The nuclear industry likes to lowball the cost of SMRs (heart of nuclear ships), but the overall cost difference of power types is the truth. Aircraft carriers are also 4x the cost of diesel, but with only 2x the operational costs (inclusive of similar functions of managing planes). An aircraft carrier requires 1000 extra crew to supervise the reactor.

Absolute bubble for the datacenter middlemen and the AI software behemoth models that need data centers. The hardware companies though, and AI/LLMs overall, are here to stay and even if they waste their profits on investing in middlemen/datacenter/software customers, they can be profitable by inflating costs of their GPUs/hardware.

GPU depreciation matters, but tends to be relatively slow due to controlled incrementalism in hardware. Still, the high end faces the most risk, and Huawei/Alibaba won’t be satisfied with small share gains over Nvidia to keep pricing gains. Even AMD is improving software stack fast enough to make affordable private AI. The low end has signficant disruption potential to the fossil powered datacenter/Skynet model.

It’s not just an overall stock market bubble, it is a US GDP bubble. Where datacenter growth $ is larger than consumer spending growth $. Skynet for Israel control spending is an unstoppable corruption vector, and yes the champions of Israel must be financed and supported as geniuses by all media or “China and Iran will win.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuScale_Power is the epitomy of scams in US/western nuclear and political corruption. SMRs are a new scam because larger units are unbankable and proven failures. The science for a theoretical on budget process makes SMRs more costly, even though the on budget time/costs of nuclear is not economic to begin with anymore.

NuScale SMR is about combining up to 12 77mwe reactors for your totals. It is up to budgets of $20/watt with variable costs of $120/mwh with still a handful of years to go before first completion. Vogtle spent a decade with a 3 year completion target, and budget doubled during that decade. They ended with $17/watt construction costs. SMRs also cheat on build costs by requiring ultra enriched (expensive/scary plutonium equivalent) fuel that is scarce without new build of military focused breeder/traditional reactors to provide adequate supply.

The primary appeal of SMRs is their portability

There are micro/nano nuclear designs meant to fit in a truck trailer. They are under 1mw power, and not meant to be affordable for those who need more power than that. They are not space efficient to power ships. They may never be made, and just investor scams.

As for shipping, civilian use would be nightmare. Virginia class nuclear subs cost $2.7B. 5x more 2.2B more than best diesel submarines and have operational costs that are 4x higher than diesel subs. Wind power is path to decarbonizing shipping. That chinese airborne blimp windmill posted recently would work.

https://github.com/ryanjenkinson/data-centre-modelling/blob/main/notebooks/model.ipynb does give model details, but doesn’t use that cost file directly.

some mistakes…

inflates 2021 costs to 2025 for all technologies. Solar has depreciated, and wind maybe did not go up in price. A bigger deal is no distribution costs. Offshore tall AF wind turbines are cheapest power in the world, if you build an island/raft at the bottom of the turbine to drink the power, and that is only scenario where they are part of a microgrid. They cost much higher than solar due to HVDC lines, and transformers to use “normal” current. Current conversion equipment in general also not included.

The gas costs overall are very low. Ridiculously low is fixed opex 1/4 that of wind. insurance about the same as solar, when people can get burned or poisoned “easily”, and mile wide craters have occurred at gas plants. No fuel delivery markups on futures prices, or infrastructure costs to deliver it. If it’s going to be 5%-20% capacity factor, delivery by truck is no infrastructure, but high fuel costs. Fuel delivery/handling for low capacity use makes coal look better. Fixed opex requires people operating 24 hours and emergency shutoff standy people.

Battery modeling is bad. Model uses constraint/linear programming to find a mix, but battery range is capped at 600mwh, with wind and solar at 2000mw, and so can fill battery in 20 minutes. Claim that at 600mwh, you only need gas for 5% of power, makes a gas plant a complete absurdity relative to a utility grid connection. A good battery size is 2 times the maximum charge rate.

SMR modeling is extreme joke. Based on 540mw reactor which simply is not even SMR. Normal big reactors are 1gw. They save substantial costs by having 4 to 8 on a site. The $55/mwh ($80 in 2025) figure from earlier is just variable/fuel costs. $5/watt construction costs not serious. no reason to ever expect under $15/watt. Neither of the numbers scale down to 120mw either, and nuclear is simply not a 24/7/365 capable energy source, even if you want your datacenter to be. If you need 12 hour maintenance windows, you need 1440mwh of battery systems that you will hardly every use. Nuclear was always stupid to consider, and a grid connection with possible exporting generation assets on site is the way to go.

