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Google to back three new nuclear projects

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Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#111

It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate. As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of…

Training GPT-4 used (claimed) 62GW-h over 100 days, for an average of 26MW. Rest of your comment follows from this error.

26MW is a fraction of the primary power consumed by a single passenger aircraft, by the way. It is an absolutely trivial energy input.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#112

Personally I’m skeptical of nuclear power given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity (sure, intermittence is a problem, but I think we can deal with it by being cleverer). But anyway, if anybody (other than the government, which gave up long ago) can pay the upfront costs of nuclear, it is the big tech companies like Google. > […] Google has set 2030 goals to reach net zero emissions across i…

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay fo…

Due to political issues, the US doesn’t have the capacity to engage in infrastructure projects that take more than ~2 years to complete, unfortunately.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given how much easier it is to incrementally add renewable capacity The problem is, the weather dependency makes it harder the more you add, because you will have too much when the weather is optimal and next to nothing when it isn't.

Storage is absolutely exploding. With China adding 74 GW in 2024 [1] alone and for the US it was expected to make up 30% of grid additions [2] before Trump came with his sledgehammer of insanity. Replacing Vogtle with renewables TWh for TWh and then building $63/kWh [3] storage with the money leftover leads to enough storage to supply the equivalent to Vogtles two new reactors for 10 days. That is how utterly truly i…

That's a reasonable way to think about it, but is 10 days enough? It seems 12-24 hours would be needed to smooth out diurnal variations, but there is also the seasonal variation of 2x-3x in many places which either requires a large investment in overgeneration or huge amounts of storage. There is also this problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute

which means the storage requirements will be a bit more than you'd think otherwise. You can't get reputable people to quote a price on a whole power grid because of all sorts of uncertainties such as "how many days of outage will people tolerate a year?"

If we use electricity to drive other decarbonization efforts, lets say green steel, or "petrochemical" manufacturing, or sustainable aviation fuels, the grid might become less tolerant of variation rather than more. Use the word "start-up" around a chemical engineer and they're likely to jump out of their skin because starting up a chemical factory is an unprofitable and sometimes dangerous operation. In an oil refinery, for instance, there are systems that produce hydrogen and others that consume it and it reaches a steady state. During startup you may have to make up inputs that aren't available and dispose or store outputs that don't have consumers. There are heat exchangers all over the place to recycle heat but you're going to have to supply steam to some of them and cooling water to others. The system is dynamically stable when it is running but during start-up vulnerable to all sorts of problems, plus people are crawling all over it doing various operations opening up the possibility of human errors such as sucking in storage tanks. In particularly the chemistry used to make jet fuel from syngas or methanol is horribly capital intensive to begin with, increasing that cost 5x by only running the factory 20% of the time takes something that's probably a non-starter to begin with [1]

So far as Voglte a lot of the cost overrun might go away if we just "stayed the course" and built more reactors of the same design. The real sticker cost is probably a bit more than they say it is, but if you could build one bungling free you'd think it could be made for less. It's not just a "western" problem, as the AP1000 is built as a number of "modules" in a factories in China and they waited for years for those factories to figure out how to build the parts and sometimes when they got those parts they were built wrong. If China is succeeding where we are failing it is because they can, politically, raise people's electric bills in the short term in order to dominate an industry in the long term. The main build they are doing now is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualong_One

which is an improved reactor of the kind the French were building back when the French were building large numbers of reactors reliably.

[1] when they really are forced to aviation will probably line up with ground transportation around some single entity fuel like methane or DME

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re skeptical of nuclear, a proven technology with excellent safety record, the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle, and believe in a technology we don’t have. If we (the West) had built out nuclear to satisfy our electricity needs, implementing new nuclear power tech as it improved, we could have electricity subscriptions like we have mobile / home internet planes. You’d just pay fo…

I can't speak for the prior poster, but I am highly skeptical that the current business ecosystem in the United States is capable of effectively and safely building new nuclear power infrastructure, particularly if and when the ever-popular but, to the best of my knowledge, never-completed Small Modular Reactor pitch gets involved.

Conversely China has built a lot of new nuclear capacity, and has projects for SMRs in the works too.

The problem as you allude to isn't the technology.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#115
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember that time France went from 7% to 70% nuclear energy? https://youtu.be/1WNjyxeBsWc?si=kVa2qf0uBeFrAyYB

Yes? That was half a century ago. The equivalent choice in 2025 is renewables with storage. Today they are wholly unable to build new nuclear power as evidenced by Flamanville 3 being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule. Their EPR2 program is also in absolute shambles continually being pushed into the future while revising up the costs. Now hopefully targeting investment decision in mid…

EPR was so unbuildable that it could have been designed by Amory Lovins to eliminate nuclear power.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in any realistic sense. This report https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost... just mashes together a PV array with about an hour of storage and quotes a price for that which is low and is certainly not going to get you through the night. So many things drive me nuts about that report and the discourse around it that, I think, contribute to people talking past each other. For instance, quotin…

A case study for Denmark. Not even using the latest plummet in price of BESS. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192... Generally: Renewables and storage solve somewhere high in the 90s percent. Then throw some gas turbines on it. Low CAPEX high OPEX. Just like we’ve done for the past decades with the previous ”base load and peaking” paradigm. Those gas turbines will be a minuscule part of the t…

I love how green hydrogen is assumed to become abundant and trivially easy to retrofit into existing infrastructure but fast neutron reactors are automatically considered infeasible by comparison.

Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#117
post #102

It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate. As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of…

GW is power. Gwh is energy. Energy is what matters when training a model. Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.

[deleted]

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#118

It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate. As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of…

What is the alternative though? I think it’s fair to question a decision but if people put their foot down when they don’t see the answer as good or clear enough then you end up with the status quo. This is the same thing that happened with housing (and building projects in general) in many larger cities. If all the housing projects are squashed for some decent alternative reason, you end up with the alternate reality which is potentially worse. City’s that have massive sprawl, people relying on cars for travel, unaffordable housing, etc.

In the energy case, we will be more reliant on non nuclear power: coal, fossil fuel, etc. I’m not sure you can scale “clean energy” at the rate we are moving.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#119
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only power generation that has a completely closed fuel life cycle What exactly are you talking about? It does not sound like it describes the way nuclear power, uranium mining, and nuclear waste storage works.

Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with. Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value. Hint: it isn’t. There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants. Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very…

Nuclear waste is essentially a non-issue today. Even if there was a way to magically make spent nuclear fuel disappear it would not materially change the prospects for nuclear energy. And if all other issues with nuclear were resolved (the primary one being cost), storage of spent fuel in dry casks for several centuries is a fine and economical solution.

The only scenario in which waste processing becomes an issue is if nuclear is so wildly successful we start running out of cheap uranium and need to do reprocessing and breeding. That is not the world we live in (this is also why thorium is a non-solution.)

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#120
post #102

It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate. As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of…

GW is power. Gwh is energy. Energy is what matters when training a model. Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.

> Please get your units right. In the meantime, down voted.

I don’t think a reply like this is in the spirit of this site.

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