Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy

https://www.techradar.com/pro/microsoft-joins-world-nuclear-association-as-it-doubles-down-on-small-modular-reactors-and-fusion-energy

by mikece • 11 months ago

208 426 11 months ago

techradar.com

Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...

rhdhfjej3• 11 months ago

Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU? Well here we are building nuclear reactors to run our brute force "scaled" LLMs. Really, really dumb.

DeepYogurt• 11 months ago

Big O? More like Big H2O (heavy water).... I'll see myself out.

JumpCrisscross3• 11 months ago

Remember when they told us in CS class that it's better to design more efficient algorithms than to buy a faster CPU?

No? The tradeoff is entirely one between the value of labour versus the value of industry. If dev hours are cheap and CPUs expensive. If it’s the other way, which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs.

estimator7292• 11 months ago

This makes sense if and only if you entirely ignore all secondary and tertiary effects of your choices.

Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.

Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.

utyop222• 11 months ago

"Which it is in AI, you buy more CPUs and GPUs."

Ermmm. what?

infecto• 11 months ago

Pretty exciting to me. Constraints breed innovation and it’s possible that the wave of AI leads to new breakthroughs on the green energy front.

Edit: Amazing how anti-innovation and science folks are on HN.

logicchains2• 11 months ago

There's no efficient algorithm for simulating a human brain, and you certainly haven't invented one so you've got absolutely no excuse to act smug about it. LLMs are already within an order of magnitude of the energy efficiency as the human brain, it's probably not possible to make them much more efficient algorithmically.

irjustin2• 11 months ago

I'm really sad the core argument for the Matrix's existence doesn't hold up (it never did, just for me as a kid is all).

rhdhfjej3• 11 months ago

Your brain has a TDP of 15W while frontier LLMs require on the order of megawatts. That's 5-6 orders of magnitude difference, despite our semiconductors having a lithographic feature size that's also orders of magnitude smaller than our biological neurons. You should do some more research.

wmf• 11 months ago

There's a ton of research into more efficient AI algorithms. We've also seen that GPT-5 has better performance despite being no bigger than previous models. GPU/ASIC vendors are also increasing energy efficiency every generation. More datacenters will be needed despite these improvements because we're probably only using 1% of the potential of AI so far.

zekrioca4• 11 months ago

Interesting, if GPUS/ASICS have been improving in energy efficiency, then why is it that total consumption has been exponentially increasing?

keepamovin5• 11 months ago

You have a point. But it doesn't make sense to seek for the next unrealized breakthrough (low energy, brain-comparable power consumption) AI leap yet, when existing products are already so transformative.

It will come, give it time.

crinkly3• 11 months ago

The one company I really want to see involved in dangerous things with clean up and serious environmental risks is the company that has serious production QA problems, an attention span of about 2 minutes, regular bouts of corporate schizophrenia and a policy of forcing half the planet to abandon working hardware.

Nothing good can come of this.

Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it.

nomel6• 11 months ago

Or, for another perspective, they're helping force capitalism to work: an opportunity exists to reduce prices.

This is a good way to force the (often monopolistic) providers to get their shit together, as google did with google fiber.

crinkly3• 11 months ago

Ah yes a nuclear race to the bottom. Sorry but that will be a monumental fuck up if you have any historical knowledge about how we handle nuclear materials.

Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.

It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.

I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.

RandallBrown• 11 months ago

Are there serious environment risks with fusion reactors?

My understanding was that very little radioactive waste was created from a fusion reactor and what little there is will decay pretty quickly (decades).

crinkly3• 11 months ago

Well we don't have working fusion reactor topology yet but the current "reactor" components are low level waste so safe within 40-100 years. Which is still a hell of a long time. Also they still will require biological shielding and associated materials are quite difficult to deal with (concrete etc).

I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.

philipkglass3• 11 months ago

You are correct. Radioactive materials from fusion reactors are not a significant environmental threat. The bigger problem with fusion reactors is that nobody has yet built a controlled terrestrial fusion reactor that produces net power.

pfdietz20• 11 months ago

The big risk is tritium leakage.

To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.

adrian_b3• 11 months ago

A fusion reactor creates a much more intense flux of neutrons than any fission reactor, which will transmute into radioactive isotopes any substance from which a shield will be made.

So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.

Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.

However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.

A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.

utyop222• 11 months ago

"Microsoft needs to start asking if it should do something before it does it."

Do they? I hope they don't. I would enjoy seeing MSFT implode and losing trust of its shareholders with its cash - itll be forced to return it rather than reinvest.

hereme888• 11 months ago

Yay, common-sense energy ftw. Good for MS.

cheema33• 11 months ago

Yay, common-sense energy ftw.

Yeah. Countries around the world, including China are abandoning their solar and wind plans and picking up on new nuclear plants instead. Not.

It is a conspiracy I think.

nomel6• 11 months ago

China's nuclear growth definitely appears to be slowing: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61927

keepamovin5• 11 months ago

It depends which way you're aligned. Some tech is good for humanity, some not so much.

mclau157• 11 months ago

But fusion has never been proven to work at scale

messe• 11 months ago

On the contrary, I think it has only been proven to work at scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star

cladopa• 11 months ago

It has been:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba

tootie• 11 months ago

From what I can tell, Helion energy has already broken ground on what would be a commercial fusion reactor connected to the WA grid despite their best prototype still not producing net positive energy. It's a gamble, but presumably everyone involved is willing to take the risks. A data center that runs on fusion would be a real watershed moment and everyone wants to be first.

philipkglass3• 11 months ago

If Helion delivers a working fusion reactor that produces net electricity, at commercially competitive rates, I think that's an even more significant event than the recent AI boom.

tim333• 11 months ago

Helion is a odd one. They have picture of the site here https://www.helionenergy.com/articles/helion-secures-land-an...

saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028"

but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)

I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.

antonvs3• 11 months ago

I don't understand this line of thinking.

"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.

No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.

It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.

lazide2• 11 months ago

Fusion definitely works at large scale; and in short bursts. That is the Sun and Thermonuclear weapons.

What has not yet been shown (and may be impossible?) is fusion working at small scale and over long timeframes.

winterismute• 11 months ago

I read this analysis of the SMR farm announcement in Canada a few months ago and I found it quite insightful: https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2025/5/11/the-first-te...

pfdietz20• 11 months ago

"there is no evidence today that SMRs will reduce electricity costs compared to continuing rapid investment in wind and solar."

mikestorrent5• 11 months ago

Not with the approach we are showing, but if solar was built like this, it would fail too: remember Solyndra? Treating it as a bespoke construction project instead of as a commodity manufacturing project is the fundamental mistake that continues to result in nuclear costing too much.

Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.

torginus8• 11 months ago

This is concern trolling. The key to nuclear economics is speed of construction, and controlling costs, and not caving to safety pearl-clutchers (that is, adding cost and delays for 'safety measures; meant to appease the public, not things deemed necessary by experts and regulators).

