Posted by mikece 6 days ago
Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.
It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.
It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.
Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.
I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?
https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1l5h5e2/sola...
Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.
[1] The video of the debate itself.
I thought solar won.
[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...
At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".
> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.
...
> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.
You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.
Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.
I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.
Not at all.
Fukushima costs 7 billion per year now, after 15 years, with no end in sight. Boar with meat measuring over 30 000 bq/kg was shot 30 years after Chernobyl in areas over 1000 miles away.
The things that have already happened were not acute, immediate or local, they were wide-spread and long-lasting.
And they were far from the worst that could have happened. Imagine if the fire at Chernobyl was not put out, for example.
Financially and technically nuclear makes little sense since solar and batteries are faster to deploy and much cheaper.
Nuclear power is very interesting for nations and companies that want to extract money from the taxpaying population. Microsoft gets cheap electricity now, and when the US discovers that its promise to handle the waste and liability is crazy expensive, taxpayers will have to pay for it. Not Microsoft.
Politicians and corps generally want to start multi-billion dollar projects to deliver comparatively tiny amounts of electricity 10 years from now, because it's about the money today, not about the electricity tomorrow.
Don't fall for it. We want to build cheap, distributed, uncomplicated electricity ourselves, controlled by the people who consume it.
Even if nobody gets rich from selling electricity in that scenario, there's plenty of money to be made from consuming almost free electricity.
The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.
If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.
> It's all proven technology
Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.
Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...
Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!
Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not.
It is a conspiracy I think.
They’re not. The targets keeps being revised down and pushed into the future for every plan they make.
> This was followed by a period of delay as China undertook a comprehensive review of nuclear safety in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
> Subsequently, moderated nuclear energy targets were established, aiming for a nuclear energy contribution of 15% of China’s total electricity generation by 2035, 20-25% by 2050 and 45% in the second half of the century.
> However by 2023 it was becoming clear that China’s nuclear construction program was well behind schedule. The target for 2020 had not been achieved, and targets for subsequent 5-year plans were unlikely to be achieved.
> In September 2023 the China Nuclear Energy Association (CNEA) reported that China was now aiming to achieve a nuclear energy contribution of 10% by 2035, increasing to around 18% by 2060.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/chinas-quiet-energy-revolution-t...
China has also revamped the funding model for nuclear power with it now having to compete on costs with alternative generation. They have an enormous backlog of reactors which has achieved regulatory approval but have yet to start construction.
In 2025 only 4 reactors have so far started construction, in 2024 the total number was 6 reactors.
At current expansion rates nuclear power's slice of the Chinese grid is shrinking. Let alone multiplying.
Current construction / execution issues involves in dealing with 1st wave of indigenous plants, again it's shrinking as % of grid/mix because denominator is higher than expected, which is independent of central gov desire to multiply nuclear build rate, which they can't reliably commit to until tech is mature. So the best we can say is they're a few years off their planned nuclear GWs and if tech matures, they can go forth and multiply. Of course if alternative LCOE makes nuclear not economical that could change, i.e. if storage blows up. But there's no actual policy hints that nuclear is being revised down, as in not in the last 15 years, which even then is mostly target being pushed a decade due to factors listed. Now they're on trend and the delays are single digit year execution related, not 10+ year we have to rebuild the tech stack delays.
We’re in the realm of math here, not your opinion or imagination.
The second derivative is negative for all data shown (except 2018). That means, factually, objectively, in reality, as measured, the rate of growth decreased.
If you need help understanding this, I can provide a spreadsheet with the calculation and plots.
This seems like a nothing burger.
Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of.
If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”
What has not yet been shown (and may be impossible?) is fusion working at small scale and over long timeframes.
saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028"
but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)
I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.
There may be some of that, but I think a lot of it is people who believe in what they're doing. A good example in another field is Stockton Rush and his submarine - assuming he wasn't suicidal, he clearly believed in what he was doing, even though to any sane and informed outsider it was fundamentally and life-threateningly flawed.
"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.
No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.
It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.
And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".
I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.
[1]: https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro...
[2]: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
You could for example look at China, a country that has embraced nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and EVs because they don't have good access to oil and don't have much government influence from that group.
Do they recycle more or less of their plastic waste than the USA?
Google suggests in 2023 it's 30% in China vs 12% in the USA.
It's a confusing topic, as some anti-plastic campaigners seize on this intentional failure of the US to recycle more and better to try to push total plastic bans.
Which are good policy for specific items, and again we see these being done in China too, as a complement to recycling, not a replacement.
That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this:
> Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.
As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible.
While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons.
And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective.
Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.