[just_human]

This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.

[ChuckMcM]

Yes, and ... restarting the fuel cycle under the current administration is, according to activity in the US uranium rich areas, kind of happening. I haven't seen anything "official" yet but driving around southern Utah shows signs of 'unexpected economic activity.' Speculation is that the USG is going to re-open a Uranium mine near Moab.

[boringg]

I think I should correct your statement slightly - its not wrong however we don't have a uranium shortage -- we have more uranium than we could possible use.

We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.

I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.

[dopa42365]

Enriching uranium to 20% instead of 5% is easy. If reactors require it, the fuel will be found just fine. You already have hundreds of SMRs in submarines and aircraft carriers and what not. A1B reactors in your carriers run on 93% enriched uranium!

That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.

[PaulHoule]

I don't believe it.

The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.

For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.

It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...

... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.

I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!

[just_human]

> The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.

Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.

[PaulHoule]

I want to see a real explanation of the bungling that makes projects go 3x late and over budget and it is not "environmentalists" who might make it go 20% late.

I've looked long and hard and not found an explanation of the bungling fitting the facts better than that it's like a poker game: the vendor never believed in the sticker price, but the vendors figured that once there were chips in the pot the sunk cost fallacy would mean the buyers would never fold.

Thing is, they do, at least in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal

I think NuScale was trying to be honest about costs but the buyer in Utah built a process in which they could control costs by folding early and they did. Europe, China, and other places have more engineering thinking and less financialization and they're more likely to "stay the course" but as an engineer I'm not sure this is right -- it might work for China but not for Europe.

On one hand I'm glad to see GE get the BWR, especially the work done on ESBWR, back into the game with the BWRX300, but the costs they are quoting are too freaky low and their talk about "design to cost" makes it seem like they just quote the cost number that they need to be competitive with the solar sticker price without storage which will lure in the public as opposed to being competitive to whatever the (unknown) solar + storage sticker price will turn out to be. (e.g. highly variable because it depends by "how frequent blackouts will your accept?")

[just_human]

Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.

Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.

[PaulHoule]

I don't believe it -- although ideology makes explanations like that popular with a lot of people.

The cost escalations and bungling were well in progress before the TMI. The NRC streamlined the reactor approval processes in the 1980s by trying to separate the licensing of a standard reactor from the licensing of the site -- nobody took them up on the offer.

In the case of AP1000 builds both Sumner and Vogtle were held up for years because they were waiting for Chinese factories to figure out how to make parts, in some cases they never figured it out and they had to source them elsewhere. Factory modular construction was supposed to prevent bungling at the site but replaced it with bungling at the factory.

In theory the factories got up the learning curve and if somebody ordered another AP1000 it would be different, in practice the AP1000 is a Chinese reactor and the Chinese gave up on it for the Hualong One which there are (oddly enough) two designs for, which goes back to the designs the French were using back when they were building many plants on time and on budget... which is maybe a good thing, but they look pretty quick to move on to the Hualong Two and before they get up the learning curve on that one they'll be switching to the Three...

I'll agree that the Europe hired somebody who thinks like Amory Lovins to design the EPR and really did bungle the politics more than the engineering, but that's not the story in the US.

[vlovich123]

Regulatory requirements were definitely a real thing. One of the drivers was that nuclear companies were required by law to match the price of oil and any surplus profits from that had to be reinvested into safety and that set the bar for new safety requirements. What that meant was the 1970 oil crisis created a new level for nuclear safety beyond what was needed and that was locked in for future construction. The entire history of nuclear energy is one of bungled regulation and given the political power oil companies have had and continue to have, it’s not surprising given the existential threat nuclear posed.

[nomel]

> Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US

Bar graphs showing decreasing regulatory cost on page 6. Pretty dramatic recent change.

https://www.nei.org/CorporateSite/media/filefolder/resources...

[magicalhippo]

Here in Norway there's now talk about nuclear power, after a long time of little to no interest.

However they can't even put up wind turbines anymore, due to NIMBY issues, environmental concerns and whatnot. We had a ton of such projects but it's just about ground to a halt now.