But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.

mikestorrent5• 11 months ago

Depressing, but it shows the typical faults of most Canadian projects these days. Massive government spend on a project doomed to fail by economic analysis before it's even online; and no takeaways for the Canadian people to actually get momentum going.

If we wanted to do SMRs right, the goal should be to build one or more SMR production factories, here in Canada, where we manufacture N reactors per month, that fit onto train cars, and can be delivered to qualified, secure sites around the world. Instead, we're paying massive cash out to GE Hitachi, and so the end result will never be "the capability of building and deploying SMRs", it will be "4 unprofitable SMRs in a facility and $4.4 billion a unit if we want more of them to lose money on".

Obviously this is doomed to fail; the units should cost like $100M max so they have positive ROI within a few years. If the unit will never beat solar in $/megawatt for operating and fueling costs, and won't pay for its own construction cost before its lifetime ends, it should never have been constructed; the entire thing is catabolic, all of the work and carbon that goes into it is an utter waste. Everyone involved should just do something else with their lives if we're going to approach it this way.

What's the point? Why do such small-minded people get authority over grand projects?

tomComb• 11 months ago

It’s usually about well connected companies lobbying for free money. It’s the sort of thing that keeps Bell and others afloat and guarantees they never have to get competitive.

The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.

bryanlarsen10• 11 months ago

Have we seen Microsoft actually put any skin in the game yet? All the pre-purchase announcements are virtually risk free for Microsoft. They've agreed to buy a certain amount of power at a certain price, if the counter-party can deliver it. But they're not pre-paying, they only pay when the electricity gets delivered. If they never deliver, Microsoft isn't out any money.

lazide2• 11 months ago

It’s a smart move on their part. It’s also a way for VC/investors to have some concrete value prop in their math. Aka if x works, I’d get at least y return (where y is guaranteed to not be zero)

JumpCrisscross3• 11 months ago

I'm halfway certain it's for political optics.

I'm intensely pro nuclear. But the tech is still in the stables. We need research into driving down costs. In the meantime, we need to think harder about where we're putting datacentres and how we can, if not make power cheaper for average Americans, at least not raise its real cost.

dopa423652• 11 months ago

There're 0 new reactors being built in the USA currently. Not Microsofts fault obviously, but then again what's the point of these articles?

keepamovin5• 11 months ago

The Gates Foundation has heavily invested in Thorium salt reactors.

jmyeet• 11 months ago

Ugh, I rdread this topic because nuclear is as close to as a religion as you get on HN. SMRs just arne't better in any way that matters [1].

And while I personally hope we have economical commercial power generation in the future, I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons, which have the added problem that they destroy your very expensive containment vessel. Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core (depending on the size of the star) and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.

I'm reminded of the push recycling of plastic. Evidence has surface that this was nothing more than oil industry propaganda to sell more plastic [2]. A lot of "recycling" is simply dumping the problem into developing countries and then just looking the other way. We used to do this to China until they stopped taking plastic to "recycle".

I can't help but think that Microsoft issuing some press releases about nuclear is nothing more than marketing to contributing to the data center explosion that will inevitably drive up your electricity bills because you'll pay for the infrastructure that needs to be built and will be paying the generous (and usually secret) subsidies these data centers engotiate.

[1] https://blog.ucs.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bro...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

antonvs3• 11 months ago

I'm not convinced that'll ever happen due to one massive problem: energy loss from high-energy neutrons

That's just one of many massive problems? You touched on the reason for this:

Stars deal with this by being massive, having fusion happen in the core ... and gravity, none of which is applicable to a fusion reactor.

As a result of this, we actually have no good reason to believe that commercially viable fusion power could ever be possible.

While we can create conditions comparable in relevant ways to the core of a star, it's extremely uneconomic to do so, for obvious reasons.

And we haven't even achieved the scientific breakeven point for a sustained reaction, let alone one that remotely approaches being viable from an engineering or economic perspective.

Neutron energy loss would be a good problem to have, because it'd mean we're much further along than we are now. The fact that, after half a century and enormous expenditures, we haven't even reached the point where neutron energy loss is the main problem, gives an idea of just how unrealistic this all is.

ZeroGravitas7• 11 months ago

Ironically, I'm fairly sure that it is in fact big oil propaganda claiming that plastic recycling is big oil propaganda.

You could for example look at China, a country that has embraced nuclear and solar and wind and batteries and EVs because they don't have good access to oil and don't have much government influence from that group.

Do they recycle more or less of their plastic waste than the USA?

Google suggests in 2023 it's 30% in China vs 12% in the USA.

It's a confusing topic, as some anti-plastic campaigners seize on this intentional failure of the US to recycle more and better to try to push total plastic bans.

Which are good policy for specific items, and again we see these being done in China too, as a complement to recycling, not a replacement.

actionfromafar• 11 months ago

China though seems to care even less about toxicity than the rest of the world. Also by default I would be wary of number fudging from there.

deater2• 11 months ago

dating myself here but I remember in the 90s reading a really funny spoof article about Microsoft announcing they had developed nuclear weapons. Didn't even seem that implausible at the time.

I would have linked it here but none of the search engines are turning up anything at all, and in fact I don't think it's even possible to find stuff like that with search engines anyore.

deater2• 11 months ago

I had thought maybe it was on the old 0xdeadbeef mailing list, but no luck, but probably it was this from rec.humor.funny which in the end isn't quite as clever as I remember it being.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.humor.funny/c/4zIyBq1-1_E/m/...

lumost• 11 months ago

The funny part about our 1990s memes on big tech, is that today’s big tech is 100-1000x larger.

NVidia is worth more than Germany.

krautsauer• 11 months ago

We're not for sale, but still… numbers? Nvidia's stock price isn't even a 10th of the gold reserve, as far as I can see?

yk• 11 months ago

The Windows 98 license actually did forbid using Windows in nuclear power plants (along with other high risk areas). That was due to some interaction with the Java license and I always considered it a very fortunate fluke.

btown2• 11 months ago

"It looks like you're trying to insert some control rods. Would you like help with that?"

rising-sky• 11 months ago

nuclear_power_run_book.doc

yieldcrv• 11 months ago

funny, except now it will be Ani as the avatar to Grok Unhinged

netsharc• 11 months ago

The same thing with QuickTime (remember QuickTime, and trailers.apple.com?)..

Ah, where did that carefree time go, where we had the time to read licenses...

zamadatix2• 11 months ago

Reference for those curious: https://archive.org/stream/microsoft-windows-98-second-editi...

kfrzcode4• 11 months ago

Awesome. I'm convinced nuclear is the only realistic path toward an energy-laden sustainable future, I've yet to understand the fear mongering beyond political faction bearing and token counting in terms of district employment numbers or some such third-order nonsense... there's nothing safer in terms of human lethality.

