Technology

AI seems perfect for renewables load balancing. Got extra power to burn because it is windy at night? Train your models

Cyberpunk dystopias weren't supposed to be guidelines dammit

The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn't mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they'll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.

If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468

To my layman's knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can't melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.

Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.

Growing from a broad research effort at U.S. universities and national laboratories, Kairos Power was founded to accelerate the development of an innovative nuclear technology ...

Kairos Power is focused on reducing technical risk through a novel approach to test iteration often lacking in the nuclear space. Our schedule is driven by the goal of a U.S. demonstration plant before 2030 and a rapid deployment thereafter. The challenge is great, but so too is the opportunity.

So basically academics finding people to fund a large scale lab experiment, they want to get working by 2030. It sounds like they sold Google on an idea (for funding) and now have to move their idea from the lab to the real world. It does sound safer than water cooled plants of old at least.

This is good news, relatively speaking.

SMR technology is one of the most promising pieces of technological development in the nuclear power space.

Standardized factory production and completely sealed, so refueling is only at the factory, never on-site. Their also, small, but scalable depending on the needs of each site.

I'm not sure of the design this company is using, but I'm assuming they're leveraging a fail safe reactor, as in, it requires properly running systems to generate fission, but if those systems fail, the fission process stops. There are no secondary systems that have to kick in, it's a simple as either it's running properly, or it can't run it all.

As opposed to systems like Chernobyl, or 3 Mile Island, that required separate active safety systems to guard against catastrophic failures. But if those failed, they're backups failed, etc., well, meltdown.

So um. What happens when the white supremacists attacking FEMA and electrical grids starts attacking these nuclear reactors?

Thank goodness we can now get a little nuclear waste with our cat pics.

CorpoNations.

Crazy how quickly we've gone from "Nuclear is a dead technology, it can't work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y'all have to use fossil fuels instead" to "We're building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing".

Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.

At last, we'll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don't kill everyone!

For some reason this doesn't feel like good news.