And since our distribution network sucks, we've had a ~100x price difference between north and south for a long time now due to that, you can't just put it in the middle of nowhere.

As such I have very little faith they'll manage to put up a nuclear reactor in the near future, at least not close to initial cost and time. And none of that has to do with the details of building a nuclear reactor.

That said, there's change on the horizon. At least more and more people seem to be realizing that if they don't want wind turbines, they don't want huge swathes of solar panels and they don't want to alter more rivers then there's not a lot of options left on the table.

[XorNot]

It's just experience in most cases. We don't build enough so the management and project structures and experience to do it never get a chance to be efficient.

The right thing to do with something like the Vogtle plant for example would be to keep building them since you've just paid some very expensive costs learning what causes delays, but the knowledge of what gets the plant built - because it was built - is still there and fresh.

[PaulHoule]

That's why I wish we had more information about what happened to the AP1000 than has gotten out.

[johncolanduoni]

This is the idea behind the “small modular” part of SMR. Current nuclear projects are huge, largely bespoke efforts that require a bunch of contract firms working together on different parts of the project. The idea of SMR is to push most of the necessary parts one after another from a factory. The best analogy I’ve heard for this is comparing how the Japanese built planes in WWII (in small batches done by craftsmen) to how the US did (with an assembly line following a documented process). I buy the conceptual argument, but there are a lot of details to work out.

[ViewTrick1002]

We’ve been trying to build ”SMR”s since the 1950s and a bunch has been built throughout the decades.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/the-forgotten-history-of-small...

The problem is also: who pays for the hundreds of prototypes before the ”process” has worked?

[johncolanduoni]

I guess the answer might be hyperscalers that want cheap electricity to run LLM inference. They’re already throwing tens of billions at AI, what’s a few billion more to have a chance at super cheap energy for their new data centers?

[bruce511]

Nuclear proponents argue that renewables (solar, wind) are not base-load, and nuclear is. They are correct.

But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.

In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).

From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.

Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)

There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.

[PaulHoule]

One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.

If that's really the case then a Gen 4 reactor that runs at higher temperature, uses printed circuit or other advanced heat exchangers and a Brayton cycle gas turbine could win on the capital cost but it's easier said than done. There's not a lot of hope I think the LWR but the BWRX300 is at least trying to do it by deleting the heat exchanger and the only way you're going to get costs down radically will be by deleting things. Commercial Gen 4 reactors are at least 20 years out and we should have gotten started 20 years ago.

[philipkglass]

One radical answer that question which is often neglected for the facile "regulations" explanation is that we quit building coal burning power plants at the same time we quit building nuclear plants because the steam turbine and heat exchanger cost too much compared to natural gas plants.

The timing undermines this theory. The US added one nuclear reactor to the grid in 1996 then zero until 2016 (sort by first grid connection date here):

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....

The US built an additional 58 coal generating units between 1995 and 2009 (see section "Age comparison of coal plants"):

https://www.gem.wiki/Existing_U.S._Coal_Plants

Combined cycle natural gas units were already cheaper to build in 1995, but the gradually rising natural gas prices over the next ~12 years meant that coal could still compete on cost for electricity generation. The cheap fuel for coal units counterbalanced the slower, more expensive construction process. It wasn't until fracked natural gas drove fuel prices down that coal unit construction ended in the US.

[jabl]

A lot of the natural gas plants are combined cycle, which includes a steam Rankine bottoming cycle.

[perihelions]

I don't see how this isn't dispositive on the economics question. That markets (overwhelmingly) choose to build combined-cycle natural gas plants, choose to add the Rankine bottoming cycle, means the marginal cost of the steam turbine is *less* than the marginal cost of the fuel saved by the efficiency gain. That's the case even in the USA; and natural gas elsewhere in the industrial world is integer-multiples more expensive.

