Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).
Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:
EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:
Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
This is all about the revival of pebble-bed reactors, which were attemped several decades ago but had problems with the graphite pebbles breaking down and releasing graphite fragments that clogged the pipes, basically. China is way ahead on this with helium-cooled versions. The big deal is that in the event of complete power loss (see Fukushima) they go into shutdown without melting down, although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire. Still an improvement in safety. See:
> "Several high-temperature thermal neutron–spectrum pebble bed reactors are being commercialized. China has started up two helium-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors. In the United States, the X-Energy helium-cooled and the Kairos Power salt-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors will produce spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with burnups exceeding 150 000 MWd per tonne. The reactor fuel in each case consists of small spherical graphite pebbles (4 to 6 cm in diameter) containing thousands of small TRISO (microspheric tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles embedded in the fuel of zone these pebbles."
(2024) "Safeguards and Security for High-Burnup TRISO Pebble Bed Spent Fuel and Reactors"
> although if the coolant lost and replaced with air you would get a nasty Chernobyl-style graphite fire
Or alternatively, radioactive dust could be released into the atmosphere such as THTR-300 did.
INL did a gap analysis in 2011 between what was known and what needed research. The german AVR reactor had technical issues that weren't expected -- dust being one of them.
Would be extremely interesting to the the $/MWh for the deal to understand the viability.
Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.
A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.
All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.
> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
> All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them.
History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.
PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.
The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.
Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.
Ok, we've changed the title to language from the article itself (edited to fit HN's 80 char limit) which seems both representative and neutral. If there's a better title, we can change it again.
(Submitted tile was "Google funding construction of seven U.S. nuclear reactors")
> Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027
Sounds great in theory, but it took NuScale Power 6 years to get their design approved? I hope the AI hype lasts that long then maybe the world would have two certified 75 MWe SMR designs.
Also the NuScale Idaho plant was cancelled last year when cost estimates balooned 3x. 9.3bn for a 460 MWe plant?
seeing how 2GW of nuclear cost $34B in Georgia, why would Google waste $120B when they can get the same output for at most half the price (and realistically more like 1/10th) using renewables and batteries? and they’d have results in 2 years instead of 2 decades.
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
I'm fairly pro-nuclear but the EIA (Energy Information Administration) publishes a "Levelized Costs of New Generation" report every year that compiles the total cost of installing new generation, taking into account the fuel, build up, maintenance, interest, and inflationary costs, and nuclear ends up costing more $$$ than other renewable alternatives.
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Nuclear is a terrible investment in 2024. Price per delivered megawatt-hour is guaranteed to be much lower for a combination of solar+battery+wind.
-- Edit --
To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.
Google's entire thing only consumed on average 2.6x worth of AP1000 energy last year. Why does anyone think that the IT industry needs to pull all of the weight of electrifying the American economy by building 7 AP1000 power stations?
It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
> it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement
A frequent complaint from utilities has been AI companies refusing to sign PPAs. They want the option of picking up and leaving if someone else offers a better deal down the road, leaving the utility stuck with overbuilt infrastructure costs.
> virtue signalling
This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
> This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
If a technological solution is optimistic and remains vaporware possibly forever, then it maybe "virtue signaling" is if there more nonfunctional desire for it that outstrips practical or economic utility. A better term would be "vaporware" when there is less social puritanism involved, and I don't think coal or nuclear signal anything of redeemable greenwashing value compared to cheaper renewables combined with PES and distributed grid storage.
This isn’t a binding contract like Elon Musk agreeing to buy Twitter. Google may be bound in some way to buy power from a future unbuilt powerplant that doesn’t yet exist in prototype form. If Kairos fizzles, more likely than not, can Google seek damages? Will Microsoft seek damages from their binding contract when Helios isn’t grinding out fusion gigawatts in 2028 as promised?
A power purchase agreement is critical to getting investment. The US aviation industry is wouldn’t exist if not for the UK and French governments making a purchase agreement for planes at the start of WW2
It's funny how many people think getting investments is as easy as just asking a bank or VC for money. If you want anything substantial besides scraps of angel/friends and family rounds, you need to prove your product first.
Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
Insurance and regulatory hurdles are far higher than contracts selling future electricity customer purchase agreements and likely to doom almost all new nuclear projects in the US as they have for the past 50 years. I don't see why an amoral customer would care about the specific source power as long as it's cheapest, but even a socially-conscious customer would probably be okay with renewables if and when they are generally the cheapest option. Perhaps there are a handful of specific datacenter locations and requirements in particular areas that would be better suited to geothermal or nuclear.
Yeah, its not much I agree. But it is an agreement the company can wave that they at least have future buyers for their non-existing power generators if they were to build them!
Kairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel.
While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.
First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.
Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)
Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.
Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
I'm inferring from this that their current plan is to import lithium-7, from either Russia or China?
- "The Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor requires highly enriched lithium-7 to support operations. The high enrichment requirements complicate quality and process control due to lack of qualified standards and instrumentation capable of meeting the required precision and accuracy. Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities."
- "Due to environmental concerns and relatively low demand for enriched lithium, further use of the COLEX process is officially banned in the USA since 1963, which strengthens China’s near unanimous [sic] hold over the market of enriched lithium, followed by Russia.[7]. [...]Although US nuclear industry relies heavily on Chinese and Russian enriched lithium, ecological concerns over the process may impede its future domestic use at industrial scale."
On the one hand, I'm glad we're finally slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we're still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me.
On the other, a nuclear startup, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.
> cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut
Do you think SpaceX cut every conceivable corner to make money? Nuclear (and space), are heavily government regulated. It isn't perfect a safety net but it works.
If SpaceX cuts corners, some rockets fall over a field in Texas/the ocean somewhere. Not a great thing to have happen, but the damage is pretty minimal all things considered.
If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.
I love the 'ideally' in the dry cask storage article...
"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
The best thing about nuclear, IMHO, is that all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium. Compare that to coal, oil, natural gas, etc.
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
> all of the highly radioactive waste ever produced by nuclear power plants in the US could fit into a single football stadium.
I have heard this before, but is this just the physical waste's volume? Isn't that a useless metric? What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
`not too hard a problem`
- just hard enough that it hasn't been progressed for decades.
but the great thing about next gen reactors is that the waste solution does not need to be addresed; any waste from next gen reactors will simply go wherever the final solution for existing waste engines lands.
Safety claims of novel, unproven fission designs always come with a crazy footnote. Pebble bed reactors are completely safe, if they are never exposed to water or oxygen, which is a pretty hilarious caveat for planet Earth.
there aren't any records in history with problems with casks storing solid waste.
Related to spent fuel: the solution should be storage facility like in sweden + purex like in France (or even better - fast reactors and pyroprocessing)
Epochal "century" boundaries don't always line up with year % 100. One could argue that the 20th century didn't properly begin until some idiot shot an archduke. It likewise seems like the 20th century likewise overshot Y2K by a decade or two. Now things are accelerating in a different, new, and exciting direction.
It's the same thing with decades. People often say the "sixties" didn't really start till 1963. And when you think of the start of 1980's culture, a lot of people are really only talking about 1983-1984.
Like, 1960 itself clearly belonged to the 1950's, the same way 1980 still belonged to the 1970's -- culturally, that is.
Obviously, the question of what year a decade "really" started in, allows for endless argument. :)
It’s still possible to mitigate without upending society (provided the Hansen paper is wrong), but just barely and not for long. It is absolutely dire and urgent but we’re not beyond hope for the future generations yet.
Sort of feels like we wasted a long time having our best and brightest figuring out how to optimize advertising algorithms. I think we're finally starting to recover from that phase.
Citation needed for the claim that any particular non-trivial fraction of engineering talent has been wasted on ad algorithms, or that those are the "best and brightest", or that those people would have been doing other useful work if the ads didn't exist.
Without evidence this is just a repetition of an old, unproven meme for internet points.
Nah, those are the giant overly complex fission reactors. Now we're talking about sleek, much safer, miniature designs that are mass produced. Well, technically they're actually mass fueled. ;)
Readit News
Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/kairos-power-starts-const...
EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:
Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24/7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.
[1] https://kairospower.com/technology/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41841108
> "Several high-temperature thermal neutron–spectrum pebble bed reactors are being commercialized. China has started up two helium-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors. In the United States, the X-Energy helium-cooled and the Kairos Power salt-cooled pebble bed high-temperature reactors will produce spent nuclear fuel (SNF) with burnups exceeding 150 000 MWd per tonne. The reactor fuel in each case consists of small spherical graphite pebbles (4 to 6 cm in diameter) containing thousands of small TRISO (microspheric tri-structural isotropic) fuel particles embedded in the fuel of zone these pebbles."
