News Microsoft Seeks to Power Datacenters with Small Modular Reactors

[Admin]

Microsoft is hiring a person to lead its nuclear technology strategy.

Microsoft Seeks to Power Datacenters with Small Modular Reactors : Read more

 

[hotaru.hino]

If they can do this and prove the viability, reliability, and safety of the technology, maybe we'll finally get people to accept nuclear fission is the way to go to meet our clean power demands until fusion is finally a thing.

 

[Evildead_666]

Yes, lets give Skynet the energy independance it needs
/s

 

[Giroro]

SMRs are very much not renewable energy as you can't just create more nuclear fuel....
But if Microsoft or whoever can lawfully use one of these reactors, they might as well give it a shot. The waste should be pretty manageable and more energy diversity is more better, as long as it's not wasting tax money.

 

[punkncat]

How very Soviet of them.

 

[hotaru.hino]

SMRs are very much not renewable energy as you can't just create more nuclear fuel....

Yes you can. At least in the sense that you can get more out of whatever fuel you put in than in a traditional reactor.

 

[DavidLejdar]

Yes you can. At least in the sense that you can get more out of whatever fuel you put in than in a traditional reactor.

Breeder reactors and SMRs are not one and the same thing though. So, supply, such as in the U.S. currently half from abroad, and waste management, those are still issues. And e.g. here in Europe, wind farms still end up producing electricity at a lower cost per kWh.

 

[stonecarver]

So solar panel farms are old school now. If I live long enough and I have a great. great grand son and he asked can we go see the historical old school data center. Hell no little one unless you want 3 eyes and a tail.

I was back east in Tennessee and the nuclear power plants where I was staying pretty much said if we have a melt down don't worry running your already dead and Have a nice day. I started to ask the locals why every bank or building had the nuclear sign with nuke symbol.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Breeder reactors and SMRs are not one and the same thing though.

But there's nothing preventing breeder reactors in something classified as an SMR. SMR only defines size, capacity, and how it's manufactured, not the type used.

 

[punkncat]

I started to ask the locals why every bank or building had the nuclear sign with nuke symbol.

It has been a long time since I have seen a fallout shelter sign. As a kid you would see these all over the place. Are you old enough to remember the duck and cover drill at school?

 

[stonecarver]

Are you old enough to remember the duck and cover drill at school?

Shhh My dad my whole life said he was 37 I'm sticking to that myself. He passed at 78 but I will say my 30's now feel like a distant memory.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Small nuclear reactors have been powering naval vessels for decades, and modern reactor designs, such as the one championed by Bill Gates, use liquid metal as coolant and the laws of thermodynamics to passively circulate it so that in the event of something catastrophic the liquid metal circulates until it solidifies, trapping the radioactive materials inside it safely. No chance of a Fukushima style hydrogen explosion as there is no water involved, and no chance of a Chernobyl style explosion because, well, it's not a fast breeder.

Renewables are all well and fine, and are a great -supplement- to nuclear, but until fusion reactors are a reality, nuclear is the way to go, just have to educate the public that they are not the shoddy 1970s designs anymore.

 

[edzieba]

Combine an SMR and Microsoft's Project Natick underwater datacentre, and you would be able to take a fully containerised self-contained datacentre and drop it anywhere off of a coast (or a large lake) with just a fibre link to shore to immediately deploy low-latency services where needed, with no local services impacts for power & cooling.

 

[thisisaname]

If they can do this and prove the viability, reliability, and safety of the technology, maybe we'll finally get people to accept nuclear fission is the way to go to meet our clean power demands until fusion is finally a thing.

Yes it is a "short" term fix, it rightly should not been seen as a long term solution.

 

[thisisaname]

Small nuclear reactors have been powering naval vessels for decades, and modern reactor designs, such as the one championed by Bill Gates, use liquid metal as coolant and the laws of thermodynamics to passively circulate it so that in the event of something catastrophic the liquid metal circulates until it solidifies, trapping the radioactive materials inside it safely. No chance of a Fukushima style hydrogen explosion as there is no water involved, and no chance of a Chernobyl style explosion because, well, it's not a fast breeder.

Renewables are all well and fine, and are a great -supplement- to nuclear, but until fusion reactors are a reality, nuclear is the way to go, just have to educate the public that they are not the shoddy 1970s designs anymore.

True just a shame quite a few of those "shoddy 1970s designs" are still in operation long passed their designed life span due to lack of replacement.

 

[helper800]

Yes it is a "short" term fix, it rightly should not been seen as a long term solution.

The amount of "waste" fission reactors produce is small, you could fit all of the spent fuel ever made in the US on a football field. Spent fuel is also significantly less radioactive than most people assume it to be. Doing some simple math, with that link as a source, we could give everyone on earth energy for a year and the spent fuel would take up roughly the volume of 57 Olympic-sized pools.

 

[2+2]

As Jensen Huang said,
Power requirement is the hurdle of AI.

Compute efficiency only increases linearly.
So it will be a LONG time before AI can come close to the most remarkable energy efficiency and high compute functionality of the human brain.

Until then,
I think all the investment hype is over their skis.
Power and costs need to come down for the technology to be greatly beneficial to business.

 

[thisisaname]

The amount of "waste" fission reactors produce is small, you could fit all of the spent fuel ever made in the US on a football field. Spent fuel is also significantly less radioactive than most people assume it to be. Doing some simple math, with that link as a source, we could give everyone on earth energy for a year and the spent fuel would take up roughly the volume of 57 Olympic-sized pools.

True but the fuel is only part the waste problem.

Small modular reactors produce high levels of nuclear waste | Stanford News

Small modular reactors, long touted as the future of nuclear energy, will actually generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants, according to research from Stanford and the University of British Columbia.

news.stanford.edu