Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy
techradar.com
Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...
techradar.com
The trouble is that:
a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"
b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period
c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle
d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables
e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
[1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...
"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.
If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.
You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.
If they get undercut by renewables most of the time, there is simply no way they can stay competitive.
Nuclear peaker plants are not ever gonna be a thing, because that makes no sense economically: High capex is the last thing you want for that usecase, and it implies that the economics for your plant have to stay decent for the next 30 years. Meanwhile batteries, solar and wind are still getting cheaper every year right now. This is the worst bet you could ever make as an investor.
> nuclear may be a very sensible choice since a single nuclear plant can replace a whole lot of natural gas peakers.
This argument does not help nuclear power if the equivalent number of gas plants is still cheaper than a single nuclear reactor (and built much faster).
In Ontario, Canada they are the third-cheapest (after hydro, and nat/methane gas); see Table 2:
* https://oeb.ca/sites/default/files/rpp-price-report-20241018...
In previous years they have often been second-cheapest (after hydro): their 'ranking' depends on methane gas commodity prices.
Moreover nuclear's aptitude to load-following is vastly over-stated because it has too much inertia (even hot). Even France (shock-full of reactors) always needs to produce approximately 10% ( https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?Metric=Share+of+... ) of its juice thanks to fossil fuel, for a non-negligible part ensuring load-following.
Ontario is now planning on building another plant. Their own document says it won't pay for itself for 50 years, and that's assuming there are no cost overruns, which is a laughable assumption.
Because they are over-regulated. Why? Because of nucleophobia, which is fueled by fossil fuel producers.
Nobody has some sort of proposal of a different regulatory scheme that is somehow cheaper. Even France, which built a ton decades ago, has completely failed for more than a decade at building. South Korea has been somewhat successful at building, but also sends execs to jail for faking parts approvals. But perhaps that would be cheap to fix.
What has changed since the mid 20th century is that construction labor is far more expensive in comparison to other things that can be done with that labor. Construction productivity has remained roughly constant over time, as manufacturing and other productivity has gone through the roof.
Nuclear is fundamentally a big construction project. SMRs weresypposed to be an attempt to make nuclear power a manufacturing project, not a construction project. But it turns out that construction projects like the BWRX300 are the only real SMRs that can be produced, after a decade of hype. Manufacturing SMRs like 747s is not any more real today than it was when the nuclear PR machine turned to it in the wake of the financial and construction disaster of the AP1000s at Summer and Vogtle.
The real story of nuclear is the need for super cheap labor, and excellent high-tech construction capacity. These two requirements are at odds with each other, because in societies with high tech construction skills, labor quickly becomes expensive.
Even places like China with lots of successful nuclear projects is only building a tiny tiny amount of nuclear when compared to their wind, solar, and batteries. China does everything, and they won't abandon nuclear completely because a nuclear workforce is essential for a country with superpower ambitions, but the nuclear power is there for the superpower ambitions, not the electricity generation.
It's actually working great. Gas peakers are expensive to run, but not nearly as expensive and time consuming to deploy as nuclear - you could deploy a solar installation with matching gas capacity and still spend less and have it years earlier than the least expensive, fastest deploying nuclear power plant.
On top of that storage has been undercutting gas lately in terms of cost - especially now that it scaled up.
That is all affecting the economics of nuclear.
This does not align with reality.
Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.
What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.
Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.
There is also the fact that France added millions of people while not building new nuclear capacities, so of course at some point there is going to be overload without renewed investment.
Bug people like seems to want to put more money on renewable so that we can import even more electricity from Germany's coal plants (that makes up to 40% of their electricity generation in the winter when the wind is nowhere to be found).
I'm very curious where you find your data, because it's not at all what I have been able to get. If there is some source that clearly shows renewable superiority in the winter, I would really like to see it.
To be self-sufficient without coal, Germany needs to install 150GW of wind power still, and at current rate it will take at least 10 years. But I'm very curious what is their solution for when they get no wind for weeks on end, like it has happened recently. So far it seems to be, fire up the coal plant and take the cheap nuclear from your neighbor while posturing and virtue signaling about your superiority of not using nuclear.
