Technology

59374 readers

7261 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

665

Google adopts small nuclear power reactors at unprecedented scale — inks deal for seven reactors to feed AI data centers (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

212 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants

If you don't get a high ROI, you're not going to have lots of investors offering up their cash at low interest rates.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

That was true in the 70's, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

The big changes since the 70's has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.

There's less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.

Not when the federal government was just building them to generate fissile material and giving the electricity away after that.

There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive

Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh. Long term, nuclear is cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.

So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn't going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia's ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that's all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.

NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.

Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn't been great.

And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there's less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.