Apparently nuclear power is easy to do. 2030 it goes online, just announced today... talk about fast.

[Space Lynx]

Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers

Nuclear power startup Kairos Power is its partner.

www.tomshardware.com

Google just signed a deal with nuclear power startup Kairos Power to buy carbon-free electricity, with a 2030 initial delivery target and full deployment by 2035. According to Google’s blog ‘The Keyword’, the tech giant aims to deliver 500MW of “new 24.7 carbon-free power” to the U.S. power grid.

I know they are small reactors, but still. This is impressive. A holistic energy grid is very smart, really surprised government still hasn't done something like this, if a company like Google can.

 

[Mister300]

Sounds fantastic on paper but here are the challenges. Here is part of a presentation I gave on nuclear tech. There is a huge resistance to new tech due to the PWR monopoly.

 

[Vincero]

Great, the AI boom can stimulate the inevtiable nuclear boom when one of these companies slip up....

That's what we call 'synergy'...

 

[Space Lynx]

Sounds fantastic on paper but here are the challenges. Here is part of a presentation I gave on nuclear tech. There is a huge resistance to new tech due to the PWR monopoly.

Google is pretty smart with contracts, I imagine they have it built into the contract that if they fail to deliver by 2030, the price they pay goes down. That's just my guess, I could be wrong. My only thought when I saw this article, was holy crap that is fast, because even the small nuclear reactor in Wyoming that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are building is taking a long ass time. Last I heard it was making decent progress though.

A five year turn around is impressive though (if they pull it off).

 

[DirtyDingusMcgee]

Sounds fantastic on paper but here are the challenges. Here is part of a presentation I gave on nuclear tech. There is a huge resistance to new tech due to the PWR monopoly.

Ah, the Rickover trap.

 

[Easy Rhino]

It is easy to pay people off to grease the wheels when you have hundreds of billions of dollars...

 

[Endymio]

I know they are small reactors, but still. This is impressive.

Other nations build large gigawatt-level reactors in 5 years time. The US regulatory system is the fault here. Most reactor projects are delayed multiple times by lawsuits ... and after every delay, the NRC must re-certify and generally requires the project to tear out and rework sections of the construction, to conform with regulations that changed during the interim.

 

[Klemc]

Electricity is obsolete, there is already something else, i think

 

[Ruru]

Olkiluoto 3 is probably the biggest joke for us Finns

Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Space Lynx]

Olkiluoto 3 is probably the biggest joke for us Finns

Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I read the wiki just now you linked, I mean at least it is finally producing power, even if 18 years late. Wild. Interesting too being Japan, I just assumed they would be faster at that, especially back then. So, about 23+ years in total of working on this thing, and it really doesn't produce that much, what double or triple these small reactors, but those can apparently be built in five years.

Interesting times ahead of us if this ends panning out, the energy problem could be solved tomorrow. Imagine if we had spent 7 trillion on this instead of Covid, every major city not near a fault line could have had a small reactor up and running by now and energy costs could be cut in half with that sort of Keynesian injection. Wild times indeed.

Electricity is obsolete, there is already something else, i think

I don't know what you mean by this

 

[Klemc]

@

Space Lynx​

, i thinked about... magic

 

[Steevo]

Small reactors that can be buried and passively cooled would be amazing.


Building reactors where old coal plants were would be smarter.

 

[the54thvoid]

A few LQs. This the science forum. Keep it related to the OP and keep it on topic.

 

[ir_cow]

Easy to do, hard to clean up

 

[Ruru]

I read the wiki just now you linked, I mean at least it is finally producing power, even if 18 years late.

Yet still it's often in the news that it's under maintenance

 

[damric]

Sounds fantastic on paper but here are the challenges. Here is part of a presentation I gave on nuclear tech. There is a huge resistance to new tech due to the PWR monopoly.

I'm an old naval PWR guy. It's very old tech but it's proven and safe, provided procedural compliance. I've seen and been involved in some incidents, but even those were contained because of procedures and engineering redundancies.

I browsed your documents. The first one had some incorrect information, as there have been U.S. nuclear power deaths. If you are curious, I'll try and find some unclassified info on that. It's interesting that these small reactors are 500MW, as that's similar to what's on carriers. But wow the nuke plant is pretty much the whole bottom half of the ship. These new ones are tiny which is awesome, but they are unproven as far as safety.

It does bother me how much radioactive waste that commercial fission reactors generate, and it's absolutely stupid to store that stuff on site.

 

[Klemc]

On a serious tone, the only thing it makes me think about is it is ecologically catastrophic. Ecology influes on health/life.

Tell that nuclear is non carbonic, meh, allright, but at what cost.

 

[Endymio]

The first one had some incorrect information, as there have been U.S. nuclear power deaths.

