[dcolkitt]

As a tangent, I wonder if Bitcoin mining could re-ignite the nuclear power industry. Nuclear power plants involve a high upfront capital cost, then produce a long-life of fixed electricity output at near-zero marginal cost.

My understanding is that one reason more plants were built in the 60s was because electricity prices were fixed by regulators. That made financial modeling easier, because investors could legibly forecast their payback on the capital investment. When electricity moved to free floating price markets, it introduced much more risk and therefore increased the cost of capital.

Seems like nuclear power and bitcoin mining are a match made in heaven. Demand remains smooth and predictable, even from minute to minute. The marginal cost of electricity is near zero. Many of the large mining pools are so large and well capitalized that they could afford to commission a dedicated plant.

[ska]

Predicting nearly anything (today) about crypto over the timelines necessary to even only commission a new nuclear plant, let alone its lifetime, seems ... risky.

[syngrog66]

I wrote a bit of fiction recently which portrayed a future where a starship needed to run its own Bitcoin mining cluster (because "reasons") and the ship also happened to use a nuclear power plant. and for "reasons" the mining host hardware was also placed as close to the nuclear reactor as they could get away with (well the electricity generation portions anyway.) all needed for (arbitrary, fanciful) plot reasons, but one of ideas I used to justify it was because the power generation qualities fit the power needs of the crypto miners pretty well. stable load, low cost per watt, theres no wind or geothermal or tide in space, and solar is sometimes too weak and other times entirely blocked (picture situation when ship in planetary orbit, on far side from the star, so light is eclipsed.)

[jki275]

Most miners are on hydro, located right next to the dams, and probably colluding with them for either zero or near zero cost. Similar advantages to nuclear I'd imagine.

[tim333]

Nuclear power isn't cheap. Miners need cheap.

[rstuart4133]

> Nuclear power isn't cheap. Miners need cheap.

Yep. And I suspect there isn't any power cheaper than the output of an over provisioned wind or solar farm on a windy or sunny day. And they all will be over provisioned. In fact they all assume a faction of nameplate output now.