Molten salt reactors, micro-reactors, modularity. It's the miltech we had in the 60s, on the path to commercialization and commoditization.

It's all proven technology and the obvious exemplar is the nuclear-powered navies, micro-cities that can roam, submerged within the depths of, or riding atop the world's oceans, for decades at a time. We've been doing this for over 70 years.

It's only a matter of time. AWS has a campus in PA already next to the power plant at Susquehanna, plugged in. They're invested in small modular reactors.

Google has contracts and investments toward the same end. This fits the pattern we're seeing across big tech, and it's driven by the non-negotiable power demands of AI.

I don't balk at the climate-changists, I'm more curious about the anti-Nuke sentiments on HN; what am I missing?

harimau7772• 11 months ago

The problem is that I don't trust corporations to run nuclear plants reponsibly; and if they fail to do so and I get hurt, then I don't trust society to take care of me or to hold the corps accountable.

kfrzcode4• 11 months ago

I don't outright buy the claim that a "failure" results in you getting hurt. Nuclear disasters like Fukushima or Chernobyl are acute, immediate events. You're getting 3x the yearly radiation from one cross-country flight NYC to SF than you would if you lived at the gates of a nuclear power plant for a year.

You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.

Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.

I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.

kadonoishi• 11 months ago

[0] A summary on ACX of a debate between nuclear and solar proponents; and

[1] The video of the debate itself.

I thought solar won.

[0] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-stu...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbypyd7HFPE

ZeroGravitas7• 11 months ago

Also relevant given the post is also about fusion.

At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".

Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.

...

the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.

jeffbee• 11 months ago

What's with this narrative? There isn't some popular resistance holding nuclear back. The only thing holding them back is their own ineptitude.

It's all proven technology

Literally none of the things you mentioned exist at commercial scale. It is the opposite of "proven". This technology is purely hypothetical.

kfrzcode4• 11 months ago

McMurdo was powered by a modular reactor in the 60s. It's not "hypothetical" - though I do agree it's not economically scalable, but neither is training an LLM and before OpenAI did it DARPA did it, and you'd better believe the DOD did it too. I'm saying that the technology exists, it's been proven, and it can work - the hangup is political and cultural, and it burdens me with sadness to see conversation focus on things like "omg what if microsoft put clippy on an ICBM" it's appealing to ridicule and we've enough of that tendency these days. Instead we should celebrate this! Explore and discuss it from merit and principle.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...

toast0• 11 months ago

There's a history of protests against nuclear power, so I don't think it's right to there isn't a popular resistance holding nuclear back.

Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.

TwoNineFive• 10 months ago

I want to like nuclear, but it's clear that many of it's proponents are red-eyed bitcoin-maxis with that strange fanatical juvenile vibe going, and it all just turns me off because it's obvious they are spouting BS. It's all just an act to pump a penny stock or because they are an angsty teen.

matthewdgreen2• 11 months ago

China has been running a side-by-side experiment building both nuclear and solar. Here's one rendering of the result:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1l5h5e2/sola...

Nuclear may be a big part of the future (assuming storage prices don't plummet) but it's not going to be the bulk of the power we ever receive. It'll be the 10% that stabilizes the grid and provides baseload, at most.

adrr• 11 months ago

Uranium shortage, expensive builds, long timelines, unproven technology(no commercial molten salt deployments). Just do solar and batteries. It is way cheaper and proven. Going to get even cheaper when sodium batteries become mainstream, less than half the cost of lithium batteries.

energy1238• 11 months ago

It's too expensive compared to solar with storage.

The numbers from published analyses are clear. The revealed preferences from local market participants and foreign geopolitical rivals strongly aligns with these analyses.

If Bill Gates wants to put his money into making it cheaper per Wh, then that's great, and I support him doing this.

keepamovin5• 11 months ago

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Acres of battery parks on fire, near the Tianjin Gate.

thakoppno• 11 months ago

is there a terraform module for a nuclear reactor yet?

LarsDu88• 11 months ago

I don't believe idempotency is as easy or safe to achieve with a nuclear reactor as it is with EC2 instances.

just_human4• 11 months ago

This is a big deal, not because Microsoft wants to build reactors but because it highlights the real bottleneck: nuclear fuel. There’s already a growing uranium deficit, conversion and enrichment capacity are thin and geopolitically fragile, and next-gen reactors need HALEU, which barely exists today. Building new reactors is the easy part — scaling the fuel supply chain takes years.

kfrzcode4• 11 months ago

Very interesting, can you provide any more reading on this topic in particular? Curious about how the modern private market is approaching the fuel supply chain issue in creative ways.

just_human4• 11 months ago

Recommend starting here: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/

defrost• 11 months ago

As per just_human, more specifically, start- https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

matthewdgreen2• 11 months ago

If building nuclear reactors is the easy part, and we're barely building nuclear reactors (and when we do they go massively over estimates), this sounds all around kind of bad.

windows2020• 11 months ago

Perhaps the bottleneck is public perception after the accident at Three Mile Island, and then everyone wasting time on alternate (insufficient) renewables. But now it's not about migrating from dirty to clean energy (which nuclear is), it's we need more power and it's time to get serious. Welcome back, nuclear. Microsoft entering an agreement with Three Mile Island nicely concludes a period in energy history. The next one should be most exciting.

destitude• 11 months ago

And yet we still have no place to put that "clean" energy when it is depleted.

triceratops11• 11 months ago

Nuclear is great but we can do without bashing renewables as "insufficient". Solar + batteries are here right now and they're cheaper than nuclear.

ChuckMcM• 11 months ago

Yes, and ... restarting the fuel cycle under the current administration is, according to activity in the US uranium rich areas, kind of happening. I haven't seen anything "official" yet but driving around southern Utah shows signs of 'unexpected economic activity.' Speculation is that the USG is going to re-open a Uranium mine near Moab.

ggm• 11 months ago

Nuclear fuel, like lithium is a supply chain problem not an Erlich/Simons end-of-resources problem. Nuclear fuel UNLIKE lithium, has bizarre qualities that the waste stream from some kinds of reactors in turn, is valuable fuel. Not that we want prolifration from breeder reactors, but the point "fuel is the bottleneck" has some caveats. Supply chain logistics around fuel, including whole-of-life treatment of the outputs, is a problem.

PaulHoule7• 11 months ago

I don't believe it.

The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction. For instance there is an unlimited amount of handwringing over a closed fuel cycle costing a little more than an open fuel cycle but nobody points out that the capital cost of the reactor dwarfs fuel cycle costs for any fuel cycle -- no nukes hate reprocessing so they won't point this out and nukes don't want to remind you of the capital cost problem.

For every NPP that's had a nuclear meltdown there have been 20 that had a financial meltdown before they've even turned it on.

