Why Big Tech's Betting Billions on Nuclear (Not Renewables)

Video script and citations:

Get my achieve energy security with solar guide:

Follow-up podcast:

Join the Undecided Discord server:

👋 Support Undecided on Patreon!

⚙️ Gear & Products I Like

Visit my Energysage Portal (US):
Research solar panels and get quotes for free!

And find heat pump installers near you (US):

Or find community solar near you (US):

For a curated solar buying experience (Canada)
EnergyPal's free personalized quotes:

Tesla Referral Code:
Get 1,000 free supercharging miles
or a discount on Tesla Solar & Powerwalls

👉 Follow Me
Mastodon

X

Mastodon

Instagram

Facebook

Website

📺 YouTube Tools I Recommend
Audio file(s) provided by Epidemic Sound

TubeBuddy

VidIQ

I may earn a small commission for my endorsement or recommendation to products or services linked above, but I wouldn't put them here if I didn't like them. Your purchase helps support the channel and the videos I produce. Thank you.

Chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:11 - Big Tech, Big Energy
03:34 - Embracing Nuclear
05:13 - Nuclear Options
09:08 - Can Small Modular Reactors Spark a Nuclear Renaissance?
14:05 - Can Regulations Keep Pace with Innovation?

[texanplayer]

Datacenters release a lot of heat. Perhaps a good solution to be more energy efficient would be to capture that heat for district hot water and district heating. I know a data center in Switzerland has done that. Basically, every kWh of electricity there is used twice: once for the data processing, and once for heating the district. This could tremendously reduce our need for more energy.

[qzy-SanTzxkW]

1890 futurism: flying cars in 2025
2025: *steam powered AI*

[kornydad]

As a design engineer that works on automotive electrification directly, it always amazes me how many people talk about the affects of EV charging on the grid when data centers are using WAY more power than EVs. This just goes to show that public perception is all about marketing.

[LauraliteBrezia]

My main issue with the reference to Fukushima-Daichi, is glossing over/failing to mention the part that the disaster, as described, was entirely avoidable if TepCo had actually listened to their own engineers and disaster planners to build the backup generators higher up.

Otherwise good video overall.

[Kubose]

It's a little depressing how nuclear power was here as an option for over half a century as a cleaner, safer alternative to all the massively pollutant energy, but it wasn't until tech corps needed more energy for their algorithms that we're talking about firing up nuke plants, and it's not even to replace polluting energy sources, but just to add more power to the grids so companies can sell us on even more algorithms.

[CollinHeist]

I work for a power utility, and we are inundated with requests for extremely large load interconnections WAY more than we ever use to be. Last I checked we had requests for >2 GW of data-center load apparently "coming online within 5-10 years", when the entire peak load of our existing balancing area is just under 4 GW. 80% of it is purely speculative, but it's crazy

[What-verdude]

Notice that they can build data centers faster than housing....

[terchip]

The NAVY has operated small scale nuclear reactors for 50 years without any accident of large scale.

[BloodyMobile]

"Microsoft claims to be carbon negative by 2030" - they also claimed 10 was the "last" windows. So I'm not even expecting them to be neutral by 2030.

[beardmonster]

It's a tragedy what happened to nuclear power due to excessive fear. The Three Mile Island accident basically showed that the safety measures used in western nuclear power plants worked even in a meltdown situation. The radiation was not on a lethal level and nobody died. Nobody in the West would have built the kind of stuff Soviet built, yet increased safety demands in the West dramatically increased costs, and political uncertainty about the future of nuclear made investors less willing to take the chance that they would be able to keep new reactors running for the decades needed to make a profit. Instead people just built fossil fuel plants, even though fossil fuels kills more people every single day than nuclear power has ever done. Sigh. If rules demanding that fossil power plants couldn't release any harmful particles had been put in place instead, we'd probably be rid of them by now, saving many million lives in the process.

[jimhaskell]

The safety if Nuclear power is like the safety of air travel. It's extremely safe, but when an accident happens, it's dramatic.

[maxmustsleep]

or, hear me out, maybe we don't need AI in every damn device on this planet.

[thamiordragonheart]

Nuclear, even more so than other types of thermal power plants, gain huge efficiencies from the scale of each individual plant. Larger pipes and reactor vessels mean fewer surfaces and connections to make and inspect to nuclear standards, bigger plants have higher thermal efficiencies, and redundancy tends to be cheaper the bigger the plant. Costs like plant operators and guarding the nuclear power plant also scale very slowly with size. There's a very good reason why even when the US Navy had already demonstrated small safe and reliable units at the larger end of current SMR designs for ships and submarines, historically all nuclear power plants have been multi-gigawatt scale.

I think a better direction for cheap nuclear than tech bros deciding they know better and SMRs are the future when the fundamental cost drivers haven't really changed would be to learn from another industry that figured out how to build giant things in relatively low numbers at low cost, shipbuilding. Modern shipbuilding builds big blocks and almost completely finishes them internally, then welds them all together and makes the connections to finish the ship. A lot of what makes it so efficient even for low-volume production is that it lets different specialties work on different blocks at the same time so that everyone is working continuously in parallel instead of having to bring them in sequentially to finish the whole ship.
I don't see any reason you couldn't adopt the same sort of procedure for building large nuclear plants faster and cheaper.

[jmj]

Not to nerd on it or anything but correction is needed on 14:55 The approved design is not 77mw/h but is 60mw/h. They are seeking approval for 77 mw/h.

[keithnance]

Nuclear power should never have been sidelined…we needed to take the technology stack and further innovations in nuclear power for both sustainability and space…but…I guess AI is the driver…

[JSx]

Dare we ask the very valid question - what are we actually getting out of all of the AI hype and is it worth what we’re are spending on it (resources, dollars, etc)? Sounds like a very expensive “solution” in search of a problem.

[LTVoyager]

The Vogtle plant issues were mainly due to not having continued with nuclear continuously from the 80s. We didn’t continue to advance the technology and we lost the skills needed to build plants on time and on budget. Had we continued over the last 40 years, we would be building many plants each year with a skilled workforce and well-refined technology on time and on budget. The issue we have with nuclear now is entirely self-inflicted because we listed to the green nuts.

[chuckzilla]

At this rate, every residence will need to produce its own energy just because more of our power plants’ energy will be gobbled up by AI.

[janami-dharmam]

I loved the ad for the vac cleaner. Here too the major problem is the battery: after the original one dies after an year or so, the new replacement batteries show a remarkable lethargy for more work

[markosz]

I always found it confusing how the world just abandoned nuclear power research and advancements after just a few incidents and kept shutting down NPPs...
If we hadn't done that, we could have had cheap and clean power and no environmental crisis. But of course that's not good for fossil companies or oil based empires :)