this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Crazy how quickly we've gone from "Nuclear is a dead technology, it can't work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y'all have to use fossil fuels instead" to "We're building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing".
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
I still think it's too expensive, and this contract doesn't change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said "if you get it working, we'll buy power from you." That isn't itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.