It drives me up the wall that big tech companies want to buy "a reactor" or an unspecified "SMR" but never an AP1000 (reactor that's actually been built) or even a BWRX300 (an SMR that might actually get built.) If there wasn't any bullshit a new build AP1000 would probably have a 10 year lag at least but...

... in the current international tariff situation it's almost impossible that any full-size or even moderate-sized reactor will be built in the US in the forseeable future because the US has no super-heavy press that can forge a nuclear reactor vessel. Japan, China, Korea, the UK, and many other countries have them and in the neoliberal world of a year ago we could have just had one made for us and shipped in by boat. The BWRX300 is the only western SMR that is far along and the pressure vessel will be made in Canada -- it's going to cost plenty no matter what but put 35% on top of that and you're doing the no nukes job for them. Way to go.

I want to see it work but I am not seeing realistic plans from the likes of Microsoft and Google, just the hot air from a 100W lightbulb when we really need 10,000,000 times as much heat!

just_human4• 11 months ago

The problem with nuclear energy is not the availability or the cost of the fuel but the capital cost of the reactor and the high level of financial and operational risk involved with the construction.

Yes, in US and western Europe it's been practically impossible to build new reactors since the 90's for capex and regulatory reasons (both are related). However, we used to be able to build reactors significantly cheaper and faster and I'd argue we're on the path to do it again later this decade. There's no technical reason we can't solve this problem: there's bipartisan support for nuclear, willing financial backers, and no demand shortage. We're going to see 100+ gigawatts of new nuclear in the western world in the next 20 years.

bruce5114• 11 months ago

Nuclear proponents argue that renewables (solar, wind) are not base-load, and nuclear is. They are correct.

But the people building power generation are doing it on a for-profit basis. Since solar is cheaper to deploy, faster to deploy, simpler to maintain and so on, that's what for-profit people build.

In other words, on the one hand you have large generators, requiring years of planning & permitting, a decade of construction, endless court battles from the anti-nuclear folks, generating returns 15 years from now, competing with the exact opposite (cheap, quick to build, beloved by eco folks, easy to run and maintain, off the shelf parts etc).

From a capital point of view its a no brainer. Capital follows profit, and solar is very profitable.

Nuclear may be good policy. Base Load may be very desirable. But unless govt is putting up the capital it just won't get funded. (Nuclear plants are being built, like in China, but using govt capital, which sees a return in more than just cash terms.)

There are lots of strong arguments for Nuclear. But Nuclear proponents need to address the capital requirements above all. Until the capital problem is solved, every other argument is useless.

nomel6• 11 months ago

Here's a nice pie chart of the costs:

https://ifp.org/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/

ksec• 11 months ago

BWRX300

I believe Rolls Royce is pretty close as well. But both have yet to deploy a single working example. And it doesn't seem we are anywhere close to see one yet.

boringg• 11 months ago

I think I should correct your statement slightly - its not wrong however we don't have a uranium shortage -- we have more uranium than we could possible use.

We do have a HALEU advanced nuclear fuel supply chain issue. Thats being currently tackled. To your advanced reactor point -- they are also still far away so it is plausible that the supply chain catches up before any of the new reactors get deployed - assuming they make it to the finish line.

I should hope they make it to the finish line - I think we could do well with more nuclear providing our backbone of energy.

ljlolel• 11 months ago

General Matter working on this (founders fund company)

dopa423652• 11 months ago

Enriching uranium to 20% instead of 5% is easy. If reactors require it, the fuel will be found just fine. You already have hundreds of SMRs in submarines and aircraft carriers and what not. A1B reactors in your carriers run on 93% enriched uranium!

That really isn't the bottleneck by any means. If there's demand there will be supply.

zozbot2345• 11 months ago

Fission fuel is so cheap that we currently don't even bother to fully recycle our nuclear waste. We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.

pbmonster• 11 months ago

We could easily extract a lot of energy from that source that currently goes unexploited.
easily

That's and understatement. The PUREX process is a nightmare to get right, is expensive in both CAPEX and the specialized personell you need to pay, it produces much more deadly waste products, and you really don't want to proliferate it.

In the end, virgin uranium directly from ore is orders of magnitude cheaper for the foreseeable future.

looofooo02• 11 months ago

There is more than enough uranium on the planet. This is more of a pork cycle problem. If there is a clear path towards an SMR industry supply will be there.

keepamovin5• 11 months ago

But if you dismantle nuclear weapons and downblend to make HALEU you have it. Killing two big birds with one small shift. Megatons to megawatts, ftw.

ChrisArchitect• 11 months ago

Announcement release: https://world-nuclear.org/news-and-media/press-statements/wo...

spamjavalin• 11 months ago

Relevant - worth a listen, changed my mind about nuclear, also beautifully and compellingly read by the author.

'Going Nuclear - How the Atom will save the world' by Tom Gregory https://open.spotify.com/show/7l8wXWfPb3ZAUmd1pfUdv3?si=52fe...

fooker• 11 months ago

Microsoft seems to be announcing random vaporware innovations every once in a while.

Earlier this summer it was quantum computing, more recently optical computing, seems like the next one is going to be fusion!!

surfingdino2• 11 months ago

AI Santa next?

Animats2• 11 months ago

The article mentions Helion. Those guys were supposed to have their Polaris demo machine running by now. But they've become very quiet about that. Press releases about it in 2024, but not much in 2025.

Polaris is supposed to pass theoretical breakeven, and maybe even technical breakeven - more electrical power out than they put in. That would be a huge event.

ted_dunning• 11 months ago

Polaris has been operating at low power already. They have recently installed shielding in the walls to allow higher power operation.

There seems to be a fair bit of progress notes from them. They aren't obligated to tell us anything, of course.

Animats2• 11 months ago

Here are their funding rounds.[1] Their funders, which include both YC and DoD, had better be getting info.

[1] https://tracxn.com/d/companies/helion/__fS6qGKScel2LE9EV85bG...

jillesvangurp2• 11 months ago

These are very long term bets. MS isn't betting much here, just staying involved just in case. Which is prudent but not much of a commitment. A big commitment for a trillion dollar company would have a big dollar value. Like billions of dollars. That's not what's happening here.

I like the idea of small reactors from a technical point of view. But I'm also a realist. To match current renewables growth (or even put a minor dent in it), many tens of thousands of these things are needed. They don't put out a lot of energy. In wind number of turbines it's something like 2-5 turbines per reactor. There already are tens of thousands of wind turbines. Plonking down a few hundred wind turbines is routine business. Getting the first small reactor online is still in progress.

In other words, small reactors are not happening anytime soon. Certainly not in the next decade. If there are a few hundred active small reactors in 15 years that would be really amazing. And if that happens at a reasonable cost (big if) relative to wind, solar, and batteries, that would be even better. But we'll be well into the second half of this century before these things are putting a dent into other sources of energy. And that's only if it all works out in terms of cost and technology. 25 years is not that long in nuclear. Long planning cycles are common. These things have a lot to prove.