The natural gas plants without steam turbines are precisely the load-following plants that run for a fraction of the time (or at a fraction of their capacity); the relative weight of capital vs. fuel costs is inverted. (Or those, like xAI in Memphis, which are rapidly assembled in rushed desperation. I wonder if that will be a trend in the datacenter boom: designs limited, not by costs under normal market conditions, but bottlenecks affecting rushed projects. Nuclear SMR's would seem to be worst at this—the designs they expect to use haven't even been built yet!)

[PaulHoule]

Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.

It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel. Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.

[jabl]

> Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.

It's a cost reduction, but likely not radical when talking about a nuclear power plant. For a cost breakdown of a nuclear plant see

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

So the "conventional island", which would include the steam turbines, condensers, generators etc. is about 15% of the cost. Reduce that to a 1/3 the size, and cost drops to 5% of the total, a savings of 10%. Probably even not that much, since a steam turbine 1/3 the size probably costs more than 1/3 the cost of a "1/1" size turbine. And then the remaining 2/3 of the power output would have to be generated some other way, so would shift cost somewhere else. Of course, some part of the cost of the nuclear island can be attributed to steam production as well. In any case, all in all I don't see this as making or breaking the economics of a nuclear plant. The issues that cause nuclear plant costs to skyrocket lie elsewhere (and no, just blaming regulations is overly simplifying it as well, though a popular scapegoat).

(I'm not sure, but I suspect what's making coal non-competitive with gas isn't so much the steam turbines, but rather that there's more labor and machinery involved in burning coal than gas, from mining, transportation, pulverizers, and then all kinds of exhaust gas treatment used at least in the civilized world, ash handling etc.)

> It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel.

Yes, that's true. The BWRX300, which of the current crop of SMR's is probably the one with the most realistic prospects of actually being built somewhere, is a BWR, and the maker claims one reason for the supposedly good economics is that they have spent a lot of effort on minimizing construction cost and equipment needed. We'll see, I guess. I think historically the economics of BWR's vs PWR's is mostly a wash.

> Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.

The follow-up ASTRID project, which never left the drawing board, used a sodium-air (or might have been nitrogen, to avoid issues with trace contaminants in air since it was all closed cycle anyway?) heat exchanger and Brayton cycle turbomachinery, to avoid any potential issues with sodium and water. I think it was supposed to have slightly lower thermal efficiency than an equivalent steam plant, but maybe somewhat lower capital cost.

[credit_guy]

When a big tech wants to build some huge datacenters, where they plan to put hundreds of thousands of ultra-expensive GPUs, they want to run those GPUs as close to 100% of the time as possible. Every hour the GPUs don't run costs them money. From the point of view of Microsoft, having an SMR next to a datacenter makes perfect sense. Solar and wind can do the job, if coupled with batteries and/or natural gas. But than you need a grid operator. If all you need is electricity for a datacenter, and you don't care about being connected to the rest of the grid, then you want as simple a solution as possible. And an SMR promises to be just that, a turn-key solution to get continuous and constant electricity.

[bruce511]

I think "promises" is the key word there. Data centre's want power, as you say, but they want it now, not 15 years from now.

So yes, when SMR's are "off the shelf" (aka from "order" to producing) , including permitting, construction etc, within a couple years then they are appealing.

I don't think we're quite there yet.

[credit_guy]

Sure. But this is why what Microsoft did here was just a hedge. It did not cost them much (if anything at all) to become a member of the World Nuclear Association. If the SMRs become reality a few years down the road, and if the demand for datacenters increases significantly because of the increased use of LLMs, then they stand to benefit a lot. If either of this does not pan out, then what's the risk for Microsoft?

[johncolanduoni]

The point of the baseload argument isn’t the “desirability” of power sources that can provide baseload, it’s the necessity. Renewables that can be scaled up (i.e. not niche cases like geothermal) are all too inconsistent to replace the entirety of generation without storage. Other tactics like long range transmission can reduce the amount of storage needed but not eliminate it. Fully replacing generation with renewables isn’t just unprofitable without storage, it’s impossible.

Storage is making great strides but for it to get good enough to fully convert the grid we need qualitative advances in the underlying technology, not just manufacturing scale driving down prices.

