Oklo in particular seems to be total vaporware, I can’t find a single technical picture anywhere of anything this company’s reactor is seeking to do. They seem to raise money based on a rendering of a ski lodge.
A huge, concrete investment in TerraPower would be more interesting, but as a molten salt SMR which has never been built, this also looks extremely non-committal.
SMRs in general seem like a dead end, we’ve heard about them for decades and they don’t seem to be any closer to making nuclear power buildouts less expensive.
Everything that makes proven nuclear power plant design expensive seems to revolve around the same drivers of expense for all long-term construction: large up front capital requirements, changing regulations, failure to predict setbacks, and pervasive lawsuits. SMRs purport to tackle a couple of these (shorter-term builds, fewer setbacks), at the cost of considerable efficiency, but so far this seems like an inferior alternative to “just get better at building proven nuclear plant designs”.
If this nuclear plant has 2 GW of power output, were talking about 2.4 billion dollars to store 12 hours worth of the plant's output assuming $100 per KWh of storage.
China has over 28 plants in progress, which should provide a total of >32GW of capacity when they're completed. That's 32×24×365= 280TWh of electricity per year. California's total electric grid in 2024 produced 216TWh.
Which is to say, $7B is a huge sum. But as far as infrastructure goes, China is currently building 130% of all of California's generation capacity that'll be complete within a decade or so, for much less than double the estimates for a high speed rail system that'll serve almost nobody by 2038.
$7B is a lot of money. But it's actually a very reasonable amount of money because the projects are actually happening. 28 $7B projects in the US are actually probably closer to a trillion dollars in investment for far less net public good over five times the timeline.
Not to mention you wouldn’t generate a single kW for 20+ years from today.
In theory they’re fantastic. In reality not so much (which, incidentally, is the same story for the CA HSr)
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Whether they run over budget (or whether this is an under inflated figure) is yet to be seen, but it would seem that China is bringing the cost down, and substantially.
I'm not a nuclear expert by any means, but from the reading I've done, they're largely designing and building the reactors themselves these days. And it seems that to help keep the cost low (among other reasons), they're also helping other countries build them.
As I said, if a developed country can do half what they’re doing (ie twice the price and double the construction time) in the next 20 years it would be a miracle.
Workers rights I have no real knowledge on. But China isn't known for their track record on any kind of rights, and arguably US blue collar workers have a pretty awful quality of life that the government largely doesn't take the blame for (because we don't have state-run healthcare and minimum wage doesn't keep up with the cost of living). China has forced labor, America has legalized slavery in the prison system. Plenty of American industries rely on the unethical use of migrant labor while the state disappears those same people to "alligator alcatraz" or overseas prisons. I don't know the full extent of how bad things are in China for the kinds of workers who build these plants but I am hesitant to overlook how bad things are in the US.
And SMRs get sold is the very idea you state because it sounds compelling: the more you build, the cheaper it gets.
Nuclear seems like it should work. But there are massive unsolved problems like the waste from fuel processing, processing the spent fuel, who can be relied upon to run these things, who can be trusted to regulate them and the failure modes of accidents. Despite there being <700 nuclear reactors built we've had multiple catastrophic failures. Chernobyl still has a 1000 square mile absolute exclusion zone. Fukushima will likely take a century to clean up and cost upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Yet this all gets hand-waved away. Renewable is the future.
[1]: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/csiro-confirms-n...
[2]: https://spitfireresearch.com/scaling-example-1-small-modular...
I personally trust the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I also trust the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and the regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU.
Why?
The failure modes are not binary. A reactor is not just operating fine or going boom. There are multiple small failures that can happen, and you can get an idea if a country's nuclear fleet is run with safety in mind or not.
Chernobyl happened during a safety exercise, an exercise that was attempted 3 times before and failed 3 times before. In principle the plant should not even have been allowed to operate until the exercise had been completed. The exercise was supposed to demonstrate if in case of reactor emergency shut-down the cooling water can be kept circulating in the core for one minute, the amount of time it took for the Diesel generators to ramp up power; it was an essential exercise to perform before starting full power operations. The fact that the plant was allowed to operate for 3 years without completing this exercise - no, actually, while failing this exercise multiple times, tells you a lot about the safety mentality of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union.
In the US, the NRC performs a lot of monitoring, and the results are published. For example, here's [1] a dashboard of performance indicators. There are 17, such as: Unplanned Scrams per 7000 Critical Hours, Unplanned Power Changes, Residual Heat Removal System, Reactor Coolant System Leak, etc. Out of about 100 reactors, you can see only green, with the exception of one yellow; that yellow is for the Palisades plant that is not currently operating, it is in the process of restarting operations, and I am sure it will not be allowed to restart until all the performance indicators are green.
[1]https://www.nrc.gov/reactors/operating/oversight/pi-summary
The arguments made there; why Australia is better to pursue renewables now rather than hope for nuclear eventually have no bearing on, say, China's use of nuclear for 20% of Chinese baseload.
A large part of the CSIRO argument is the greenfield standing start no prior expertise massive upfront costs and long lead time to any possible return.
China, by contrast, has an existing small army of nuclear technologists, multiple already running reactors, and many reactors of varying designs already in the design and construction pipeline.
