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Power Bitcoin The Almighty Buck

Could Bitcoin Mining Really Provide Crucial Demand For Nuclear Power? (gizmodo.com) 154

Posted by EditorDavid from the power-plays dept.
Gizmodo takes a hard look at a "growing sense of excitement" about collaboration between bitcoin-mining operations and nuclear power plants (which are now plagued by high operating costs compared to renewables as well as natural gas): Of the three partnerships between bitcoin companies and nuclear energy that the Wall Street Journal mentioned, two involve bitcoin miners partnering with existing nuclear sources to power their operations... These are not companies investing in the future, but rather companies searching for anything that will help keep the profits flowing using existing power plants. It's pretty safe to say that some cash-strapped owners of nuclear plants will be using mining partnerships not to make any technological strides, but rather to simply keep the old plants operating.

"The plants themselves are pretty well-run, and they know what they're doing," said Alex Gilbert, a project manager at the think tank Nuclear Innovation Alliance. "It really is a matter of the economics. There's a certain point where you're definitely unprofitable, and you're going to be likely to close because you're not getting enough money in power markets. But if a bitcoin operation takes 10 to 15 to 30 percent of your power at a reasonable price, that tips you into profitability." This profitability means the plants can stay open, giving miners a little carbon-free energy as a treat while keeping the U.S.'s biggest source of zero-emissions power operational. This is especially a good idea while we wait for more renewables — and policies that favor them — to come online, in what could be the first real-world proof bitcoin is doing some societal good instead of being a waste of energy and resources....

A few small-to-medium reactors should be ready for licensing in a few years and some over the next decade, he said, helped along by private and federal funding. To actually get to a point where the kinds of smaller reactors could be developed that would be competitive with the (rapidly falling) price of renewables, Gilbert said, would take a significantly larger bump from private capital — as well as more customers. "Providing early demand for advance reactors, especially microreactors, that's how bitcoin can most help the nuclear sector," he said.... I'm not a technofuturist who dreams of a libertarian paradise, but I have to admit that there's kind of a cool idea here. If the bitcoin community really believes cryptocurrencies are the money of the future, let them be the first to invest in a budding technology that could be the energy of the future.

In the interim, however, they shouldn't be allowed to rest on their greenwashing laurels while continuing to churn out emissions as they wait for fast reactor technology to become feasible in 10 years. Government regulations are, of course, anathema to crypto true believers. But a mandate that any new mining facilities source power from nearby nuclear plants could go a long way toward cleaning up bitcoin's act and ensuring the carbon-free energy we desperately need stays on the grid while fancy fast reactors come online.
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Could Bitcoin Mining Really Provide Crucial Demand For Nuclear Power? More

Could Bitcoin Mining Really Provide Crucial Demand For Nuclear Power?

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  • No. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @08:04AM (#61877247) Homepage
    This is a stupid argument. If you have excess nuclear power you can shut down more fossil fuel plants. I thought we were supposed to have a big national grid where energy can be pushed where it is needed (except Texas, obviously). So why can't that be made to work?

    -Bitcoin: An energy suck looking for a reason.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Entrope ( 68843 )

      You're probably just jealous that you didn't think up the idea of digging holes in the ground, and then filling them in, to provide otherwise unmet demand for shovels and excavators. (/s)

      • That was how Roosevelt ended the depression. Pay people to dig ditches and pay people to fill up the ditches.

        • oooh, an interesting metaphor for WWII!

        • Entirely imaginary in the U.S. context (unless you meant WWII), people were actually paid to do culturally useful things, but very close to what the English did in Ireland during the Great Famine. They had men construct "famine roads" (or "hunger roads") [wlu.edu], roads to no where many of which still exist, because simply providing food to a starving family was unthinkable, back-breaking forced labor had to be extracted to, otherwise "moral hazard" or something.

