[smeej]

I know the topic is anathema on HN, but a personal friend of mine was working with people in New Hampshire to help make the nuclear power plant a better solution for the regional power needs by equipping it with bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off algorithmically to deal with the fluctuations in demand.

I know next to nothing about nuclear energy (or most other kinds of energy), but what I understand from what she told me is that one of its biggest hurdles is that it can't adjust up and down for demand very well. If you want to meet peak demand, you end up massively overproducing the rest of the time. If you have the batteries available, by all means, store it, but if you don't, bitcoin mining rigs can very easily be turned on and off in whatever numbers you need to balance out the demand, or at least smooth it out enough that the nuclear production can handle the remaining fluctuation.

It's a different problem, trying to match energy production that would prefer to be constant with demand that fluctuates, as opposed to trying to match fluctuating production with fluctuating demand, but I think of it almost like a "battery" that stores the "energy" as money rather than directly. Like, when the demand drops, earn whatever bitcoin you can with the miners so you can keep it cost effective to run nuclear and you're not having to turn to supplemental, higher cost, less clean energy sources in times of peak demand.

[tedivm]

This just isn't true. The burden on nuclear is the extremely long construction time and massive cost overruns.

[smeej]

But New Hampshire already has the plant built. That cost already happened. The question now is how best to meet the energy demand with the resources available, and that's already available.

[tedivm]

New Hampshire is on the national grid. If they have more power than they can use they simply sell it to Massachusetts so they can turn down some of their natural gas generation.

[smeej]

Massachusetts has basically the same weather at the same time. When demand plummets in NH, it also does in MA.

Somebody somewhere would still have to store the energy being produced overnight, which happens to be when nobody wants to use it.

[worik]

> The burden on nuclear is the extremely long construction time and massive cost overruns.

Yes, and:

* Risk of catastrophic failure

* Long term waste which there is no technology capable of handling

* Decommissioning

[smeej]

Aren't all these things moot in a situation where the consideration is how much energy to produce from a plant that has already been built and is already operating?

New Hampshire's utility isn't considering whether to use bitcoin miners or whether to decommission the whole plant and stop using any nuclear energy. They're considering whether they can increase production to cover a higher amount than baseload by making sure they can burn off extra energy easily when demand drops.

[threatofrain]

> Long term waste which there is no technology capable of handling

IMO too many people are dying from conventional dirty energy sources. We don't know how to handle the waste.

[cool_dude85]

Right, seems kind of silly to me as a utility guy. We have this nuclear plant that we don't want to use as baseload for some reason even though operating it is way cheaper than every other plant we have. Rather dump the electricity into mining bitcoin and expose the utility to those financial risks.

[smeej]

As far as I know, they do use it for baseload, but there's a very big difference between baseload and peak. In the summer in New Hampshire, for example, it's very common for people to run their air conditioners for a few hours during the hottest part of the day, but turn them off the rest of the time because it's not miserable. If you're fluctuating between peak and no heating/cooling need over the course of every 24 hours, that peak demand is a real problem, and demands a lot from the other energy plants.

If you could ramp the baseline production up a little bit and meet more of the peak demand from nuclear, it'd be cleaner than relying on the other plants, but you end up with too much energy produced, especially at night when it's cooler. Conveniently, cool temps are a benefit to bitcoin mining rigs, so it works out to spin up some ASICs overnight and make some money from the excess energy.

Nobody's suggesting the utility hold the bitcoin. The expectation would be that it would be sold whenever it's generated, so there isn't really any financial risk. But even if there weren't money to be made from it, having something that can easily be ramped up or down to compensate for energy demand is still useful.

[worik]

> even though operating it is way cheaper than every other plant we have

No. It is not. More expensive than anything else we can imagine

[tomrod]

Marginal versus average cost. Extremely low marginal cost (cost of the next unit to produce) but extraordinarily high average cost (includes capex). You typically make decisions for profit maximization on marginal cost.