I don't believe China is convinced (yet) of the long-term viability of nuclear power (fission or fusion) but, like with many things, they're hedging their bets. In the US? It's just another opportunity to transfer wealth from the government coffers to private hands through a series of cost overruns, massive delays and under-deliveries.
China's advantages here are extreme. They have the manufacturing base, would likely use the same plant designs in multiple places (rather than a separate procurement process in every city or province) and they have a bunch of existing infrastructure that gives them options, like they're pioneers in UHVDC transmission lines that might make it more viable to build a nuclear reactor away from populated centers. Even UHVDC development was to solve a largely China-only problem: the power generation is mostly in the west part of the country whereas the people are in the east.
And yes the CSIRO report is Australia-specific but the timeframes for building nuclear power in the US are similar: 10-15 years. Starting today it's unclear if such a plant would be online by 2040. Yet we can build solar in months.
That's the other part of this: if we're just looking at data centers, theyh can be placed anywhere. You can ignore where fiber runs. You just build more fiber if you have to. DCs need power and water, basically. The Southwest is very efficient for solar [1] but light on for water. There's the Colorado River but that's been tapped beyond its limits already.
Along the Mississippi is another option. Not as efficient as the Southwest for solar but water is plentiful. Inclement weather is an issue though, both tornadoes and the winters.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7fk7eu/solar_power...
* The US has existing commercial scale nuclear power stations. Australia does not.
* The US has an existing nuclear weapons industry. Australia does not.
* The US has existing advanced courses on nuclear technology for workforce scale populations. Australia has extremely limited coursework.
* The US actively builds and maintains SMRs for submarine use. Australia does not.
These are fairly critical differences in terms of additional costs to Australia above and beyond build times.
The reality is more complex [1].
Molten salt reactors are another active area of research but they have been for decades as well.
- Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
- Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
- Multiple catastrophic failures: sounds bad until you realize that you can name only two:
1. Chernobyl: old flawed reactor design, basically impossible today, a few unfortunate deaths among first responders in the cleanup, that's it
2. Fukushima: no radiation deaths. You would get a higher dose of radiation flying to Japan to visit Fukushima than from drinking the irradiated leaked water there.
> upwards of $1 trillion if not more.
Where are you getting this number? According to https://cnic.jp/english/?p=6193 it was estimated at JPY 21.5 trillion (roughly USD 150 to 190 billion).
This is simply untrue. Depending on the type and enrichment of the fuel it will need to be actively cooled for some period, possibly decades. After that you can bury it. You need facilities for all of this. You need personnel (done by the NRC currently) to transport and install new fuel, remove old fuel and transport it to suitable sites as well as manage those sites. Before they even make it to storage sites they'll typically be stored onsite or in the reactor for years.
> Who can be relied upon: who do you rely upon to run your drinking water?
Given the current administration, almost nobody. The state of drinking water in places like Flint, MI is a national disagrace. The continued existence of lead pipes that leech lead into drinking water in many places is a national disgrace. The current administration gutting the EPA and engineering the Supreme Court to overturn things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act are just the cherry on top.
A significant ramp up of nuclear power would necessitate a commensurate ramp up of the NRC in all these capacities.
> Failure modes of accidents: have been extensively studied and essentially designed out
Like I said, hand waved away.
> Where are you getting this number?
Multiple sources [1][2]. Fukushima requires constantly pumping water to cool the core. That water needs to be stored (in thousands of tanks onsite) then processed and ultimately released back into the ocean, which itself is controversial. Removing the core requires inventing a bunch of technologies that don't exist yet. The decomissioning process itself is something most of us won't live to see the end of [3].
The $1 trillion and a century for 1 nuclear plant. Pro-nuclear people will point to the death figure because it suits their argument. It's economically devastated that region however.
And as for Chernobyl, billions of euros was spent building a sarcophagus for the plant, only to have the integrity of that shield destroyed by a Russian drone.
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
The other fuel issues you mention are already dealt with today as a matter of course. It's just the final part that remains up in the air.
You are the one hand waving about failure modes. As with aircraft, as failures have happened we've learned from them. New designs aren't vulnerable to the same things old ones were. All the mishaps have happened with old designs.
Personally I think the anti-nuclear FUD that the climate activists push is unfortunate. We would likely have been close to carbon neutral by now if we'd started building it out in the late 90s.
That said, I'm inclined to agree that solar might be a better option at this point in environments that are suited to it. The batteries still aren't entirely solved but seem to be getting close. In particular, the research into seasonal storage using iron ore looks quite promising to me.
Can we please not have these "slightly improved language" comments? You're arguing against something I didn't say and making a meaningless nitpick on word choice.
"cheap" to me implies it is affordable in a relative sense, compared to other options. It will almost certainly never be cheap - even if we make it cheaper through more production, it is going to remain in the group of the least affordable power generation technologies.
The lowest LCOE for nuclear is to the right of the most expensive solar plus storage.
I don't think anyone will dispute that the initial build out for solar is far far cheaper. That much is self evident to everyone. The devil is in the rest of the details.
They essentially got a ton of traction because Altman was on the board (but since left) but most (not all) tech people don’t understand deep energy problems.
