Why data centers want to have their own nuclear reactors

Microsoft Mutually Azured Destruction

Just one note, nuclear power plants run at around 35% efficiency. This is because they are basically steam generators and tend to not push as hard for safety. I think they can get up to 40-45% with combined cycles and such, but then we are in the "very large" territory

Large scale data centers, like the ones that end up in the news for FAANG are ~100 megawatt footprints.

I have no idea where you're getting 3.4 megawatts as the largest data center in the US, but that is wildly undersized.

Well if you're in the US you can get it from New Mexico and Wyoming. We've even got a few mines here in Texas.

So in the US it's a matter of getting licensed by the NRC and contacting one of the many processing facilities.

Mali has a significant mine that France essentially controls. In America, we have mines but import a lot too.

We actually currently buy about 25% of our uranium supply from Russia, though Congress just passed a ban that’ll go in effect in 90 days. It allows for waivers if there are supply issues, though, so it might end up being more than 90 days. (I have no idea how quickly a country can find a new uranium supplier but it sounds complicated.)

No shopping cart? Was this site built on the 90s?

Nuclear.AI here we come

Nuclear power is complicated because it still involves mining. Which will inevitably damage the environment even if all the mining equipment are electric vehicles run on solar power.

You can’t actually plop something out in the middle of BFE.

The number of data centers in Prineville/Hermiston/Umatilla/Boardman, OR beg to differ. Power is cheap due to the Bonneville dams and that trumps latency as they're BFE as hell unless you live in Portland.

While latnecy matters sometimes, there's still a lot of data center services that care a lot less and can be put anywhere.

I remember reading a story about an email server that was limited to sending emails within 150 miles. Through a lot of digging, they found it was due to an auto-timeout timer getting reset to 0ms. Anything further than 150 miles would cause a 1ms delay and thus get rejected for taking too long.

For the majority of applications you need data centers for, latency just doesn't matter. Bandwidth, storage space, and energy costs for example are all generally far more important.

The earth has a circumference of 25,000 miles, and the speed of light in a fiber cable is 124,000 miles per second, so going the whole way around the earth would take .2 seconds(assuming you could send a signal that far).

need to be somewhat close to important population areas

They really don't. I live in regional Australia - the nearest data center is 1300 miles away. It's perfectly fine. I work in tech and we had a small data center (50 servers) in our office with a data center grade fibre link - got rid of it because it was a waste of money. Even comparing 1300 miles of latency to 20 feet of latency wasn't worth it.

To be clear, having 0.1ms of latency was noticeable for some things. But nothing that really matters. And certainly not AI where you're often waiting 5 seconds or even a full minute.

They’re currently being deployed in industrial settings around the US.

I searched and I can't find any cases of such a reactor being deployed anywhere in the US.

"Microreactors for civilian use are currently in the earliest stages of development, with individual designs ranging in various stages of maturity."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_microreactor

The reactor you're referring to doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

Weird.

That eVinci reactor is tiny at only 5MW. You'd need something like a thousand of them to run a single AI data center. It's also horrifically expensive at over $100 million (each! multiply that by a thousand!) and it can only produce that amount of power for eight years, then I'm not sure what you do. Buy a thousand more of them?

For comparison, some wind turbines provide more than twice as much power from just a single turbine. And they cost single digit millions to setup. They're not as reliable and they're also bigger than a micro nuclear reactor. But none of that really matters for a data center, which can draw power from the grid if it needs to.

The only really promising small reactor I've heard of is the NuScale one - but it may have been vapourware. Republicans made a big splash during the 2016 election campaign and committed to paying 1/12th of the cost of a reactor as part of their clean energy "commitment". There was no price tag, just 1/12th.

A couple years later, after they'd won the election, they quietly abandoned that plan and agreed to pay $1.3 billion which they claimed would be 1/4th of the budget. The subtext was the earlier election promise was before a budget had been figured out yet. But going from 1/12th to 1/4th is a pretty big jump.

And then a few years after that... when the company told the government $1.3 billion would not be enough money for the project to be financially viable... and that in order to sell electricity at all they needed the government to subsidise every single watt of power produced by the plant for the entire period that it operated... because it was going to run at a loss... that's when the government pulled all funding (except what had already been spent, which was a lot of money) and the whole project collapsed.

I tried to find references for all of that, but the website for the project is now a "domain for sale" page. All that's left is a few vague news articles which have conflicting information. But I've been following this for decades and the project you linked to was one of the ones that made it crystal clear to me that nuclear doesn't have a future unless something really big changes.

Who knows, perhaps if the government had been really committed to NuScale, they might've pushed through the pain and helped it succeed int order to become cheaper later. But the government wasn't willing to take that risk and apparently nobody else was either.

Hey, is Signal down? Ah, reactor exploded, destroying the datacenter along with the staff on prem
Jk, cool stuff

*unfortunately oil companies that control the entire energy sector, NRC, and most politicians have created a fictional State politics and news fear cycle, since nuclear energy is the primary way to eradicate their business and profits

Fixed it for you.

Friendly reminder that the government is a facade and is run by major corporations and nations like Saudi Arabia & Israel. The people have completely lost control of the government in the US. Voting is a construct hijacked to institutionalize hopelessness and release the steam of rebellion. It isn't voting when corporations choose who your choices are!