ACC Natural Gas + Solar/Wind + Batteries + actively priced load shedding market seems like a tremendous quartet.
In the US it is also super cheap because it is a byproduct of our fracking in The Dakotas.
The fracking is also in Arkansas and Texas and many other states. An amazing amount of gas continues to be discovered. I am not a geologist but assume that Australia could dedicate resources to explore fracking gas reserves and would come up with quite bit.
sidebar, but I just realized that Australia doesnt really have mountains to speak of. Tallest mountain is around the elevation of the typical Colorado Rockies valley towns. Australia may not have the 'cap traps' required to retain large amounts of gas in the various layers going down under ground.
Storage over a 24 hour period is one thing, the economics don't look difficult at all. In places like Upstate NY, however, usable insolation can vary by a factor of 3x between summer and winter. You can overbuild solar panels by 3x or you can add a few months of storage which costs a lot more than a few hours or days worth of storage. There is also the issue of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
It would be great to have a backup energy source which is fully and economically dispatchable and environmentally benign but it's not there. I suspect there is some point of required reliability where adding nuclear baseload makes the grid more reliable economically compared to building months worth of storage. See
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
also nuclear power plants are capable of load-following
https://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-lo...
it's just not an optimal use of the capital. The Gates foundation has been researching LMFBRs that use thermal batteries to improve load following abilities.
You might think dispatchable natural gas fired plants with some kind of carbon capture would help but with amine-based carbon capture the capital cost is high, just like with nuclear, so you are looking at a high multiple of what it would cost to add carbon capture to a coal plant that runs continuously. Calcium-based chemical cycling, metal-organic-frameworks and such offer some hope for lowering costs but probably not enough for those scenarios.
The real criticism of nuclear at this point in time is that any new plants are a decade out. It's a reason to start early, but no matter how you slice when the next NPP goes online in the US the amount of solar and wind added to the grid between here and now will dwarf it.
Figuring out the most economical mix of overprovisioning, improved grid connectivity, battery storage and more exotic longer term storage (synthetic gas/heat/fossils + capture/etc.) is a problem that is IMO best solved by the market over time.
I also think it is very telling how even a nation like France, which is basically in the perfect position to stick with nuclear power over renewables is still building out wind/solar rapidly. Nuclear power not even managing to defend its home turf makes it very questionable to fully bet on it elsewhere.
I think you are missing far simpler solutions for what is in terms of TWh needed a tiny problem.
Why not just use biofuels, synfuels or hydrogen?
Whatever the aviation and the maritime shipping industries settles on since they are unable to in the foreseeable future decarbonize with batteries.
The US today produces enough ethanol for gas blending to run the entire grid for 16 days without help.
As we switch to BEVs it is trivial to repurpose that for the grid, while also ensuring that the inputs decarbonize as well.
We’re seeing the first prototype ferries with hydrogen propulsion being built and delivered as we speak.
Hydrogen does not work for ocean crossing routes, then it takes too much space in compressed form.
Liquid is always an alternative, but that comes with its own challenges.
Modern society/civilisation relies on reliable power generation on cue, wanting to gamble that ability just to be able to remove nuclear because "it's too expensive" is beyond stupid. The cost of a long blackout is so much worse than anyone pretending otherwise is a fool.
As for storage solutions, even if they were existing and dirt cheap there is the problem of capacity sizing. How much do you build for? One week, two weeks, one month? If renewable generation cannot recover for a single day more than you planned for, you are done.
In a world where climate is constantly changing and the rate of change is increasing; it is crazy to be willing to put everything in solutions entirely depending on this.
We have to build renewables, they make sense for the low hanging fruit, but only doing renewable is just foolish. And this is exactly why nuclear makes sense, no matter how much it costs.
People on HN all seem to be venture capitalist, only thinking about cost/profits as if that should be sole motivator for doing things. That's just sad.
Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.
I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.
'“Energy Droughts” in Wind and Solar Can Last Nearly a Week, Research Shows':
* https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-sol...
