Google To Go Nuclear | Hacker News Reader

Google To Go Nuclear

techcrunch.com

20 pointswhyleym11 comments

For about 10 seconds I believed this. Given their power needs it would be a reasonable move to get into power generation technology, and nuclear would be the nerd's choice.

IIRC google has funded research into some "alternative" approaches to nuclear fusion -- so to that extent they are taking the nerd's choice. In contrast, fission is only a choice for people who like political quagmires; the technical challenges are tiny compared with the political challenges.

FWIW, they're already doing solar:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-5749586-7.html

http://www.jasonmorrison.net/content/2009/touring-googles-so...

Aside from the speculation of Google making nuclear weapons to use against China, I think there isn't anything unreasonable about it -- that is, funding research into safe nuclear energy, and deploying it first in places with friendly regulations (then using that success as an example to argue for better regulations in the US). The top of the article is dated "March 31st", so I imagine it might be true.

Nuclear is an obvious next step for the company.

An early start on April Fools day?

It's already April 1st in Australia; so I'm going to go with yes.

It's not a very good April Fools joke if it makes complete sense.

Google replies: http://blog.google.org/2010/03/gooey-googley-energy.html

What strange article. I find it reasonable that Google might want to experiment with small nuclear reactors. Then the author goes off into imagination land suggesting that Google might colonize and become and independent nuclear armed nation which would need Mutually Assured Destruction against China. Seriously strange.

Google has been considering going nuclear since at least 2006:

"Should Google Go Nuclear? Clean, cheap, nuclear power (no, really)" http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#

Granted, other than the title they've chosen for the video, there isn't a focus in this video on Google actually adopting Nuclear energy. But they were clearly trying to start changing the perception of nuclear energy as far back as 2006.

To be clear, most of this is speculation. All we’ve confirmed is that Google has acquired a company with a new enrichment process and that they have begun researching small, nuclear portable generators.

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