Preview: Colleague Henry Sokolski Advocates Private Natural Gas-Fueled Electricity as Superior Solution for AI Data Center Power Demands. More Later.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 January 2025
⏱️ 3 minutes
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| 0:24.9 | Subject to coverage availability. Limitations and terms apply. See votaphone.com.i |
| 0:28.9 | forward slash terms. This is John Batchel, conversation with Henry Sikolsky, the executive director of the non-proliferation policy education center artificial intelligence data centers |
| 0:40.2 | the guesstimate is that we need a lot more electricity for those data centers going into the |
| 0:47.0 | future the answer is according to some nuclear power henry has another idea and is not impressed by small modular reactors, which is the hot |
| 0:59.1 | hand right now in nuclear power. |
| 1:01.6 | Henry Sikolsky on generating the electricity AI needs, but not with nukes. |
| 1:07.8 | With an old friend, natural gas, Henry explains. More of this tonight. Yeah, I mean, |
| 1:13.2 | the reason why is you can build, these are basically jet airplane engines, if you will, and you can, |
| 1:21.4 | we know how to build them quickly. They don't require much staff, and they don't require much |
| 1:27.3 | money. And so you start with staff, and they don't require much money. |
| 1:28.3 | And so you start with that, and you can amortize or get a return on investment very quickly. |
| 1:35.3 | The problem with reactors is they're expensive. |
| 1:39.3 | They are not yet cheap, even the small ones that we know about had forecasted numbers in the case of |
| 1:49.0 | the most advanced and licensed item, which was a new scale reactor. In Utah, they rejected it |
| 1:58.5 | because the vendors said it would cost $9 billion for less than 700 |
| 2:05.1 | megawatts of electricity, which is really expensive per megawatt. |
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