Not from commercial nuclear power. There have been none.

It does bother me how much radioactive waste that commercial fission reactors generate

They generate a tiny amount of high-level waste. Most commercial reactors have stored their waste on site for 50, sometimes 60+ years ... and it all still fits in one small building on site. That compares to a coal-fired plant which generates several thousand tons per day of waste. One of the true ironies is that ash from these coal plants releases orders of magnitude more radioactivity into the atmosphere than do nuclear plants ... from the radioactive isotopes found naturally in coal.

 

[mechtech]

Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers

Nuclear power startup Kairos Power is its partner.

www.tomshardware.com

Google just signed a deal with nuclear power startup Kairos Power to buy carbon-free electricity, with a 2030 initial delivery target and full deployment by 2035. According to Google’s blog ‘The Keyword’, the tech giant aims to deliver 500MW of “new 24.7 carbon-free power” to the U.S. power grid.

I know they are small reactors, but still. This is impressive. A holistic energy grid is very smart, really surprised government still hasn't done something like this, if a company like Google can.

SMR - small modular reactors??
Supposed to be up to 500MW max?

I think this is the big hope moving forward for nuclear going forward, since a full-blown large plant/reactor is very expensive and very long to build.

 

[damric]

Not from commercial nuclear power. There have been none.


They generate a tiny amount of high-level waste. Most commercial reactors have stored their waste on site for 50, sometimes 60+ years ... and it all still fits in one small building on site. That compares to a coal-fired plant which generates several thousand tons per day of waste. One of the true ironies is that ash from these coal plants releases orders of magnitude more radioactivity into the atmosphere than do nuclear plants ... from the radioactive isotopes found naturally in coal.

Commercial reactors were built with government military research. So maybe the guys at SL-1 that got impaled to the ceiling by the control rods mean nothing to you, but without their sacrifice there wouldn't be commercial reactors. They also don't include all of the workers that eventually died of cancer.

I reckon you have no idea what radioactive waste actually is if you think it is tiny. Allow me to inform you:

C.R.U.D. is a thing, mostly radioactive rust, which builds up in the primary coolant loop. The Cobalt-60 in the C.R.U.D. is extremely dangerous to humans and has a very long half life. It's filtered out of the coolant using cation/anion resin beads. This resin becomes extremely radioactive, and needs to be changed out frequently on commercial reactors. That's a lot of gallons of radioactive resin. If you were to get near some, you would die.

Pipes, structure. Eventually all of that steel gets impregnated with neutrons over the decades. It's good for a while but eventually it becomes too brittle so it needs to be changed out. That's a lot of tons of radioactive metal.

Primary shield water. While I can't say here what we use as additives to the water, I can tell you that they become radioactive over time besides just being toxic in their own right. That's a lot more gallons of radioactive water.

Spent fuel. Unfortunately this is a huge problem for commercial reactors as fuel plates are changed out frequently. When fuel plates become spent, they become huge blocks of random fission products, and they emit a huge amount of decay heat, and there is some amount of unspent U-235 which can again go critical when under the right conditions. Again the problem is storing these on site in "pools". This folly approach was the reason Fukashima was a disaster. It is better to bury this shit under a mountain as was originally planned back in the 1950s.

But yeah I agree, still cleaner than coal or oil. We have a huge problem with coal ash here.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

For those who don't want to dig into the tech side, it's a pebble-bed reactor using TRISO fuel and molten salt coolant.

TRISO fuel is, IMHO, the way to go for nuclear acceptance broadly. Inherently impossible for a massive accident to occur. Small accidents are of course possible, but not a Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Molten salt coolant is, on the other hand, a bit of an odd choice, compared to gas cooling. For one thing, it takes away some of the simplicity of the pebble-bed design, and adds circulation of radioactive material outside of the core. Also, the main benefits of the molten salts are not utilized with TRISO fuel - the solubility of fission products and the ease of mixing in fissile fuel.

Whatever. I imagine they know their job better than I do. However, I think their timeline might be a little ambitious considering they haven't started the pilot plant yet.

 

[mechtech]

OPG chooses BWRX-300 SMR for Darlington new build

Ontario Power Generation has selected the BWRX-300 small modular reactor for the Darlington new nuclear site, and will work with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy to deploy the reactor. Canada's first commercial, grid-scale, SMR could be completed as early as 2028.;

www.world-nuclear-news.org

BWRX-300 small modular reactor..........................GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy

BWRX-300 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[JWNoctis]

For those who don't want to dig into the tech side, it's a pebble-bed reactor using TRISO fuel and molten salt coolant.