[pfdietz]

There is necessity with baseload plants: they have to be run at high capacity factor or else their economics go all to hell. This is especially true of nuclear where capex dominates. So describing something as "baseload" is actually describing a defect: it's a generation technology that cannot be practically dispatched.

[johncolanduoni]

It’s only a defect if you try to make the grid 100% nuclear, just like solar’s variation is only a defect if you try to go 100% solar. It’s not a competition where either is likely to “win”, they’re just two different tools for power generation.

[bryanlarsen]

It wouldn't be a defect if it was complementary to solar. But it's the same defect as solar/wind, so it is a defect.

[bruce511]

Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.

From a purely financial point of view, base load is not appealing. Whereas cheap solar is appealing. If I have a billion$ to invest, I know which one I'm choosing. I'm maximizing return, not "societal good". Which is why govt is best placed to build base load, since they optimize for societal good, not profit.

To make base load appealing to investors we need expensive power at night. But that's countered by local battery storage.

To be clear, this is not a "what we need" argument. It's a capital argument. Private Power suppliers chase profit, and there's more profit in daytime power than nighttime power.

[johncolanduoni]

> Of course electricity at night is highly desirable. But there are no economic incentives to build it.

Wait, what? Who is going to accept having no power at night at their house? Ignoring the fact that the intra-utility trade does provide a direct economic incentive, nobody is going to live somewhere the power companies can’t keep the lights on 24 hours a day most days (in the developed world anyway).

[bruce511]

You're looking at this from the consumer point of view. But consumers provide income, not capital.

Consumers may, or may not, have a choice of power providers. They can choose to "accept" what is on offer, or remove themselves from the grid. But they have very little negotiating power.

Actually it's pretty easy for (residential and office consumers to spend their own capital on batteries and inverters. Most homes consume (or can be set to consume) reasonably low power at night. A 20 kw/h battery will cover most homes easily.

(Solar panels aren't necessary for this.)

The capital cost, and savings therefrom, put a hard limit on what suppliers can charge for night time power. And of course storage is just as attractive to suppliers. (More capital-attractive than say a nuclear plant.)

As consumers we are used to simply announcing our needs. And assuming companies will expend any capital necessary to meet those needs. In practice it doesn't work that way, as rural phone/internet/cable consumers will testify.

Once you see electricity generation as a capital issue, not a consumer issue, things get clearer.

[ZeroGravitas]

The point of separating electricity artificially into "baseload" and "peaking" was the quirk of engineering that made coal and nuclear cheaper if you ran them flat out.

In a world where both solar and wind are massively cheaper, that entire paradigm collapsed. Even more so when you can reuse the same hydro and gas that was working as peaking as "firming" to complement the new model.

[nomel]

Here's a nice pie chart of the costs:

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/

[ksec]

> BWRX300

I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.

[kfrzcode]

Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.

[defrost]

As per just_human, more specifically, start- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[just_human]

Recommend starting here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/

[matthewdgreen]

If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.

[ggm]

Nuclear fuel, like lithium is a supply chain problem not an Erlich/Simons end-of-resources problem. Nuclear fuel UNLIKE lithium, has bizarre qualities that the waste stream from some kinds of reactors in turn, is valuable fuel. Not that we want prolifration from breeder reactors, but the point "fuel is the bottleneck" has some caveats. Supply chain logistics around fuel, including whole-of-life treatment of the outputs, is a problem.

[looofooo0]

There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.

[zozbot234]

Fission fuel is so cheap that we currently don't even bother to fully recycle our nuclear waste. We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.

[pbmonster]

> We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.

> easily

That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.

In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.

[keepamovin]

But if you dismantle nuclear weapons and downblend to make HALEU you have it. Killing two big birds with one small shift. Megatons to megawatts, ftw.

[ljlolel]

General Matter working on this (founders fund company)

[windows2020]

Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.

[triceratops]

Nuclear is great but we can do without bashing renewables as "insufficient". Solar + batteries are here right now and they're cheaper than nuclear.

