Comment by 6r17 9 hours ago
Let's be honest it's one of the smartest and most useful place anyone could be investing - it's literally is whatever happens a way to contribute to mankind - even if it's just so that FB servers are off-grid ; it's still a huge win, I just hope Mark realize he has much more potential than what he is doing rn
>We know how to build nuclear, we don't do it because its too expensive.
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.
Building nuclear power stations includes a lot of labor-intensive hard to automate tasks like construction. Baumol's cost disease means it's getting even more expensive: rising general productivity leads to higher wages and higher costs in fields that cannot increase productivity as much as the general economic growth. That's why it's also still cheaper in countries with access to low-cost labor.
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.
For the last two years more than 90% of new power generation capacity added globally was renewable. Est 95% in 2025. So no, new carbon sources are not competitive.
Highly misleading stat. That's referring to capacity expansion, not new construction.
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.
What's wrong with steam?
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)
> Nuclear is expensive even after the reactor is build.
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.
There's the "we forgot" hypothesis, but I think a more realistic hypothesis is the "we got too rich" hypothesis.
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.
Since you say ALARA made things expensive, maybe you can tell me how you foresee cheaper designs without it?
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!
Are there targeted investment vehicles for the general public, like an ETF?
Mark is doing much more than should already, and not the good kind, no at all!
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.
They're just purchasing power from existing nuke plants. All this is doing is making a formerly publicly available resource private. This will drive up energy prices for everyone else. These datacenters need to build their own generation. When people talk about how important it is that the US lead innovation in AI what they're really saying is how important it is for their quarterly results
> Our agreement with TerraPower will provide funding that supports the development of two new Natrium® units capable of generating up to 690 MW of firm power with delivery as early as 2032.
> 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.
If history repeats itself ... tax payers will be fitting the bill. Ohio has shown to be corrupt when it comes to their Nuclear infrastructure. [0] High confident that politicians are lining up behind the scenes to get their slice of the pie.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
Well, private investment is a great way to avoid subsidy nonsense.
You know that there's no actual private investment in nuclear in the US.
The nuclear industry is indemnified by the taxpayers. Without thar insurance backstop, there would be no nuclear energy industry.
The weasel wording is strong here. That's like me saying that buying a hamburger will help advance the science of hamburger-making. I'm just trading money for hamburgers. They're trying to put a shiny coat of paint on the ugly fact that they're buying up MWh, reducing the supply of existing power for the rest of us, and burning it to desperately try to convince investors that AGI is right around the corner so that the circular funding musical chairs doesn't stop.
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.
Well in a way they are building their own generation by paying elevated prices for nuclear to keep it running, as most nuclear will be shutting off pretty soon due to cheaper alternatives.
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.
> Electricity generation is getting cheaper all the time, transmission and generation are staying the same or getting more expensive
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.
Oops, that's a typo, should be transmission and *distrbution
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.
>Unlocking Up to 6.6 GW
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.
I don't really get the antagonism with these ersatz concerns. when FB builds its own datacenters, or it's own chips & racks, or it's own algorithms absolutely no one is saying "well there's no profit motive to build a completely custom server chassis" or "oh no, theyre taking publicly available math and making it private"
We in Ohio don't need more nuclear. The costs for maintaining what we have is already falling behind solar and wind (including batteries). Then there is the ecological costs that rarely get factored in.
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
The promise of small nuclear reactors, modular reactors, thorium or whatever else has really failed to materialize at the same time that solar and battery has just leapfrogged the entire field. Nuclear has some big advantages, but it's still mired in humongous upfront costs and the intractable issue of nuclear waste. And I think we're also about to see an explosion in enhanced geothermal. The good kind of explosion.
Well, because it means that other energy generation sources like oil, gas, and coal aren't being used there instead. Since they cause far, far more harm than nuclear waste does, it's a net win.
The same is true for solar and wind energy but without nuclear water. She cause far less harm than nuclear waste, even bigger win.
Our main problem isn’t energy production it‘s storage and quick reaction to consumption spikes. Nuclear energy doesn’t help with that.
the waste isn't a win, of course, but is a downside of a tradeoff that is massively weighted to the upsides for society -- that is (otherwise) completely clean always-on high capacity energy production.
We understand very well how to safely handle nuclear waste and make it a very (very) low risk downside.
looking backwards in the supply chain for other externalities is a good point, but I'm not sure any energy production method is exempt from this?
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.
The progress on 'nuclear' is so slow, that the same investment in Batterie and renewable would actually help a lot more around the globe.
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.