> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.
The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
>> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild
I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?
Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."
It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'
NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.
The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."
There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
History:
- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.
- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.
Alternative reactor history:
- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.
- "That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid"
Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.
Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".
It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.
They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.
Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.
The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.
Where did you see that the containment at Fukushima was too small? I thought that most of the release was done because there was not enough storage of contaminated water.
I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.
The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.
South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.
But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.
"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"
"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"
"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
"...."
There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
> I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades.
I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.
It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html
Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".
Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.
Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.
They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.
Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.
Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.
this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?
Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.
I suppose like anything there are multiple reasons, but what are the top 3 why California electric rates are so high (compared to the rest of the U.S.)?
Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
My impression was that the California utilities were being operated in revenue extraction mode for decades and prioritized paying shareholders over infrastructure maintenance leading to the crisis situation we are in today. The enormous costs today are due to the need to keep paying owners as well as catching up on the deferred maintenance, and in classic fashion the owners are still gobbling up most of the money and starving the operations budgets.
PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements them, and I think it almost always does.
I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
It's largely forest fires and regulation. Electricity prices are regulated by the state, and at the same time they mandate certain green energy goals. To hit these goals, electric companies have to ignore infrastructure to build renewable energy sources. If the infrastructure gets too old, it risks starting a fire, which could cost the company billions. When the state sees them lose money after a fire, the state lets them raise prices.
It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.
It's because the California government doesn't believe in markets, prices as incentives or anything like that. California govt believes in state mandates
While I was going to community college in the late 90's, I had an IT consulting biz where I serviced mechanical engineers and folks in the US nuclear industry who were ex-General Electric (GE NE). I learned nuclear was heavily-regulated (rightfully so) and costly but the main barriers to new sites were insurance, the huge capital investment, and the very long project cycles. As such, these are just too risky for most business people and investors. Nowadays, even with SMRs, the ROI still doesn't make sense given the massive, massive advances in renewables and regional grid storage. Very few Americans want an unproven, fly-by-night startup SMR in their neighborhood or in their county. I'd be okay with just a few mega reactors in fixed sites in very remote areas that would be heavily defended with perimeter security and anti-aircraft/-drone emplacements. I'm not okay with SMRs on flatbed trailers with minimal security in urban areas.
Every compute company knows that power shortage is a looming crisis. They don't have nuclear expertise in-house and are desperately looking for somewhere to put their money that seems to have experience and capability
This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a new reactor in less than geologic time.
The NRC isn't the bottleneck. For the recently completed Vogtle Unit 3 reactor, construction work and permitting work ran in tandem. Early construction work started in 2009 and all NRC approvals were completed by 2012. Neither NRC regulations nor lawsuits ever halted construction. Vogtle 3 was originally supposed to be ready in 2016. It suffered enormous cost overruns and delays due to the companies actually building it before finally entering service in 2023.
The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led to the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for securities fraud:
Ignoring AI (don't @ me) what are we doing with all that compute? Google (the search engine) hasn't meaningfully changed. Shopping is still largely the same as when Amazon first started out. Websites are pretty much the same. I don't understand what we're doing with all those operations.
I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
Ludicrous. You can't build a reactor in the US for less than $10 billion. Combine that with natural gas at prices five times less than Europe and that means that no-one will loan money for a project. If they do, it is usually subsidized by naive taxpayers. Meanwhile a windmill can transported on the Interstate in Kansas unattended and installed in two days.
I view nuclear as a prudent diversification of energy sources:
What happens if some supervolcano erupts, and because of the ashes significantly less sunlight reaches the surface of the earth.
Presumably, there will also be less wind then.
Plats survive some time (days) without light. If there is not enough backup power source (peaker gas plats, not nuclear though) the grid could quickly collapse causing a continent-wide blackout from what it would be really hard and it would take a long time to bring the grid up. Cities would be uninhabitable within a few days (no water, not sewage processing, no heating).
Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of death, flying into windows.
Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
It will likely be more expensive than Vogtle, smaller reactors are just more expensive and they go big because it's more cost effective.
What's slightly different is the financial risk profile. Failing on a 1x 300WM $5B project is slightly easier than a $18B 1GW project.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear decisions are made almost entirely along financial lines, instead of the safety concerns that dominate most debate about nuclear.
$20B for 300MW, and that's before the inevitable massive cost overruns. Continuing the Ontario provincial government's history of lighting taxpayer money on fire for electricity.
Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of). Fear of nuclear waste isn't irrational, but highly overblown because catastrophic events are more emotionally compelling than the slow degradation of either living standards and/or environment caused by competing technology.
30 years ago, I would have said the same thing. But right now solar is seeing technological advances at an exponential rate, such that by the time we build a nuclear power plant, get it approved, and get it running, solar will be both cheaper and safer while using less space.
> Nuclear (hopefully fusion at some point) is the only plausible way to meet energy needs in the future (that we currently know of).
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
I think you probably just disagree with OP about the levels of our energy needs in the future.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
Solar and wind aren’t reliable energy sources. They’re not dispatchable 24x7 and fluctuate along various timescales. Storing renewable energy for 24 hours doubles the cost. Storing it seasonally increases the cost 150x. Show me any place, anywhere, which is using renewable for baseline energy production 24x7.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
To be fair, Chernobyl was an older and unsafe reactor design in comparison to the newer ones we have today.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
Nuclear reactors do not surprise explode. The Chinese designs are passively safe: cut off all power and they'll simply sit there. They do not require active cooling.
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.