        • there was some make work, but there was a *ton* of infrastructure spending. The reason our infrastructure is 80 years old (and falling apart) is that it was built by Roosevelt.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suss ( 158993 )

      Could turining on all the taps and just letting the water flow all over the place increase "crucial" demand for more water? -- slashdot, we're just asking questions.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      The Wookie defense is strong. Clearly bitcoin miners are only too happy to buy nuclear power directly for more than they would pay buying it from the grid the regular way, which keeps nukes online even though they're more expensive than renewables. Obvious, right?

      • If they can get long term contracts at stable prices, yes. Add to that placing the mining equipment adjacent to the plant to effectively eliminate transmission fees and it starts making more sense.

    • Re:No. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @10:32AM (#61877497) Homepage Journal

      If you have a heavily interconnected grid then prices will go down as renewables join it, and nuclear will suffer because it can't quickly vary output to match demand and availability.

      This half baked plan aims to solve that by using the "excess" energy that would normal force prices down to levels where, even with the massive subsidies, nuclear is not profitable. If you are going to do that you might as well do something useful with the energy instead of mining crypto, and it's only a short term solution anyway because it will just encourage more renewable energy until the original problem comes back.

      • Good point that nuclear can't ramp up or down in a timely fashion, but I would rather that extra energy be used to pump water up hill or maybe give some wind back by turning those windmills faster :D

    • The only way it should make sense is if you use it for load leveling. Transmission is not free, especially long distance transmission, but the uneconomical hours in the day are what makes it hard for nuclear.

      That said you would still be better off using renewables as the lower source when energy is readily available, so it is hard for me to understand why this would be a better deal. A PPA for 10% of your output at a market rate doesn’t do much for economical operation; it is just cash flow.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      The argument here is that Bitcioin miners will pay a premium for power because they are making so much profit. In the US, at least, nuclear power has never been profitable and the country has never been able to deal with the waste. For under utilized nuclear plants, this makes some sense. However crypto currency is not likely to support the fantasy of these new generation of reactors. It has been 50 years of practical experience with nuclear, and we know where they work and where they donâ(TM)t.

  • Like seriously NO! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Goatbot ( 7614062 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @08:15AM (#61877265)
    There must be a better commodity to produce from excess energy other than bits and bytes. Hydrogen, desalination, helium, FFS redesign the the city to actual use the HEAT rather than dumping it. Lots of great uses for it but also not much incentive for people holding certain purse strings.

    • Doesn't even produce bits and bytes. It flips them. The physical implications of that are why there is no such thing as "intellectual property".

      • Lovely. Layman lawyer. Now all we need is a Slashdot proctologist with their sandpaper and wire cutters.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You could use the excess energy for big projects like municipal air conditioning, or you could just use pricing to get customers to do the work for you. For example you might offer lower prices when energy is abundant if people allow you to cool their homes by an extra degree or two over the level set on their thermostat. That's also a good way to smooth out peak demand, because already cooled homes have a lot of thermal mass and won't turn on the AC until the peak is over.

      • Yeah but then we need to reverse course in selling electricity as a commodity. Often times the prices reflect nothing to do with costs to generate. Hell most providers have contracts that guarantee set percentage profits and that in itself removes the incentives to drop rates. I was all for smart meters and time of day pricing until it was implemented and in reality has nothing to do with time of day. It generates the same amount of money just using a different method.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It needs a proper plan, not just ad-hoc solutions like we have now. Industries set up to make use of excess energy, and idle when none is available. Businesses on-board with thermal storage, cool the office overnight instead of during the day.

          • Aside from foundries and smelters, every type of energy storage solution I have looked at has a minimum cost of $70/MWh— you need that much of a delta between on-peak and off-peak rates for it to work. Thermal ice storage, batteries, and a slew of other options included.

            This dynamic seems to reinforce the cost delta rather than eliminate it. (Utilities are a scam, but that is another discussion.)

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Much of the thermal storage is free. Just cool the office by an extra degree or two when energy is cheap overnight, keep the windows shut during the day so the warm air doesn't get in.