Capacity factors for wind of 0.61 is high due to invalid offshore use. With 1400mw wind, and over 800mw wind per hour, a 120mw datacenter is horribly mismatched. Solar of 0.11 is 2.5 hours/day production. It’s a reason to have datacenter outside of UK, but onshore/onsite wind+solar can work for the right UK site. Solar for “off grid” in north should go for lower total capacity factor by maximizing tilt for winter production. Easy to get a full day’s power 9 months of the year, and find way to monetize surpluses. Grid exchange for datacenter application, smart. For datacenters, all electronics run on DC, which means they can all run off batteries, and everything else charges batteries.

The starting point with behind the meter renewable power with bidirectional grid connection is production required for maximum use + export on a 120mw transmission line per day = 5800mwh. 2600mwh battery to discharge up to 120mw all day is also 24 hours of operation power. Summer solar in UK will reach 8 hour days, and many 7 hour days. Onshore Wind averages 6 hours, but can hit 20 hours in a day. Model is $1.5m/mw wind, and $500k/mw solar (excluding grid connections) at capacity factors favours more solar. Natural DC power also favours solar. Wind has less land footprint, and could benefit from being on the north side, with (idk) solar panels helping rare south winds funnel up to the blades. The winter capacity factors are much higher for wind, and worth more than 3x the cost in winter. Other factors is export value of our electricity. A renewable future means higher night prices, and even in UK, higher winter prices. 24 hour huge battery means profit from day 2, 3 day ahead forecasts arbitrage.

The right model is 7 hours solar + 6 hours wind = 5800mwh (summer peak). and 6 hours wind + 1 hour solar = 1300mwh which is hoping for 50% self generation in bad solar winter days, but average wind. 200mw of wind and 650mw of solar at winter optimized angle gives 1850mwh on bad solar average wind winter day, and the 5800mwh summer maximum on mnay days with some curtailment possibility. up front power costs are $390m batteries, $325m solar, $350m wind = $1.065B. Over 1twh non curtailed self production per year. For 10% ROI on power production (nevermind datacenter companies having 5% cost of capital), $100/mwh is both export revenue needed and cost of internal power (which if you only needed 5% ROI/or financing burden is $50/mwh). This is lower internal costs than grid or just variable SMR power costs, and can often undercut competing supply for even higher profit. This is same annual production as 120mw 24/7 SMR, but that has $1.8B+ capital costs, and $180/mwh breakeven energy value (before the extreme variable/fixed operating costs). A 120mw fossil plant does mean just $30/mwh capital cost retrieval, but the operational costs are at least $60/mwh. OP Model underscores these heavily. The renewables approach achieves lower internal power costs + big profit opportunity from electricity trade. The variable costs of fossil fuel plants means they can’t just run 24/7 into a market price that loses them money, and so it only makes sense for datacenter to not share fossil power with rest of society.

what is .nc file format? their csv data has no cost numbers.

wouldn’t a too-low estimate for nuclear costs give extra validity to the claim that microgrids are much cheaper?

It is much cheaper. Everywhere. But the modeling done in this instance can still be completely incompetent.

More aggression of some kind towards USA is needed to resolve trade deal. That tariffs hurt Canadian businesses and consumers can mean other means. Certainly US/allies investment in auto sector can be instigated by actual China trade closeness or at least more eager meetings. If F35 deal officially cancelled yet? Have we demanded refund for existing crappy planes?

Simply, some path other than total sycophancy to US/CIA/NORAD even NATO/Council of Americas is necessary if counter tariffs are not used. Simply not behaving as though words of “Rupture/irreparable breech of trust” has occurred.

Elon just went to UK telling white people there that they need to overthrow parliament now or the immigrants will kill them all.

The swap is explicitly conditioned on countering “China’s interference in the territory,” according to Casa Rosada officials quoted in Argentine media. Bessent’s veiled threats included stipulations to halt financial deals between Buenos Aires and Beijing, effectively demanding that Milei sever Argentina’s $20 billion currency swap line with China, which remains partially active in an economy on financial life support.

Good reporting I was unaware of.

This currency/bond operation would essentially be neutral for Argentina, if China is bailed out by being able to sell its pesos to the US. I don’t expect Milei to refuse Chinese help though. Still a bankster oligarchy needing future favours from administration is also putting up investment packages. They are not necessarily doing anyone else a favour if privatizing stuff cheaply with Milei help.

Extreme incompetence in modeling. the github is complete crap. otoh their angelfire site does actually list some costs for the SMR.

They make the SMR side look absurdly cheap. $55/mwh power costs with 30c/watt capital costs is just absurdly low. Conservative SMR power estimates start at $180/mwh, and so actual microgrid costs would be over 80% lower.

