Amazon just bought a 100% nuclear-powered data center

https://electrek.co/2024/03/05/amazon-just-bought-a-100-nuclear-powered-data-center/

61 17 2 years ago

evilos2• 2 years ago

I've been wondering how to take America's existing grid structure (both in a physical and business sense) and get new nuclear plants built. Big infrastructure projects like nuclear plants are so risky for private entities that it is a hard sell.

In many places the answer has been that the state manages the project since sovereign states cannot go bankrupt. But maybe the answer in the US is that the monstrously large tech companies who need 24/7 (and more recently, clean) energy become the anchor customer.

barbazoo• 2 years ago

Why are they so risky? I thought it was mostly about the gigantic price tag.

tetha• 2 years ago

It is about the overall build time, giant price tag and later on risks involved.

I am intentionally oversimplifying a bit, but for a new solar park, you ram metal poles into the ground, run metal beams cross those, put panels on those and cable all of these into a transformer with a lot of electronics. If that transformer detects a problem, it cuts power to the grid and that's it. Then you dig up a short caused by moles, replace it and turn it on again. Wind turbines aren't far off of that thing as well.

Wih nuclear you have for example the question of getting fuel. There is little nuclear fuel available outside of ex-soviet control. Efficient use of that fuel is also tricky, because if you tried to enrich nuclear fuel to make use of nuclear waste, you're 90% the way towards nuclear weapons and suddenly it's globally political.

You have the build time. We can stamp down a lot more solar parks and wind turbine parks in the time a single nuclear plant gets accepted, at least in europe. And also the maintenance time. Due to the planning and build costs of nuclear plants, these need to be planned to last 20 - 40 years. Especially with climate change and climate change turning chaotic - who can say some location is safe to start building a nuclear plant for 15 years, and say safe for 20 - 30 years? Especially if we consider that against renewables, and power storage improvements over these 15 years?

Like don't get me wrong. I also hate it that germany exited nuclear before exiting coal. Which, most likely, was lobby'd by the fossil energy companies. But building new nuclear facilities is too late.

evilos2• 2 years ago

I'm talking about financial risk btw, not safety risk.

Any large project like a dam or nuclear plant is risky from a financial perspective. You're putting up a lot of capital and probably paying a lot of interest. Larger projects in general tend to run over schedule and over budget too. Back in the day, the US was better at building big things and using public funds for them so it wasn't as risky. Add in the mountain of paper work that the regulators now require for everything nuclear and you have a very high risk project.

It doesn't have to be this way. Other countries have shown that you can consistently build these projects on time and in 4 to 5 years if you have an experienced work force, solid supply chain, and a reasonable regulator. Japan holds the record for a gigawatt scale reactor built in just over 36 months.

kjkjadksj2• 2 years ago

I tried to look up how many potentially used nuclear powered ships are out there, since you could just drop an anchor and a ton of power all over the world with one, but it seems like a surprisingly short list outside of US navy. I guess it would make sense due to nonproliferation. What a shame though. Imagine if every other container ship had one of these power plants how many remote areas would probably meet a great deal of their energy needs from a battery array in their shipping port, rather than the current paradigm where they must provide dirty fuel for shipping companies that goes on to pollute the harbor.

devoutsalsa2• 2 years ago

Imagine a nuclear powered container ship captured by pirates.

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

You can't.

Nuclear currently is 6x as expensive as wind and solar. Emphasis on currently.

Now nuke plants take 10 years, and alas they aren't getting cheaper. Solar / wind however is almost certainly going to get cheaper. Solar has perovskites poised to revolutionise it, and both have a huge economy of scale coming in manufacturing.

Storage wise sodium ion and longer term sodium sulfur will vastly cut the cost of grid storage.

So by the time you build a nuke plants in 10 years, it will probably be 10-12x as expensive.

I think nuclear needs a paradigm shift to reduce its costs. I think something around LFTR which scales down and produces far less waste might move the needle, to hopefully get to a projected cost of only 3-4x as expensive, but of course no design is commercialized. Maybe China will succeed.

thatcat• 2 years ago

Nuclear costs more due to construction regulation not due to op cost.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39597184

Amazon just bought a 100% nuclear-powered data center

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