Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power

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Based on the headline I thought that this was an enormous capital commitment for an enormous generating capacity, but the deal is with a company called Kairos that is developing small modular reactors with 75 megawatts of electrical output each [1]. 7 reactors of this type, collectively, would supply 525 megawatts (less than half of a typical new commercial power reactor like the AP1000, HPR1000, EPR, or APR1400).<p>Kairos is in a pretty early stage. They started building a test reactor this summer, scheduled for completion by 2027:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;ne&#x2F;articles&#x2F;kairos-power-starts-construction-hermes-reactor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;ne&#x2F;articles&#x2F;kairos-power-starts-const...</a><p>EDIT: Statement from the official Google announcement linked by xnx below [2]:<p><i>Today, we’re building on these efforts by signing the world’s first corporate agreement to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs) to be developed by Kairos Power. The initial phase of work is intended to bring Kairos Power’s first SMR online quickly and safely by 2030, followed by additional reactor deployments through 2035. Overall, this deal will enable up to 500 MW of new 24&#x2F;7 carbon-free power to U.S. electricity grids and help more communities benefit from clean and affordable nuclear power.</i><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kairospower.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kairospower.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41841108">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41841108</a>

It’s not real funding, it’s a power purchase agreement from something that may never be built! No different from Microsoft’s previous fusion power purchase agreement. The Goog may as well announce they’ve reserved office space in a building to be built on Proxima Centauri B.<p>Just tech virtue signalling: Google&#x2F;Microsoft trade the impression that they’re relevant leaders for some legitimacy for a blue sky startup.

Kairos is using FLiBe coolant with TRISO solid fuel.<p>While this has some advantages (low pressure, no fission products in the FLiBe), it also some issues.<p>First, the fuel cycle costs are higher than a LWR. The fuel is dispersed as small encapsulated grains in graphite spheres. Manufacturing the fuel is more expensive, I believe the enrichment needed is higher, and the volume of the spent fuel is considerably larger. All that graphite needs to be disposed of along with the spent fuel.<p>Second, FLiBe require isotopically separated lithium. Li-6 has a ruinously high thermal neutron absorption cross section so it must be rigorously excluded. It also produces tritium when it absorbs neutrons, which would permeate through the reactor and beyond. But there are no large scale lithium isotope separation plants in operation, and the technology that was used for this in the Cold War (to make Li-6 for H-bombs) has been shut down and cannot be restarted because of mercury pollution (liquid mercury is an inherent part of the process and much escaped down drains at Oak Ridge.)<p>Kairos has announced operation of a FLiBe purification plant, which sounds promisingly like an isotope separation plant, but it appears it&#x27;s only a plant for removing other impurities (oxygen, sulfur, iron, etc.) from FLiBe. Isotopically pure Li-7 fluoride would be an input to this plant.<p>Third, FLiBe is about 11% beryllium. Annual world production of beryllium is just a few hundred tons. There&#x27;s a limit to how much FLiBe could be made for these reactors (or for fusion reactors, for that matter.)

God I&#x27;m so conflicted.<p>On the one hand, I&#x27;m glad we&#x27;re <i>finally</i> slowly letting go of the BigOil(tm) propaganda against nuclear. The fact that we&#x27;re still burning dead dinosaurs to power our society and relying on windmills is insane to me.<p>On the other, a nuclear <i>startup</i>, presumably some VC-backed monstrosity who will only care about making the most money (aka cutting every conceivable corner there is to cut) possible, sounds like a recipe for fucking disaster just waiting to happen sooner rather than later.

I love the &#x27;ideally&#x27; in the dry cask storage article...<p>&quot;Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel.&quot;<p>Also guessing that article is woefully out of date since it mentions:<p>&quot;The NRC estimated that many of the nuclear power plants in the United States will be out of room in their spent fuel pools by 2015, most likely requiring the use of temporary storage of some kind&quot;

Official post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;outreach-initiatives&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;google-kairos-power-nuclear-energy-agreement&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;outreach-initiatives&#x2F;sustainability&#x2F;goog...</a>

Finally, 24 years in, it’s really starting to FEEL like a new century.

