear plants are so impractical, why is Google funding seven of them?
Nuclear is only competitive if you don't factor in the negative externalities ( it has that part in common with fossil fuels) and the massive amount of government guarantees and subsidies that go into each and every plant.
Nuclear accidents are not insurable on the free market, that should tell you everything. If they were and owners had to factor in a market based insurance price, that alone would be so astronomically high that no investor would ever touch nuclear.
So governments guarantee to pay for damages in case of nuclear incidents. Governments bear the cost of waste disposal. Governments bear the cost of security (as in military /anti terrorism measures, because these things are awesome targets). Governments pay huge amounts of direct subsidies or take on debt via government owned companies to cap consumer prices. None of this is factored into electricity prices, none of this is factored into most studies.
Because, again, google won't ever have to foot the actual bill. Also, google has a history of investing into things that don't work out, so I wouldn't necessarily cite them as an authority.
Edit: We don't even know if google is actually "investing" anything here. They only say they agreed to buy power.
Are you talking about storage? Because there are a lot of places to safely store nuclear waste for the foreseeable future, and initiatives like nuclear waste recycling could dramatically simplify that.
If we look at renewables, many often ignore the negative externalities of producing those products as well (mining lithium for batteries and whatnot).
We're seeing similar things w/ renewables like solar and wind.
From your first link:
I 100% agree this is an issue, and I wasn't aware that Congress was providing this guarantee. But this isn't a problem with nuclear itself, it's a problem of stupid government intervention in something that should be handled privately. Nuclear facilities should be seeking insurance protection from an insurance company, and if that's insufficient, people should be able to sue the power company and the government should be able to look for evidence of criminal conduct. Again, this isn't a reason to avoid nuclear, it's a reason to restructure the types of protections companies have, as well as reduce government interference in energy policy.
Likewise with waste disposal, nuclear facilities should be banding together to manage waste disposal, and governments should merely set some rules (i.e. maximum levels of radiation leakage outside of a defined area). This could be largely similar to burial plots, where you purchase usage of a certain plot of land (with appropriate lining to reduce impact on the local ecology) for a certain period of time.
Governments should never cap prices, they should instead provide cash directly to consumers who need assistance.
But that's the great thing here, Google doesn't have to keep using the energy these plants produce, this energy can be resold to the rest of the grid if Google decides AI isn't something they want to keep investing in.
And yeah, we don't know the specifics of the deal, but I think we can assume the energy company felt it was a satisfactory deal. AFAIK, there's no government involvement in this deal, so it doesn't really have anything to do with your main objections above.