I'm skeptical on especially the cost aspect. Nuclear proponents tend to gloss over the fact that nuclear has always been expensive. Things like waste handling and security add extra cost and small reactors just complicate that further. Small reactors have a lot to prove and the rosy projections tend to dodge the harder issues here. There's a lot of magical thinking around this topic.

In any case, a few hundred of these things would be a meaninglessly small drop in the ocean in terms of energy output. It's not coming even close to the yearly growth with solar, wind, and batteries. And MS needs data centers sooner than even those would be coming online. And the energy to power them. Wherever that's going to come from, it's (mostly) not going to be nuclear any time soon. Unless they drastically scale down their AI expansion plans. And long term this is a cost game. MS is going to need lots of cheap energy. Expensive energy just raises its cost. Unless small reactors fix the cost issue, MS won't be using a lot of small reactors.

energy1238• 11 months ago

This for me is the real crux. Safety, nuclear waste, land-use, etc, are all issues of relatively trivial concern. They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.

For SMRs, all their work is still ahead of them. To get the learning rate going, you need to start mass production. Then you need to double that production again, and again, and again. Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.

Never mind that solar & storage will undergo multiple more doublings between now and then, and never mind that private industry will struggle to fund the required doublings for SMRs because it's not the maximally profitable choice on the margin.

It's just a very difficult pragmatic picture for nuclear.

jacquesm9• 11 months ago

Then, after 2-3 decades of doublings, you may be able to deliver $/Wh in the ballpark of where solar & storage is today.

I highly doubt that will be the case. Even if solar and wind do not get better costwise (which is likely not true) the cost of maintaining and decommissioning SMRs is likely only to go up. This based on every other nuclear power plant to date, I have seen zero good arguments on why SMRs would be an exception to that rule.

panick21_4• 11 months ago

They're fixations on the wrong question. The dominant issue is delivering competitive unit economics.

The problem is. The regulation around safety, waste and land-use is what make the economics the problem.

But you are right, it is difficult, or just straight up impossible with the current state or regulation and policy.

Just for reference, since NRC was establish, basically new nuclear has been approved. During the AEC, innovation was rapid. Basically, no longer a balance between concerns, but simply all out focus on safety for a specific set of reactors. That's not the only factor, but its a big one.

torginus8• 11 months ago

Renewables can't meet the base energy needs. You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines. They also have low power density, making them problematic at grid scale.

SMRs fix all the issues of modern nuclear reactors. SMR's are not 'small' in the absolute sense, they're on the scale of traditional power plants, not existing nuclear reactors.

They have a ton of advantages:

- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.

- They produce power comparable to existing power plants. Nuclear plants have huge issues with producing tons of power in a centralized manner, meaning the energy infrastructure needs to be designed around them, and probably you need a centralized infrastrucure for power distribution, which might not jive well with local politics. They also need huge concentrated cooling capacity, which might have negative ecological effects, and present a huge risk should they need to be shut down. The recent issues in France with global warming, where the rivers water level got lower and the water warmer, cutting down on cooling margins dramatically leading to shutdowns comes to mind.

- In contrast SMRs can be slotted into current energy infrastructure. Modern reactor designs can be throttled to match grid needs.

- SMRs are standardized, smaller and don't need to be built on site and can be built relatively quicker and cheaper. This is huge. If a traditional plant costs $20B and takes 20 years to build, the interest on the loans could mean it's never going to be financially viable. If you cound do something that makes quarter the power, but costs $5B and 5 years to build, it's an entirely different value proposition.

China is already building these, and they are the main country of origin for solar panels and equipment. Renewables make a ton of sense, but can't solve every issue.

energy1238• 11 months ago

You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.

You're going to need more work than a bare assertion to demonstrate this, given that storage exists, and given that gas peaking exists, and given that interconnects exist.

Consider these:

- https://www.offgridai.us/

- https://sci-hub.se/10.1039/c7ee03029k

jillesvangurp2• 11 months ago

Renewables can't meet the base energy needs.

That assertion is not something everyone agrees with. And baseload is hardly ever qualified with even a ballpark estimate in GW or GWH of capacity needed. So, it's a fairly hollow and meaningless term.

And the reality is that for every 100GW added to grids world wide, about 80% or more is renewable. Nuclear is only small portion of the remaining capacity. And SMRs are a rounding error on that. Most of the rest is gas based generation.

Besides, data centers are a great example of something that can easily scale up and down its energy consumption based on price signals, user demand, etc. So, it's actually ideal to pair with fluctuating supply and demand from renewables. Using e.g. spot instances makes it easy for data centers to scale down their demand if energy is scarce and expensive. Other things they could do is throttle CPUs/GPUs based on energy pricing or encourage people to time shift non critical jobs to when energy is plentiful.

SMRs won't have fixed anything until there are lots of them. Whether you believe this will happen or not, it won't be happening very soon. Realistically, SMRs will remain a niche solution for decades to come; even if they do work at reasonable cost levels.

riffraff• 11 months ago

but SMRs have the problem of not actually being proven.

China has a few under construction, but having reactors built is not proof of them being viable, e.g. remember the superphénix.

zozbot2345• 11 months ago

Throttling a reactor makes no sense when the fuel is dirt cheap, which it is for nuclear. It's not clear given the choice of providing the same amount of power with thousands of SMR's worth a few MW's each or a handful of traditional nuclear plants, that SMR's are inherently the better choice. SMR's make obvious sense as a distributed source in cases where power transmission is itself costly and the density of power use is low, but not obviously otherwise.

bluGill• 11 months ago

You can't only run your datacenters and factories when the wind blows or the sun shines.

This has been false in the real world. Factories that use a lot of energy do work with the power company and shutdown all the time based on demand. Large steel mills have their own power plant onsite, but smaller ones just buy grid energy and they want the cheapest. They arrange their factory maintenance schedules with the power company so that the power plants are maintained as the same time they are shutdown. They shutdown every December so the power company can sell the power they were using to run Christmas lights. They often run overnight shifts only because that is when power is cheapest. Even the large factories with their own power generation have shutdown for a couple weeks to sell power to the grid (this is very rare, but it has happened).

Wind and solar is a little more difficult because it isn't as predictable, but that is different from unpredictable. The power companies already are running models to predict the wind and solar cycles because it is important for many things they do. You can bet those smaller factories are already working with the power company to schedule shutdowns when power is predicted to be expensive - factories have to do regular maintenance anyway so it is just a matter of being ready (spare parts) when asked, and wind/solar is predictable enough for this.

Kon5ole4• 11 months ago

- They are inherently safe, no need to worry about meltdowns.

I don't worry about designed meltdowns, I worry about someone bunker-busting it, crashing a plane into it, detonating a convoy of trucks filled with fertilizer inside it, someone deciding that an old mine close the the ground water is "good enough" to store the waste from it, that war, forest fires, floods or famine will leave the sites unmanned until the storage pools dry out and the waste starts burning, or any number of similar scenarios which become so much more likely the more of these things we have.