TRISO fuel is, IMHO, the way to go for nuclear acceptance broadly. Inherently impossible for a massive accident to occur. Small accidents are of course possible, but not a Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Molten salt coolant is, on the other hand, a bit of an odd choice, compared to gas cooling. For one thing, it takes away some of the simplicity of the pebble-bed design, and adds circulation of radioactive material outside of the core. Also, the main benefits of the molten salts are not utilized with TRISO fuel - the solubility of fission products and the ease of mixing in fissile fuel.

Whatever. I imagine they know their job better than I do. However, I think their timeline might be a little ambitious considering they haven't started the pilot plant yet.

So it is, in the end, a very hot bubble tea now? Nice.

But seriously, I assume that molten salt coolant must still have some advantage for them to do that. TRISO is, if what I read is still correct, still covered in carbon which could ignite in air, and ideal gas law means gas coolant could still create a significant pressure differential as temperature change. It also supposedly have failure modes that reveal the much hotter interior of the fuel particle while in use, despite attempts.

Notoriously left leaning corporation going for nuclear energy ? Interesting.

Actually made sense; Datacentre is largely baseload and nuclear power is also largely baseload, I think.

There might eventually be greater antitrust concerns, though.

 

[Endymio]

Commercial reactors were built with government military research. So maybe the guys at SL-1 that got impaled to the ceiling by the control rods mean nothing to you, but without their sacrifice there wouldn't be commercial reactors.

A tiny experimental research reactor 60+ years ago isn't relevant to the commercial power industry. It's like claiming Benjamin Franklin jolted by a lightning bolt is relevant to the safety of home electrical appliances.

I reckon you have no idea what radioactive waste actually is

I reckon I might. A graduate degree in physics, along with a decades-ago summer internship at a yellowcake and UF6 manufacturer.

Allow me to inform you: C.R.U.D. is a thing, mostly radioactive rust, which builds up in the primary coolant loop. The Cobalt-60 in the C.R.U.D. is extremely dangerous to humans and has a very long half life.

Incorrect. Co-60 is has a *short* half-life, just over 5 years. Arsenic and lead are extremely dangerous to humans also-- yet there's a little of both in every bite of food and drink of water you've taken your entire life. The dose is the key.

The vast majority of Co-60 is produced intentionally (through Co-59 loading) because Co-60's a valuable isotope with many uses. The trace amounts produced in the steel of a reactor is quite small -- about 15 kCuries over the course of an entire 2-year fuel cycle, distributed throughout several thousand tons of steel. Fast-forward 20 years or so, and that amount's decayed to under 1 kCurie. You could sleep on a bed made of that steel without problem.

FYI: several apartment building in Taiwan were accidentally built with Co-60 impregnated steel scavenged from a nuclear reactor. Over the course of 30 years of exposure there, residents had lower rates of cancer than the general population. It's called hormesis.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

So it is, in the end, a very hot bubble tea now? Nice.

But seriously, I assume that molten salt coolant must still have some advantage for them to do that. TRISO is, if what I read is still correct, still covered in carbon which could ignite in air, and ideal gas law means gas coolant could still create a significant pressure differential as temperature change. It also supposedly have failure modes that reveal the much hotter interior of the fuel particle while in use, despite attempts.

Salty bubble tea.

Molten salt has the advantage of being atmospheric in pressure, even if it is corrosive. So the reactor doesn't have to be a pressure vessel for helium.

I think the outer layer of the particle is SiC, but I wouldn't swear to it. Either way, the carbon coating has a higher autoignition temperature than the self-regulation temperature in the event of total loss of coolant.

As far as I know the particle failures were mostly attributed to the manufacturing plant when the Germans were testing the concept. The pebble-bed reactors in current use haven't had that issue to my limited knowledge. Part of it may have had to do with their use of uranium oxides where most of the US produced ones were uranium carbides.

Spent fuel. Unfortunately this is a huge problem for commercial reactors as fuel plates are changed out frequently. When fuel plates become spent, they become huge blocks of random fission products, and they emit a huge amount of decay heat, and there is some amount of unspent U-235 which can again go critical when under the right conditions.

Pebble-bed reactors have a much higher burn-up rate than LWR designs. Over double in some cases.

One of the German test reactors attempted to use TRISO fuel to breed plutonium, but it was found to be too difficult to get out of the fuel.

Pipes, structure. Eventually all of that steel gets impregnated with neutrons over the decades. It's good for a while but eventually it becomes too brittle so it needs to be changed out. That's a lot of tons of radioactive metal.

They also have little or no steel inside of the reactor itself. There are no coolant pipes, as the coolant is circulated directly around the fuel elements. The pebbles are dropped out of the bottom via gravity to remove them from the reactor, so there is no structural elements inside either.

Now, this design using molten salts would have more irradiated steel due to the coolant being radioactive. However, it is a lot lower intensity than the core itself.