[idiotsecant]

Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage. Storage is extremely expensive. Nuke is extremely cheap to generate -once its built. The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!) and each nuke plant is a bespoke effort which gets recertified each time. This is enormously expensive. There is reason to believe that small modular nuke plants will vastly reduce this cost. That means we might have a path to cheap nuke, but there is no immediate path to cheap storage barring a technological revolution (not just incremental improvements) in battery tech.

In the long run solar power will kill fossil fuels, but we desperately need a bridge to get us there and not destroy the carbon balance in the atmosphere. Nuke is that bridge.

[triceratops]

> Storage is extremely expensive

Define "expensive". Over what timescale? Have you seen https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e...

"Achieving 97% of the way to 24/365 solar in very sunny regions is now affordable at as low as $104/MWh, cheaper than coal and nuclear and 22% less than a year earlier."

This is right now, July 2025. The costs of batteries continue to fall. How much cheaper will batteries be by the time we start churning out SMRs fast and cheap?

By all means keep beavering away at nuclear. Its time will come one day. But I won't hold my breath for it to solve the climate problem in the next 10 years.

[johncolanduoni]

“Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there. The storage required goes up dramatically once you run the numbers for somewhere that has seasons. The long-range HVDC lines between hemispheres idea is cute but probably geopolitically impossible; I don’t think the US will let its ability to literally keep the lights on depend on South America.

Storage could get there, but I don’t think it’s credible that manufacturing scale alone will solve the problem. We probably need some new, qualitatively different chemistries to become viable for solar to be viable for the whole grid. From a technical perspective the nuclear plants we could build in the 1960s could do it, whether we can still build them (no matter if the barrier is regulatory or practical) is another question.

[ViewTrick1002]

The other side of the question is:

How will you get me with rooftop solar and a home battery to buy your extremely expensive nuclear powered electricity when I have my own imperfect solution almost the entire year?

Scale this up to a society adding onshore and offshore wind and you quickly realize that the nuclear plant will have a capacity factor at 10% or so.

Vogtle with a 20% capacity factor costs somewhere like 85 cents per kWh, or $850 per MWh.

Nuclear power due to the massive CAPEX is the worse solution imaginable to fix renewable shortcomings.

Take a look at France. They generally export quite large amounts of electricity. But whenever a cold spell hits that export flow is reversed to imports and they have to start up local fossil gas and coal based production.

What they have done is that they have outsourced the management of their grid to their neighbors and rely on 35 GW of fossil based electricity production both inside France and their neighbors grids. Because their nuclear power produces too much when no one wants the electricity and too little when it is actually needed.

Their neighbors are able to both absorb the cold spell which very likely hits them as well, their own grid as the French exports stops and they start exporting to France.

[Dylan16807]

In most of the US, the minimum solar power in winter is still more than half the average amount. We can set up enough panels within the country.

[triceratops]

> “Very sunny” is doing a lot of work there.

The price dropped 22% in a year. Next year it could be the same price in "somewhat sunny" places.

[ericd]

Are you so sure that storage is so expensive? It’s been coming down the cost curve extremely quickly, such that opinions formed even an year ago are severely outdated, and it’s now solar+storage that’s being favorably compared to replacing nat gas plants, not just solar itself.

[johncolanduoni]

Storage that is good enough to replace peaker plants, and storage that is good enough to handle seasonal variations in insolation are completely different ballgames. The lithium battery chemistry in your phone will self-discharge on the order of a month - there are alternate chemistries but they have other problems right now.

[ViewTrick1002]

> seasonal variations

Or overbuild renewables reducing the seasonal variations. In cost terms when compared to nuclear power those would be insignificant.

With fossil based energy systems we didn’t match production capacity to consumption 100% with peakers having low capacity factors.

But somehow we can’t overbuild a kWh and need massive seasonal storage when it comes to renewables.

[magicalhippo]

> Solar is very, very cheap and almost totally worthless without storage.