But mostly I worry that they are more expensive than anything else even in a best-case scenario.

Why should we invest in more expensive electricity, that also carries a significant risk for immense disasters, when we have solved cheap solar, cheap batteries and synthesized fuels? The path forward seems obvious, even though it's less traveled.

jl62• 11 months ago

I see a lot of skepticism in the comments, but if you’re going to gamble, SMRs seem like a pretty good bet. Nuclear is still in its mainframe era, where everything is bespoke and costly. Modularization enables repeatability, which is the heart of optimization. Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!

There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

zozbot2345• 11 months ago

Thing is, traditional nuclear plants generate so much power that we only need a few "bespoke" plants to fill in all baseload demand and even provide enough redundancy. Renewable sources are quite a bit cheaper though wrt. to the sheer amount of bulk power that they supply over time, it's just unreliable and highly intermittent. Smaller reactors just aren't very useful in that kind of scenario - it's unlikely that they'll be cheaper per watt than a few large plants.

preisschild2• 11 months ago

I technically agree, but modularity also works on large reactors. And they are generally cheaper to build and operate per energy produced than smaller reactors.

jl62• 11 months ago

Modularity could work on mainframes too but it mostly didn’t. Mainframe cost per transaction can be very low, and yet here we are. Tech at scale always passes through a cheap/worse is better phase.

mrtksn3• 11 months ago

I'm not anti-nuclear but I don't like the idea of proliferation of nuclear reactors on every corner because I don't believe that there are enough smart and trustworthy people to handle that many reactors. I'm all on for huge ones but they have obvious issues.

Have you been to a failed state? Bulgaria was in a state of disrepair when it comes to its industry, as kids we wandered to abandoned factories and I'm %100 sure that I don't wish a nuclear reactor to end up in a place like that. As 12-14 y/o kids we were going in, tear apart stuff the get interesting objects out like bearings, flat plastics etc. that we can use for games or making machines and if small reactors were a thing back then I'm certain that many disasters would have happened. AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.

Nuclear reactors are very cool, they all have its place but please don't make it available to an average bozo that lucked on crypto or some greedy maniac in a failed state.

I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail and things end up in wrong hands but where I grew up you can find remains of a few ancient empires + 1 quite recent ones with machinery and electronics unaccounted for.

looofooo02• 11 months ago

Seriously, you are concerned small nuclear reactors left behind? The main idea is, that you will be able to load them onto a truck and ship them back to the factory. So the chance of anything left behind is very small.

myrmidon8• 11 months ago

AFAIK in Russia there are many lost RTGs, somehow nothing really bad happened but there are many instances of people getting exposed to radiation when working with recycling.

People did actually die because of abandoned RTGs, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident

piokoch• 11 months ago

If only you knew how deadly is average chemical factory that you probably do not know is just a few miles from your home, you would not worry about SMR-s that much :)

jacquesm9• 11 months ago

I'm sure in America it must feel inconceivable that states fail

Anybody that still feels like that right now in America is not paying attention.

GuB-42• 11 months ago

Doing something smaller, but more often, is how you get good at most things!

And yet, for most things, we see the opposite trend. We build big factories, big ships, big warehouses and yes, big power plants. We tend to make things as big as physics lets us do, because of economies of scale. For power generation specifically, big things tend to be more efficient, thanks to the square-cube law. For example look at big ship engines, they use specialized piston engines with cylinders you can fit into, not dozens or truck engines, even though the truck engines would be a good example of modularity.

And speaking of the "mainframe era", in a sense, that era was more distributed/modular than today. Companies had their own mainframe, whereas nowadays, it is centralized in huge datacenters. The servers themselves are modular, because we can't make a datacenter on a chip, physics get in the way, but having big datacenters help make economies of scale on cooling, power generation, security, etc...

I am not against SMR, they are an option worth considering, but if I had to bet between SMR and conventional, large size nuclear reactors, I'd go conventional. Someone mentioned China as taking SMR seriously, and yes, they do, but they are also building lots of big nuclear power plants, and they are doing very well at it.

ViewTrick100216• 11 months ago

There’s a hundred and one “yes, but” objections to make, but our energy transition needs to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I don’t think it’s a choice between nuclear and other renewables. We need them all.

That is what we did 20 years ago when the renewable industry barely existed.

What has happened since is that the nuclear industry essentially collapsed given the outcome of Virgil C. Summer, Vogtle, Olkiluoto, Flamanville and Hinklkey Point C and can't build new plants while renewables and storage are delivering over 90% of new capacity in the US. Being the cheapest energy source in human history.

We've gone past the "throw stuff at the wall" phase, now we know what sticks and that is renewables and storage.

rswail• 11 months ago

We recently had an election in AU where "nuclear" was on the agenda as the (losing) party/coalition were promoting nuclear as a "solution" to our aging coal-generator fleet.

The trouble is that:

a) "baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"

b) CSIRO (our government research organization) releases a regular report called "Gencost" [1]. It has shown regular decreases in solar and wind, with costs for other solutions (coal/gas/nuclear) growing during the same period

c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle

d) AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables

e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed

f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU

[1] https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/ele...

zozbot2345• 11 months ago

"baseload" is a misnomer, what is required is storage to cover periods when "the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow"

"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks. The only longer-term storage that matters when you look at the numbers is pumped hydro, and that's built out. That's why "baseload" is in fact quite relevant; it's way better to supply those critical needs via a highly reliable source.

MrBuddyCasino3• 11 months ago

One would think people would learn from the disastrous results of the German Energiewende, where this has already been tried, but no.

The problem is that the issue of intermittent energy generation is unsolved. It is currently not feasible to use batteries for base load needs, it would be insanely expensive. Some day perhaps, but not yet.

There was never a technically solid plan to solve this issue by the German Greens, just wishful thinking. They undertook this massive project without having the faintest clue about the underlying physics and financials, which is hard to believe but true. The overwhelming majority of green party members are from the humanities, not STEM.

So you either have a lot of pumped hydro, in which case great, or you don’t, which is the case nearly everywhere but the nordics and perhaps Switzerland.

Solar is much better than wind btw, wind is simply a costly mistake as it is a lot more intermittent than solar. The math doesn’t add up.

ZeroGravitas7• 11 months ago

If you compare the combination of renewables and batteries to pumped hydro it loses badly.

It's like pumped hydro with a very predictable rainstorm directly above it every day. You'd be able to get by with a much smaller reservoir.

myrmidon8• 11 months ago

First, "providing baseload" is a privilege you enjoy if you are the unconditionally cheapest provider of electricity at all times, not something that anyone ever needs you to do.

