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> Maybe the current admin (which is big on deregulation) will make it easier to build power plants, especially nuclear ones.

They aren’t big on deregulation at all. They’re big on selective regulation. They’re also big on killing any power project that isn’t oil or coal.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-offshore-wind-renewable-ene...

We are in for a painful lesson on why China’s investment in renewables wasn’t just good for their ecology.

Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build (after permitting)

It makes more sense to go for PV plus batteries that can be installed in a matter of weeks

how much of that 10 years is the physical limit, and how much is social / cultural / organizational / political overhead?

From memory, when the brits got out of their own way they could build a nuke plant every 6-8 years.

Does that matter much when you want to have a datacenter as quickly as possible? It’s not like those things will change quickly.

yes -- knowing the physical limit can motivate moving closer to it.

> after permitting

Load-bearing parenthetical!

> Nuclear power plants take something like a decade to build

The most-recently completed fission power station on this planet needed 23 years under construction and it is still in testing. A recent American one took 15 years.

When the brits were at it (With insourced nuclear engineering and low regulatory overhead) they could crank them out every 6 - 8 years.

The brits let all that technical capability wither and could not do it again right now.

But if someone was willing its still theoretically possible. Just takes total alignment between government and private.

OK, but people who want these actually have to build them in the countries that exist. This isn't Civilization. You cannot switch to a civic that gets more hammers at the beginning of your next turn.

Sure but the argument against nuclear is always the same. Its hard right now.

The problem is that if you dont start correcting that hardness now, the next time you think you might need a nuclear industry, its still hard.

You need to train, grant experience and give money to professionals so they can exist to build stuff. It took the UK ~ 15 years to get started, then they were cranking them out like no ones business.

Think of it this way, in 15 years you can have something you might need, or you can guarantee you wont have it whether you need it or not.

Thing is its the same for all large infrastructure products. But only in nuke do we have people actively trying to prevent the industry from being created and maintained so they can use the unreadyness as an excuse.

How do you get the expertise back on a dime?

You have to tack on a few slow builds that create talent and local knowledge for that, or poaching people from China Operation Paperclip style maybe.

It's why the Vogtle plant is on track to lead to the worst possible outcome: yes it was very expensive. So the best thing to do is to start building another one right away while all those lessons and skills are still current.

Or we could just use solar and batteries that can be installed by a combination of literally any basic carpenters, electricians, and truckers.

South Korea built 13 nuclear reactors in recent decades, with an average construction period of 56 months...

Apparently Japan is the fastest builder (46 months).

the 10 year+ issue is a western problem.

Ok but telling someone they can have GPUs online in a mere 5 years if they build as fast as SK is still going to be a very painful pill. How do we get a DC in a year?

  How do we get a DC in a year?

Migrate an existing plant? https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-xai-bu...

> The company has apparently been thinking outside the box to meet its power needs, with Musk stating a couple of weeks ago that it intends to buy a power plant from abroad and import it into the US to provide energy for its data centers.

That did not go well for the Japanese

Skill issue!

In my part of PA there are 3 in the process of going in nearby. I think the largest of the 3 is "only" 828 megawatts though. One of the others is supposed to be 300MW, and I'm not sure about the 3rd. There is another group talking about 3 more campuses with a combined power budget of 1.3GW about 55 miles from here. But then while we don't have cheap land, we do have nuclear and hydroelectric in the area, so I guess the makes it attractive.

Places further north are great contenders because of the free cooling. Also, many of them have cheap electricity from hydro or even geothermal, like Iceland.

> One of those is Quebec (but it's not that big)

Sort of a baffling statement. Quebec is gigantic. It would be a top-20 nation, by extent, if it were a nation.

Quebec has a lot of empty land. But it does not have a lot of buildable land near plentiful power, super fast internet, and highly skilled technical workers, which are all things you need to build a datacenter.

There is tons of big power producing electric dams in the middle of nowhere (north of Québec province). It’s also cold most of the year. As far as I know, datacenter doesn’t mean tons of technical workers (except during the building phase). Bringing fiber would not be impossible.

The Texas grid is stable now that they added batteries BTW.

Making it easier to build nuclear power stations would be extremely useful. Let's hope nothing of value is lost in that process.

I bet on natural gas powerplants will start being built together with data centers.

Ironically xAI is already doing this.

I think Texas (ERCOT) is a terrible option these days. Meta recently made a fantastic choice by picking Louisiana for their new monster. The MISO grid tends to be cheaper and less volatile than ERCOT.

Curious what you think about Oregon.

Has a lot of hydroelectric and the nights get super-cold, so you could open the roof for free ventilation

There are hydrogen pipelines in texas. There is at least one DC provider using that for power instead of the grid

In m