- How big are the commitments here? I’m having trouble finding actual dollar amounts. Does this actually represent an infusion of money into these SMR efforts, or are these “commitments” tied to so many missable targets that it’s actually meaningless?
Oklo in particular seems to be total vaporware, I can’t find a single technical picture anywhere of anything this company’s reactor is seeking to do. They seem to raise money based on a rendering of a ski lodge.
A huge, concrete investment in TerraPower would be more interesting, but as a molten salt SMR which has never been built, this also looks extremely non-committal.
SMRs in general seem like a dead end, we’ve heard about them for decades and they don’t seem to be any closer to making nuclear power buildouts less expensive.
Everything that makes proven nuclear power plant design expensive seems to revolve around the same drivers of expense for all long-term construction: large up front capital requirements, changing regulations, failure to predict setbacks, and pervasive lawsuits. SMRs purport to tackle a couple of these (shorter-term builds, fewer setbacks), at the cost of considerable efficiency, but so far this seems like an inferior alternative to “just get better at building proven nuclear plant designs”.
- Okla really seems like a meme stock. Their original design was rejected by the NRC, so they are very far from ever breaking ground. I don’t understand why their valuation is so high. Why not just take all this money and build an existing, approved design?
- Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - even if it's just so that FB servers are off-grid ; it's still a huge win, I just hope Mark realize he has much more potential than what he is doing rn
- I wish that Meta would pay for the extension of Diablo Canyon in California. They have had to jack up already sky-high electricity rates to keep it going, after deciding nearly a decade ago that it would be uneconomical to try to extend its lifetime.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers, and how it's driving up everybody's costs because we are all paying for that increase at elevated prices.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, higher than geothermal, renewables backed by storage, and natural gas. Nuclear is good for virtue signaling in some communities, but from the technological and economical perspectives, nuclear is very undesirable and unattractive. It's only social factors that keep alive the idea of new nuclear in advanced Western economies, not hard nosed analysis.
Here's a new preprint from Germans showing that even for Europe, a continent with very poor solar resources for many countries, new baseload is not the most economical route:
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
- For reference, China installs about 1 GW of solar per day. By this time next week, they will have surpassed the output of this entire project.
- That’s something that is possible only in the USA, for the best and the worst.
I don’t know any other country that would allow a truly private company to mess around with nuclear reactor.
- Curious how this new design addresses the biggest safety challenge of nuclear reactors (the issue that was the root cause of the Fukushima accident and an indirect cause of Chernobyl): how do we ensure that the nuclear core temperature remains controlled during exceptional events (e.g., earthquakes, structural failures) when the reactor must shut down abruptly?
- Meta (seemingly) bought the local race track in Beaver PA for a large data center. We were sad to see a world class racing facility go away as it finally started to hit its stride. But the offer was too hard for ownership to pass up
- I'm kind of surprised there's so many nuclear power companies. I remember Google signed a deal a year or so ago [0] with a different one (Kairos). I wonder why they're not in this deal? Is it all connections and funny money? Or do any of these have real shots at making something useful?
I was thinking how the dotcom bust left a lot of dark fiber infrastructure which helped the internet take off after that. It would be great if the upcoming AI bust (if it happens) leaves a bunch of power generation and new nuclear tech behind.
[0] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/su...
- This may just be me... but is anyone else in their head saying: "whats the catch?"
~~Meta~~ Facebook has made their money by de-stabilizing people's emotional state to keep them engaged and buying stuff via ads. I'm having a tough time connecting the dots between that and nuclear power.
- I won’t take Meta’s new ambitions serious unless Zuckerberg does something like have a “fireside chat” next to Ezra Klein moderated by Kara Swisher where he awkwardly spams the word “abundance” while staring Klein square in the brow. And then buys Vox Media.
- To do what Grok has been doing?
- I remember when terrapower was supposed to build a kind of reactor which would use depleted/unenriched uranium which was basically a hole in the ground slowly burning up, but now it seems they're doing a molten sodium "classic" reactor, is that the same thing and I am confused, or did they change their strategy?
- This is cool, but I'm waiting for the announcements for datacenters to start establishing on-site geothermal power for baseload power supply.
- I'm glad somebody is doing it, even if it's Meta. The world really needs more energy and nuclear is a great option
- The biggest barrier to nuclear energy in our country is the linear no-threshold safety model. We know the model is wrong, opens up operators to infinite liability, and since adopting it the nuclear industry has effectively been dead.