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
I think it would be location-dependent (low risk that (e.g.) the UK would be windless for long stretches of time, especially off the coast).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403211...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09601...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811...
A) It happens often enough to be a problem emergency capacity can't handle.
B) Natural gas is not always an option (especially when Russia is the only readily available seller in the area and you DON'T want to be dependent on a potentially hostile neighbor).
C) Existing storage solutions require a massive investment in local solutions, or in the national grid if storage is centralized.
We need to re-think the entire idea about energy always being cheap and available, while somehow preventing those with more money from simply monopolizing supply by outbidding everyone else. You won't solve that with batteries. Many therefore try to maintain the current situation by doing this the old way.
B. Europe has lots of natgas storage. 100 days of storage isn't enough for independence from Russia now, but if we're only using gas for dankelflaute's 5 days of the year, thats ~20 years of storage.
Batteries are extremely cost competitive today for overnight storage, and are marginally cost competitive for weekly storage. That's enough to handle everything except for a dankelflaute. In which case see above.
This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.
The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.
Creating fresh water and pumping it uphill to a reservoir that is uphill of a turbine would help solves two problems in Southern California.
It's like pumped hydro with a very predictable rainstorm directly above it every day. You'd be able to get by with a much smaller reservoir.
See the system described in the OP link at this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942
Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.
What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.
Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.
Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).
In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.
If there is a motivation, consumed amount for particular cloudy day could be 1\4 easily. Simply do the laundry, other energy intensive task next day.
lol the single life
The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.
There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.
So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.
Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.
The CSIRO report says that nuclear is almost 2x more expensive than renewables even after factoring in all costs of storage and interconnects.
> Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar.
That depends on the location. Insolation and seasonality vary depending on distance from the equator, among other factors. Also, solar and wind are negatively correlated on both seasonal scales and intraday scales, so it often makes sense to mix the two if you're in Europe, rather than pick a simple winner.
I myself am located on the west coast of Scotland and we get most of our energy from wind. Solar panels make much less sense here we tend to get much less light than most places in the world.
Wind makes extremely good sense and has been making good sense for 30 years or more now depending on where on the globe you are looking. There is a ton of FUD about it but it is practical, affordable, available and relatively fast to deploy. Moreover there is readily financing available to take care of the capex.
There are 7 MW turbines deployed regularly
https://www.enercon.de/en/turbines/e-175-ep5
And there are 10 MW turbines and higher on the drawing board. Offshore and onshore options are available.
Culture war, innit.
It is none of those things.
German electricity production is increasingly dominated by renewables, in the first quarter of 2025 (which had unfavourable weather conditions) 46.9% of electricity was produced by renewables (mostly wind). Coal and gas has been declining steadily and Germany regularly exports electricity to nuclear focused France. Currently on average Germany is a net importer from France, but that does mean little because of the way cross border trade is an integral part of the European grid (note that Germany also is a net importer from Denmark whos grid is largely wind based).
So to me that sounds like a success story.
45.65 US cents per kilowatt-hour for households in Germany compared to 16.06 US cents per kilowatt-hour for US households.
The interesting question is: What is the wholesale cost + subsidies?
Subsidies which now are being phased out for new production, or in some cases even lead to companies having to bid to get the privilege to build.
The retail price is so high because it is a failure of both technology and politics. The taxes are that high because politically they decided to over-invest in a bad technological choice; pretending otherwise is an extremely bad faith argument.
This is a huge success already.
Germany's electricity price is almost twice of its "dirty" nuclear neighbor (France). Proof is in the pudding as they say. But most here seem to be unwilling to even look at the pudding, let alone eat it.
That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.
Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.
It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.
100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.
People who don't live in such regions are likely to underestimate solutions that work well in these places.
I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.
There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.
> SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way
.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.
One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.
> e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed
SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.
> f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU
This is why the Coalition plan proposed large reactors in addition to SMRs. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/04/nucle...
I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.
Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.
That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.
Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.
I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.
In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.
I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.
In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.
For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.
Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.
It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.
I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.