> “It’s not like the NRC asks for an extraordinary amount of information,” said a former nuclear official who was involved in reviewing Oklo’s failed application and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their work in the industry. “The NRC asks three questions: What is the worst that can happen, what are the systems, structures and components in your reactor that prevents that from happening, and how do you know that?”
>“Oklo would only answer them at a very high level,” the person said. “They wanted to say nothing bad can happen to our reactor.”
>DeWitte said Oklo had planned a robust public rebuttal but claims that at the time, NRC officials “threatened us, in a retributional way, not to issue a response letter to correct the record.”
>“Well, they’re gone now,” he added.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/11/26/nuclear-e...
This...does not square with the successful hamstringing of the nuclear energy industry by regulation over the past several decades.
In the 2000s the NRC adopted a new licensing scheme at industry urging. What "hamstringing" are you talking about?
Okla would sound a lot more reliable here if they would have fought back with lawsuits with their accusations, or if the would release the communication now that there's no chance of this supposed retribution. As it is Okla makes all the talk of "hamstringing" seem like people not doing their jobs and trying to blame others.
From the horse's mouth in 2012, only 3 (*3!*) such licenses had been granted in 30 years ( https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=5250# ).
If your agency's job is to regulate something and you've done it so successfully that barely anybody has actually gotten a license--all while complaining about compliance costs--maybe you're the problem.
Had the fellow said "Oh, we have a really high bar for safety and compliance, and not everybody's able to handle that", it'd be fine. But, acting like "oh golly gee we're so easy to work with we don't ask for much" is brazen horseshit.
Or any the other many many other reactors abandoned at various states of development:
http://www.powermag.com/blog/nuclear-renaissance-recalls-pas...
There's an argument that the NRC could do things better, but placing all the well documented failures in the nuclear construction industry on the NRC doesn't make sense. Who are going to believe, the people who are always late and over budget, or the bystanders in the industry that have watched it all play out?
Why?
The US Navy doesn't have to go through the NRC.
[1] https://www.eenews.net/articles/doge-told-regulator-to-rubbe...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/doge-doesnt-exist-with-eigh...
Anyone could’ve picked up the mantle of fixing the NRC, which is an obviously broken agency. France transitioned the majority of its grid to nuclear back in the 80s. Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, anyone could have picked up this low hanging fruit and fixed the problem. Nobody even tried.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy-and-environ...
We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive. Other forms are so far away from being useful, that the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
And the benefit? Every 3th world country and person can invest in small and big Storage + Renewable but they can't do the same with nuclear.
Refusing to build nuclear for decades makes it more expensive. If we start actually building reactors the cost will come down.
>the current Storage + Renewable pricing is so crazy good, that whatever you do with nuclear will just not be able to compete.
I would find this more persuasive if there were no new investment in carbon sources, but carbon sources have clearly remained competitive with batteries + solar, and global carbon emissions remain at an all time high. There's demand for baseload energy.
SMRs are a try to get out of it by building more but smaller reactors. The reality is however that nuclear has an issue with scaling down. Output goes down way faster than costs and most SMR designs have outputs far greater than what initially counted as an SMR.
Investment in renewable energy already greatly outpaces investment in fossil energy. The economic decision to keep using a fossil system is a different one than having to choose a new one. There's still problems that have no economically competitive renewable solution yet, but a lot of what you are seeing is inertia.
Base load electricity is simply an economic optimisation: demand is not flat, but the cheapest electricity source might only be able to create a relatively flat output. You'll need more flexible plants to cover everything above the base load. If you have cheap gas, base load does not make any sense economically.
Prior energy assets go offline and are replaced each year. The report you cite is discounting all of that, looking only at expansion above the baseline, then taking total renewable construction and calcuating renewable total construction's share of expansion. Apples to oranges.
If you look at the chart in your own link you'll see that carbon construction investment exceeds renewables still.
Chart: "Annual energy investment by selected country and region, 2015 and 2025"
I would love for what you say to be true but it just isn't, even by that agency's own stats.
ANY investment is by definition creating capacity that would not be there without the investment. If carbon were not competitive it would not get investment.
If you sum up all of the carbon and compare to renewables in the chart there's more new carbon investment annually globally than renewables. (Comparing the dark lines vs the green line)
Also this is ignoring "low emission fuels", which are still carbon sources, natural gas and the like.
If you check the chart "Global electricity generation of zero-carbon sources vs. fossil fuels, 2000-2024" you can see that carbon sources were at an all time high in 2024. Growing slower is still growing.
We ought to be shrinking these to zero. I'm very glad to see solar and wind growing but my point is nuclear is worth supporting as an non-carbon energy source that could replace some of this carbon load because of its baseload characteristics.
That's because carbon sources are almost never made to pay for their externalities (i.e. pollution during energy generation).
And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
It's better than carbon. And solar + battery requires more carbon to produce than nuclear energy as there's a lot of mining and physical construction involved + you must overbuild to supply power or rely on non solar sources.
All for building solar. Do not understand the constant need to denigrate nuclear in favour of carbon sources while doing so.
(If carbon sources were at zero this would be a different conversation)
We are at the end of the tech curve for steam, we have pushed it hard and made some super impressive technology, but it's not advancing anymore. Supercritical CO2 might have some advantages, or other fluids.
