BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
Of all the things that will never happen, this is the one that will never happen the most.
I give it slightly higher odds than AGI.
Edit: or cryptocurrency replacing fiat
Honestly thank god they’re vaporware. Somehow I don’t think we should have startups building actual nuclear reactors.
hol up google wants 500MW? that’s 1. one regular sized reactor that could be delivered in the same timeframe, and 2. google uses already almost 3GW on average (2023), this is compared to about 2.5GW for ms of which something in the ballpark of 700MW just for ai. they’re gonna need much more, like five regular sized reactors if they want to use entire baseload (that’s how NPPs work best. the french made load-following NPPs but i guess it’d be harder to make them small) or swing wildly with power consumption to conform to renewables
Thanks for posting this good collection of links. HN has as hard-on for SMRs and as a first-order approximation that means they’re wrong, but it’s good to have something more than vibes backing it up.
I got a lot of them from very pro-nuclear guys too, but ones who can count
500 megawatts? Pshhj that’s not even though to power the flux capacitor.
I can easily get 500 megawatts with a few power towers burning rocket fuel, plus I don’t have to worry about the logistics of recycling uranium and plutonium waste.
I’m unrelated news, the Satisfactory 1.0 update is pretty great. What are we talking about again? Oh sorry gotta go build another heavy modular frames factory
this game destroyed my life for weeks. I’m doing shapez 2 now and I’ll probably finish up my miserable tour of factory games with factorio afterward
EDIT: also rocket fuel seems extremely overpowered to me, I don’t think powering tier 9 should be as trivial as making some RF and slamming down fuel plants for ten minutes
I’m more of a factorio guy myself. I’m going to become a hermit next monday
Great game, just sucks the main dev is a bit of a chud.
I swear they looked at Bill Gates failing to launch SMRs and thought: “he’s a smart guy”
We buy tech of the future that might or might not work/get government approval/make actual sense to build so we can’t be blamed for ruining the climate with AI using up all the energy. That’s the more earth bound version of: I don’t care about climate change because we will live on Mars soon™.
I got into the wrong business.
didn’t we all
i sometimes wonder how i’d make money if i was unencumbered by ethics. i originally thought audiophiles, but then i discovered crypto, holy shit
ai is the same
I am 100% in support of deploying nukes to Google and Amazon
You need to deploy them around the same time else contingency plans have it that everything just boots back up in another region, at least Google. us-east-1 otoh…
us-east-1 is Amazon’s Self-Nuking Technology™
At least is technically feasible (although completely impossible to do in that timeframe)
Unlike the cold fusion energy deal that Microsoft greenwashed last year that’s pure science fiction (invent, create, test and build a cold fusion reactor in just 4 years: impossible unless they got a time machine or found some alien tech in a remote cave)
Google has signed a deal with California startup Kairos Power for six or seven small modular reactors. The first is due in 2030
So, well after the bubble is going to pop.
Oh no, they created the means to generate non-fossil-fuel energy for nothing /s
Who knew that the only thing stopping nuclear power, the most morally and environmentally correct power source (uranium is only produced by popes shitting in the woods), was that Google and Amazon hadn’t thrown money in the direction of Chernobyl first. It was so simple this whole time. Now it’s solved and I can go back to gaming.
BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
Well acthtually we prefer to be called fission/fusion nerds
“greenwashing is cheaper than action” indeed.
Caroline van der Plas and that entire gaggle of talking heads that call themselves a political party are a bunch of muppets. Muppets that are being puppeteered by a very wealthy dairy and agricultural industry
Deze post klopt! ;)
wouldn’t it make more sense to put NPP on seashore and just dump waste heat to ocean like everyone else does
Iirc at the sea in friesland was one of the options yes. But the farmer option was also landlocked, de achterhoek if you want to look it up.
Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher (“utredning”) who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.
It’s gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.
[1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair
@dgerard somebody should found a startup and sell ASMRs to Google and Amazon
I’m looking forward to seeing the tech attitude of “move fast and break things” being brought to nuclear reactors.
What could possibly go wrong? Better ask for forgiveness then plant permissions!
