this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
309 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3040 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You comment has one minor flaw.
Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.
Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.
The NRC approved the design, so now they can start building it. That is still a looong way off from having a working reactor. And all those companies are way behind their originally planned schedules. Which is my whole point. I'm not saying they might not get this stuff to work some day. I'm saying that it will take way too long to make any contribution to fighting climate change. We need to decarbonise now and and we have the technology to do it now.
That’s got nothing to do with Microsoft though. Their reactor wouldn’t be used to power other people, only their own data centers.
They currently buy that from the grid, and they don’t really have any control over the source of that electricity generation. We should absolutely be pushing the power generators to go with renewables, but Microsoft isn’t a generator. They’re a customer like you or me.
They’re looking at moving to small reactors eventually because of the cost of buying from the grid, not for the environment.
It would still be far cheaper to deploy the same kind of capacity in renewables. Whoever came up with this brilliant plan can't do basic math.
Probably not because they would need to buy MUCH more land to do it.
SMRs are so much more compact per MW. The one from NuScale that is approved already can do 924MW in 0.05 square miles. To do the same capacity with wind would take 94 square miles and 17 square miles for solar.
Buying 17 square miles of land close enough to just one of their data centers would cost billions, on top of the cost of paying for the panels and installation.
The whole point of them looking at these at all is because they do not want to purchase from the grid.