We have zero-carbon tech that uses non-steam principles, and is currently on a tech curve that's getting cheaper than any thermodynamic cycle. We have storage tech now which is an even bigger revolution for the grid than cheap solar, because a huge limitation of the grid has always been the inability to store and buffer energy.
I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
(BTW denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources, because they use the same mechanism, except for some natural gas turbines)
> I still have pinning rust disks, but only because they are cheap. If SSDs were cheaper, then we would see a massive switch.
I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
I doubt name calling is a sensible basis for policy decisions.
I don't care about steam conversion efficiency as much as I care that steam Rankine cycle engines are a solved problem so there is no more technological advancement. One of the biggest advancements over the past decades is using a Britton cycle in front for natural gas, ie moving away from steam engines.
> I only use this technology because it is more competitive than the alternatives for my usecase ... ?
If I understand you, yes of course use the more competitive technology. Sticking with steam when there are cheaper alternatives is a poor idea. But moreover as we look to what people choose as technology improves, we will find that steam usage will be relegated to things like geothermal, which like nuclear has essentially free fuel, but doesn't have to go down for a month to refuel, has the potential for more variable generation instead of undesirable constant generation, and is far less complicated.
> denigrating steam also denigrates all fossil fuel electricity sources
The critique is not name calling, it's pointing out that the technology is mature and not improving, unlike the technologies that are recolutionizing grid energy right now across the world. The number of applications that use fuel to generate electricity via steam are shrinking. Perhaps hydrogen in the future, if electrolyzers ever come down the cost curve, but it's pretty speculative.
Horse buggies still exist, but mostly as novelties. Steam generation is headed the same direction.
Optimal steam plants can get do better, exceeding 50% in some configurations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined-cycle_power_plant#Eff... ). Steam is awesome.
For a useful comparison you have to compare both sides, not give a stat in isolation and assert it is worse without comparing.
Solar panels and wind turbines need maintenance too. And they have much shorter operational lives than nuclear power plants, meaning they'll need to be expensively replaced much more frequently.
> And I wouldn’t call it progress to still rely on steam machines for energy
Could you please explain your objection to steam-based power? Is it purely aesthetic, or is there some inherent downside to steam turbines that I'm not aware of? Also, concentrated solar power systems that concentrate sunlight and use it to boil steam[1] are significantly more efficient than direct photovoltaics.
Why would I invest then if it can't even pay for itself?
Construction productivity has stayed stagnant for more than half a century, while manufacturing productivity has sky rocketed and made us all fabulously wealthy compared to when the first nuclear reactors were built half a century ago.
I don't trust China's public cost numbers as much as I trust their actual capital allocation on the grid. And I will trust GE's numbers once they have actually produced something at those numbers, as pre-build cost estimates for nuclear are not believable due to their extensive track record.
There's a lot of talk and some very shady science about getting rid of ALARA but nobody says what will change on the build that is causing the cost. Meanwhile China has adopted the same designs as in the West, without abandoning ALARA.
Those who advocate for changing ALARA see to be mostly trying to shift the Overton window on the public opinion of radiation rather than trying to pursue engineering and cost goals. I hope I am wrong on that!
> Our partnership with Oklo helps advance the development of entirely new nuclear energy in Pike County, Ohio. This advanced nuclear technology campus — which may come online as early as 2030 — is poised to add up to 1.2 GW of clean baseload power directly into the PJM market and support our operations in the region.
It seems like they are definitely building a new plant in Ohio. I'm not sure exactly what is happening with TerraPower but it seems like an expansion rather than "purchasing power from existing nuke plants".
Perhaps I'm misreading it though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
We got hosed when they stole our content to make chatbots. We get hosed when they build datacenters with massive tax handouts and use our cheap power to produce nothing, and we'll get hosed when the house of cards ultimately collapses and the government bails them out. The game is rigged. At least when you go to the casino everyone acknowledges that the house always wins.
Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive. Nuclear plants get more expensive the more of them we build, but for already paid-off nuclear reactors there's a sweet spot of cheap operations and no capital costs before maintenance climbs on the very old reactors.
Meta paying for all that very expensive maintenance is not a bad deal for others, unless market structure is such that the price for entire market is set by this high marginal generation from uneconomic aged plants.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, since you claim that generation is getting cheaper, staying flat, and getting more expensive all in a single sentence.
But I can tell you my energy bill hasn't gone down a single time in my entire life. In fact, it goes up every year. Getting more (clean!) supply online seems like a good idea, but then we all end up paying down that new plant's capital debt for decades anyway. Having a company such as Facebook take that hit is probably the best outcome for most.
Electricity costs have two components: "generation" to put power on the grid, and then the "transmission & distribution" costs which pay for the grid. You can likely see the costs split out on your bill, and the EIA tracks these costs.
Generation costs are falling, because of new technology like solar and wind and newer combined cycles natural gas turbines. However the grid itself is a bigger part of most people's bill than the generation of electricity.
Most utilities have guaranteed rates of profit on transmission and distribution costs, regulated only by PUCs. T&D tech isn't getting cheaper like solar and storage and wind are, either, so that T&D cost is likely to become and ever greater part of electricity bills, even if the PUCs are doing their job.
