Google Plans Advanced Nuclear Reactor Project For Tennessee 61
Google, TVA, and Kairos Power are teaming up to power data centers with advanced nuclear energy through a collaboration in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The project aims to deliver 50 MW of nuclear energy by 2030. From a blog post: Today we announced the first deployment of Kairos Power's advanced nuclear reactor -- the Hermes 2 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee -- through a new power purchase agreement (PPA) between Kairos Power and Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Marking the first purchase of electricity from an advanced GEN IV reactor by a U.S. utility, this agreement will enable 50 megawatts (MW) of nuclear energy on TVA's grid that powers our data centers in Montgomery County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama.
Last October, we began a long-term collaboration with Kairos Power to unlock up to 500 MW of nuclear power for the U.S. electricity system through multiple deployments of their small modular reactor. With this next step, we are creating a three-party solution where energy customers, utilities, and technology developers work together to advance new technologies that can help meet the world's growing energy needs with reliable, affordable capacity.
Here's how it works: TVA will purchase electricity from Kairos Power's Hermes 2 plant, scheduled to begin operations in 2030. In this initial phase of the collaboration, we will procure clean energy attributes from the plant through TVA to help power our data centers in the region with locally sourced clean energy, every hour of every day.
Last October, we began a long-term collaboration with Kairos Power to unlock up to 500 MW of nuclear power for the U.S. electricity system through multiple deployments of their small modular reactor. With this next step, we are creating a three-party solution where energy customers, utilities, and technology developers work together to advance new technologies that can help meet the world's growing energy needs with reliable, affordable capacity.
Here's how it works: TVA will purchase electricity from Kairos Power's Hermes 2 plant, scheduled to begin operations in 2030. In this initial phase of the collaboration, we will procure clean energy attributes from the plant through TVA to help power our data centers in the region with locally sourced clean energy, every hour of every day.
I wonder (Score:3, Funny)
I wonder if anyone at Google Googled "How to build a nuclear power plant" to get this project started.
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I wonder if they got any of their project managers involved, and if they'll judge that the project hasn't turned a profit in 2 years so needs to be abandoned.
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It's an SMR - a Small Modular Reactor. A failed technology that has yet to see a single operational prototype.
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
China and Russia both have operational SMRs. That the west is slow to the game is not surprising in this day and age. Fortunately here in Canada work continues in spite of people like you.
Harriet Brooks will now be stored on the project site until assembly begins in early 2026. When operational, the TBM will bore and line the 3.4-kilometre-long Condenser Cooling Water tunnel—an essential element for bringing Canada’s first grid-scale small modular reactor online. [opg.com]
To support a fleet of SMRs, the DNNP team has worked to secure several long-lead items, including the reactor pressure vessel. As the SMR’s largest component, the vessel will contain the reactor core, coolant, and support structures. Measuring over 30 metres in length and over six metres in diameter, and weighing 550 tonnes, this is a positively massive piece of equipment. Meanwhile, the generator rotor—a key component of the turbine-generator system that converts heat from the reactor into electrical power—has been forged and is now undergoing pre-machining. It’s expected to arrive at the project site by summer 2027. [opg.com]
On budget and on schedule so far.
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the 3.4-kilometre-long Condenser Cooling Water tunnelâ"an essential element for bringing Canadaâ(TM)s first grid-scale small modular reactor online.
Wow, look, how small!
Yes yes, we all know small refers to the reactor vessel, but the very problem with nuclear power is that nothing is small. The capital costs are enormous. The maintenance costs are massive. More small reactors means more points of failure, and either the same amount of infrastructure or more given an amount of production, based on how many are placed on the same site. But if you gang many them up on a single site then you've lost any supposed benefits of small reactors, when having two
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though smallness also has many benefits which you avoided mentioning and I'm sure have no interest in hearing about
What kind of advantages? Being less fuel-efficient? Requiring special fuel? The point of my post is that there are no actual advantages.
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Small is less dangerous? Probably not
It's incredibly safe in any case. Like people who are afraid of flying, statistics simply won't convince them it is the safest way to travel regardless.
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and is already the most expensive way to generate power.
As soon as you consider capacity factor and thus required storage/backup/transmission of renewables, nuclear becomes much more competitive. Luddites always leave out these things. Ontarians pay around $0.14CAD/Kwh for their heavily nuclear oriented electricity. I'm lucky to be blessed with clean hydro and pay $0.09CAD, but 14 cents is not awful for such a premium product. It is a shit ton better than what they pay in most of the nuclear hating EU. Also keep in mind the lifetime of those high capital co
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As soon as you consider capacity factor and thus required storage/backup/transmission of renewables, nuclear becomes much more competitive.