If you only need power for short periods of time when renewables are unavailable, then "constant output" plants like coal or nuclear are the last thing you want to build-- they are simply not worth it for the the short periods of time when renewables are down.

You want simple, cheap powerplants instead that trade off higher fuel costs for low capex, and that is currently gas. You want cheap MW (max power) from those plants instead of cheap MWh (energy), basically.

willvarfar• 11 months ago

Can sand batteries work? Recent post on HN about use in Finland https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45112653

crote• 11 months ago

But how often is it cloudy and windless for weeks at a time? And for those once-every-few-years scenarios, why shouldn't we build (far cheaper) carbon-captured natural gas peaker plants?

Besides, you've got to keep in mind that we aren't going to be building for yearly-average kWh consumption. Companies will be building overcapacity to take advantage of high-demand/low-supply peak pricing.

I don't think it is unlikely that we'll end up with a situation where PV on an overcast day is enough for "baseload", with the practically-free electricity on sunny/windy days opening up new economic opportunities.

pfdietz20• 11 months ago

"Storage" can't do that for more than smoothing out daily peaks.

See the system described in the OP link at this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45012942

Long term literally dirt cheap thermal storage coupled with extreme cost optimized PV that would provide 600 C heat 365/24/7 for as little as $3/GJ, on par with combustion of inexpensive natural gas. Complementary with diurnal storage from batteries, this would be a complete solution to the renewable intermittency problem.

natmaka8• 11 months ago

A typical car battery stores 60 kWh (the average capacity of models is increasing), so, charged during the day using inexpensive renewable electricity (particularly solar), it can power a household during one of the rare winter nights with insufficient wind.

Case in point: France. A household consumes an average of 14 kWh of electricity per day. The capacity of electric cars will exceed 500 GWh before 2035 and 2000 GWh between 2040 and 2050.

Trucks, utility vehicles, and stationary batteries (domestic and industrial) will add to this. Batteries from retired vehicles will increasingly be converted into static batteries before being recycled (see "Redwood Materials" in the US).

In California, when the sun is at its peak (midday), solar power produces up to three-quarters of the electricity. Batteries are charged in the afternoon, when solar electricity is cheap, and released in the evening, when Californians return home. At their peak consumption, around 8 p.m., batteries can supply up to 30% of the state's electricity.

gpm• 11 months ago

Baseload is quite irrelevant, because baseload also doesn't supply those critical needs. "Baseload" is by definition power production that can't follow the demand curve, and thus can't provide the power to keep the grid stable. It's as bad as solar and wind in this way, it's just that instead of having a fixed but variable supply curve it has a fixed but flat supply curve.

What you want is dispatchable power. Gas peaker plants for instance. Or overbuilt solar + batteries. Not baseload.

adrian_b3• 11 months ago

"Storage" can synthesize hydrocarbons, i.e. fuel, which can then be stored forever, until energy is needed.

This was already possible by the time of WWII, but now there are many methods in development for reducing carbon dioxide by electrolysis, and then use the product to synthesize longer hydrocarbons, which have higher efficiency than the older methods.

The round-trip efficiency of this will always be worse than for batteries, which remain a better option for short time storage, but synthesizing fuel will be a valid method for storing energy for the winter during the summer, and also for applications where batteries are unsuitable, like aircraft and spacecraft.

tcfhgj5• 11 months ago

you forgot gas

Neil44• 11 months ago

I guess the shear quantity of land that AU has available for solar and wind takes away a lot of the issues for you guys?

XorNot2• 11 months ago

Well it all does absolutely nothing to store energy.

ZeroGravitas7• 11 months ago

It's interesting that this country with all the spare land is also a world leader in rooftop solar.

That rooftop solar is delivering the cheapest consumer electricity in history.

Amazingly, the hardware costs and labor costs for rooftop solar are the same as the USA and sensible regulations around permitting and training have dropped the cost by 2/3rds.

pfdietz20• 11 months ago

Land cost isn't a strong limit on renewables even in Europe.

energy1238• 11 months ago

g) AU is very well suited for solar, due to the confluence of abundant desert making land-use a non-issue, high irradiance per m^2, low seasonality of irradiance, and large landmass which generates statistical diversification due to lower temporal coupling between plants.

ZeroGravitas7• 11 months ago

This applies to where most of the human population live currently.

People who don't live in such regions are likely to underestimate solutions that work well in these places.

aussieguy1234• 11 months ago

There's another Australian state, Tasmania that also runs on 100% renewables, mostly hydro. There are plans to export more of that power to other states.

0xy• 11 months ago

100% renewable until the dams dried up and they flew in diesel generators (worse than coal) to prop up the state, reversing several years of environmental progress.

That event is illustrative of the fundamental problem here. Green energy proponents pretend it never happens and do not factor diesel emissions into the cost of hydro and other solutions.

Another common way they mislead is by pretending that emissions from gas peaking plants are not inherently associated with solar and wind generating, even though they would not exist without them.

It's a kind of sleight of hand or green washing that should be called out more frequently.

100% renewable does not exist. Not in '100% hydro' Tasmania or anywhere else.

belorn• 11 months ago

Hydro is pretty great with a few caveats. Flooding remain a massive problem if there is a failure, as the world most deadliest power plant accident was a hydro power plant with a death toll between 26,000 to 240,000 people. An other major issue is the extinction of species, as is currently occurring in Europe and especially in the northern parts. There are technologies to allow for migrating fish to bypass hydro power plants without chopping them to bits, through the effectiveness of the bypass tend to work against the power output of the plant.

pjc502• 11 months ago

AU home solar is world leading, with now a government subsidy available for home battery storage to soak up the midday peak, one state (SA) regularly runs on 100% renewables

I feel we're going to keep seeing "solar doesn't work" posts in decades to come, long past when many areas of the world will already be on 100% renewables. It turns out that incremental deployment is a superpower.

There's no longer any good reason for AU not to be at >100% solar at midday every single day.

SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way

.. while this is more of a problem. I could jokingly say that SMRs are a conspiracy by Big Turbine to sell more turbines. Also don't forget the need for water cooling, which may be a critical problem in AU.