              • I’d suggest looking at real-world data on how well (poorly) that works. You need to stay in the comfort zone for the morning, so you only have a few degrees to play with. At best, you get about 0.65 BTU/SF.

      • Most homes have very little useable internal thermal mass— some tile and maybe a fireplace. A concrete basement would have more, if externally insulated, but that can create humidity l/condensation issues. Desalination, waste water treatment, and similar solutions that create time shifting opportunities all require excess capacity (and associated capital investment) to make working during low cost windows work, rather than operate as a continuous process.

  • Ethereum is moving to proof of stake in the next 6 to 9 months by all reliable accounts. Expect Bitcoin to follow within a year max. Anybody who thinks Nuclear can go up within a 2 year window is either retarded or lying to themselves.

    • Re: It could but it won't (Score:4, Insightful)

      by IdanceNmyCar ( 7335658 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @08:54AM (#61877325)

      There is no way Bitcoin goes PoS. without any centralization, it basically comes down to a miner consensus and you honestly believe miners will agree to trash their business? No fucking way. It might fork and instantly go the way of something like Bitcoin gold. This is because any fork means coins dupplicate and the same miners who don't want it can drive it's value to nil simply from the sacks they are sitting on and relatively profit 2 fold in doing so.

      I know your an eth fanboy and I took support Ethereum but what you said is literally some of the stupidest shit I have heard from the like...

      • No, it doesn't come down to a miner consensus. Bitcoin can update protocol on a whim and it's tough shit for anybody who disagrees. Obviously there will be robust discussion first and possibility of a fork...

        Miners will be against moving to PoS because they have invested money in ASIC hardware. But... there will be other blockchains that need ASIC mining which they can simply move to.

        It seems to me that it makes sense for new blockchains to start with PoW and transition to PoS when they get some trac

        • I do agree about your latter point that modern chains start PoW and transition to PoS. I don't think ASIC will be a valid solotion for most modern chains as I believe adoption of NFTs and smart contracts is paramount for blockchain growth.

          I don't see the adoption for many of these "legacy" chains to adopt PoS and likewise I think the development of Bitcoin as a gold standard for block chains rest on this. Maybe I over simplified the transition towards PoS for a given chain but in general, even if the develo

        • You have absolutely no clue what you are talking about. Like, none.
    • Proof of stake literally is the rich getting richer whereas proof of work is the working class getting its due. No wonder hyper capitalist China is shutting down Bitcoin.
      • Hmm, I think you're misinformed. Anyone with balance will be able to join a staking pool. It's basically the same as interest on a savings account.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kremmy ( 793693 )
          That's exactly why people need to be a little more cautious with the whole idea. Cryptocurrencies aren't magically not susceptible to the kinds of economic crashes we see happen all the time. I think there's a strong possibility that moving to proof of stake will lead to crashes as hard as the cryptocurrency lending programs already do. There's just too much raw faith in the equation while ignoring the negative possibilities to an extreme, like any hyper-capitalist model.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Lol sure. The working class can much more easily buy a little POScoin than they can design and build ASICs and buy electricity at wholesale rates in Iceland or Quebec in order to efficiently mine POWcoin.

        Both provide return in proportion to expenditure. One has a much higher barrier to entry, and it ain't proof of stake.

    • I've been hearing for a couple of years now that they're going to move to prove of stake and it always seems to get pushed back... I'd like to see it happen since it might help with graphics card demand.

  • It looks as though Heinlein's "Crazy Years" are arriving a bit late. The description fits almost pefectly.

    https://www.quora.com/Do-you-t... [quora.com]

  • I don't think crypto fanatics claim their efforts are green. Pretty sure I missed that part of Satoshi's whitepaper. However the point was to disrupt the modern banking regime and these kind of disruptive movements piggy back for sure.