Generation in many places is disconnected from the grid, and when somebody makes a bad investment in a gas turbine, then the investor pays for that rather than the ratepayers. Look at Texas, for example, where even being at the center of the cheapest natural gas in a country with exceptionally cheap natural gas, solar and battery deployments hugely outpace new natural gas. That's because investors bear the risk of bad decisions rather than rate payers.
In places that let utilties gamble their ratepayers money, and where the utilities only answer to a PUC that gets effectively zero media coverage, there is a massive amount of corruption and grift and fleecing of rate payers.
That's not correct, including storage with solar is still cheaper than nuclear. That's not measuring the cost by MW or GW, it's by measuring the cost of kWh, or the levelized avoided cost of energy, or the whatever metric you want.
And solar has the benefit of being able to avoid a good chunk of transmission by placing it at the site of use, so including transmission costs can only be to the benefit of solar.
You could just as accurately sum it up by saying they would like to tie up nearly 6.6 GW, otherwise they wouldn't be making quite as large a deal. They wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have a financial technique to afford it, and it's still taken a while to make the commitment.
What about less-well-heeled consumers who would be better served if the effect of increased demand were not in position to put upward pressure on overall rates?
To the extent that new debt comes into the mix, that's just an additional burden that wasn't there before and this is a very sizable investment at this scale. So the compounding cost will have to be borne for longer than average if nothing else.
Naturally some can afford it easily and others not at all.
And all these new datacenters are pushing up our electric bills. Maybe this deal could be competitive long term with newer reactor designs and if they are competently executed, but I'm very skeptical.
Maybe PA situation is different
This have a slight potential of becomeing a good one, if we only dream good things. Very limited details here, pure corporate self paise dominantly, can become anything. Another bad for example.
Our main problem isn’t energy production it‘s storage and quick reaction to consumption spikes. Nuclear energy doesn’t help with that.
We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
Does the handling of nuclear waste consider foul play by terrorists and such?
I didn’t he many worries about russian rockets hutting wind turbines in the war in Ukraine.
Also, by the way, my perspective isn't about nuclear Vs X (wind turbines etc) - I like all the ones that are net clean and useful in different circumstances as part of a mix.
I'm just addressing the narrower point about whether nuclear per se is a net benefit for society, which I believe it is, massively.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers, and how it's driving up everybody's costs because we are all paying for that increase at elevated prices.
Nuclear is extremely expensive, higher than geothermal, renewables backed by storage, and natural gas. Nuclear is good for virtue signaling in some communities, but from the technological and economical perspectives, nuclear is very undesirable and unattractive. It's only social factors that keep alive the idea of new nuclear in advanced Western economies, not hard nosed analysis.
Here's a new preprint from Germans showing that even for Europe, a continent with very poor solar resources for many countries, new baseload is not the most economical route:
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
> storage cannot meaningfully "back" intermittent renewables because it's only good for a few hours load from the grid
That's trivially untrue. If you can build a battery for four hours duration, then of course you can build another to get to 8, or however many you want. Batteries are being added to the grid at a huge rate.
> natural gas peaker plants are very expensive and increase CO2 emissions. There isn't much of an alternative to nuclear.
Gas peakers are about the same cost as nuclear. We will have a ton of gas peakers hanging around in the coming decades, and they will be used less and less as we get more batteries on the grid. Already, batteries eat peakers' lunch economically.
In the most optimistic grid modeling scenarios, nuclear can play a 5% or 10% role in a fully decarbonized grid. If you go full nuclear, then you also need a ton of batteries. And if nuclear was cheap, I would advocate going for a ton of nuclear plus batteries. But nuclear is super expensive, and doesn't scale fast enough to meet our needs.
We are currently at 20% nuclear power in the US and have a rapidly aging fleet. Even if we had investors who wanted to spend the $500B it would take to keep 5% of our grid as nuclear, it's unlikely we'd be able to build those 50 1GW reactors over the course of the next 20 years. Scaling SMRs seems even less likely.
I really hope I'm wrong and the SMRs somehow materialize and are cheap, but none of the startups are acting like the have anything real or the chops to scale. A new reactor getting built by 2032, as suggested here? Pumping out an SMR in 6 years, when design isn't even finalized, the company hasn't shown progress since abandoning an NRC application, does not seem plausible.
Meta's nuclear intention is a perfect example of how tech is willing to pay far more for energy than other customers
Diablo Canyon in particular is big (https://www.pge.com/en/newsroom/currents/energy-savings/diab...). It might be too big for their balance sheet. I imagine they picked the most economical sites to expand?
Nuclear compliance and certification is extremely expensive. The actual construction and maintenance costs are fairly trivial.
The largest cost associated with a new nuclear plant are the interest payments given that a plant may need to spend 10+ years sitting idle before it can be activated.
That is not at all what I have seen, the costs tend to be from absolutely massive infrastructure needed to last a long time in harsh conditions that are difficult to repair.
Those seem more like fundamental engineering requirements.
