The whole plan has only one minor flaw: It’ll never work. Building a nuclear power plant never was, never is and never will be economical. The current boom in nuclear grandiose announcements is nothing but a smokescreen. The purpose is to delay the adoption of renewable energy with lofty promises that will never come to fruition. Then we’d be forced to keep using fossil fuels, which is the end goal.
Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.
Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.
The NRC approved the design, so now they can start building it. That is still a looong way off from having a working reactor. And all those companies are way behind their originally planned schedules. Which is my whole point. I’m not saying they might not get this stuff to work some day. I’m saying that it will take way too long to make any contribution to fighting climate change. We need to decarbonise now and and we have the technology to do it now.
That’s got nothing to do with Microsoft though. Their reactor wouldn’t be used to power other people, only their own data centers.
They currently buy that from the grid, and they don’t really have any control over the source of that electricity generation. We should absolutely be pushing the power generators to go with renewables, but Microsoft isn’t a generator. They’re a customer like you or me.
They’re looking at moving to small reactors eventually because of the cost of buying from the grid, not for the environment.
That’s … actually pretty neat.
Makes a lot of sense given the amount of power needed to run a data centers like that. Definitely cleaner in the long run too.
They’ll still need backup power/generators but they’ll need a lot less of them and they’ll mostly be needed for the nuclear parts.
The whole plan has only one minor flaw: It’ll never work. Building a nuclear power plant never was, never is and never will be economical. The current boom in nuclear grandiose announcements is nothing but a smokescreen. The purpose is to delay the adoption of renewable energy with lofty promises that will never come to fruition. Then we’d be forced to keep using fossil fuels, which is the end goal.
You comment has one minor flaw.
Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.
Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.
The NRC approved the design, so now they can start building it. That is still a looong way off from having a working reactor. And all those companies are way behind their originally planned schedules. Which is my whole point. I’m not saying they might not get this stuff to work some day. I’m saying that it will take way too long to make any contribution to fighting climate change. We need to decarbonise now and and we have the technology to do it now.
That’s got nothing to do with Microsoft though. Their reactor wouldn’t be used to power other people, only their own data centers.
They currently buy that from the grid, and they don’t really have any control over the source of that electricity generation. We should absolutely be pushing the power generators to go with renewables, but Microsoft isn’t a generator. They’re a customer like you or me.
They’re looking at moving to small reactors eventually because of the cost of buying from the grid, not for the environment.
It would still be far cheaper to deploy the same kind of capacity in renewables. Whoever came up with this brilliant plan can’t do basic math.