techno-ag said:
It's difficult to remain in a non-dynamic municipal environment when you've got the largest Tier I research university in the world right next door. Things are going to continue changing around here with nuclear power, data centers, weapons development, event centers, Blue Alliance stuff and more.
Perhaps you could move to someplace like Terlingua to get away from all this progress.
Circling back to the first commercially run small nuclear reactor in the U.S., it's important to remember that first-of-their-kind technologies often bring unintended consequences, no matter how reputable the companies involved.
Years ago, I worked on a project installing a first-of-its-kind 35 MW cogeneration gas turbine. Cogeneration itself wasn't newwe were using a gas turbine to produce electricity for the grid while capturing waste heat for a chemical plant. But our lower-power package was the first of its kind.
Both companies we partnered with were top-tier, with extensive experience building larger and smaller systems for similar setups. This was no "garage experiment." Yet, on startup day, the gearbox exhibited a natural frequency issue that could have caused catastrophic damage if not addressed. The boiler twice tripped the system offline because of blown superheat tube sections. Each failed grid connection cost us $1 million in fines from HL&P.
I even visited the turbine manufacturer's factory to observe mitigation testing. As we walked through the massive facility, my host casually pointed down a bay and said, "That's where the gearbox for a Trident submarine is being built." These were the best of the best, and we still encountered expensive, unforeseen problems.
That experience taught me a hard truth: upscaling or downscaling complex engineering systems always brings unintended consequences, even for elite engineering firms. No one is immune.
Now apply that reality to the RELLIS datacenter, which will be tied to four separate first-of-a-kind small commercial nuclear reactors. Each one introduces its own learning curve, startup issues, and potential failure modes. Instead of one point of risk, you're multiplying it by fourright next to the same grid that powers our homes, schools, and hospitals.
And yes, there are edge-case failure scenarios to consider. For example, a boiler failure on the tertiary high-pressure steam loop of a thorium salt small modular reactor powering a 300 MW+ generator could "rapidly disassemble" and trigger a heat spike on the nuclear side faster than the freeze plug can melt. Even with inherently safer reactor designs, there are realistic situations where cascading failures can outpace engineered safety responses.
Even in the best-case scenario, where the freeze plug works exactly as intended and the fuel salt drains safely, the reactor would still face significant downtimeanywhere from a week to several monthswhile going through mandatory inspections, reviews, and recertifications before returning online. During that entire period, the massive datacenter load doesn't vanish. It shifts to the local power grid, directly competing with residents and businesses for electricity, driving up prices and straining local infrastructure.
And these edge cases can't simply be dismissed, especially when this entire nucleardatacenter venture is framed as "research," not commercially proven technology. By definition, research and first-of-a-kind deployments are where the unknowns get discovered and worked out in real time. That's how innovation happensbut it also means the surrounding community is being asked to shoulder the risks and costs of those unknowns. When the technology hasn't been proven at commercial scale, the margin for error is smaller, and the consequences for the local grid, water supply, and residents are far greater.
In my real-life example, when we blew the superheat section tubes, all we had to do was slam shut the natural gas valve, and the turbine's heat production stopped almost immediately. That was our fail-safe: turn off the fuel, and the system cools.
With a nuclear system, the dynamics are entirely different. You can't simply "turn it off." You're dealing with decay heat, complex thermal behaviors, and safety mechanisms that must perform flawlessly under stress.
I have no doubt the engineers working on these reactors are smart, capable people who've tried hard to anticipate edge cases. But at the end of the day, it's not the companies or engineers who bear the consequences if something unexpected happensit's the citizens who live next door.
And that raises the fundamental question:
> Shouldn't it be the citizens, not a small group of companies or planners, who decide whether they're willing to risk their families and communities to commercially test these designs in their own backyard?