Across four different regulatory structures: France, Finland, the UK, and the US, modern nuclear has proven to be excessively expensive and require massive amounts of high skilled labor. In the past century, high skilled labor was cheaper, but these days we need to pay welders and other construction workers higher wages because they have high productivity alternative jobs that pay better than in 1970.
Those high interest payments for 10+ years are also because EPC promises to build the design within 5-7 years then takes 2-3x the time. At Vogtle the fuckups both on design meant that many plans were "unconstructable" and then construction proceeded anyway with whatever they could wing together then they had to go back and make sure that whatever the bell was built still met the design.
You can say the same for cars, houses, appliances, medical devices, elevators, stairs, disabled access, etc etc.
So, what exactly is your point? Yes, everything would be "much cheaper" if nobody had to pay as much attention to most details any more. Everything would also be much much more expensive for everybody else and longer term, or not work at all or reliably or safely.
If the price of building stairs was growing each year in only the west to the point were we were opening one staircase 5 every years, it might be worth to ask some companies why. If they all say "the last guy who built stairs got bogged down for 25 years trying to meet all the safety standards". It might be time to relax some of them.
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/CountryDetails....
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity. And of course to enable their military ambitions.
One armed bandit says explore as well as exploit. This delta you cited indicates the pendulum currently is more exploit than explore, but its not a static equation.
TBH this part seems key, even PRC couldn't operate full western designs reliant on western industrial capacity economically, part of it was simple incompetence of western supply chains (business closures / regulatory drama / sanctions). Nuclear seems viable once you strip out a lot of the politics that makes them uneconomical, hence PRC had to indigenize the designs since once western supply chains enter picture, the schedule goes out the window.
https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-rep...
6 GW Nuclear is either a tech company getting ahead of bad PR with a token gesture. Or its maybe? the start of something real.
Where are we at today? Can we catch up under this administration?
Where do we compare on a nuclear basis? I know my state installed nuclear reactors recently, but I'm not aware of any other build outs.
In a war game scenario, China is probably more concerned about losing access to oil and natural gas than we are. Not that we shouldn't be building this stuff quickly either.
No. The future is Chinese, if the Chinese can maintain good governance.
A big "if"
China's building a bunch of nuclear too.
Nuclear has one of the highest capacity factors (90% or greater), whilst natural gas turbines amongst the lowest (<10% per the link below). This relates not only to the reliability of the technologies, but how they are employed. Nuclear power plants cannot be easily ramped up or down in output, and are best operated at continuous ("base load") output, whilst gas-turbine "peaking stations" can be spun up on a few minutes' notice to provide as-needed power. Wind and solar are dependent on available generating capability, though this tends to be fairly predictable over large areas and longer time periods. Storage capability and/or dispatchable load make managing these sources more viable, however.
The coal plant will have a capacity factor of 80% though. Solar will be 10 to 20%. And the gas plant could be very low due to usage intent.
Battery projects are the same (since they're reported as generators). Whatever nameplate capacity...for about 4 hours only.
Nuclear and solar are different energy products that are complementary. This solar vs nuclear narrative is basic and anti progress.
For example china invested in solar so they can transition their energy system and get it paid by selling globally via subsidized cell manufacturing.
I don't think they will be able to sell export their nuclear tech globally since it is essentially repackaged US tech.
But yeah Im all for solar - more solar the better but it cant do firm power well.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
China is barely building nuclear power, in terms of their grid size. It peaked at 4.6% in 2021, now down to 4.3%.
Compared to their renewable buildout the nuclear scheme is a token gesture to keep a nuclear industry alive if it would somehow end up delivering cheap electricity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/15/business/nuclear-power-fr...
Or 50% of the Swedish fleet two times this year being offline?
Maybe we should get the opposite conclusion from this incident.
Since that incident storage has been scaling massively. How does a nuclear plant compete with zero marginal cost renewables?
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
And no, storage hasn't scale at all yet, it would need a 100x increase before being useful for such events.
The proof is in the pudding anyways, if that works so well, why nobody does it?
Small scale where I am, when compared with hydro.
It's also so geographically constrained no one can choose to build it anyway.
I don’t know any other country that would allow a truly private company to mess around with nuclear reactor.
The truth is, all reactors ever built were considered safe at their time with whatever definition of safe. No one builds unsafe reactors. Yet they turned out not to be safe.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232447/
But the bottom line is that renewable costs are trending down, hard and fast, battery tech is just getting started, and development time for wind and solar is comparatively fast.
Future nuke costs at this point are speculative, development time is very slow, and even if new reactors were commissioned tomorrow, by the time they came online it's very, very likely solar and wind + storage would make them uneconomic.
IMO the attachment to nukes is completely irrational. There are obvious economic downsides, no obvious economic benefits - and that's just the money side.
Nuclear is up against against nat gas, diesel or coal (in the rare states that still have coal power plants) for the most part for "baseload" or "firm" power.
