The design is supposed to run at excessive temperatures and extract warmth from the reactor utilizing helium, which is used to boil water and generate electrical energy. Every reactor can produce 80 megawatts of electrical energy, and the reactors are designed to work effectively as a set of 4, making a 320 MW energy plant. As of but, nonetheless, there are not any working examples of this reactor, and the design hasn’t been accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Fee.
Why now?
Why is there such sudden curiosity in small modular reactors among the many tech neighborhood? It comes right down to rising wants and a scarcity of fine options, even given the extremely dangerous nature of the startups that hope to construct the reactors.
It is no secret that information facilities require huge quantities of power, and the sudden reputation of AI threatens to lift that demand significantly. Renewables, as the most affordable supply of energy in the marketplace, could be a technique of satisfying that development, however they don’t seem to be superb. For one factor, the intermittent nature of the ability they provide, whereas attainable to handle on the grid stage, is a foul match for the around-the-clock calls for of information facilities.
The US has additionally benefitted from over a decade of effectivity features maintaining demand flat regardless of inhabitants and financial development. This has meant that each one the renewables we have put in have displaced fossil gasoline technology, serving to maintain carbon emissions in verify. Ought to newly put in renewables as a substitute find yourself servicing rising demand, it’s going to make it significantly harder for a lot of states to succeed in their local weather targets.
Lastly, renewable installations have usually been in-built areas with out devoted high-capacity grid connections, leading to a big and rising backlog of initiatives (2.6 TW of technology and storage as of 2023) which are stalled as they watch for the grid to catch up. Increasing the tempo of renewable set up cannot meet rising server farm demand if the ability cannot be dropped at the place the servers are.
