Where do you buy fuel grade uranium in order to run your own reactor?
I’m asking for a friend.
I think a lot of it is mined in Africa.
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.)
You have to talk to a Westinghouse sells rep. If you want uranium outside of a fuel rod most chemical supplier sell it.
No shopping cart? Was this site built on the 90s?
Chemdirect has a shopping cart?
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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.
Probably in northern Utah.
I heard my local data center had a few fall off the truck last week out by lakeview.
AWS CloudNuke
Maybe AWS Mushroom Cloud
Microsoft Mutually Azured Destruction
It’s okay, even if if they wanted to nuke the world, they’d need to find which specific portal to log into, and even after inputing everything correctly there’d be around an hour before the servers actually processed the change request.
Hey man, nuke-the-world requests take time to propagate you know.
Amazon Nuclear Prime.
2 hour weapon delivery. Free year of movies included.
When you have cloud providers growing faster than the region’s grid capacity, something has to give … throttle growth there, or plan for mega growth? I guess it helps that nuclear is green again. 😁
throttle growth
You don’t want line to go up? That smells like commie talk!
Throttle growth? But then how will we create believable bullshit generators? We have to stick an AI label on useless crap to sell damnit!
It’s not cloud, it’s AI.
Do it.
I mean, that’s what Ford did. They had the tech to generate power for the factory, so were the city’s electric company.
Yeah, do it. Quit being a consumer of mixed source power, start being a producer of steady, good energy.
(Dirty enough that calling it clean green energy gets pushback, but far better than non-green normal sources like coal or natural gas.)
Yeah I call bullshit on that. I get why they’re investing money in it, but this is a moonshot and I’m sure they don’t expect it to succeed.
These data centers can be built almost anywhere in the world. And there are places with very predictable weather patterns making solar/wind/hydro/etc extremely cheap compared to nuclear.
Nuclear power is so expensive, that it makes far more sense to build an entire solar farm and an entire wind farm, both capable of providing enough power to run the data center on their own in overcast conditions or moderate wind.
If you pick a good location, that’s lkely to work out to running off your own power 95% of the time and selling power to the grid something like 75% of the time. The 5% when you can’t run off your own power… no wind at night is rare in a good location and almost unheard of in thick cloud cover, well you’d just draw power from the grid. Power produced by other data centers that are producing excess solar or wind power right now.
In the extremely rare disruption where power wouldn’t be available even from the grid… then you just shift your workload to another continent for an hour or so. Hardly anyone would notice an extra tenth of a second of latency.
Maybe I’m wrong and nuclear power will be 10x cheaper one day. But so far it’s heading the other direction, about 10x more expensive than it was just a decade ago, thanks to incidents like Fukushima and that tiny radioactive capsule lost in Western Australia proving current nuclear safety standards, even in some of the safest countries in the world, are just not good enough. Forcing the industry to take additional measures (additional costs) going forward.
IMHO, data centers kind of need to be somewhat close to important population areas in order to ensure low latency.
You need a spot with attainable land, room to scale, close proximity to users, and decent infrastructure for power / connectivity. You can’t actually plop something out in the middle of BFE.
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.
One of those cities is pretty close to Redmond. The other 2 are 2-3 hours away from a major population center. The San Francisco equivalent would be data centers in Sacramento. Not exactly next door, but close enough to ensure that latency isn’t terrible for loading an e-commerce site or something.
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.
In case anyone wants to read that: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
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.
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.
What is currently the state of things for nuclear waste in the US? In germany they still search for a place for storing it long term. Gets in the news now and then. Did the US have more success with finding a good site? Or is this again just companies betting to hand over the waste to the public when they are done? As I remember in germany the companies got a cheap buy out for the waste after the closure of nuclear power plants where setup.
The US does not have a final deposit for nuclear waste. But nuclear waste is not more dangerous than other chemical waste which already has final deposits in Germany. The specifications are deliberately made harder for nuclear because of politics.
The US has an ideal, chosen, location for long-term mass storage.
Unfortunately State politics and news fear mongering are preventing it from being developed and utilized.
Just more footgunning.
*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!
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