SMRs are more akin to mass manufactured widgets, where the scale benefits come solely from manufacturing efficiencies gained through volume. They'll have a learning rate that governs the price declines for each doubling in production volumes.
From a unit economics POV, it's probably more useful to think of SMRs as a solar/battery-like technology rather than a 1960s nuclear-like technology. The problem for SMR proponents is that solar/batteries have had 50 years of this feedback loop playing out, but SMRs are starting from no volume.
There is economies of scale for creating the thing, and then the economies of scale for the thing making electricity.
You can make nuclear reactors smaller under the assumption that you’ll be able to make them faster and cheaper over time. But the cost of the electricity they make goes up versus larger reactors because the costs for parts aren’t linear. An SMR is a basically a tiny plant for making electrify.
A solar panel doesn’t have this issue. Making the panel 2x, 5x, 10x bigger does not change the unit economics of the electricity it produces.
The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.
But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.
Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.
You seem to be calling for a magical new set of regulations that are just as effective but don't cost as much. That's not going to happen.
You do not achieve safety by hard-coding all regulation to a specific technology and make everything else practically impossible.
It works like this:
"Your computer needs a C compiler with good error messages otherwise you can't build this",
"Ok but we are building a LISP machine, there literally is no C".
"We hear you but your C compiler needs good error messages".
"Ok, could you maybe tell us who you would accept from, we can show you our LISP compiler will have amazing error messages"
"MMhh sure we can do that, give us a full specification, and then we get back to you, but its going to cost you for every 1h we invest in that. And at the end, will tell you what we will accept as an application"
"Ok, how long will that take and how much will it cost"
"We can not give you a time or a cost, you will just have to wait (implied it will take at least many years and at least 100s of millions of $ with no outcome certainty what so ever)"
That's just the tip of the iceberg. And then each individual country has their own version of something like this.
So we have a market that is ultra heavy capital that needs scale. But scale is basically impossible to achieve.
Thankfully the US government has finally made some steps into relaxing some of these and adopting a smarter approach, but its like turning the titanic, see GAIN for example.
I am not suggesting we hand out plutonium the everybody who asks for it.
In fact what I dislike, is that anybody who even suggest that regulatory form is part of the solution people instantly bring out 'we need some regulation' or 'new regulation wont be magic'. Both are true, and both are irrelevant.
The de/re-regulation of many other industries has had dramatic effects, think of airlines, trucking, software, the Bell System and so on and so on. The current regulatory regime was created at a high point in panic and anti-nuclear sentiment.
What I would like to see is something like what NASA did, for commercial cargo and commercial crew. You start with something achievable (commercial cargo). Create programs where the government want's to achieve something, and has multiple companies bid in a technology independent way. Start with some smaller things, nuclear reactor for space, medical isotope reactors, off-grid nuclear and then do SMR.
SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.
They have a ton of advantages:
- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.
- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.
- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.
- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.
China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.
This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).
Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.
That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.
Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.
SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.
If we close all the steel mills and ship off manufacturing to China, then yes, we won't have baseload, and we can be happy that we saved the planet using solar!
> Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.
> And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable.
Do you have solar at home? Because I do, I have 10kW of panels on my roof. I just checked my stats and in December I approximately made about 15% o peak capacity. And even that isn't the whole picture, as there were chunks days where I basically made nothing and even the batteries couldn't pull me through it. And I have no idea how you're calculating this 100GW. If you count adding 2000 500W panels as adding 1MW, then even on the Caribbean your calculation is going to be incredibly generous.
> Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity
As for nuclear, it was made way too expensive because the economy and money became fake, divorced from real value, and pearl-clutchers and concern trolls made it too expensive. But even in the 70s-80s when things were actually built in Europe, it was clear that Gen IV (of which SMRs are an example) was the future of nuclear, its just nobody bothered to build it because it was easier to ship off manufacturing into the 3rd world.
>Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption.
Yeah when you buy millions of dollars of HW, the 'we'll need to run it at 15% capacity in December and during night, not at all' sounds like a sound return on investment. Way to cheerlead to get another industry shipped off from the continent.
> SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them.
SMRs are not small, they are scalable, and can be made in similar capacity to existing coal and gas plants. Once they reach EOL, they'd be a perfect slot-in zero emissions replacement. But since nuclear is the devil's work, I guess we'll get to keep burning gas for another half a century.
But everything because they are going to scale magically. Nobody ever explained how that scalability is supposed to happen. A large portion of any nuclear reactor is still a steam turbine, we have built lots of these without seeing prices fall exponentially (like solar) why should adding a couple (really a miniscule) number of SMRs suddenly fundamentally change the way their price scaling?
SMRs identifying trait is that these reactors are prefabricated and transported onsite and do not have to be built in pace.
86% of generation added in China in 2024 is renewable.
That's not to hate on solar - I think it's great, and I personally have solar at home, but its not a substitute for everything
Much of the renewable price/cost calculation is plain wrong because we have offloaded the cost to other countries (who gladly still use fossil fuels).
On top of that there is the problem of maintaining a real economy inside the country, to benefit people actually living in said country. I believe most of HN don't care because they get paid to make stuff that is sold globally and they profit from that. They can't understand that not everybody can do that and you need to create value inside of the country so that they can share/benefit from that value creation.
I also have access to solar generation statistics in the middle of France and they make no sense without the generous subsidies and electricity generation purchase from the provider. But plenty are profiting from that so of couse they are happy about it.
You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.
Consider these:
Which is why old paid off nuclear reactors are today are being forced off the grids when renewables bring sustained low prices.
I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.
But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.
Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.
And if reactors are really so expensive (5 G€/reactor, while Italy spends 10 G€ per year in subsidies for renewables), why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours?
Attempts are made regularly, and nuclear plants all over the world implemented additional security measures after 9/11.
"A foiled Chechen rebel assault on the Russian city of Nalchik in October 2005 would have involved an attempt to hijack and fly one of five aircraft into a nuclear power station. Papers released in the UK in February 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act (2000) revealed there were more than 40 cases of potential security breaches at UK civil nuclear sites from 2004 to 2005."
https://www.rusi.org/publication/countering-threats-nuclear-...
>why are Italians like me paying twice as much for electricity as the French, even though 70% of their energy comes from uranium and 0% of ours
It's complex but a simplified answer is that Italy pays what it actually costs, while the French leaves a lot of the cost to their children.
The children (of the people who built the french nuclear plants) recently had to pay over 50 bn euros to cover the debts of EDF, and will likely have to pay another ?? bn to cover lack of maintenance on the aging reactors. (Google it). For 50+ years, france sold nuclear electricity at a loss, mostly unknowingly.
Once they have paid the sins of the parents, the remaining costs to maintain the plants for another 20+ years again will likely be postponed to the next generation, since covering the cost today would make the electricity too expensive to sell.
Note that France is running their economy at a much larger deficit than Italy for the past few years. Nuclear power that is not paid by electricity consumers now, but instead by the government, is of course not the entire explanation but it's part of it.
China has a few under construction, but having reactors built is not proof of them being viable, e.g. remember the superphénix.
Ah, where did that carefree time go, where we had the time to read licenses...
We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.
I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.
That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.
The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.
For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.
It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...
... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.
I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!
Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.
I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.
Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.
On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")
But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.
In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).
From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.
Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)
There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.
If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.
Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.
In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.
I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.
> easily
That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.
In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.
In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.
Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...
"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."
This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?
By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.
For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.
Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.
If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.
Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.
I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.
So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.
This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.
No.
As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.
No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.
Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.
FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.
There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.
I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.
Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.
Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.
This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.
Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.
On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).
Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.
Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.
On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.
There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...
The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.
NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.
Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.
But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.
> The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.
Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.
Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.
> The PWR is the problem
Which architecture seems more appropriate?
> the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.
This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.
> Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right
About the "Faustian bargain"?
> An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.
As a French I doubt so. Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...
China invests way, way more on renewable than on nuclear.
There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.
Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.
Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.
I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.
People did actually die because of abandoned RTGs, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident
Anybody that still feels like that right now in America is not paying attention.
