The AI data centres need the electricity when they're built*, though. Not in 10-20 years when the nuclear power station opens.

* We know they're not getting built...

global industrial giants like Hitachi and Toshiba making "strategic buyouts" of British atomic businesses.

The old, old story.

Well, Toshiba did us a favour by taking Westinghouse off our hands a few years back, didn't they? Otherwise it would have been the UK taxpayer picking up the $9bn tab for US losses.

Fusion - still only a decade away?

Yes - and it [1]always will be

That said, [2]"aneutronic" fusion could be interesting, but it requires much higher energies (pressure, temperature) than regular D-T fusion

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2026/01/07/new_carbon_capture_tech/#c_5207021

[2] http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2022/ph241/ruiz2/

Too late to edit, but the link above talks about temperatures "in excess" of 300 million degrees C (K); other sources say 1-5 billion Kelvin.

At those temperatures, matter glows in the gamma ray spectrum due to its sheer temperature, and it glows obscenely bright. So while you'd have no nasty neutrons, you'd have a LOT of gamma. And you'd need to somehow get it up to that temperature (and keep it away from the walls of your vacuum vessel) before fusion can start.

Forty years ago fusion power was thirty years off. It might just come through in my lifetime.

I don't think so - it's just too infeasible. As I said before, Deuterium-Tritium fusion is possible but makes everything around it radioactive due to its neutron emissions, while aneutronic fusion is totally infeasible due to the even-more-mind-boggling temperatures required.

Frankly, fusion is a distraction from R&D into better fission designs.

el Reg said: "Though this was disputed by the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ), which issued a report last year estimating that it would cost less to power a 120 MW datacenter with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy."

It was a 120MW data centre with an 80 MW gas turbine. In other words, it was mostly gas. And the wind was from offshore wind farms which were constrained by lack of transmission lines, which meant that the wind power couldn't get to the data centre anyway.

In other words, it was greenwashing gas turbines for data centres.

I have been listening to interviews of people involved in the nuclear industry, including many from the UK. The renewed interest in nuclear power in the UK started well before the AI bubble and was mainly driven by the perceived coming end of burning fossil fuels throughout the world.

These people identified two countries as being the most promising in terms of being a good place in which to develop new nuclear technology. These were the UK and Canada. Both had very similar nuclear regulatory systems which were receptive to evaluating designs on their individual merits from first principles. They call this results oriented regulation. That is, your design passes regulatory review if it results in a safe design.

They contrasted this with the regulatory system in the US where it is all about following the right steps in a very bureaucratic process and ticking the right boxes. They call this process oriented regulation. This makes it very hard to do anything new that is nuclear related in the US in terms of taking something from the drawing board to reality.

The UK and Canada also have very good national nuclear laboratories which will provide technical assistance and advice. Most of the technology required in a nuclear reactor is actually chemistry and metallurgy rather than nuclear physics, and this is actually the hard part that needs testing. The UK and Canada also have research reactors which can be used to test materials when required as well.

The result is that many of the innovations are taking place in the UK and Canada, even for companies which have headquarters elsewhere. Most have been working on this for at least a decade, long before the AI bubble. The foundations where laid at least 15 years ago.

I expect the nuclear companies will take the AI money while it lasts, but they aren't predicated on it. The actual business cases for nuclear rest heavily on environmental requirements to stop burning fossil fuels, and nuclear power is the only alternative that isn't limited by geography (like hydro electric is) and can deliver energy 24/7 on demand.

Most of these people in the nuclear start up industry see fusion power as being many decades away at best, and more than a few have doubts about whether it will ever be economically competitive with conventional nuclear fission.

Yes, we have strong expertise, but unfortunately the UK regulatory system is designed to stop almost anything being built quickly or at good value, and especially to screw over nuclear, with thousands of design changes required by the UK authorities on the Hinkley EPR, compared to the French version.

Separate to that, government have screwed up the electricity system by spending £400bn to date on renewables which are an appalling bedfellow for nuclear, and these are not only on long term index linked subsidies, but they get paid if they're used or not. That's not a promising environment for financing any other type of power plant. Decades of government idiocy have gifted us the most expensive electricity system in the world, and despite that it's insecure, and wholly reliant upon foreign technologies and upon imported power from France. There's plans to build a modified EPR at Sizewell (can't have any standardisation, you know), then another new design the Hualong One at Bradwell, then we have all this "lets have loads of SMRs" bollocks, and at the same time Milliband is continuing to carpet bomb the countryside with subsidised solar power plants that are the worst choice of any technology for the British grid, plus of course grand schemes for new wind farms.

The core problem here is that most energy ministers are fuckwits, they understand nothing about the energy industry, how the system works, what the technologies and costs are, and they don't want to learn anything about it. As a result we have humanities graduates like Milliband and so many before him who make persistently poor choices, and serially fail to create a coherent, long term affordable energy strategy. But why would they? Government makes policy, takes all the big decisions, but the overwhelming majority of the costs are simply heaped on bill payers, rather than being government spending.

this:-

"The core problem here is that most energy ministers are fuckwits,"

should be:-

"The core problem here is that all ministers are fuckwits,"

Especially from the Labor benches as most (AFAIK) have never had a real job in their life. School-> University (PPE) -> Researcher for MP -> PPC for a marginal seat -> PPC for a safe seat -> Government Minister.

PPE : Politics, Philosophy and Economics

PPC: Prospective Parliamentary Candidate

At least a few of the LibDems and Tories have held jobs before becoming an MP. Reform is full of liars and hot air salesmen.

> Reform is full of liars and hot air salesmen.

Can we use that hot air to drive a turbine ?

No, it's low-grade heat, and highly toxic.

That really stretches "Hanlon's razor" to it's limit.

For some government ministers and advisers it really is malice (or at least self-interested greed / corruption) rather than plain old fuckwittery. The incompetence award goes to those who knew about it but failed to do anything about it.

It goes all the way back to Thatcher's government selling off the National Grid and the rest of the state utilities to the private sector.

Out of genuine interest, why do you describe renewables as an "appalling bedfellow for nuclear"? Especially as I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that we will see significant technical advances in energy storage technologies for renewables in the not-so-distant future (well, certainly not-so-distant as fusion).

You'd have thought that France would be our natural partner in this enterprise, with their long-term historic commitment to nuclear, and after all they're conveniently close geographically, and we're both part of a powerful economic blo… oh… wait.

I hear you, but color me a bit skeptical that Canada will actually get reactors built here. We have developed such a culture of NIMBYism and cost overruns on public construction projects that I see us taking the lead in deployments as a very low probability. Our Greens don't win many elections, but are influential to some extent and would be dead set against it. Whereas our Conservatives do like nuclear but also generally deny global warming and like pumping gas out.

They (the PR Droids, not the boffins) have been saying that since around 1960. My guess that it will still be a decade away in 2060. My grandchildrens, grandkids might get to enjoy it.

Yes, not quite the same bangs per buck as Uranium. However there's a lot of it around and it leaves far less mess. Also can't be used for nukes.

If Iran really wants nuclear power, this is the way forward.

You think this war is about nukes? How cute. I guess they must have been hidden in Venezuela really well not to have been found.

BTW has anyone found those WMDs in Iraq yet, or are they still looking.

Anyone else feeling rather sad that the renewed push for nuclear energy, and especially fusion research, isn't due to more important reasons - say global warming or energy security - than feeding our friendly neighborhood stochastic parrots? Even if the renewed interest predated LLMs, its high profile and public awareness is only coming in now.