(2024) "Safeguards and Security for High-Burnup TRISO Pebble Bed Spent Fuel and Reactors"
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00295450.2023.2...
and
https://www.powermag.com/nuclear-milestone-chinas-htr-pm-dem...
Or alternatively, radioactive dust could be released into the atmosphere such as THTR-300 did.
INL did a gap analysis in 2011 between what was known and what needed research. The german AVR reactor had technical issues that weren't expected -- dust being one of them.
https://inldigitallibrary.inl.gov/sites/sti/sti/5026004.pdf
From what I can tell the dust issue is still a point of contention.
Otherwise similar to the NuScale deal which fell through last autumn.
A PPA like agreement which then only kept rising until all potential utilities had quit the deal.
All honor to Kairos if they can deliver, but history is against them. Let’s hope they succeed.
> NuScale has a more credible contract with the Carbon Free Power Project (“CFPP”) for the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (“UAMPS”). CFPP participants have been supportive of the project despite contracted energy prices that never seem to stop rising, from $55/MWh in 2016, to $89/MWh at the start of this year. What many have missed is that NuScale has been given till around January 2024 to raise project commitments to 80% or 370 MWe, from the existing 26% or 120 MWe, or risk termination. Crucially, when the participants agreed to this timeline, they were assured refunds for project costs if it were terminated, which creates an incentive for them to drop out. We are three months to the deadline and subscriptions have not moved an inch.
https://iceberg-research.com/2023/10/19/nuscale-power-smr-a-...
History is not really against them. Our current reactors (mainly pressurized water reactors) are the way they are because Admiral Rickover determined that PWRs are the best option for submarines. He was not wrong, but civilian power reactors are not the same as the reactors powering submarines.
PWRs are expensive mainly because of the huge pressure inside the reactor core, about 150 times higher than the atmospheric pressure. For comparison, a pressure cooker has an internal pressure about 5 times higher than the atmospheric pressure, and such a cooker can explode with a pretty loud bang.
The Kairos Hermes reactor design is based on a design that was tested in the '60s, the Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment [1]. While such a reactor can be used to burn thorium, Kairos decided to go with the far more conventional approach of burning U-235. The reactor operates at approximately regular atmospheric pressure. This should reduce considerably the construction costs.
Of course, there are unknowns. While the world has built thousands of pressurized water reactors, it has built maybe 10 molten salt reactors. For example one quite unexpected effect in the MSRE was the enbrittlement of the reactor vessel caused by tellurium, which shows up as a fission product when U-235 burns.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is a very conservative organization, and they don't have much experience with molten salt reactors because nobody has. It took them 6 years to give NuScale an approval for a pressurized water reactor, design that they knew in and out. My guess is that they will not give Kairos an approval without at least 15 years of testing. But Google's agreement with Kairos is quite crucial to keep this testing going.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment
(Submitted tile was "Google funding construction of seven U.S. nuclear reactors")
Sounds great in theory, but it took NuScale Power 6 years to get their design approved? I hope the AI hype lasts that long then maybe the world would have two certified 75 MWe SMR designs.
Also the NuScale Idaho plant was cancelled last year when cost estimates balooned 3x. 9.3bn for a 460 MWe plant?
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
edit: to be clear, 1GW of wind or solar is $1B. Build 3GW for overcapacity and you’re still at just 17% of the cost of 1GW of nuclear, and you technically have 3x more capacity. Now figure out how many megapacks you can buy for the $14B/GW you saved https://www.tesla.com/megapack/design (answer: 16GW/68GWh)
It's no conspiracy why nuclear never gets traction these days -- maybe it was cost-effective 10-30 years ago but renewable technology has gotten relatively cheap. (Shutting down active nuclear reactors earlier than needed is a whole different issue though.)
Here's the report for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...
There is no report for 2024 because they are building a new model to take into account even newer technologies: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/releases/press537.php
-- Edit --
To clarify, "Nuclear is a terrible investment for private industry in 2024." However, I understand why nation states (and their equivalents) would want a diversity of power sources. There many be non-economic reasons why nations want to build nuclear over solar+battery+wind.