Playing with lead, you notice that it lives traces on your hands, it looks wrong so you try not to play with the lead anymore.
A lightbulb with a shiny liquid in it? Don't break it or break it in open air at safe distance. Even if you touch the liquid make sure you wipe it out clean as it looks unnatural.
You easily develop instincts to detect what's dangerous with machines and chemicals, with nuclear you can't do that.
Ans as for the active ones, I hope they are taking good care of them. Bhophal 2.0 is indeed possible.
What makes you think that this can't happen? It can happen in so many ways, i.e. the owner is criminal and runs away or fucks up and loses everything and the court takes years to decide who gets what from the factories, the new owners put it on sale it takes another 10 years to sell because the repair costs incurred are massive and equipment is getting obsolete therefore you can't find a buyer. People get old, move on and all that decays for 50 years until the land becomes valuable enough for someone to buy it with all that obsolete garbage.
It happens all the time.
That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.
What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.
We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.
Economies of scale wins in big compute projects too
And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.
And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...
I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.
If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".
Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.
What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?
The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.
Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.
If you want "hot rocks", it's probably much cheaper to just resistively heat them with cheap solar (you don't even need inverters). This could store energy over many months and, pushed to its cost reduction limits this promises to be the final nail in the coffin for any dreams of a nuclear revival.
Because the level of permitted development without being crushed by onerous regulatory burdens has been absurdly hamstrung on nuclear. All of the issues you add as "but" cases are things that many different innovations in a fluid market for research could have refined. The same has been done for many complex technologies over the decades, yet for nuclear there's always some excuse like the ones you mention. The comment you replied to is right. We're talking about something that since decades ago could have been improved enormously, and hasn't been thanks to a multitude of stupidities.
The United States Navy trusts extremely compact reactors (designed and working despite the DoD's notoriously lax financial and schedule stringency with defense contractors) to power its absolute most important, costly, defense-crucial war machines, and regularly docks them right inside the country's (and world's) largest urban areas, but somehow there's just no way to make nuclear power for civilian use more compact, cheaper and effective?
I am imagining a field of shipping-container sized units, each of which is a small modular reactor. Probably with solar panels on top ;) Still a few orders of magnitude different, but the idea here is that each unit is small enough that it can be manufactured, so that nuclear plant bring-ups don't take 30 years. Most of the cost is because of the tremendous generational effort involved in just a single project; what does it take to reduce the cost of the plants themselves to the point where they can really shine, economically?
The goal is to have reliable base load power generation so that we don't have to deal with the massive complexity and carbon footprint of battery plants all over the place to deal with peaky generation technologies like solar. I don't believe that that is a solved problem: using tremendous amounts of rare earth materials for limited-lifespan installations that don't even produce energy is possibly not the best use of our resources, considering it's almost all fossil fuel going into those logistics operations anyway, right? EROEI for a battery plant is going to be hard to achieve.
But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.
The argument that this time, for sure, nuclear will be much cheaper has worn quite thin. Why do you think anyone in power is going to listen that song again?
BTW, do you think the dominance of renewables over new nuclear construction in China is due to "pearl clutching" there?
Yet China has managed to build those plants exactly around those costs and budgets - I have seen this argument so many time, around high speed rail, where Americans failed at infrastructure and deemed it 'uneconomical', then when China succeeded they smeared them for building probably in 'an evil way' or what.
Let me turn your question back at you - if China is doing so well on renewables, why is it that they're still building tens of gigawatts of nuclear capacity with hundreds more planned?
Even the linked article admits that 'Solar GWh' is not comparable to nuclear GWh because if you add the wattage of panels together you get a meaninglessly big number.
If you are planning around a 24/7 available power source, you need to overbuild solar by 20x I estimate, and the article admits, their calculations do not take storage into account (which you simply would not need if you had an always available power source.
China leads on solar panels, equipment and batteries, yet they are the biggest investors into nuclear today, I think that says enough about solar (and wind) not being able to economically substitute for nuclear.
You are right - by these standards it makes no economic sense to build a nuclear reactor, but the standards only exist because of the positively lethargic Western work moral.
