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Google to back three new nuclear projects

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Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#121

Post by barbazoo »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #105
mmmBacon wrote: post #96

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…

Put all of it in the Greenland tundra. Free cooling. No humans to irradiate.

The data centers too then? Because those need to be connected to the grid.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#122

Post by chermi »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #64
neural_thing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the California government doesn't believe in markets, prices as incentives or anything like that. California govt believes in state mandates

California famously deregulated its electricity market at the end of the 20th century, becoming the first state to do so. https://paylesspower.com/blog/deregulated-energy-states/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%932001_California_e...

You understand there are multiple types of regulation, right? The deregulation you're referring to was with respect to generators being able to sell into the grid.

The relevant regulation here is the state-backed guarantees on returns for pge under authority of CPUC. CPUC approves basically any rate increases pge approves. It doesn't need to do this. It could hold pge accountable based on what they determine qualifies as operating expenses vs. infrastructure improvements. PGE wants everything to count as infrastructure improvement because they're guaranteed a rate of return on infrastructure projects.

Obviously it's difficult to determine what "infrastructure improvements" were actually due to poor management and maintenance vs. what infrastructure improvements are required purely to meet demand (for example) or from "normal wear and tear".

It's hard to reconcile 1) the fact that there's pretty broad consensus that PGE fucked up and didn't fulfill its obligations, especially maintenance and 2) reporting record profits. Clearly there's something wrong with the system, particularly the CPUC-utility relationship. AKA, regulation.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#123

Post by doublerabbit »

nandomrumber wrote: post #77
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nuclear boosters are particularly odd. I can engage in solar boosterism with my own money: I have 3.7kW on my house. I'm not going to have a backyard reactor, this isn't the Jetsons.

Roof top solar doesn’t work in apartments, and it also doesn’t work for renters. Roof top solar is great for people with spare cash to optimise heir future cash flow. I advocate for nuclear because it guarantees the poor won’t freeze in the dark.

Doesn't work how?

If it's monetary gain then thats a political not one in residence.

If not producing enough power then that's a people's problem. Being greedy taking more than what they need and for not enough resources on building efficiency.

Overall solar works. It's just gate-kept tightly by evil organisations who are scared to lose their dirty cash for such technology to evolve.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#124

Post by nandomrumber »

energy123 wrote: post #55
nandomrumber wrote: post #39

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…

Yeah, if we went back in time and built nuclear then we'd have nuclear today, and the fixed costs would have been paid by a previous generation. Is that surprising? But that doesn't inform us on what the optimal policy decision is in the current year of 2025 given 2025 prices and time-to-build of the various options. In Australia renewables have the perfect confluence of multiple factors: - low seasonable variability…

The whole argument is like going back 40 years and claiming there’s no point thinking about deploying nor researching & developing solar / wind because we don’t have the expertise nor technology.

We still don’t. Australia doesn’t manufacture solar panels, and other than building the wind turbine masts locally, we don’t manufacture wind turbines either.

Refusing to commit to developing a domestic nuclear power industry commits future generations from having that knowledge and skill base.

And I struggle to understand how anyone can, with a straight face, claim nuclear is too expensive, as though more solar and wind is going make retail electricity prices in Australia cheaper.

AU$0.325 per kWh is ridiculous. We export more coal to China than we use locally, and their electricity is cheaper (around half the cost) and dominated by coal, hydro, and nuclear.

CSIRO perfidy.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#125

Post by neuronexmachina »

agos wrote: post #25
perihelions wrote: post #2

Here's a better article: 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 d…

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?

> Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?

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.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#126

Post by barbazoo »

bee_rider wrote: post #5

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…

We’re not adding solar fast enough and are still struggling with storage. This would be a great way to bridge the gap. Not if the data centers consume all this new energy of course which seems to be what’s happening. Maybe after everyone has turned their own portrait into a studio ghibli picture we can go back and use that new, clean energy to solve the climate crisis.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#127

Post by leoapagano »

dfilppi wrote: post #9

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.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#128

Post by oijaefiojoijaw »

barbazoo wrote: post #120
steren wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But very in line with their bio...

> Product Manager on Google Cloud Platform.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#129

Post by pfdietz »

ttfkam wrote: post #116
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, hydrogen is clearly a much easier technology to make work than fast reactors. Why is this even a question? For example, fast reactors have the issue that in an accident, if fuel melts and rearranges, one can have potentially have a configuration that is prompt supercritical on fast neutrons. This is functionally an atomic bomb.

Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.

Re: Google to back three new nuclear projects

#130

Post by bee_rider »

PaulHoule wrote: post #52
bryanlarsen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the costs of these solutions are rarely included. Solar plus storage is included in all the major levelized cost reports, like from the NREL.

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…

Cryptocurrency is mostly bullshit I think, but for whatever reason people keep buying it. That could be a nice endlessly-dispatchable economically rewarded (despite all reason) workload.
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