    People love to complain about the Chinese ban on cryptocurrency which is in part currency control but also largely because they still provide cheap, dirty energy. Forcing crypto miners in any and all countries to use carbon neutral energy sources is a worthy effort and a much

  • What a waste or resources that would be. China has the right idea: shut down bitcoin and any other scheme based on "mining".
    • China banning BTC mining helped BTC. Prior to that there was mumbling that BTC was vulnerable to a 51% attack, which of course was nonsense. I'm sure you know all about it since you're clever.
      • I would like to see it made illegal to mine for bitcoin, and pushed into the underground. Sites that store and trade bitcoin would be shut down. Good riddance! The underlying idea of bitcoin, for verifiable contracts, is a good one. The problem is the energy-intensive mining. We need to shut that down. We can debate the details, but the bottom line is that we need to find a way to reduce it - nearly put an end to it if possible - so that we are not wasting energy for the mere purpose of making money.
        • If it refuses to ever go proof of stake I will agree, but I don't think it will once the shit hits the fan.

  • Value? (Score:3)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @10:19AM (#61877465)

    What is the actual economic value of bitcoin mining? Uh, duh, ZERO. It doesn't actually produce anything other than perceived, probably delusional, independence from governments.

  • If you think about it, the advent and ubiquity of computers in the 1990s followed by the mass use of the internet followed by the tsunami of personal electronics has been the root cause of massive energy demands in the last 30 years. And while correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, the advent of global warming fear now rebranded as climate change correlates fairly well. Energy is essential to progress and cheap energy free from political meddling even more so. The more technology people want, t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kremmy ( 793693 )
      These days all of those devices draw less power to run constantly than just running a few lights in the house in the evening used to burn, 30 years ago.

  • So we're talking about validating transactions for virtual currencies using an algorithm. That algorithm is designed so that each transaction will require a little more time or computational power or both. These increasing demands can be viewed as increasing demands for electrical power, or for resources to build more efficient processors for the algorithm or both. So it's a "hungry" algorithm and the more virtual currency transaction that are made, the more the algorithm eats. And it seems like the big

  • The worst application for any clean baseload! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Sunday October 10, 2021 @11:56AM (#61877671)

    If you have a clean energy source, especially a baseload source, apply it to retiring fossil capacity, not keeping the ransomware industry going. At times when your baseload source produces more energy than the grid consumes, desalinating some seawater is a much worthier application.

    • FYI you can desalinate water just using the waste heat from the condensers in the 2nd transfer loop of any nuke plant under any load. Same thing can be done with the main transfer loop of a coal or gas plant.

      Normally that heat is just dumped into the local heat sink, sea, lake, air and lost.

      Using an adapted OTEC [wikipedia.org] system you could even co-generate some extra electricity along with the distilled water.

      We already have the technologies needed to produce all the energy and fresh water we need. We just need to b

  • Dude, if all you need is someone to waste a ton of electricity, just legalize it and have people grow indoor.

  • It would be nicer if we had been rolling out and refining nuclear power to handle the energy needs of human civilization rather than wait until massive automated systems became that much of a drain.

    • It would be nicer if we had been rolling out and refining nuclear power to handle the energy needs of human civilization rather than wait until massive automated systems became that much of a drain.

      I still can't understand how so much energy is expended just shunting data about. Computer-driven businesses such as Google consume vast amounts of power. Amazon at least supplies physical goods.

      I would be very interested in a study of a person's energy usage, that includes the use of online services. Maybe I am not such a frugal energy user, if my Google searches cost so much in energy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kremmy ( 793693 )
        Those studies are bound to be incredibly misleading. They'll likely overlook the fact that everything used in the home has become vastly more energy efficient over the years. It took a lot more power to light our homes even 20 years ago. 10 years before that, 20? I grew up with enough old school electronics, *felt* the waste heat off of them. Vacuum tube electronics were running blistering hot to the touch. They burned a lot of current. Home usage is probably not even a blip anymore.

  • Really, did these cryptokooks stop and think for even one second how they are going to aquire the reactors, the fuel for the reactors, and the security to guard the fuel from people who would slice their heads off without a second thought to get the dirty bonb goodies inside?

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