Ignoring what Elementl is developing as their material is confusing, what would be some of the practical energy sources for power hungry AI workloads other than nuclear?
Readit News
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...
> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."
> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."
> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."
Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.
It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.
I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.
The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?
I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".
Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."
It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.
NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.
The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."
There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.
History:
- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.
- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.
- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.
Alternative reactor history:
- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.
- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.
- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]
- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.
Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor
[3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.
Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".
True story. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716
It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.
They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.
Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.
Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.
Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.
The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.
South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.
There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.
"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"
"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"
"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"
"...."
There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.
I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.
Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal
That's why :)
Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).
Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".
Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.
Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.
They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.
Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.
The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.
Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.
Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?
For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...
> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
Why doesn't the state encourage more capacity to bring costs down? (to encourage electrification/EVs, etc.) Is it because they are phasing out natural gas? Is it to encourage roof top solar? Or trying to reduce consumption by having high prices? Or environmental permitting? "Lobbying" by entrenched incumbents? Or maybe the high price is due to taxes and not the price of generation?
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2025/02/pge-reco...
PR staff will talk about the insurance liability and mandated action to improve infrastructure (wildfires keep starting on power lines and then burning down cities) but it's hard to look away from the record profits
I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
Where did the money go? Paying for wildfire damage.
There's not really any way around that. Capital expenditures are profit.
The costs come from the wildfires and a derelict grid requiring large infrastructure upgrades.
It is a very silly cycle which could be ended by either removing green energy goals so they could improve infrastructure, and to not hold electric companies directly liable for all damage from a fire.
It’s PG&E and regulatory capture. Santa Clara County is off PG&E and has normal energy tariffs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...
California is raising rates to build out infrastructure for electrification and mitigation of the dangers that now exist due to climate change.
This is a good thing, but will be fruitless unless the US NRC modernizes in parallel with the industry to actually approve a new reactor in less than geologic time.
https://www.powermag.com/vogtle-3-reaches-initial-criticalit...
The identical AP1000 reactors under construction at VC Summer in South Carolina also suffered enormous cost overruns and delays, again not caused by the NRC or lawsuits. The construction problems were so severe at the VC Summer project that the project halted after spending over $9 billion, it led to the largest business failure in the history of South Carolina, and a couple of company executives went to prison for securities fraud:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
I guess VOD is new, but does that really demand that amount of compute?
Plot twist: the computer's last act at the end of The Last Question was just an LLM's hallucination.
What if hackers/terrorist attack the power plants?
What if the operating companies values profit over security?
What if an earthquake or Tsunami hits nuclear power plant?
Wind has down sides like moving parts and requiring giant concrete poors. Birds strikes, noise as well as ground vibration are also issues.
Many birds die as a result of human activity. In the US, the leading cause of these deaths is cats [1]. Cats cause four times more bird deaths than the next anthropogenic cause of death, flying into windows.
Cats cause ~1000x more bird deaths than collisions with wind turbines.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...
Unless you're vegetarian, or vegan, how so?
> Ontario set to begin construction of Canada's first mini nuclear power plant
So the starting stated price is only 20% cheaper than that train wreck. Will love to see how high this number gets given it's a first of its kind.
What's slightly different is the financial risk profile. Failing on a 1x 300WM $5B project is slightly easier than a $18B 1GW project.
My personal hypothesis is that nuclear decisions are made almost entirely along financial lines, instead of the safety concerns that dominate most debate about nuclear.
Estimated 20B CAD for 4 x 300MW power stations.
This is simply false. At this point, its falsity has been sufficiently well demonstrated and communicated that you should have known it was false. If you are not deliberately lying, it's only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
If we just sustain human life and pleasure then yeah renewables are probably fine. If we want to pursue highly energy intensive applications and then further if we want to pursue those applications with mobility then we need nuclear.
At this point, that’s sufficiently well known that you should have known it. If you’re not deliberately lying, it’s only because you steered yourself away from learning the truth.
I am not fully detesting nuclear, but I do disagree it a cure to the environment crisis as Solar is plenty and free; as are Wind and Water too.
The risks of what if; and that now we live in such a volatile world. How are you going to convince me it's safe?
How do I know a drone won't strike it in the next war? Some sponsored hack?
Stuxnet was an organised hack that was created to aid destruction to nuclear hardware.
Chernobyl is still unsafe and that's many years ago and was recently damaged again by a drone.
Anecdotally, I live near the Palo Verde nuclear powerplant in Arizona, we receive all of our electricity through a combination of solar (clouds are very rare here) and nuclear. These 2 factors mean energy is abundant in the state, and necessary in the summer for survival; air conditioning is a necessity due to the extreme temperatures in the summer.
The Palo Verde plant was commissioned in the 1980, and provides more power than any other reactor in the US. Since its not located near a body of water, it uses treated wastewater for cooling. It is a Pressurized water reactor design similar to the ones used on Naval vessels, a much safer design than the one used in Chernobyl, and none of which have ever experienced a meltdown or critical failure. Overall, I've never experienced any anxiety regarding the reactor not too far from where I live, it is the least of my concerns.
I believe the future will need to be a combination of renewables, to put all our eggs in one basket in foolish. Smaller and safer self contained nuclear reactors (like the ones used on Submarines) seem very promising for data centers. AI is on the rise, for better or worse, and it's power demands are constantly growing.
The Gen 4 designs, which they also have, are physics safe: literally drop bombs on them and they still won't fail (bombing a nuclear plant in general is an over stated risk for other reasons too). They're building those now too.