Panos for Progress: Thoughts and Selections

Data centers need a lot of power. Nuclear energy has been reinvigorated to support the growing demand for power. Both data centers and power plants need a lot of water for cooling and other purposes. Let's build them side by side and float them in the ocean past the horizon of major coastal cities. Make it a trifecta by having a desalination plant option; these are also power hungry. I proposed some of these in 2010 , as part of my platform for Mayor of Honolulu, to enhance the infrastructure resilience for one million people in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Five years later, a group from MIT and other researchers launched an initiative to add substance to this concept ... Floating on the deep sea . Nowadays the concept is gaining production scale : "Samsung Heavy Industries is pioneering floating nuclear power plants (FNPP) by developing barges equipped with compact molten salt reactors (CMSR) or Small Modular Reactors (SMR)." The floating infrastructure proposals ...

My article on Nuclear Fusion was printed in the  Reno Gazette Journal on September 6, 2024 ; it is copied below. Nuclear fusion energy is possible —the sun and the H-bomb prove it— but the engineering part for achieving commercial energy production is complicated. Proof of concept models are very expensive, but several exist by entities such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, First Light, Helion Energy, National Ignition Facility, Tokamak Energy and several others. Earlier this year the Joint European Torus tokamak reactor near Oxford, England produced enough fusion energy to power about 12,000 houses; but it was a five second spurt using a tiny amount of fuel. The primary fuel, deuterium, can be readily harvested from the oceans, and the radioactive waste of nuclear fusion plants has a life of 50 to 100 years, compared to thousands of years for the waste from our current nuclear fission reactors. Can nuclear fusion power be sustained and scaled for mass, affordable production of...

  “Nuclear energy accounts for 50% of the US’s carbon-free electricity” ( The Verge ). Four recent developments point to a renaissance. 1. Vogtle in Waynesboro, Georgia is the largest generator of clean energy in the US; it has two old (1980s) and two new nuclear reactors. Unit 3 entered commercial operation in July 2023, and unit 4 entered commercial operation in April 2024 . The combined power capacity is 4,536 MW! 2. The Diablo Canyon Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA was under closing procedures to conclude in 2025, but a $1.1 billion grant from US DOE to Diablo Canyon added to a $1.4 billion loan PG&E got from the state when Gov. Newsom signed a bill in September allowing the plant to stay open until 2030 . 3. A US DOE conditional commitment of up to $1.52 billion for a loan guarantee aims to bring back online the Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan, which ceased operations in May 2022, and upgrade it to produce baseload clean power until at least 2051. 4. Constellatio...