[adrianN]

You can ignore capex if borrowed money is literally free, which historically happens very rarely.

[pyrale]

You can safely ignore capex once the plant is built, though. Because nobody is going to give you the money back. And so, after the plant is built, the only relevant optimization parameter left is marginal cost.

[aorloff]

Which is why we should be running them at high capacity when they are operational and storing the extra juice

[esalman]

Surely there are more useful avenues for harnessing excess energy than mining Bitcoins?

[samatman]

This kind of question can only be definitively answered through market discovery.

If you can come up with an economically productive use of intermittent excess electric power, which beats Bitcoin in profitability, you can make a truly enormous amount of money selling whatever value you're generating to the people who want it.

Because it's a safe bet that excess intermittent electricity is going to be a growing resource over time.

[smeej]

I don't know if there are as any that are as easy to acquire and set up without major infrastructure projects.

[XorNot]

I mean this is where pumped hydro would be pretty handy actually. Pumped hydro can't charge as fast as batteries, but can have enormous energy capacity.

You could almost certainly tune a pumped hydro installation to absorb the ramp of a reactor cycling up and down, but you'd lose the risk of running dry due to renewable unpredictability.

[throwaway473825]

Most places where pumped hydro is viable already have it. The growth potential is limited.

Hydrogen is a more interesting option. Not necessarily for energy storage, but as a fuel for use cases where electricity can't be used (like fertilizer or methanol rather than cars or heating).

[maxerickson]

Pumped storage can absorb power faster than any built battery array. It can't switch between storing and providing as quickly.

[XorNot]

Pumped hydro can store more energy then any battery array. You can size a battery, or pumped hydro, to any power level you like, but batteries by their nature scale differently: the faceplate capacity of a battery multiplied by 4 is also pretty much the energy storage.

Whereas pumped hydro can store far more energy (limited by upper reservoir size) then any battery array, but you pay for it in the fact that if you have a 1 MW turbine system on it, and 100 MWh of storage, you still only have 1 MW of power capacity (and about 100 hours of storage).

The problem is 100 hours of storage isn't much use if your grid needs more then that right now and it also can usually only be "charged" at about half that rate, so that 100 hours takes 200 hours to accumulate and that number is fixed - there's no surge capability - but if you're dealing with solar panels putting out on average 30% of their faceplate power, but obviously peaking at 100% frequently, you need to be able to store the peak to store it at all.

[maxerickson]

You said "Pumped hydro can't charge as fast as batteries".

This simply isn't true, there are dozens of pumped storage plants that can store energy faster than any grid battery that has been constructed to date. If you meant that the typical battery reaches capacity faster, that's not really a feature, it's a limitation.

[esalman]

This is exactly the type of solution we need. Redistribution of hydro and other resources can be an excellent use of excess energy.

[tomrod]

Many! Carbon pumps, reverse-turbines (technically jet engines), water pumps, etc.

[jefftk]

> equipping it with bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off algorithmically to deal with the fluctuations in demand

Interesting that people are doing this! When I was thinking about this ~10y ago [1] the economics didn't work out because of how quickly the ASICs depreciated, but they've probably stopped getting better quickly by now?

[1] https://www.jefftk.com/p/balancing-the-grid-with-bitcoin

[CTDOCodebases]

If you find that interesting there are also mining bitcoin with gas that normally just gets burnt off at oil wells, rubbish dumps etc.

[infecto]

I dislike bitcoin but this one definitely makes the most sense.

[necheffa]

> one of its biggest hurdles is that it can't adjust up and down for demand very well

This is a historic limitation. We have the technology to perform load follow with the legacy fleet. Most utilities just designed their fleets around the assumption that nuclear would be base load and therefore are less incentivized to operate their nuclear reactors this way.

[adrianN]

No, it's an economic limitation. You can of course turn the output of a nuclear plant up and down, reasonably quickly. The problem is that nuclear power is mostly capex. If you throttle your plant to 30% output, it just means that you produce power at three times the price.