Related:<p><i>Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41601443">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41601443</a>

We should have learned by now that as soon as things go south, be it a radioactive leak or worse, it won&#x27;t be any company which will cover the costs related to solving the caused problem. It will be the taxpayer.

The selling point of modular reactors is that they are built on a production line and that the next one is identical to the one before. But why not apply this principle to large reactors? After all there are plenty of reactors that operate reliably so why not just dust off the drawings and build another one just like the one before?

Can someone more informed than me comment — is it me, or does it seem that Situational Awareness essay rings more and more true?

Never in my life I would have think I would once read &#x27;nuclear energy&#x27; and &#x27;startup&#x27; in the same sentence.<p>First line of the article is about how the company is trying to avoid spiraling costs. Yeah, seems like a great idea with nuclear energy.<p>So where&#x27;s going to be the next Chernobyl? I read they have clearance to build one in Tennessee.

I feel like the article is not accurate and understandable to me, can somebody please explain me the background?

Man, this wide scale deployment of LLMs is gonna wreck the environment. Why do we even need this?

&quot;startup&quot; + &quot;nuclear&quot;, what could go wrong

A step towards realignment with their OG motto. Good.

Sadly, read the fine print before applauding too hard

Reuters article, no paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;artificial-intelligence&#x2F;google-buy-power-small-modular-nuclear-reactor-company-kairos-ai-needs-2024-10-14&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reuters.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;artificial-intelligence&#x2F;g...</a><p>CNBC article, no paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;google-inks-deal-with-nuclear-company-as-data-center-power-demand-surges.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cnbc.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;10&#x2F;14&#x2F;google-inks-deal-with-nuclea...</a><p>No battery farm can protect a solar&#x2F;wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have battery backup sufficient for time T and the weather doesn&#x27;t cooperate for time T+1, you&#x27;re in trouble.<p>Even a day or two of battery backup eliminates the cost advantage of solar&#x2F;wind. Battery backup postpones the &quot;range anxiety deadline&quot; but cannot remove it. Fundamentally, solar and wind are not baseload power solutions. They are intermittent and unreliable.<p>Nuclear fission is the only clean baseload power source that can be widely adopted (cf. hydro). After 70 years of working with fission reactors, we know how to build and operate them at 95%+ efficiency (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;ne&#x2F;articles&#x2F;what-generation-capacity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.energy.gov&#x2F;ne&#x2F;articles&#x2F;what-generation-capacity</a>). Vogtle 3 and 4 have been operating at 100%.<p>Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries.<p>Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (probably 80 years, maybe more). The unenriched uranium fuel is very cheap (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cameco.com&#x2F;invest&#x2F;markets&#x2F;uranium-price" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cameco.com&#x2F;invest&#x2F;markets&#x2F;uranium-price</a>), perhaps 5% of the cost of running the plant.<p>This is in stark contrast to natural gas, where the plant is less expensive to build, but then fuel costs rapidly accumulate. The fossil fuel is the dominant cost of running the plant. And natural gas is a poor choice if greenhouse emissions matter.<p>Google is funding construction of 7 nuclear reactors. Microsoft is paying $100&#x2F;MWh for 20 years to restart an 819 MW reactor at Three Mile Island. Sam Altman owns a stake in Oklo, a small modular reactor company. Bill Gates owns a stake in his TerraPower nuclear reactor company. Amazon recently purchased a &quot;nuclear adjacent&quot; data center from Talen Energy. Oracle announced that it is designing data centers with small modular nuclear reactors. As for Meta, see Yann LeCun&#x27;s unambiguous comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41621097">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41621097</a><p>In China, 5 reactors are being built every year. 11 more were recently announced. The United Arab Emirates (land of oil and sun) now gets 25% of its grid power from the Barakah nuclear power plant (four 1.4 GW reactors, a total of 5.6 GW).<p>Nuclear fission will play an important role in the future of grid energy, along with solar and wind. Many people (e.g., Germany) still fear it. Often these people are afraid of nuclear waste, despite it being extremely tiny and safely contained (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dry_cask_storage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dry_cask_storage</a>). Education will fix this.<p>Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

Typical.<p>Should not even be allowed to finance nuclear reactors before the long term storage facilities and recycling facilities

Good.

