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Comment by Moldoteck | Hacker News Reader

Wait... But everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?

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> everyone says wind+solar+batteries are so much cheaper than nuclear. Why aren't big corpos pouring money in these instead to get even more output?

Same reason it makes sense to build as much wind and solar with batteries plus nukes as possible: scale. (And false dichotomy: they’re also investing massively in wind, solar and batteries.)

We didn’t produce enough batteries (or solar panels or wind turbines, for that matter) fast enough before . For solar and wind, moreover, approval difficult scales with land area. You’d think nukes would be harder, but it’s apparently easier to get a state to let you YOLO on land rights when it’s on a small footprint.

Solar and wind (with batteries) is still cheaper. Gas is politically problematic for Big Tech, so they go with nuclear. The voting public in America and Europe, on the other hand, chose gas.

but considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then. Unless they need firm power that solar+wind+battery can't provide enough unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them

> considering acceleration of scaling solar/wind/battery production & it's fast deployment, they may as well wait 5-8 years and build the stuff then

Do you have sources for your time scale?

The acceleration is massive and from a massively tiny baseline. AI is predicted to add 0.8% energy growth a year to American power use [1]; lots of that is going into gas.

> unless you have huge overcapacity of all of them

There is the political reality that what’s been built has voting employees and tangibility in a way what is to be built does not. That’s the danger in our deployment of gas turbines. If we hit an energy surplus, the first to get cut will be things not yet built, even if those are renewables. (Think: phase out of subsidies, maybe even grid charges.) Some enlightened jurisdictions will continue shutting down gas turbines to replace them with solar, maybe even nukes, but most won’t.

[1] https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/AI-poised-to-...

> AI is predicted to add 0.8% energy growth a year to American power use [1]; lots of that is going into gas.

And given past performance, the nuclear projects being proposed here are projected to add 0% energy capacity to the grid within the next 20 years.

actually vogtle showed that unit 4 was completed faster and cheaper than unit 3. Add to that no experienced ppl for building it, foak build, unfinished design, covid. Imo new projects of ap1000 could be done significantly cheaper and faster

There are. There's about one announcement a month for those deals. For instance Google inked deals with at least Energix, New Green Power and Black Rock in the last quarter.

So the question then is: why do the nuclear deals make Hacker News and the solar deals don't?

yes, but why not pour even more $ in those then since if it's cheaper = you get more kw for the same $?

Spreading your bets is considered sensible.

> why not pour even more $ in those then since if it's cheaper = you get more kw for the same $?

Law of diminishing marginal returns: you don’t. You either need to pay a premium for expedited delivery or eat the time value of delays.

"Everybody" doesn't say solar, wind, or batteries is cheaper than nuclear. The question of what is "cheaper" at any given time isn't really relevant at this scale -- its cheap.

Price and availability of electricity and power is more or less global, however datacenter customers are in the situation where they need to power a city with electricity in a location where there is neither an existing city nor its generation capactiy.

Baseload. Nuclear runs forever and you can put a datacenter right beside it to avoid grid complexities.

Nuclear only runs about 95% of the time. You still need to deal with grid complexities.

1.3 nines of reliability? Awesome.

Do you have a source for that, how wide is the variation for different reactor types and operators, does it apply to individual reactors or whole sites when there are several reactors on one site?

The PRIS database has country averaged data for energy availability factor, capacity factor etc.

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/ThreeYrsEnergyAva...

I have to say: That looks as if they all value safety over uptime.

Thanks.

An added value is that in off-hours nuclear can be used to produce hydrogen for carbon free fuel.

Not arguing against you, but - as can wind and solar at times of excess generation.

Absolutely. However, an often made detraction of nuclear is that the baseload is superfluous during off hours, so hydrogen generation is worth mentioning.

Do data centers really have off-hours?

I was under the impression that whatever drop in consumer usage exists overnight is made up for with ML training, video transcoding, etc. That there's never any shortage of tasks to run.

these do have downtimes for maintenance when load is shifted to others

Not if you are a high-demand single point consumer like a data center. Google doesn't want to buy thousands of acres for solar panels, nor the hassles of installing massive batteries next to a new data center. A small nuclear reactor would be a much easier fit. A steady user also wants a steady power supply. Nuclear is very steady.

Interesting to call building a "small nuclear reactor" an easier fit than simply putting up a bunch of containers with batteries, hooking them up and calling it day.

I know what I would bet on.

So if you build a decent sized data center to consume 160 MWh you can get 2 SMRs and call it a day.

Or you can buy 480 Tesla MegaPacks (about 6 acres) and 1600 acres (it's roughly 1 MW per 5 acres) of solar panels to run the DC and charge the batteries during the day. Sure some can go on the building, but you'd still need way more acreage than that can provide.

I know what I would bet on too.

Revealed preference

Footprint? Maybe.

imo - need for firm power

For the same reason people support fluoridation of drinking water: they "trust the science" without even looking at it.

fluoride is good stuff in limited quantity, like many other things.

drinking fluoride in small quantities doesn't have a ton of evidence of benefit. Brushing your teeth with fluoride does.

They at least partly figured out fluoride for brushing teeth and in drinking water was a net positive based on teeth health and natural fluoride levels in wells around the world. CDC estimates it reduces cavities by 25%.

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