[necheffa]

> No, it's an economic limitation.

I don't believe that I said it was not. Although, you should look at France as a special case.

> You can of course turn the output of a nuclear plant up and down, reasonably quickly.

Well, yes and no. Most contemporary reactor designs do have the physical capability to fluctuate between about 30%-100% power. But the ability to model such a core (accurately) has been a relatively recent thing, which has knock on effects for developing a core loading plan, doing a safety analysis, and performing monitoring/prediction. This was because most of these reactors were specifically built to satisfy base load requirements for their communities, there was no demand to develop the methodology initially. The whole economics reason came about much later when people started talking about actually developing said methodology. Its kind of a big deal because your AO bands are part of your licensing basis.

[zzo38computer]

It is a interesting (but seems strange) solution, but my guess is there is probably a better way. I would think a better way would be to avoid producing power that is not needed (and to avoid needing so much power, if you can avoid it). However, if you cannot avoid producing power, then it is better to store it (like you suggest). Bitcoin seems a possibility, although there are probably other (better) things that can use power too. If you do not have batteries, I would think it would be better to add batteries (unless the batteries are too inefficient, I suppose; however, I do not actually know how much inefficient will be "too much inefficient"). Another possibility might be a combination of these things.

[bsder]

> equipping it with bitcoin miners that can be turned on and off algorithmically to deal with the fluctuations in demand.

Turning excess energy straight into heat is NOT doing something useful.

Install a boatload more storage. Set up desalinization plants. Get manufacturing to move to 3rd shift.

Anything other than Shitcoin.

[adrianN]

If you had enough storage you could just build more renewables and produce the power at lower cost.

[bsder]

Repeat after me:

Renewables can't do base load. Renewables can't do base load. Renewables can't do base load.

If you have enough storage, you don't have to adapt your reactor second by second. You let the storage buffer out the peaks and valleys and you use the reactor to backfill the storage over the course of hours and days.

[adrianN]

If you read my comment carefully I argue that with enough storage to run a nuclear power plant optimally, you can also run renewables, but cheaper.

[dubcanada]

Hydro can do base load. Hydro is considered a renewable.

[ac29]

Geothermal as well

[smeej]

> you could just build more renewables

I think your "just" is carrying a lot of weight here. Building more renewables requires buy-in from a LOT more people, like state and local government officials, never mind the actual construction of them, with all its cost overruns and boondoggling. It takes a long time.

Setting up a bitcoin mining facility is comparatively a lot easier, especially when your goal isn't "mine the highest value at the lowest cost" (which would require the latest and greatest hardware, etc.), but rather "burn off this extra energy and make a non-zero amount of money off of it in the process."

[smeej]

I think you, like almost all the other commenters, are missing the point.

Of course investing in better long-term solutions would lead to better long-term solutions. But it would require more investment. You'd have to get so damn many people on board, especially in state government, to authorize projects like that, never mind all the bidding and constructing and cost overruns and what have you.

If you want to set up a Bitcoin mining facility to burn off excess energy, you need a well-ventilated room and a bunch of hardware. You don't even need the best of the best hardware, because the main purpose is burning off the energy, and the money earned from it is ancillary, so maybe saving money on the hardware cost and making less money than you could but more money than you're making now is worth the tradeoff.

This doesn't require government and voters to get involved. The utility company execs can make that decision, and then either keep the profits or reduce the local energy costs.

If the problem is extra energy, producing something people will pay you for with your extra energy is a viable solution, even if you think the people are stupid for wanting to buy that thing from you. And if you don't want to have to wait for the political process or deal with trying to build things by committee, bitcoin mining is one way to burn a lot of energy generating something people will pay you for, in a way you can turn on and off programmatically so you're only burning energy when you have extra energy you need to get rid of.

[fragmede]

Sounds great. I have a startup that wants to do that. we can't pay any money but we'll give you a ton of sweat equity. when can you start?