For say an AI training-oriented data center, you could scale down the power usage when supply is limited. You could change power limits on the CPU/GPUs, put the machines in sleep mode or powered off entirely. So the required storage would just be a slightly bigger UPS.

Not sure if the economics works out, but at least technically it's possible as it's more flexible than user-based loads.

[anonymousDan]

AI based training is an almost ideal match with this kind of supply. You could even imagine migrating long running training jobs to different parts of the world based on energy availability to optimise costs.

[idiotsecant]

So the model is buy some of the worlds most expensive hardware and let it sit idle for half the time? If I want to save the same throughput I need to buy at least twice the hardware!

Load throttling is one of those ideas that seems great as long as someone else is doing it.

[loeg]

You don't want to waste your GPU capex by not running those suckers at 100%. (Other datacenter workloads it makes some sense to demand-regulate, but not AI.)

[Kon5ole]

Solar benefits from storage yes but it's not at all worthless even without it.

If your solar panels generate 10 TWh per year, you have 10 TWh unused hydro, gas, even oil and coal that is stored instead of spent. You have saved the planet from megatons of CO2 emissions even if you have no new green storage.

Solar is already adding the equivalent of several nuclear power plants worth of new electricity every few months. Getting another month's worth of electricity delivered 10 years from now is not much of a bridge.

I think solar and storage just needs every other worse idea to stay out of the way and things will be fine.

[delusional]

> The cost of nuke energy is not because the technology is complex or because resources are scarce. It's because we have very, very burdensome regulations around nuclear reactors (for good reason!)

So its easy, at least if it wasn't for all that burdensome regulation. But also the burdensome regulations is actually good, presumably because it's hard to get right.

This sounds like nonsense to me. If the regulation is good, that would usually be because a thing is hard to make work in a liberal society, usually for some misaligned incentive reasons. In that case the regulation isn't "burdensome" but necessary to counteract the failure of the market.

[idiotsecant]

You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.

[delusional]

> You're approaching this with the nuance of a child.

I'm really happy I got to speak to such and adult then. Fuck you too.

[zekrioca]

> Storage is extremely expensive.

No.

[destitude]

And yet we still have no place to put that "clean" energy when it is depleted.

[zamadatix]

You can bury the casks in my (literal) backyard if you'd like (please put the grass back). It's an overhyped issue much less impactful than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

[triceratops]

> than the pollution we've had waiting for an idealized answer to arrive.

As I'm fond of saying, environmentalists didn't kill nuclear. I'm not denying they had motive. But they lacked means. They can't stop anything else they've set their minds to: fossil fuels, automobiles, deforestation, industrial livestock farming. Even whaling is alive ffs.

No, there was another party with both motive (competition) and means (lots of cash and political influence) to do the deed: the fossil fuel industry. And nuclear didn't help itself with accidents (and ensuing costly clean ups, one of which helped take down the Soviet Union), and budget overruns even when things went smoothly. Both found a convenient fall guy: the green movement.

Tl;dr nuclear hasn't grown because of money. It cost too much, and the competition had the cash to slander its reputation.

[maroonblazer]

I'd rather it be stored neatly in canisters underground than floating up into the atmosphere.

[loeg]

It can be left in canisters on site. It could be dumped in the ocean. It really doesn't matter.

[triceratops]

> It could be dumped in the ocean

FFS no. This is the reason environmentalists don't trust the nuclear industry.

[loeg]

This is a "no" purely for optics; it would be perfectly safe.

[triceratops]

Citation needed.

[protocolture]

God I hate this argument. Casks. The answer is casks. The short term solution turns out to be a fantastic long term solution. If that isnt good enough, demand it be reprocessed with thorium or something.

There. No more silly anti nuke gotcha. You can give up on that one permanently.

[zekrioca]

Nuclear proliferation.

[protocolture]

I am steelmanning this, and assuming you are making a hilarious joke at the expense of anti nuke activists. Instead of defending the storage issue, this is just a pivot to another unrelated and already well resolved issue. Thats exactly what the silly anti nuke folk get up to. Well played, solid joke, 10/10.