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Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Here's a better article:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/google_signs_another_...

> "Elementl didn't respond to questions by press time. Its public materials offer little clarity on its actual operations—aside from broad claims about providing "turn-key project development, financing and ownership solutions customized to meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."

> "The nuclear developer, founded in 2022, presents itself as a facilitator of advanced reactor projects. But it has not built any reactors to date and describes itself as a "technology-agnostic nuclear power developer and independent power producer," signaling it does not back any specific reactor design."

> "This approach aligns with the background of Elementl's CEO and chairman, Christopher Colbert, who previously served as CFO, COO, and chief strategy officer at NuScale Power."

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> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit."

Holy corporate jargon batman! I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild. Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers? IMO, it's better not to say stuff like that at all. It's basically a meaningless phrase, it adds no information to the sentence. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's generally a sign that they are doing the opposite of whatever the phrase means.

Corporate equivalent of using a larger font and/or double spacing your term papers.

Corporate equivalent of acting like a douchebag who constantly makes up imaginary stories about how cool they are to distract from them being a complete loser.

> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?

I believe this should have meaning. It would mean risk mitigation is a primary objective of the company. And not every company decides to consider risk mitigation as a primary objective.

The problem is that risk mitigation is a long term objective. Who has time for that?

"We will appear to meet standards while extracting maximum profit"

> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?

Honestly, I'd rather them explicitly commit to minimizing risks than say, "We're going to address the needs of our customers, and that probably includes minimizing risks, at least in most cases, right? Product will let us know when they've done the research."

It's better that they say these things than that they don't say them. The real problem is not that they say them, but that we can't be confident they'll live up to them.

>> "meet our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit." > I love seeing example of phrases like this out in the wild

I can image that's the stuff kids would say when asked why is the candy bowl suddenly empty: "Well, you see, we were was just meeting our needs while mitigating risk and maximizing benefit".

'We at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and NIKIET feel that the RBMK reactor design meets our customers' needs while mitigating risks and maximizing benefit.'

> Stating this implies that minimizing risks and maximizing benefit is not a need of most customers?

It’s not, at least for nuclear power. In Europe, for example, the debate is entirely emotional. So saying they’re working for a rational customer is sort of meaningful, even if corporate speakified.

Oh, it's the NuScale guy again.

NuScale got far enough to get approval to build a test reactor at the Idaho Reactor Testing Station, which is in Outer Nowhere for good reasons. But they never got enough funding to build it.

The trouble with most of these small modular reactor schemes is that their big pitch is mostly "we don't need a big, strong, containment vessel because ... reasons."

There's no inherent problem in building a small nuclear reactor. Here's one from 1957, near Oakland, CA.[1] It's safety if something goes badly wrong that's a problem.

History:

- Chernobyl - meltdown and fire, no containment vessel, major disaster.

- Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.

- Three Mile Island - meltdown, big strong containment vessel, plant lost but no disaster.

Alternative reactor history:

- Fort St. Vrain - high temperature gas-cooled, subject to helium plumbing leaks in radioactive zone, shut down and plant converted to natural gas.

- AVR reactor, Germany - pebble bed reactor, had pebble jam, had to be shut down, extremely difficult to decommission.

- Sodium reactors - prone to fires.[3]

- Molten salt reactors [4] - require an attached chemical plant that reprocesses radioactive molten salt.

Most of the problems of nuclear reactors in practice involve plumbing. Everything in the radioactive zone has to last half a century or so without maintenance. That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid, but everything else tried has not worked well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1O8xAB_FDI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor

[3] https://www.nuclearsafety.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/techn...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor

> Fukushima - meltdown, too-small containment vessel, large disaster.

Probably overselling the "large" there... at least on the scale of global power production.

You wouldn’t call Fukushima a large disaster?

The financial cost is at $180 billion US. That seems large.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan , Japan had about 300 TWh of nuclear for a year at the time of the accident. So $180 billion amount to $0.6/kWh over a year if I'm not mistaken. Not cheap. But if you spread over a few decades then that's reasonable.

> $0.6/kWh

I must be messing something up, as that’s about 3-4x what I pay for electricity and seems a lot?

Sadly I don't have time to go into it now, but they're massively overpaying due to miscallibrated risk tolerance. (Paying tens of millions per QALY is not a good use of money, 1 milliSv per year is an utterly insane goal)

The actual disaster had noticably bad short term effects on only a small area and long term effects on a tiny area.

Nobody knows for sure, but the sole nuclear accident cleanup operations may cost $470 to $660 billion.

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

- "That's possible with distilled water as the working fluid"

Distilled water is pretty corrosive at high temperatures, isn't it? I'm no engineer but I've read that the water-chemistry management of nuclear reactors is a highly finicky topic.

Here's a crazy fact I can't get out of my head: the PWR types of reactors rely on lithium hydroxide in their nuclear water pipes, as a critical corrosion inhibitor. But the US can't make this (meaning, the isotopically enriched lithium of the correct flavor for nuclear reactors); it imports 100% of this key ingredient from foreign countries— currently, exclusively, China and Russia. Our top geopolitical adversaries could kneecap most of our nuclear power fleet, if they wanted, because of the difficult engineering minutae of "water is corrosive".

True story. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-13-716

Where did you see that the containment at Fukushima was too small? I thought that most of the release was done because there was not enough storage of contaminated water.

Fukishima containment.[1] The top of the containment vessel is shown in yellow, just above the red cylinder containing the reactor. The containment vessel was a heavy shell, but not much larger than the reactor. It had to contain any steam overpressure resulting from an accident, and didn't have enough volume that the steam pressure would decrease, and maybe condense. The surrounding building wasn't a pressure vessel and couldn't contain anything. Building panels blew out, leaving visible holes in the walls.

