Kansas will get the world's first mile-deep nuclear reactor and the groundbreaking is next week

[lapfog_1]

1. the numbers don't add up

30 inch wide nuke plant dropped 1 mile into a steel lined bore hole... filled with water, essentially becoming a 1 mile deep boiling water pot, generating like 40 MWatt of electricity ( making some assumptions about "10,000 homes" ). Runs for X years ( 2 to 7 years is quite a range ) and then they seal it up and hope the water stays in the mile deep shaft for the next N years. I guess no refueling or anything...

But datacenters are multi-gigawatt ( let's say just 1 gigawatt )... you would need 25 such reactors and 25 bore holes... every 5 years... each such reactor would need 50 million gallons of water ( in a closed system ).

This, of course, doesn't account for the water needed to cool the AI datacenter.