Nuclear is by far the most advanced technology that we have ever developped on the planet at this point. Fusion is just 10 years away (every ten years) ;)
[1]: although since you're basing your claims on the speculative future state of solar technology 10 years in the future, I don't see why the same shouldn't apply to the speculative future state of nuclear power, but that's besides the point
If mining deaths are included, coal, oil, gas and uranium probably do not look favorable at all, but renewables aren't perfectly safe either: there was a bridge collapse at a copper/cobalt mine in Congo two months ago that killed 32. Solar and wind use more copper per energy unit than other technologies, and solar and wind indirectly require battery technology. Lithium batteries contain lithium and cobalt. (Lithium mining seems relative safe, but 70% of cobalt is mined in Congo, which is known for artisanal mining, and the above-mentioned accident indeed seemed to happen at such a mine.) Wind, especially off-shore wind uses more concrete and steel than other power generation technologies (hydro seems like it'd use a lot too?), which could be explored too. (Course, these metals are recyclable, so you only mine them once.)
Battery factories also produce deaths sometimes, e.g. recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwaseong_battery_factory_fire, and batteries in operation as well as discarded batteries sometimes produce deaths too.
We knew what to do but screwed up hard is a operational failure and we didn't plan for it is a design/planning failure.
The people who are hurt might not care, but understanding the root cause is important to address them.
Constrained edge cases are fine. Particularly when contrasted with coal and natural gas, which are, in practice, what everyone is competing against in America.
I should add that I am not strictly anti-nuclear, and it is super interesting that some of the largest funders of anti-nuclear propaganda have been actors from the fossil fuel industry. [1]
[0] https://publicintegrity.org/environment/reactors-at-heart-of...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
Not surprised at all that oil and gas is still trying to protect themselves from competition.
We can talk all day about how the system incentivized people playing CYA rather than actually trying to solve the problem (true and fair critiques), but when it comes down to it, this happened because the cheaper option was chosen and potential issues were overlooked. That transcends political systems.
You should really consider educating yourself on the Chernobyl reactor melt down (read a book or two) to understand the level of calamity inflicted by the communist system. Stop trying to make it sound like that could happen anywhere because the pressures of capitalism could cause the same results. Its pretty eye opening how insane the chernobyl situation was.
One of the biggest arguments against nuclear is that reactors are insanely complex. Beyond a certain level of complexity, safety and predictability become impossible even with perfect management - which certainly doesn't exist in the nuclear industry.
This is especially true of any nuke system which needs external cooling, because stable water levels aren't a given any more because of climate change. Between floods, droughts, and storm surges, the environment is part of the system - something Fukushima discovered to its cost.
I am not defending the Soviet Union or any of the decisions made during Chernobyl. So you should redirect your indignation/condescension.
“As of 2020, the total number of cancer and leukemia instances has risen to six cases according to the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).[5] In 2018 one worker died from lung cancer as a result from radiation exposure.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cas...
These are small numbers compared to the number that died due to the tsunami and the massive evacuation (to avoid radiation injuries). The frustrating bit is that they could have avoided it all.
" The workers' compensation claims that have been recognized by labor authorities include six cases of workers who developed cancer or leukemia due to radiation exposure "
So compensation has been requested for cancers, of which one death has been reported.
I point to a Forbes opinion piece from a pro-nuclear person https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2018/09/06/no-the-ca... .
I was thinking how the dotcom bust left a lot of dark fiber infrastructure which helped the internet take off after that. It would be great if the upcoming AI bust (if it happens) leaves a bunch of power generation and new nuclear tech behind.
[0] https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/su...
Most of the small nuclear reactor startups hand-wave the failure modes and argue that they don't need the hulking big expensive containment building. NuScale claimed that. They wanted multiple reactors sharing the same cooling pool. If they ever had a leak, the whole set of reactors would be contaminated, even without a meltdown.
If we look at the big reactor accidents so far, there's Chernobyl, with no containment building. There's Fukushima, with too small a containment unable to contain the pressure. And there's Three Mile Island, where a large, strong containment building contained a meltdown. Three Mile Island was an expensive disaster, but not hazardous outside the plant. That's the failure mode you want.
We might be better off at developing better techniques for welding thick sections to make hulking big, strong containment vessels. There's been progress with robotic welding of thick sections.[1]
[1] https://www.agrrobotics.com/trends-s-industry-analysis/roadm...
This is actually American capitalism working at its finest.
Have you seen a video of a slime mold "solving" a maze? It reaches out in every direction with thin tendrils until it makes contact. (Then the game shifts.)
We have a sense, like a slime mold picking up on the "scent" of food, that there is energy. But there are lots of good hypotheses for how we get there. So we try them. Not exhaustively. But multiply. When someone demonstrates they've got it, the game will shift to consolidation and scaling.
~~Meta~~ Facebook has made their money by de-stabilizing people's emotional state to keep them engaged and buying stuff via ads. I'm having a tough time connecting the dots between that and nuclear power.
Power prices would presumably fall.
seems like they're getting the ball rolling, will be interesting to see how this scales
The problem is geographic. You need hot rock near the surface. It's too expensive to drill deep in most places.
You'll be waiting a while as the subsurface siting is highly specific. These would be unicorn projects.
Datacenters are trying to just pull geothermal electrons from same geographic grid, at best.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical-science/fulltext/...
See https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Lignite was third with 67 TWh and hard coal sits at 27 TWh.
https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/electricity_generat...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
It's remarkably easy to scale solar to very large amounts in short time periods. Far easier than building a new nuclear fleet.