More incompetence has their microgrid using off shore wind which is just stupid for HVDC requirement for small scale. Automatically too incompetent to trust their modeling. They don’t specify cost assumptions for any of the microgrid components.

NG newbuild in UK is not cheaper than wind. Unless NG is extremely cheap due to no one using it anymore, and there are abundant supply options.

They undersell the benefits of renewables significantly overall. This is for UK which they come out with slightly lower costs for omitting solar. They also say 5 years to build a 120mw microgrid. 1 post driller, 1 crane for support posts, with 2 workers guiding post insertion and cleaning up, 1 “wall of panels” crane lifter, with 3 workers aligning connecting panels on the ground, and then connecting wall to posts can get 40kw/hour=320kw/day. Complete in little over a year. But, in solar, 9 crews can really make a baby in 1 month.

Microgrids don’t need permits, and utilities will give them an import connection.

The Vogtle scam’s end cost was $17/watt. $8B or $4/watt was just financing costs prior to eventual operation that Georgia Power got to charge its customers for its share, over the 20 years before it gave them power from the boondoggle.

Solar costs under $1/watt to deploy, and batteries in a container (can fit under solar) costs $1 per 10 watt-hours of storage. Both last over 30 years.

SMR’s can pretend lower capital costs per watt, when excluding design/prototype time, but trade much more expensive enriched (proliferation risk) fuel that is less efficient, needs breeder reactors to provide likely from Russia, and carries higher security costs per watt. SMRs are simply a new scam to defraud investors with because nuclear is worthless as energy, and only ever is for military applications.

China has cleared regulatory hurdles to allow a deal on their terms. Deal includes leasing the algorithm at a 20% revenue royalty. Which is $2-$3B payment/year to ByteDance. Previous valuations of US operations were $40B at high end which means profit under $2B/year, and so the buyers are buying a money losing business that they have to invest to grow sales and lose even more from the royalty payments. ByteDance shareholders (many American) love this deal because they get $14B (or 45% of it) + all of the profits they were ever going to get in the future.

The criticism that this is a sweetheart deal for MAGA supporters is false. This is just Zionazi media consolidation to ensure Zionazi/MAGA censorship. Like all Zionazi media, operational profit is not the purpose.

There seems to be a bug in rust md5 implementation. This can break everything, but then everything can soon be fixed too.

no gods exist, so all belief, no matter how seemingly benign, is delusional and harmful.

I can’t prove god, but am sure that if there is one, it is humanist and idealist. It’s possible to see Jesus as trying to empahsize this, unlike Hasbara Moses declaring there is no god above insignificant minor Canaanite god, and commanding his followers to go kill everyone else and destroy their idols.

The point is not that humanism and idealism is delusional and harmful, whether or not it comes from God. It is that “idealism as a sales pitch” to steal your soul for megalomania profits is too easy. It’s not Jesus’s fault that fanaticism makes us want to go kill everyone who “doesn’t believe in thou shalt not murder” as much as our powerful in-group.

Very few human brains see a moral line between pride and supremacism. Religious adherence is a proud act. The appeal of christofacism means it is easy to deliver souls thinking they are given to god, to any and all demonic gaslighting that pays the religious order/pastor to gaslight their flock. The business of religion is to gaslight people into giving you their souls for your power and profit.

There should be consequences for lying??? For GOP??? What are you, 12?

Very pathethic political responses to this as usual. Soybeans and CIA-USAID propaganda budgets are not relevant

U.S. Treasury "stands ready to purchase Argentina’s USD bonds and will do so as conditions warrant. We are also prepared to deliver significant stand-by credit via the Exchange Stabilization Fund

With Argentina going down the shitter, then buying US bonds (owed by Argentina) or buying Argentine Pesos with USD, is losing US money that doesn’t get counted in the US budget either. Milei winning upcomming parliamentary elections to support Milei is only going to put Argentina further down the shitter.

There is definitely short term massive profit opportunity for insiders who know US Treasury timing. This is like 2009 QE programs in US, that China helped bail out US from collapse, btw. The shittier the shithole Argentina is, the more it pays to invest in it, because US will come bail you out of the shit.

The Christofascist, but Zionazi first, Ted Cruz appeal to both this legislation and Israel supremacy for all actions is a ploy that has been working.

Just because it sounds non-sensical to you, the pastors on the payroll, will get MAGA to lobby congress to prevent summoning the anti-christ, and then, is successful corruption of America insane? Or is it Trump circling finger around forehead smart?