I think the world has grown tired of the excuses and has largely moved on. You laggards will be coming along soon enough.
Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway.
Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.
I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area).
Please help!
'Going Nuclear - How the Atom will save the world' by Tom Gregory https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe...
Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.
There seems to be a fair bit of progress notes from them. They aren't obligated to tell us anything, of course.
[1] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bG...
No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.
Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.
Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.
This is a peculiarly USA-localized problem. For a large number of reasons, datacenters are going up all over the world now, and proportionally more of them are outside the US than has been the case historically. And a lot of these places have easier access to cheaper, cleaner power with modernized grids capable of handling it.
> pollution from higher energy use
Somewhat coincidentally as well, energy costs in China and the EU are projected to go down significantly over the the next 10 years due to solar and renewables, where it's not so clear that's going to happen in the US.
As for the rest of the arguments around chip manufacturing and shipping and everything else, well, what do you expect? That we would just stop making chips? We only stopped using horses for transportation when we invented cars. I don't yet see what's going to replace our need for computing.
And in the end, the cherry: “yes, the world is ending, so what can we do? I guess nothing, let’s just continue burning it so it dies faster.”
Both chips and developer time are expensive. Massively so, both in direct cost and secondary and tertiary elements. (If you think hiring more developers to optimise code has no knock-on effects, I have a bridge to sell you.)
There isn't an iron law about developer time being less valuable than chips. When chip progress stagnates, we tend towards optimising. When the developer pipeline is constrained, e.g. when a new frontier opens, we tend towards favouring exploration over optimisation.
If a CS programme is teaching someone to always try to optimise an algorithm versus consider whether hardware might be the limitation, it's not a very good one. In this case, when it comes to AI, there is massive investment going into trying to find more efficient training and inference algorithms. Research which, ironically enough, generally requires access to energy.
Ermmm. what?
You see this in other sectors where demand outstrips improvements in economy. Individual planes use substantially less fuel than they did 50 years ago, because there are now fewer engines on planes and the remaining engines are also more efficient; but the growth in air travel has substantially outpaced that.
It will come, give it time.
Edit: Amazing how anti-innovation and science folks are on HN.
The idle power consumption of a human is around 100 W.
You should do some basic maths; the megawatts are used for serving many LLM instances at once. The correct comparison is the cost of just a single LLM instance.
I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...
NVidia is worth more than Germany.
Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.
It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.
It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.
Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.
I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1l5h5e2/sola...
Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.
[1] The video of the debate itself.
I thought solar won.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...
At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".
> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.
...
> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.
You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.
Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.
I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.
Not at all.
Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.
The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.
And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.
Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.
Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.
Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.
Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.
Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.
The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.
If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.
> It's all proven technology
Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.
Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...
Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!
Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not.
It is a conspiracy I think.
This seems like a nothing burger.
Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of.
If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”
What has not yet been shown (and may be impossible?) is fusion working at small scale and over long timeframes.
saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028"
but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)
I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.
"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.
No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.
It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.
And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".
I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.
[1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
You could for example look at China, a country that has embraced nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and EVs because they don't have good access to oil and don't have much government influence from that group.
Do they recycle more or less of their plastic waste than the USA?
Google suggests in 2023 it's 30% in China vs 12% in the USA.
It's a confusing topic, as some anti-plastic campaigners seize on this intentional failure of the US to recycle more and better to try to push total plastic bans.
Which are good policy for specific items, and again we see these being done in China too, as a complement to recycling, not a replacement.
That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this:
> Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible.
While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons.
And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective.
Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.
Nothing good can come of this.
Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.
My understanding was that very little radioactive waste was created from a fusion reactor and what little there is will decay pretty quickly (decades).
So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.
Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.
However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.
A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.
To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.
I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.
Do they? I hope they don't. I would enjoy seeing MSFT implode and losing trust of its shareholders with its cash - itll be forced to return it rather than reinvest.
This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.
Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.
It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.
I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.
We should assume they're acting rationally, so the real question is, why do they find this interesting at all? Why not dump the money into private solar farms instead?