Even just a basic common sense threshold would make nuclear more viable overnight.
Not immediately but in a decade or two.
Infrastructure investment is a good thing, and almost always strictly better than not having it.
If AI demand lowers (generation demand plummets): Meta would have subsidized a bunch of nuclear reactors which would likely continue to produce power for 10 years - 50 years.
A big reason I have heard for lack of nuclear build out is the lack of starting capital but after they are built they are generally stable and maintenance is predictable.
An example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beznau_Nuclear_Power_Plant. It may be turned down eventually but a 60 year runtime is pretty impressive for 60s engineering!
I have also heard this, but given Meta's announcement is mostly in funding and extending the useful lifespan, doesn't that indicate without an infusion of capital, the ongoing operations are not cost effective?
FWIW, it took nearly 150 years for commoners to benefit from the industrial revolution. The idea that I must suffer and my children must suffer and their children must suffer so some future plutocrat can get a fatter nut is pathetic.
In the US, the vast majority of new generation is renewables, matched with a ton of storage. There's some gas too, but it will be uneconomical to run these gas plants before their end of life:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/08/21/eia-projects-record-6...
The biggest impediment to cheap sustainable electricity is political and basic ignorance of the voting public that allows utilities to continue installing familiar, but more expensive fossil generation.
Why are you asking this question without answering it? Unless you're assuming I said something I don't, I don't understand the relevance here.
> No country has a VRE+BESS solution to fully sustain itself.
A couple of fallacies here: non existence yet doesn't mean it's not possible, especially for a grid with equipment lifetimes measured in multiple decades. Once it makes sense to build a VRE only grid it will take several decades for it to happen.
> Nuclear was dirt cheap in US but it didn't help to expand it. and now it's not that cheap since supply chain is gone
Nuclear was completely overbuilt, based on bad over predictions for energy demand, leading to excess orders, then the only plants still being under construction being the ones that were poorly managed, leaving a distinctly bad financial taste in the utilities' mouths. They had to be bribed by state legislatures in South Carolina and Georgia to let them pre-bill ratepayers and also put ratepayers on the hook for overages on construction for new reactors, which everyone expected and which happened disastrously.
It's really unclear that nuclear is ever going to be cheap when its main costs are high skilled construction labor, concert and steel. None of those inputs are getting cheaper and the only chance at making logistics and management better seem to be small modular reactors, which are inherently cost inefficient due to losing the scale advantages of 1GW reactors.
It's no longer 1970, and the costs and technology of the modern economy are fundamentally doffeeent. We have learned so much, and I hope that we have learned tha nuclear doesn't fit with our advanced technology of the 21st century.
Despite the hype that you see on Twitter, the hard tech startup scene is actually incapable of large-scale engineering coordination on the level needed for a nuclear power plant, or even a gas turbine.
If any innovation on fission reactors is going to be successfully commercialized, we will need to see billions of dollars of investment over medium to long time horizons.
Of course, the millstone around the neck of nuclear power is that it's a dual-use technology. There's probably a lot more behind the scenes that's been done to stifle the industry effectively for non-proliferation reasons, but masquerading as cost, regulatory problems, environmental concerns, etc.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
The previous ones from Google and Amazon at least specified that it was based on PPAs. Where all they did was bind themselves to buy X amount of power at Y cost if the company could deliver.
Taking a step back I have an incredibly hard time seeing how new built nuclear power will cope with renewables fundamentally reshaping our grids.
We're seeing the unraveling of the grid monopoly infront of our eyes [1] and renewables are set to completely crash all "baseload" markets. [2] Likely forcing them to become stranded assets.
[1]: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Quiet-Unravel...
[2]: https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Wha...
Theyll just steal it
Why nuclear? Because it's cleaner than fossil fuelds but appeases the administration because it isn't wind or solar, which would immediately solve any power generation problems.
You might be tempted to say, since this always comes up, "what about base load?"
FFirst, batteries can solve that problem.
Second, you use a mix of power and when the Sun isn't out (ie night) is when power is cheaper from other sources.
Third, data centers don't really need base power at all. You just run the DC when you have power and don't when you don't. There's precedent for this. Google has a DC in Scandanavia that they shut down a few days a year when it gets too hot, otherwise it's just cooled by ocean water.
What I find most funny about all this is that all these big tech companies are kowtowing to the state in the exact same way they accuse Chinese companies of doing.
They do? Which facility is this? I'm quite surprised to hear this would happen, in Scandinavia of all places.
Bess will not solve the firming problem. And no, if you build a multibillion datacenter you want to run it around the clock as much as possible. But yes, some datacenters don't have such requirements, but here we are talking about meta
what do you think the end result is for the amount of machine-learning in use once the resource barriers go away?
like first the power availability limit, next cpu+memory availability?
result: every human job goes away that can be turned into a survey of questions
like all callcenters
But Meta can be sued for so much more ...
Now we see more demand and the building of the grid to meet that demand....yet the high cost is still remaining the same.
We should have been keeping up with this infrastructure stuff all along… but I’m really not convinced all of these companies are going to be using this shit in 5 years, anyway.
Look for home prices, doesn't matter where in the US it's always like $350-$400k. Why?