Microsoft Doubles Down on Small Modular Reactors and Fusion Energy

Things like massively increased energy cost, strain on the grid, depriving local citizens of resources for your datacenter, and let's not forget ewaste, pollution from higher energy use, pollution caused by manufacturing more and more chips, pollution and cost of shipping more and more chips across the planet.

Yeah, it's so cheap as to be nearly free.

Ermmm. what?

Capitalism fails very quickly the moment you try and push past sensible regulation and legislation. Look at the whole US situation right now.

It's expensive as hell already and we still don't handle waste or environmental issues properly. Capitalism isn't going to solve anything other than the price as it'll defer the rest until it's someone else's problem much like it does not on every single damn sector's waste.

I'm not anti-nuclear. We need it. What we don't need is tech companies getting into the market.

I expect that the longevity of their attention is considerably less than this, particularly if the LLM boom crashes. ROI will not pay for the disposal later down the line.

To show the scale of the problem: if the world were powered by Helion's reactors (for all primary energy), and the tritium produced were just released into the environment and mixed completely with all water on the planet (including oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, and ice), then it would lift all that water above the US regulatory limit for tritium in drinking water. All the water, including everything in every ocean.

So the quantity of radioactive waste will certainly not be little, but more likely much greater than in a fission reactor.

Nevertheless, because there is more freedom in the design of the neutron shield than in a fission reactor, it is likely that it is possible to find such compositions where most of the radioactive waste will decay quickly enough, so that there will remain only a small quantity of long-lived radioactive waste.

However, until someone demonstrates this in reality, it is still uncertain how much radioactive waste will be generated, because this depends on many constructive details.

A lot of components of a fusion reactor, e.g. pipes for cooling fluid and the like, will become damaged by the neutrons and they will have to be replaced periodically, after becoming radioactive. The amount of such waste will depend a lot on the lifetimes of such components. For now it is very uncertain how much time such components will resist before requiring maintenance.

saying "Milestone keeps Helion on track to deliver electricity from fusion to Microsoft by 2028"

but as you say they don't seem to have produced any energy and after watching Sabine's take I'm very skeptical (https://youtu.be/YxuPkDOuiM4)

I think it may be a bit of a scam where they keep the investment and their jobs going as long as possible but don't produce power.

"Breaking ground" and "wanting to be first" makes no difference to the physics, engineering, and economics involved here. They're just going to end up with an expensive plant that eats money.

No-one has yet demonstrated a break-even fusion reactor purely from a physics perspective - let alone an engineering or, even more challenging, an economics perspective. In other words, we're essentially still in the fundamental physical research phase.

It's like building international airports for jet planes when you've just invented the Kitty Hawk - but worse, really, because at least the Kitty Hawk proved we could fly in practice. With fusion, there's no evidence that we'll ever be able to create a sustained, economically viable reaction.

Fuck's sake, it's just some hot rocks boiling a kettle, we make it out to sound like it's magic but we had the technology for this ~80 years ago. By now we should have the cost of a standard issue nuclear plant down to way cheaper than anything else. Common layout, protocols, processes, software at all of them... could have been complete in 1989, honestly.

But the key is speed. If you tie up $20B for 20 years uselessly, there's no way you can make a profit on anything.

The gross thing is seeing the public cheer it on.

You are at a much higher risk of dying from a commercial airliner crash in your lifetime than you are of any nuclear operation - accidental disaster or normal operation. There have been zero (0) human deaths in the US from any operation or accident at a nuclear plant. There were zero human deaths from radiation at the Fukushima meltdown. In fact, more than 2,000 people died from the evacuation alone; the earthquake and tsunami killed 15x as many.

Nuclear power is safe. Carbon-friendly. Effective. Operationalized. Not scary, just malunderstood.

I call absolute bullshit on this line of thinking. Microsoft and other corporations have just as much if not more public interest in keeping their reactors safe and effective. Not to mention financial interests.

At this conference for progress nerds, with big arguments between solar and fission nuclear "no one wanted to defend fusion".

> Fusion promises cheap clean limitless power if only we can solve difficult technological hurdles. But we already know how to produce cheap clean limitless power. The only delay is regulatory, and fusion doesn’t solve this.

...

> the only pro-fusion sentiment I saw at the conference was a series of graphs comparing “fission” and “fusion” and showing strong performance advantages for ”fusion” in all categories. But it turned out the pro-solar faction had mischievously labeled solar as “fusion” since it ultimately comes from the sun’s solar core. It was a good trick - think of solar as a new high-tech wonder, instead of as the annoying thing environmentalists keep nagging us about, and it really does look like a miracle.

Certainly the nuclear industry hasn't done themselves any favors either.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/us-sets-targets-triple-nu...