Even just a basic common sense threshold would make nuclear more viable overnight.
- All that energy will surely translate into quality of life for the rest of us.
- While I'm sure that the vast majority of this energy is going straight to AI server farms, I'm also hopeful that this will renew efforts to switch to sustainable energy sources.
- I would be very skeptical about Meta on top of running any reactor. Move fast and break things doesn't work out well in that area of business. Why don't they invest money into more renewables instead, to power their data centers? That seems a safer bet and choice.
- Nuclear power from the company that moves fast and breaks things?
- So, the result will be rising energy bills for everyone?
- I despise Facebook and all that it stands for, but if the surplus value that it has extracted from humanity over the last two decades is reinvested intelligently into nuclear energy, I'm actually okay with it.
Despite the hype that you see on Twitter, the hard tech startup scene is actually incapable of large-scale engineering coordination on the level needed for a nuclear power plant, or even a gas turbine.
If any innovation on fission reactors is going to be successfully commercialized, we will need to see billions of dollars of investment over medium to long time horizons.
Of course, the millstone around the neck of nuclear power is that it's a dual-use technology. There's probably a lot more behind the scenes that's been done to stifle the industry effectively for non-proliferation reasons, but masquerading as cost, regulatory problems, environmental concerns, etc.
- So is the metaverse completely dead and over with?
- Are all these techbros drunk with power? The other day it was cloudflare guy trying to play international politics, now Zuck wants to get into nuclear.
- Extremely awesome. If you can't praise this in spite of however you feel about AI, or about Meta, you need to reevaluate your priors.
- Monopolies are insane. Why is myspace working on nuclear power?
- This is to appease the current US administration running the federal government that for some odd reasons is abhorrent to the idea of using cheap, cleaner renewable energy and battery storage to decarbonize our air and grid.
- Some Shreck Power vibes.
- Do any of their vendors have existing products or is this a Boom Aerospace situation?
- I am pro-nuclear power, but I miss the days when companies would, you know, return their profits to investors, so those investors could then invest in other companies doing different things, instead of all corporations tending towards generic everything-investment vehicles.
- After reading through all press releases I still haven't seen any details on any money changing hands?
The previous ones from Google and Amazon at least specified that it was based on PPAs. Where all they did was bind themselves to buy X amount of power at Y cost if the company could deliver.
Taking a step back I have an incredibly hard time seeing how new built nuclear power will cope with renewables fundamentally reshaping our grids.
We're seeing the unraveling of the grid monopoly infront of our eyes [1] and renewables are set to completely crash all "baseload" markets. [2] Likely forcing them to become stranded assets.
[1]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
[2]: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
- So now we’re harnessing a the dicy and capital intensive power of the atom to create the illusion of speaking to people because we can no longer strike up a conversation with a stranger on the street. Cool, cool. Personally I’m going to stick to real people with no divergent neutron chain-reactions involved.
- If they want this to work trump and co gotta be out asap
Theyll just steal it
- This is a purely political move. It will take a decade or longer if ever to ever get power from this. And yes it says "as early as 2032" but we know how that goes.
Why nuclear? Because it's cleaner than fossil fuelds but appeases the administration because it isn't wind or solar, which would immediately solve any power generation problems.
You might be tempted to say, since this always comes up, "what about base load?"
FFirst, batteries can solve that problem.
Second, you use a mix of power and when the Sun isn't out (ie night) is when power is cheaper from other sources.
Third, data centers don't really need base power at all. You just run the DC when you have power and don't when you don't. There's precedent for this. Google has a DC in Scandanavia that they shut down a few days a year when it gets too hot, otherwise it's just cooled by ocean water.
What I find most funny about all this is that all these big tech companies are kowtowing to the state in the exact same way they accuse Chinese companies of doing.
- if you think it's near impossible to reach a real human for a difficult customer service problem now, imagine by the end of this decade
- sure, let's build more energy sources with finite fuel supply and negative environmental impact while there's better options available <.<
- These companies abandon software? Does anyone really think this is going to end well?
- Nuclear energy company valuations are in the puny low ~100s of billions.
But Meta can be sued for so much more ...
- Remember prior to the AI boomb electrical bills were still high.
Now we see more demand and the building of the grid to meet that demand....yet the high cost is still remaining the same.