[preisschild]

Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

And new AP1000s in the US would cost significantly less, because there are already experienced workers & supply chains from Vogtle and getting a license requires less work too, because you can copy much of Vogtle.

The median build time for nuclear reactors is 7 years. This is archivable if you continue building and not just build 1 or 2 every few decades.

[p1necone]

> Because they need power 24/7 and not only when the weather cooperates.

Hence the batteries.

[rtkwe]

The scale just isn't there. A single nuclear power plant near me, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant, produced 17,514 GW·h in 2005. The entire potential output of the Tesla (cough Panasonic) Gigafactories in California and China have a combined output of ~50 GWh per year. [0] Nuclear power is amazing at producing a reliable base load of power that massively outstrips our ability to produce and store solar power. Say our load is well aligned with the cycle of solar power and we're ignoring weather so we can derate the amount we want to store to 30% that's 105 years of production out of what I think is the two largest batter plants in existence to store the power produced continuously by a single large nuclear power plant.

[0] https://www.fuld.com/tesla-energy-massive-growth-in-megapack...

[ZeroGravitas]

I don't follow your sums. 50GWh of battery cycled once a day for a year is: 18,250 GWh

So you seem out by around 100x.

[rtkwe]

...sometimes the brain is smoothed by meetings...

[toomuchtodo]

Global stationary storage deployed for 2024 will be ~150GWh, and this is accelerating. Batteries are easy, nuclear appears to be impossible (economically speaking).

[rtkwe]

So 35 years then to store the power generated 24/7 by McGuire at that rate of production which ignores that the huge spike of AI loads will want 24/7 power, if we're looking at that kind of load I'd rate it at 50% for starters (low to be honest because it doesn't account for how solar ramps up during the day) which is around 60 years. Plus that's giving full capacity to those batteries when ideally we'd only use the middle 60% to avoid deep cycling the batteries daily unless they've completely solved that problem.

[toomuchtodo]

The nuclear ain't getting built, these are facts. Even if one breaks ground today, you won't push your first kwh to the grid for a decade, at which point another ~10TW of clean energy will have come online globally.

If AI is using too much power in the short term, destroy demand with policy and economics. We are not beholden to the robot trainers, we just don't provide utility access to the load. Unlimited demand of industrial scales of electrical power isn't a right of some sort.

[rank0]

What other activities are prohibited in your dream dictatorship?

[toomuchtodo]

Citation for my sibling comment and that which you replied to:

https://www.energy-storage.news/arizonas-biggest-battery-sto... (“Arizona’s biggest battery storage system goes online to feed Meta data centre demand”)

https://orsted.com/en/media/news/2024/10/orsted-has-complete... (“With a 300 MW solar PV capacity, Ørsted’s Eleven Mile Solar Center will produce enough renewable energy to power 65,000 US homes while the battery can store 1200 MWh of power.”)

(~2 years from planning to commissioning)

[Moldoteck]

1.2gw of storage means in 4hr it's gone if solar and wind are weak

[Moldoteck]

look at germany's yesterday output and tell me how much batteries they'd need to cover such a drop in generation

[preisschild]

Having enough battery capacity to back up enough energy for a few minutes let alone days would require a lot of resources.

I think scaling nuclear power would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

[slashdave]

Cheaper? No, not even close. Environmentally friendly? Debatable, but wait for new tech.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renew...

[Moldoteck]

yes it'll be cheaper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03605... https://liftoff.energy.gov/advanced-nuclear/

[preisschild]

note the word "could"

We have heard better and better batteries being just around the corner for decades at this point.

Sure, maybe a few percent better, but nothing ground breaking.