By Jo Nova
joannenova.com.au

Soon, every tech billionaire will have their own nuclear power plant!

Two weeks ago, it was Microsoft reviving Three Mile Island’s nuclear plant. Now Google is buying seven small modular reactors (SMRs), and Amazon is spending $500 million USD on part of a nuclear energy company.

Too bad for the deplorables who get stuck with the expensive wind-solar-battery clunker spaghetti grid forced on them by the arts graduates in Parliament. An AI data centre needs all the same things a human city does—cheap gigawatts, 24 hours a day. The number-nerd men with money have all decided the cheapest reliable answer to running their AI data centre cities while pretending to fix the weather is nuclear power. (Coal, of course, is cheaper, which is why China uses so much, but it’s against “the religion”). The unwashed masses won’t get that choice, of course, to sign up with whatever generator they want. Only the uber-rich get that kind of luck.

Every one of these tech giants could have poured that money into wind farms and gardens of solar panels, backed up with acres of batteries and ten thousand miles of high voltage towers, pumped hydro, and synchronous condenser flywheels, but none of them want to pour in their own billions anymore, despite the social credit points bonanza and the bragging rights that would bring.

For twenty years, these same people have been pushing the renewable hard sell on us. Now overnight, without so much as a “sorry,” they’ve all flipped, leaving us holding the can of decrepit national grids that can’t do what they were designed to do.

Google will build seven SMRs, the first by 2030. Our Prime Minister and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) must be feeling hung out to dry. They declared nuclear war the most expensive option and said Australia couldn’t even build one before 2040.

According to Al Jazeera, Google has signed a landmark deal to use electricity produced by SMRs to power its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts.¹ Under the agreement with startup Kairos Power announced on Monday, the California-based tech giant will back the construction of seven small nuclear reactors capable of generating 500 megawatts of power. The first reactor is scheduled to come online by 2030, with others to follow in the coming years. “The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies that are powering major scientific advances, improving services for businesses and customers, and driving national competitiveness and economic growth,” Michael Terrell, the senior director of energy and climate at Google, said in a blog post.

Two days later, in EuroNews, Amazon is investing in US firm X-energy to utilize nuclear reactors to power its data centres.² Amazon and X-energy are aiming to have more than 5 gigawatts of SMR-generated power operational by 2039. The reactors are currently under development, with none currently providing power to the electric grid in the US. “Big investors can help change that, and these announcements could be the ‘inflection point’ that makes scaling up this technology truly possible,”  said Kathryn Huff, a former US assistant secretary for nuclear energy.

Feel the heat! Only weeks ago, these same billionaires were raving about renewable energy, down-ranking and censoring the skeptics. Now, they are doing exactly what we said all along.

1. aljazeera.com/economy/2024/10/15/google-signs-deal-with-startup-to-build-small-nuclear-reactors-to-power-ai

2. euronews.com/business/2024/10/17/amazon-follows-google-in-taking-the-nuclear-option-to-power-data-centres

Originally published at joannenova.com.au