Hyundai To Help Build Nuclear-Powered Datacenter In Texas (theregister.com) 44
Fermi America is planning to build a colossal AI datacenter complex in Amarillo, Texas, powered by up to six gigawatts of nuclear energy. According to The Register, the company has selected Hyundai to support the deployment of the "HyperGrid," describing it as the "world's largest advanced energy campus." From the report: The project is backed by Rick Perry, who served as Texas governor and US Energy Secretary, and investor Toby Neugebauer, and aims to establish Texas as the US's largest energy and intelligence campus. Construction of the first of four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors is set to begin next year in Amarillo with the plant funneling behind-the-meter power to GPU bit barns by 2032, at least that's according to a memorandum of understanding (MoU). In other words, there is no guarantee the 23 million square meter project (1.1 MilliWales) will actually be built in its entirety, but if it is, Hyundai will oversee it.
"This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world's largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus, which leverages a diverse range of energy infrastructure," Hyundai said in a canned statement. At the very least, Hyundai knows what it's doing when it comes to nuclear developments. The industrial giant has led the deployment of some 22 reactors. Ambitious as the project may be, it won't be cheap. A single AP1000 reactor was estimated to cost $6.8 billion two years ago. That's a lot of money, but nothing compared to what the hyperscalers and neo-clouds are pumping into datacenters these days. Meta, for reference, expects to spend $66-72 billion on bit barns this year. [...] How exactly Fermi America or its founders Perry and Neugebauer expect to pay for one AP1000 reactor, let alone four, isn't clear. [...]
"This agreement is significant in that it allows us to participate from the early stages of this project and contribute to the creation of the world's largest integrated energy and artificial intelligence campus, which leverages a diverse range of energy infrastructure," Hyundai said in a canned statement. At the very least, Hyundai knows what it's doing when it comes to nuclear developments. The industrial giant has led the deployment of some 22 reactors. Ambitious as the project may be, it won't be cheap. A single AP1000 reactor was estimated to cost $6.8 billion two years ago. That's a lot of money, but nothing compared to what the hyperscalers and neo-clouds are pumping into datacenters these days. Meta, for reference, expects to spend $66-72 billion on bit barns this year. [...] How exactly Fermi America or its founders Perry and Neugebauer expect to pay for one AP1000 reactor, let alone four, isn't clear. [...]
Re: Fermi (Score:1)
So your ethics are to just let a country be a victim and let those aligned with Nazis to take over the world? You lack ethics and spine.
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irrelevant to thread. Fermi didnt do that. Why is there always some whiner who crawls out of the woodwork to inject unrelated irrelevant imagined or real social injustices? Do you think this makes you important or accomplish anything? News for you, you're wasting your life and no one gives a shit about your hobby horse.
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Toby Neugebauer gave $10 million to the zodiac killer. https://archive.nytimes.com/ww... [nytimes.com]
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He was a bomb maker. Not an ethical person.
Enrico Fermi was a great man that accomplished more in his lifetime than you would in 100 lifetimes. Fuck off, troll.
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We're sending you back.... To the FUTURE!!!
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Don't worry - someday soon your timeline will stumble onto electronic fuel injection and then you won't worry about carburetors anymore.
Unlikely. (Score:3)
Considering the amount of time needed to build a nuclear power plant and the fact that there is a good chance the AI bubble will pop before it's constructed, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets canned in a few years.
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Also with nuclear plants increasingly having to shut down due to cooling problems caused by high outdoor temperatures,
Yeah, that's not a real problem. You are citing a couple of plants that shutdown for a week because the water was to warm to release back into the river. It has nothing to do with cooling the reactors. They didn't want to harm the local wildlife. The solution is simple-build a cooling tower. Or even simpler--dig a ditch, fill ditch with water, let water cool, then release cooled water back into the river.
Nuclear works with zero hitches in Arizona. Maybe google Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org] before y
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Similarly, if Chernobyl could happen there, it can happen anywhere.
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Congratulations on knowing nothing about what actually caused the Chernobyl incident.
Hint: it can't happen anywhere. See: differences between positive void coefficient and negative void coefficient, and the effect that has on a runaway reactor that is boiling the coolant off.
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A cooling tower (or any kind of evaporative cooling) will turn the nuclear power plant into a major water consumer, while an artificial cooling pond carries the geographic requirement for lots of open space.
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Land and water use (Re:Unlikely.) (Score:1)
A cooling tower (or any kind of evaporative cooling) will turn the nuclear power plant into a major water consumer, while an artificial cooling pond carries the geographic requirement for lots of open space.
