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If Secretary Burgum thinks it’s possible to ramp up electricity production significantly in five years using nuclear power plants of any description1) I have a bridge to sell him.
1) Reactivating mothballed*) plants, extending the life of existing plants, building large new ones using existing, proven designs, building new, unproven designs like SMRs (molten salt/Thorium or whatever), fusion (cough, Sam Altman, cough), reactors running on unobtanium… take your pick.
*) Just kidding. None of them has been taken out of commission and maintained in a way that they can be simply refuelled and switched on again. That would have been too expensive. They were switched off to save money in the first place. Reactivating them would mean major refurbishing of a lot of the plumbing (heat exchangers, cooling system, turbines, control systems) for starters. Depending on how close to (or beyond) its design life the reactor has run before it was switched off there’ll be considerable material degradation. Neutron bombardment will make concrete swell and steel brittle. Assessing what needs to be done, planning it and contracting the works alone will take a couple of years. If they can find contractors, both for the planning and the work. And so on.
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Yeah… Units 3 & 4 at Plant Vogel took FOREVER to complete. And it was fucking expensive.
I keep hearing about these smaller modular reactors that are going to power all these new data centers, but I’ll believe that when I see it.
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There’s one assumption you’re making that may not necessarily hold.
What’s stopping them from just turning the reactors on? Everything you list is for turning them on safely, which I agree is a necessary step, but do they?
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No, you can’t just switch them back on, safely or not.
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Kind of surprised that the War Thunder forums aren’t involved in this leak
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This is the creepiest image I’ve ever seen.
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It’s just a little fission device.
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Meta just saved an Illinois nuclear plant that was set to be mothballed
[…]
The Clinton plant came online in 1987 and faced early retirement in 2017 due to financial losses, until the passage of Illinois’ Future Energy Jobs Act in 2016 extended its operations via a zero-emission credit (ZEC) program. That support runs through July 2027, after which Meta’s 20-year power purchase agreement kicks in, securing the plant’s clean energy output and replacing state subsidies.
[…]
Meta doesn’t have the best track record of living up to its nuclear ambitions. Case in point, a day after it announced plans to fund between 1 and 4 gigawatts of new nuclear power, Zuckercorp turned around and said it plans to build its biggest-ever datacenter in Louisiana, powered entirely by three purpose-built natural gas turbines.
[…]
Still, whatever emissions savings Meta books from the Clinton nuclear deal are unlikely to offset the climate hit from its new gas turbines in Louisiana. With a power generation capacity of 2,262 MW, those new facilities - no matter how temporary they may be - generate more than twice the output of the Clinton nuclear plant.
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None of the undersea volcano bases were on the market for Zuck.
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Technically, he actually has a bona fide volcanic lair already.
(Bunker on one of the Hawai’i islands.)
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Yeah, here’s hoping that if a major disaster ever happens that the head of Zuck’s landscaping crew becomes the Warlord and Zuck gets tossed unceremoniously into the shark tank.
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