How would google insure this reactor?

Small nuclear plants have been tried and failed multiple times.

2010 - don&#x27;t be evil<p>2013 - uhhhhhh never mind!<p>2024 - be evil!

I&#x27;d think that just pooling the money from multiple consumers into large AP1000 power plants buildouts would be cheaper.<p>So far economies of vertical scaling mostly led to cheaper energy than more smaller units.<p>Ideally youd have one company with a lot of skilled labor building NPPs all the time instead of only every few decades, because that means experienced workers change jobs&#x2F;retire, supply chains cease to exist and this leads to cost and time overruns.<p>Still great to see finally more money being invested into this limitless technology (nuclear fission)

SMRs ain&#x27;t it [1]. The LCOE of nuclear is the worst of any power geneartion method. The failure modes are catastrophic. Chernobyl has an absolute exclusion deal ~40 years later of 1000 square miles (literally). Fukushima&#x27;s clean up costs will approach $1 trillion [2] and take likely over a century. These get hand-waved away as irrelevant outliers.<p>The idea that SMRs are safer is yet to be proven. SMRs have a scaling issue in that a larger reactor is simply more efficient.<p>Solar currently can produce about 1000 Watts per square meter (likely 200-400 in practice) so 500MW of power is going to be 1-1.5 square kilometers of solar panels. You can say it&#x27;s varies in effectiveness geographically. That&#x27;s true. But you can build your data centers pretty much anywhere. The Sun Belt, California or Colorado spring to mind [3].<p>Data centers just don&#x27;t need a base load. You can simply not run them when there isn&#x27;t sufficient power. Google already does. Its data center in Finland basically shuts down when it gets too hot. It&#x27;s otherwise cooled by the sea. This was deemed to be more efficient than having active cooling infrastructure.<p>So 500MW of power is what? 4B kWh&#x2F;year? In California, one benchmark I found was about 10kWh&#x2F;year per square foot. That&#x27;s ~4 square kilometers as a very conservative estimate.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ucsusa.org&#x2F;edwin-lyman&#x2F;five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ucsusa.org&#x2F;edwin-lyman&#x2F;five-things-the-nuclear-...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;16&#x2F;fukushimas-final-costs-...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo.ne.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;stats&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;201_solar_leadership.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;neo.ne.gov&#x2F;programs&#x2F;stats&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;201_solar_leadership.p...</a>

The typical reaction is I think supported by an efficient markets pov - in other words this is dumb, we know it’s dumb, but market failures make it look to the owners of capital that it’s a good investment<p>1. There is too much money in the world for the investments (Massive QE post 2008 and post covid). Hence people with money want returns on tokens that say 10 dollars in the front instead of say 5 dollars<p>2. The externalities of nuclear power are not properly priced in (see Chernobyl)<p>3. The price of tax compared to services received for wealthy is again out of whack and so any investment looks good because the whole chain is not paying enough tax<p>All in all, I believe in efficient markets and price mechanisms - I just also believe people with power and influence bend the markets to their own needs and guess what they stop being efficient - hence the need for strong governments (not strongman governments)

Genuine question: How will the US put the cat back in the bag?<p>AI even if stuck to GPT 4~ levels has the potential to be usable in industries and outcompeted non AI users, as such, how can the US tell people that they shouldn&#x27;t get nuclear power plants?<p>We&#x27;ll sell you products and services that utilize AI and you are not allowed to get it yourself, is that the new model? It&#x27;s no secret (I think?) that the US was behind many of the nuclear scare movements such as the green party in Germany as to avoid nuclear proliferation, for its own interests.<p>But if nuclear becomes required, and we are decades away from nuclear fusion...? what is the solution here? I&#x27;m genuinely curious.