How much open space? Surely this can be put in numbers we can use to compare to other energy sources. How does the cooling pond on a nuclear power plant, as well as the plant itself of course, compare to the area required for solar power? Wind power? Or flooding some land for a hydroelectric dam?
I expect any argument against nuclear power based on land use to fail on any real analysis. As I recall it's pretty typical for a one GW nuclear power plant to occupy one square kilometer. So, if there has to
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Yes, because we all know that nuclear reactors are famously built right in the middle of dense land use.
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The problem with cooling towers is that the basic cheap ones tend up evaporating off a lot of the water, instead of returning it to the source. For nuclear plants relying on inland water supplies, that if often an issue, especially when temperatures rise.
The more expensive types probably aren't worth building, even if the space is available, for the sake of a few weeks a year. While these events getting more frequent make the investment seem more worthwhile, renewables and storage are already much cheaper,
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They don't have to use evaporative cooling towers. Car style radiators work fine. As long as the steam condenses a steam plant will work.
The rule of thumb is liquid water takes 1 BTU per lb to heat up or cool down one degree F, but boiling or condensing is a thousand BTU per pound. You don't lose that much efficiency.
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Evaporative cooling isn't the issue being discussed. You need to provide cooling somehow. The reactors shutting down are the heat exchanging ones due to restrictions about maximum temperature of water discharge. If they had evaporative cooling towers they wouldn't need to shut down. But that would waste water.
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Please stop spreading lies (Re:Unlikely.) (Score:1)
Of course we'd have to place a nuclear power plant near very large bodies of cool water, like we'd see in the Persian Gulf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or out in Arizona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or near the Gulf of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Isn't Texas somewhat close to the Gulf of America? I do believe it is. If Florida can use the Gulf of America for supplying cooling water to nuclear power plants then so can Texas.
This bullshit about nuclear power plants having to shutd
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A steal at $38 billion for 5MW. The only reason they wasted so much money on it is the other uses for the material it can produce.
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Nuclear plants don't shut down because of high outdoor temperatures, they shutdown because they aren't designed for the environmental conditions they are experiencing. No one is building a nuclear power plant today using climate data from the 60s to support the engineering design.
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I was thinking the same thing, but kind of hoping they get the reactors going before a sudden outbreak of common sense shows that throwing 6GW of electricity at GPUs so that people can get worse search results and shitty generated code is stupid.
They can shut down all the GPUs, but leave the reactors running - we need the energy.
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Considering the amount of time needed to build a nuclear power plant and the fact that there is a good chance the AI bubble will pop before it's constructed, I wouldn't be surprised if this gets canned in a few years.
Wrong diagnosis, right outcome. This project probably will get canned, but not because AI is going away. It'll fail because Rick Perry is a political huckster with a losing streak longer than the Texas panhandle. His track record in energy ventures is radioactive in all the wrong ways.
But don't confuse the snake oil salesman with the oil well. AI isn’t a bubble—it’s an infrastructure transformation on the scale of electrification or the internet itself. Hyperscalers are spending tens of bi
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AI isn’t a bubble
You're not entirely wrong because it's more like religion. See also: TESCREAL
This isn’t speculative—it’s the new normal.
That in and of itself is speculative.
Good (Score:1, Troll)
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We need more nuclear everywhere.
Indeed we do.
I'm expecting a slowly growing acceptance to nuclear power, taking about as long as it takes to build a few more nuclear power plants. Then acceptance should grow quickly as people see what new nuclear power plants can do, such as provide power during winter storms, hurricanes, heat waves, hailstorms, or whatever else that could leave wind, solar, hydro, or other energy sources out of commission if not completely destroyed.
I'd suggest those reading this do an image search with their favored se
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milliwales? (Score:2)
Palo Verde Arizona is 3x AP-1000s (Score:2)
Palo Verde NGS 48 km / 30 miles west of Phoenix and just west of its suburb Buckeye in Arizona had, until Vogtle in Georgia came online, the largest 60 cycle generators and reactors in the USA (Chalk Bluff in Ontario is bigger in total though). These are 3 units of Combustion Engineering (now Westinghouse) AP-1000's pressurized water reactors (PWRs) which work like auto ICE engine cooling but at MUCH higher pressure to prevent boiling. LOTS of safety systems are there to prevent any kind of Chernobyl / TMI
Nuclear reactor on the Moon? (Score:2)
This is just stupid. This is what you get when you put in as president a person ignorant of science and technology, who is also incapable of rational thought.
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Sorry, wrong thread.
This sounds really cool (Score:1)