This is going to make one hell of a "who, me?" story. Assuming the column still exists afterwards.

Like space flight it will be interesting to see how the private sector better achieve developing and deploying the technology

No, i think it's more interesting that the likes of Microsoft and Google are betting hard against the idea of a future grid supported by just renewables and storage. That they are so seriously considering having their own SMRs with all the regulatory headaches that entails, suggests that they are seriously worried that the national grids may have long-duration, severe, perhaps complete outages in the near future. On that worry I would agree with them.

Local power outages don't normally affect datacentres because they usually have their own substations connected to the national transmission system which rarely goes down except for dire emergencies.

I would have thought that datacentres are also pretty good at load-shaping. They can be told to scale back demand without affecting software (except for response times, etc) by suspending CPU cores, pausing processes or changing mainboard power budgets.

Microsoft's recent decision in ireland to colocate with an OCGT gas plant, I thought was more about making a bit of money on the balancing market, and maximising the use of their expensive grid transformer by being able to put it in 'full reverse' by powering their servers from auxiliary Diesel generators and simultaneously running the gas plant, to prop up the grid at times of dire need and juicy balancing prices.

But to put a nuke in would actually say they are preparing for the potential long-term/permanent downfall of the national grid, which is only likely to happen through war...

Now where did I put my cold war bunker

@cyberdemon

"But to put a nuke in would actually say they are preparing for the potential long-term/permanent downfall of the national grid, which is only likely to happen through war..."

Why war? I agree with your comments and renewables and the green madness is definitely a good reason to plan for energy supply failure. This is something plenty of us have been pointing out for a while but we were told about the unicorn free energy that never arrived and is as plausible as the perpetual motion machine. We dont need war to screw up our energy supplies, it is the direction we are going anyway.

But again this could be the private sector solving for the inefficiency of public sector. To make something that works and offer the excess to people who would prefer to have the lights on.

But to put a nuke in would actually say they are preparing for the potential long-term/permanent downfall of the national grid, which is only likely to happen through war...

Not just war, add terrorism, civil unrest to the poinbt of extreme violence. And given the climate change and severity and number of storms, etc. seems to be increasing. I can understand their fears about the grid. We've already seen a few attacks on the grid by those seeking to destroy it. I suspect that sea level rise is also a fear as many power plants are on the coasts are near large rivers,

Typically, nuclear reactors are truly operational islands wholly disconnected from the Internet. They are not easily hacked. Maybe Newcastle needs to research this before throwing this out as a risk. The major impediment to this technology is the initial cost. Just like any new technology, the economies of scale will not be there at first.

In the future nuclear waste will be used as fuel within fast neutron reactors. Nuclear waste will still exist, but it will be greatly reduced.

As far as safety. every new reactor has passive safety systems put in place which ensures that they can be easily shut down if there is a risk of meltdown.

Breeder reactors made similar promises for waste disposal for a relatively low-loss of output. In fact, Britain is one of the few countries to successfully build such an arrangement at Dounreay.

It didn't go commercial, for reasons.

And on a similar front, if a commercial generator can't make nuke pay without huge government subsidy; then how can a datacentre?

> It didn't go commercial, for reasons.

Reasons including the flip flopping of Margaret Thatcher.. Same reason we've barely got a railway left but have lots of motorways full of expensive, polluting, coffins on wheels.. And people moan on about the safety of nuclear power!

But yes, you're right, if they aren't useful for a private power utility, they're not going to be useful to a software company. Unless the software company just wants to do a bit of greenwashing, as mentioned in the webcast

But I would contest that the reason they're not useful is more to do with politics, fearmongering and overzealous regulation than anything technical.

"if a commercial generator can't make nuke pay without huge government subsidy; then how can a datacentre?"

Basically, SMRs, exactly because they are smaller and self-contained, presenting a smaller risk than a large plant, are (since a couple of years, and at least in the US) regulated differently than large plants. Since a large chunk of the cost of 'traditional' nuclear power station are due to over-regulation, I could see how it could work commercially to work SMRs over larger reactors

So why don't utility companies go for farms of SMRs then?

Also, nuclear reactors are fairly prone to suddenly tripping offline, due to extremely cautious failsafe systems, and I don't see why SMRs should be any different in that regard..

Used singly for a datacentre, they would need Diesel back-up, and a very long running tank for the time it takes to re-certify a reactor after it has tripped a safety system. But in a farm of a hundred or so, this could be handled easily without any major outage.

"Typically, nuclear reactors are truly operational islands wholly disconnected from the Internet. They are not easily hacked."

Sure not easily hackable. Ask Iran and the NSA. Nowadays people can blow up planes, satellites, or nuclear facilities with a few virus and exploits.

Fission chips?

is the process of producing the fuel for the reactors.

Fairly nasty business.

No one wants to see the sausages get made, but someone still has to make them.

Perhaps AI will provide the solar breakthrough we desperately need?

/s

> Perhaps AI will provide the solar breakthrough we desperately need?

"We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know that it was us, who scorched the sky.."

'The Matrix' wouldn't have been as exciting if the machines could have simply exterminated all the humans and built their own SMRs to power their datacentres, eh?

Edit: Someone obviously missed the /s on the end of your post. Next time use the Joke icon, for the left-ponders

Or, perhaps they disagreed with your claim about the 'nasty business' of making fuel rods. Care to enlighten us on that one? Does it involve oompa-loompas?

No, I've mentioned it before

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/containing/4608161

but people don't want to talk about what's behind the curtain. It is easier, and more tasteful, to talk about what is in front of us - cooling towers, shielded containment buildings, switching stations, etc - than it is to talk about the dirty part of society.

Unlike most people, and especially most people HERE, I've BEEN inside the dirty part of society. Ever been inside a chemical plant? I have. Ever been inside a paper mill? I have. Ever been on the mountainside of a logging site? I have. Ever visiting manufacturing plants and shipping ports? I have.

And that's what people DON'T want to talk about. Hell, the reality of our "recycling" is a hell of a lot uglier than we tell ourselves, but we put the blinders on and pat ourselves on the back on what a "great job!" we're doing for ourselves with our recycling materials. Then we see what really happens to our recycling in Bangladesh... O.O

Interesting post, but it misses the point that the vast, vast majority of the "low-level waste" that you talk about, is just stuff that is "potentially contaminated" so has to be classified as nuclear waste, even if it is not radioactive at all. The disposable plastic and paper overalls, gloves, overshoes that I had to wear when entering any controlled area, for example. These were packed into barrels and presumably buried somewhere.

On the other end of the scale, your other post mentions the site of the Trinity test, where we took a load of Plutonium and detonated it out in the open, causing incalculable orders of magnitude more contamination than any civil nuclear operation, not even Chernobyl would have come close to that. Yet the people of New Mexico have not turned into 'ghouls'..

We have daft rules like ALARA/ALARP that say anything that is classified as being part of the nuvlear industry must have emissions targets of zero, while the rest of industry gets away with murder, relatively speaking. Coal power plants chuck up vastly more radioactive material into the environment than the nuclear industry does. The site where I worked had a mass panic because some visiting scientist made a radioactive source out of a box of Gas lamp mantles (which are mildly radioactive) and they were far stronger than any of the sources the site was permitted to use, had to be shipped out at great expense and treated as intermediate level nuclear waste! These are mantles you can buy at a camping shop.

It really is insanity. The IAEA must be run by a mix of CND fifth columnists and Oil industry vested interests.

just don't let OVH build one given their recent "thermal event" activities.