Perz1val• 11 months ago

In Poland we're seeing government slowly taking actions against people owning solar. Turns out, people were paying a lot in taxes for electricity and this money is now not present in the budget. Recent development is an incoming ban on energy storage beyond certain size. They want you to give energy basically for free to the grid during the day (when you're at work) and buy the energy from the grid during the night (charging cars). Electricity prices are not even that high now, bills are mostly some transfer fees. I imagine the same will be/is the case in all countries.

chickenbig• 11 months ago

c) The problem for nuclear power in AU is doubled because there is no local infrastructure or engineering or industry for the nuclear fuel cycle

One might say this is an advantage, with no home industry asking for local supply chains to be built up (at significant cost and risk). Solar panels, batteries and wind turbines are not generally made in Australia, right? For the fuel cycle, Urenco for enrichment, and Westinghouse or Orano for the uranium processing and fuel fabrication would be possible deals with allies.

e) SMRs do NOT exist in a commercially deployable way. There are any number of research and demo-scale possible SMRs, but none that are immediately able to be deployed

SMRs are not the entirety of nuclear, and were not the entirety of the Coalition nuclear plan. Large reactors do exist and are being built around the world. Rosatom are able to do so (Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh), KEPCO has done so in the UAE, and China is exporting to Pakistan. As an aside, a GE-Hitachi BWRX-300 first-of-a-kind (not demo-scale or research) is being built in Darlington Canada, so SMRs are being deployed.

f) SMRs are too SMALL to replace existing coal gen, especially compared to the capacity of solar and wind farms, with offshore wind only just being started in AU

This is why the Coalition plan proposed large reactors in addition to SMRs. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/04/nucle...

omegabravo• 11 months ago

One might say this is an advantage

I'm baffled that anyone could propose this as a good thing. I've worked in industries that are supported - just smaller than the US and the price gouging is substantial. Parts will be designed for the US market, we need to adapt. Bonus points when buying incompatible European / US designs.

Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbine have all the necessary ancillary parts in warehouses close to where they are needed. They also have all the expertise, the cranes, the transport regulations nailed down.

surfingdino2• 11 months ago

Microsoft and nuclear reactors... what could possibly go wrong?

flimflamm• 11 months ago

I wonder when Elon will go to nuclear business as green values have gone down (solar tiles anyone?)

emsign• 11 months ago

Oh, who would have thought. Fusion and nuclear is a money pit.

Because complexity is expensive and those two are by far the most complex ways of generating energy, one of which is even so complex it hasn't even achieved net plus anyway.

Even a giant like Microsoft doesn't have unlimited funds to burn.

Aleklart• 11 months ago

I am user of Microsoft Nuclear Cloud Plant Manager Xp SP3 and after update my control panel restarted causing power outage. Now every time i click power status it is crashing, while power output is rising, making pipes hot.

I already tried msreactor /scannow but don’t want to reinstall reactor as last time I did it I lost my city (and support only told to use boron or move to another area).

Please help!

mecdu92• 11 months ago

Wonderful, the next CloudStrike bug will not be a joke

natmaka8• 11 months ago

Proponents of the SMR (small modular reactor) overlook the fundamental approach in industry: taking advantage of economies of scale to improve efficiency.

Financially, SMRs are efficient when they are mass-produced and then installed as is, which is difficult to imagine today given the abundance of specific requirements from national safety authorities and site-specific characteristics impacting the installation method. Reactors will therefore have to be adapted (before or, worse, after factory manufacture), which greatly reduces the value of mass production.

Furthermore, the underlying industrialization approach standardizes products and thus increases the risk associated with a generic defect: the discovery of a problem could force the rapid shutdown of a large proportion of the (identical) reactors in a fleet.

This necessary industrialization, and therefore mass production, makes it difficult to claim to only satisfy niche markets.

Even if the SMR becomes a reality, the NIMBY effect alone could wipe it out.

On the ground today, no SMR model is in operation in the West, not even at the industrial prototype stage. Russia has an old, improved military reactor used on a barge (its load factor, as well as that of a recently launched Chinese model, is very poor).

Imitating it would be risky because the total cost of a military reactor (on board a submarine, aircraft carrier, icebreaker, etc.) is much higher than that of an equivalent civilian model. The Navy is willing to pay for features that are decisive for it (long battery life, reduced need for maintenance and surfacing, silence, compactness, etc.) but of no benefit in civilian applications.

Furthermore, a military reactor operates at sea, thus in a huge "cold source" facilitating its cooling, and in the event of an accident, it would likely be submerged far from any populated area. This is difficult to transpose to a national electricity system.

On the ground, the most advanced offering (NuScale) in the most favorable context (the USA) is withering away. Projects in Canada, a nation with expertise in nuclear power, are struggling to get off the ground. In Europe, Naarea, Newcleo, and Jimmy are reeling.

There's nothing new here, as these vain hopes correspond to what Admiral H. Rickover described as early as 1953...

nemomarx• 11 months ago

I think the most favorable context is China? the us is quite resistant to nuclear in comparison

natmaka8• 11 months ago

I doubt so as most of the challenges I mentioned aren't due to any subjective appreciation.

China invests way, way more on renewable than on nuclear.

panick21_4• 11 months ago

You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.

The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.

The NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, the issue with nuclear is cost, far more then NIMBY.

NuScale was always a bad idea. The PWR is the problem, making it smaller doesn't really solve the issues with them.

Project in Canada are struggling because the market in Canada is just to small. The reality is, you need massive amounts of funding, but with the way regulations work, even if Canada were literally perfect in every way, as long as large markets like the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.

You are right that there is nothing new here, except maybe that large private institutions are starting to do some investing.

But the reality is, Rickover was right, Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right. An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.

natmaka8• 11 months ago

You can also put my SMR onto one location with one control room.

I fail to understand which of the challenges I described it may relieve.

The answer to generic defect is not to have a bunch of incompatible stuff with no commonality.

Having all brands of SMRs build interoperable parts is AFAIK beyond the most wild utopia. The very first step (convincing them to adopt the same architecture) is out of reach.

Yes, the NIMBY effect can kill literally anything, however it IMHO is way more powerful against nuclear than against solar and even wind energy, and as those last expand more and more people will understand that they don't have, in order to obtain electricity, to accept any nuclear-induced risk.

The PWR is the problem

Which architecture seems more appropriate?

the US, has unusable regulation, and Europe has wildly all over the place regulation, the needed money is just almost impossible to happen.

This is indeed a real challenge, however it mainly is because of past nuclear incidents and accidents.

Alvin M. Weinberg was even more right

About the "Faustian bargain"?

An France did maybe the smart decision in their history when they embraced that philosophy. Sadly they only did so for 1-2 decades and then the next generation came in, was convinced that all those old people were idiots and now that the problem was solved for them they no longer had to pay attention to energy policy.

As a French I doubt so. Details: https://sites.google.com/view/electricitedefrance/messmer-pl...

talkingtab• 11 months ago

All I can think of is Microsoft === blue screen of death. Coming soon to your neighborhood.

panick21_4• 11 months ago

Fusion is dumb I don't understand why people care about it. Fission is save, has cheap inputs and the energy density is already absurdly high. Fusion adds 1000x the complexity for little gain.

LatteLazy• 11 months ago

Um…

This seems like a nothing burger.

Microsoft jointed an NGO that pushes nuclear that most people have never heard of.

If they were investing a 100bn in nuclear that would be interesting. Paying a small, cancellable membership fee is the opposite of “doubling down”

user____name• 11 months ago

Probably a good idea to have sufficient nuclear reactors on time, before we geoengineer stratospheric albedo and the output of renewables drops as a result.

Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy

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