Nuclear has much more down time than you like to pretend.
Luddites
You don't know what Luddites are. Stop using that word.
If you can plunk one of these down in the same sort of time, space, and LCOE as a gas turbine
1) You can not.
2) Plunking down has never been the problem, it has always been everything which comes after that, and you like to pretend otherwise so that you can have your jerk-off nuclear reactor fantasies.
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Nuclear has much more down time than you like to pretend.
Nuclear is a small enough club it is easy to have good stats.
https://world-nuclear.org/nucl... [world-nuclear.org]
There are outliers of course, as with most things, those edge cases people point to when they disagree with something, anything. Collectively the capacity factor of nuclear is quite exceptional.
You don't know what Luddites are. Stop using that word.
It's a colloquialism now. It fits.
1) You can not.
Not today. You really never should say never though. The SMRs at Darlington are going to get built, so prepare to ditch the there are none argument. Then we will see if they are
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It's a colloquialism now. It fits.
You're proud to be wrong. You're just as wrong about everything else in this discussion.
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I greatly suspect that like Gwehir and Amimojo you have leaned everything you know about nuclear power from Greenpeace. You shou
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Canadians are pretty good at sensing FUD from any side.
Canadians are just Americans where some of them are aggressive about speaking French. Same shit, colder sack. Same being built on stolen land.
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Canadians are pretty good at sensing FUD from any side.
Canadians are just Americans where some of them are aggressive about speaking French. Same shit, colder sack. Same being built on stolen land.
I'd definitely rather we be more American than European, but that is just me. I'm old enough it no longer matters. Kids can have whatever shithole world they want, I don't care, I won't be here.
Also pretty much all habitable land everywhere was previously occupied by someone else. In the old world they killed the previous population off. In the new world we just made them second class citizens. I'm not unsympathetic, but this is for another discussion. Obviously we will never agree on the nuclear s
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It's an SMR - a Small Modular Reactor. A failed technology that has yet to see a single operational prototype.
Every technology is a failure until it isn't. But no, there are a number of SMRs [powermag.com] out there that are in operation, just none in the U.S., AFAIK.
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I wonder why they went small? SONGS (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) was 2GW. Its shut down now, but a decent nuclear power plant is in the gigawatts not megawatts range.
I assume that smaller plants are probably safer and easier to get approved in places where people actually live. Also probably cheaper to build per megawatt, and certainly cheaper and faster to build in an absolute sense, so able to provide a return on their investment sooner. Whether those were the actual reasons or not, I have no idea.
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I assume that smaller plants are probably safer and easier to get approved in places where people actually live.
It is for sure an advantage that Canada is building its first SMRs on an already licensed nuclear site alongside existing reactors. Not just for the existing intertie and rights of way but also it probably cut several years of lawfare by luddite groups out of the approval process.
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Maybe. It's a Gen IV reactor, so very old tech with many known problems. They are claiming some unspecified "advanced" features. It's rather small by reactor standards too, at 500MW (doesn't say if that is thermal or electrical).
Very likely it amounts to nothing.
Surely you are not serious (Re:I wonder) (Score:2, Insightful)
I read that at 50 MW, fifty megawatts, from this first reactor by 2030. The 500, five hundred, megawatts was the total Google wants from Kairos by 2035.
I doubt they'd be building the same kind of "very old technology with many known problems" that was seen in the 1960s before Nixon and Carter effectively killed any means for new deployments until recently. Since then there's been developments in materials using operating prototypes that used electric heaters and non-fissile stand-ins for fuel such as depl
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Apparently even smaller at 50MW. The only reactors to ever run in this power range were experimental ones (the THTR-70, for example, which turned out to be a costly ruin after a while, like all THTRs so far) or ship-based ones that run under vastly different operational and economic conditions.
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Yeah, it's a speculative investment, not a serious plan to produce large quantities of power. It's already obsolete.
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Indeed.
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perhaps they can get some tax incentives or subsidies for investing in "greenish power" and have a statement to make when accused of costing the consumer higher prices for the datacenter usages.
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Likely. Or this is a show done to try to impress the orange ape. Although that one is in love with coal and oil, I hear.
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They have Gemini for that now. Just instruct an AI agent "build me a nuclear power plant" and wait.