Three Mile Island containment.[2] The entire huge concrete and steel building around the reactor and support equipment is the containment vessel. When the reactor failed, radioactive steam escaped into the large containment vessel, where it was contained.

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/fuk...

[2] https://www.ans.org/news/article-3916/the-three-mile-island-...

Thanks!

The vallecitos reactor site is still there to look for anyone in the bay area, at least for the next few years. It's along the 680 corridor just south of Pleasanton and it's been quietly producing medical isotopes since the 70s. They shut down the power factors after they discovered that the entire Pleasanton valley is a gigantic active fault zone called the calaveras fault, and the site itself is in a rift from from another, smaller fault called the positas fault.

Probably not the greatest placement in hindsight.

The long de-fueled reactor vessel was removed just last year.[1] Sent to Texas as a final resting place. The containment dome was still in place then. The next step is to restore the Vallecitos complex to "conditions suitable for productive reuse for other commercial or industrial purposes."[2]

So that's the aftermath of the first commercial small nuclear power reactor.

[1] https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Vallecitos-react...

[2] https://www.northstar.com/northstar-closes-ge-hitachi-vallec...

> But they never got enough funding to build it.

It's worth examining why they never went forward with builds. In 2023 their cost estimates for power went from a manageable $55/MWh to a barely-managable $93/MWh. And that was before all the additional cost increases that are typical for first projects.

They were unable to paint a story that was financially compelling.

Nuclear's problems are not TMI, it's Summer, and other failed builds. The government will insure catastrophic damages. It will not insure against construction cost overruns, and those may not kill people but they kill companies dead.

I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.

The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.

South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.

There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.

> South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.

That's why :)

Russia is also fairly successful at building reactors. Although, somehow their orders pipeline has been getting shorter and shorter (wonder why...).

It's likely because the NRC is the most insanely regulatory body of the US government. Ostensibly, this is a good thing, nuclear power, meltdowns, radioactive waste, etc.

But really I cannot emphasize enough how strict and overbearing they are.

"Oh that 12V backup battery pack needs to be replaced? Better get the same one from the same manufacturer"

"They aren't in business anymore but we have this 12V battery the fits perfectly, same specs"

"Nope, not certified with that system. You can start recertification that will cost ~$40M if you like"

"...."

There is so much ass covering and not wanting to take responsibility that the market is basically in paralysis.

Do you have a source?

I work for a company that provides electronics that end up in nuclear reactors. We don't do batteries, the story is just an example of the kind of headache it is.

Maybe it's true for the actual reactor control system I dunno. Our industrial phones ended up at a nuclear plant once (that we know of) and we only learned about it because the engineer called us for firmware reset procedure. The product doesn't have any nuclear energy certifications (although it is tested for rail and maritime use).

I don't think that's an accurate depiction of NRC for builds like at Georgia's Vogtle. Even in California, entire reactors have been installed backwards and the regulatory problems were not the big problem.

Given that France's builds in both Finland and France itself have been similarly disastrous as the US builds, I don't think the NRC seems to be the likely cause. And France is much better at building big things than the US is, their infrastructure costs are a fraction of US costs. IMHO there's something deeper to the lack of success of nuclear as a technology. It's a mainframe trying to compete in the cloud era.

There is an official report detailing why the project in France (the Flamanville-3 EPR) failed, published at (French ahead!) https://www.economie.gouv.fr/rapport-epr-flamanville , and regulations aren't a major cause (translating the summary offers a good overview).

> I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades.

I think it's less an issue of anything to do with nuclear in particular, and more that we're just living in an absolute golden age of charlatans. It's like the 1980's all over again except instead of fraud being doable because of a lack of information, fraud is doable because everyone for whatever reason you'd like to describe is thoroughly committed to pretending it's the 1980's.

It's not necessarily malice, it's very easy to underestimate the difficulty building and running a real nuclear reactor. The 1953 'Paper Reactor' memo still applies fully today: https://whatisnuclear.com/rickover.html

The Ohio nuclear bribery scandal is another case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Yes, even in South Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korean_nuclear_scandal

>Elementl

Missing vowels + no plan + a leadership team stacked with MBAs, investment bankers, and FAMILY MEMBERS?!?= bullshit private equity "play".

Let me predict what is going to happen: a team of connected "playaz" are going to get real companies with cash and the government to give them money to shake up the nuclear market.

Then the leadership team is going to hire a token staff of scientists, engineers, and public policy folks.

They are going to have a groundbreaking ceremony for a facility (not a reactor, like an R&D facility or "rapid innovation incubator" or something) that is highly publicized and subsidized by state and local business development grants and credits but will either never be finished or never fully staffed.

Nothing will happen for four years until they either fade out of existence or declare defeat due to "regulatory and market conditions" with nothing to show but some powerpoints and press releases.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that flowed into the organization is never spoken of or seen again.

Then a couple of years later they'll register another .io domain with missing vowels and start all over again.

this sounds like one of those Google PR moments where they desperately try to paint themselves as the good guys. Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?

Maybe this is related to the talk about splitting Google that's going around these days?

You mean White Washing? How dare to think Google would think of such a thing. They're not evil after-all.

> Remember when they announced contact lenses to help people with diabetes?

For anyone curious about what happened with that: https://web.archive.org/web/20181117031510/https://blog.veri...

> Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device. In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment. For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film. In addition, our clinical studies have demonstrated challenges in achieving the steady state conditions necessary for reliable tear glucose readings.

It seems like these news articles about XYZ superscaler announce agreement to purchase power from nuclear startup come up every few months. My assumption is that there's very little needed from Google et al to sign these agreements, and the upside is very cheap power if the startup miraculously pulls it off, so they might as well.

You don't think Google is interested in getting more energy for less money?

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