:(
That's.. not very much.
So typical of Google. Dip their toes in a new field. Get lots of press. Move on to the next thing.
Just tech virtue signalling: Google/Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.
A frequent complaint from utilities has been AI companies refusing to sign PPAs. They want the option of picking up and leaving if someone else offers a better deal down the road, leaving the utility stuck with overbuilt infrastructure costs.
> virtue signalling
This term has lost whatever meaning it ever had if we're using it to refer to binding contracts.
If a technological solution is optimistic and remains vaporware possibly forever, then it maybe "virtue signaling" is if there more nonfunctional desire for it that outstrips practical or economic utility. A better term would be "vaporware" when there is less social puritanism involved, and I don't think coal or nuclear signal anything of redeemable greenwashing value compared to cheaper renewables combined with PES and distributed grid storage.
Getting Google in line as a customer is absolutely huge for Kairos.
PPAs can be used as evidence of guaranteed revenue when raising funds in capital and debt markets.
That capital and debt is used to develop and deploy the technology.
Dead Comment
While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.
First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.
Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)
Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it's only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.
Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There's a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)
- "The Kairos Power fluoride-salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor requires highly enriched lithium-7 to support operations. The high enrichment requirements complicate quality and process control due to lack of qualified standards and instrumentation capable of meeting the required precision and accuracy. Currently, enrichment [sic] of 99.95% 7Li is imported to the U.S. in limited quantities."
https://gain.inl.gov/content/uploads/4/2023/10/KairosPower_A...
- "Due to environmental concerns and relatively low demand for enriched lithium, further use of the COLEX process is officially banned in the USA since 1963, which strengthens China’s near unanimous [sic] hold over the market of enriched lithium, followed by Russia.[7]. [...]Although US nuclear industry relies heavily on Chinese and Russian enriched lithium, ecological concerns over the process may impede its future domestic use at industrial scale."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLEX_process#COLEX_separation...
(Tangentially, the Chinese FLiBe reactor also uses enriched lithium-7, so I guess they're self-sufficient in that, as both supplier and consumer).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1
edit: Found an additional reference,
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716 ("Managing Critical Isotopes: Stewardship of Lithium-7 Is Needed to Ensure a Stable Supply" (2013))
I believe this is referring to rather small quantities (kilograms) imported for pH control in light water reactors.
On the one hand, I'm glad we're finally slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we're still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me.
On the other, a nuclear startup, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.
Do you think SpaceX cut every conceivable corner to make money? Nuclear (and space), are heavily government regulated. It isn't perfect a safety net but it works.
If a nuclear power plant-owning VC-backed startup cuts corners because their shareholders expect 3 cents more of profit YoY on their earnings report, we get a nuclear meltdown that shuts off an area the size of a small city for a century.
These startups can barely keep passwords secure, I don't trust them and their VC psycho buddies for a second with something as potentially powerful as nuclear energy.
"Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel."
Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:
"The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind"
It's not too hard of a problem to solve, it just requires political will to bury it in a dry geologically stable desert somewhere in the US, which we have plenty of.
I have heard this before, but is this just the physical waste's volume? Isn't that a useless metric? What would happen if you included the volume of the containers required to safely house it?
but the great thing about next gen reactors is that the waste solution does not need to be addresed; any waste from next gen reactors will simply go wherever the final solution for existing waste engines lands.
https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/the-2022-inventory/2022-uk-da...
A bit like all the world's gold would actually comfortably fit into an olympic sized swimming pool.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21969100
Nuclear waste is a bit larger because it's not pure radioactive elements, but it is still a tiny volume.
Like, 1960 itself clearly belonged to the 1950's, the same way 1980 still belonged to the 1970's -- culturally, that is.
Obviously, the question of what year a decade "really" started in, allows for endless argument. :)
We’ve had the technology to build and deploy nuclear reactors for decades but we’ve been burning coal and fuel like there’s no tomorrow so well…
"The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best is now."
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10102024/inside-clean-ene...
https://coal.sierraclub.org/coal-plant-map
https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth...
https://www.dnv.com/news/eto-energy-related-emissions-will-p...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41602799 (citations)
Without evidence this is just a repetition of an old, unproven meme for internet points.