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They aren't building a nuclear power plant. They are buying a small modular reactor. Gemini has an answer for this: "While the concept of small modular reactors (SMRs) is gaining traction, they are not yet commercially available for purchase in the same way that other energy technologies are. "
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zing
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Sure.
But maybe they started with the idea of building a power plant and ended up with the current plan.
That's often how things work...you start with one idea and research it and end up doing something else.
Sorry this line of humor was lost on you.
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That's how research works. Google isn't doing research here, they are buying a product from a company who hasn't released it yet. What they did was start with the idea of needing green power and then said, "How can we virtue signal while scumming power from actual normal power sources while promising falsehoods that will be unlikely to materialise."
When deciding which technology to adopt for a current problem you never land on the most expensive and as yet unrealised tech. Not if you actually want to solve
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if anyone at Google Googled "How to build a nuclear power plant" to get this project started.
It's worse than that. The question they should pose is "Can I purchase a small modular reactor" which is what they are talking about. Helpfully Gemini provides the following response: "While the concept of small modular reactors (SMRs) is gaining traction, they are not yet commercially available for purchase in the same way that other energy technologies are."
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Also note that "gained traction" means it is being talked and hallucinated about, not that the tech has become viable.
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Not hallucinated. The concept is indeed gaining traction, e.g. Google just invested in it.
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They relied on their AI summary instead.
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They probably asked their "AI" and it started to hallucinate hard.
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Thanks for the joke, but I think the target had more potential... Something about just what the google needs to restore their reputation for not being evil?
5 years from now .... (Score:5, Funny)
https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
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They are investing in SMRs. This won't be killed by Google, this will be killed by the reality of all SMR projects so far failing spectacularly.
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Indeed. The reality is that SMRs have been investigated time and again over the last 80 years or so. That problems with the idea were always glaringly obvious and these problems have not been solved.
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Thank goodness for "morons". No, not you though.
You are like the global cooling clowns with your conflation of ideas.
There are obvious economic reasons why SMRs will never make sense.
What are they?
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What are they?
You weren't paying attention the last 23405734027 times I explained, why waste my time on you now? The short short answer is per-unit costs and security. If you want more, see if you can find my zillions of old posts on this subject which I know you have had the opportunity to read because you were in many of the conversations where I wrote them.
No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs. It's not something I've ever paid much attention to. If you don't want to explain, don't explain, no need to be touchy about it.
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No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs.
Are you for real? This is either a direct lie or you need to have your head examined.
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No, I don't recall any other discussions about SMRs.
Are you for real? This is either a direct lie or you need to have your head examined.
Why are you such an asshole?
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Why are you such an asshole?
Why are you playing stupid?
Or are you not playing?
Here's an example of a story about SMRs you participated in:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
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The asshole here is YOU. I get that you do not like to be called out for your crap. I will do it anyways.
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What are they?
You weren't paying attention the last 23405734027 times I explained, why waste my time on you now? The short short answer is per-unit costs and security. If you want more, see if you can find my zillions of old posts on this subject which I know you have had the opportunity to read because you were in many of the conversations where I wrote them.
Security? Data centers already have to do that. So in that context, it's almost a no-op.
And per-unit costs are an economy of scale problem. Yeah, the first few units cost a lot. But as you build more of them with the same design, the cost of replicating that design goes down. So this one basically amounts to "SMRs can't be successful because they aren't successful." It's effectively begging the question, just with some layers of abstraction involved.
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SMRs will work, that's not the issue. The entire concept has failed on an economic level. You don't succeed by taking a hyper expensive technology and scaling it down. Power generation works the exact opposite way.
Also the point is the one you just made. The technology does not exist TODAY. Yet Google bought and paid for it. It's like you paying a biotech company who promised to resurrect a unicorn because you wanted a unicorn. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But you won't have a unicorn for any foreseeab
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https://killedbygoogle.com/ [killedbygoogle.com]
Let's just hope that it's only the reactor that gets killed, and not the people who are within a several-mile radius when it "dies".
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Sadly that site hasn't been updated in months, and even before then it wasn't keeping up with all the things Google killed.
Do they have a working prototype? No? (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing else needs to be said about this collective hallucination.
Bingo! (Score:2)
advanced, unlock, three-party solution, collaboration, procure...
BINGO!
What do I win besides incredulity?
No Such Thing as a Nuclear Accident (Score:1)
Cough it up, grandchildren (Score:1)