Alex Teng

Back-of-envelope numbers for 1 gigawatt data center: All-in Capex: ~$50 bn Enterprise revenue generated: ~$25-30 bn/year Electricity cost: $1-2 bn/year ~2 year payback. The boom is real.

On April 30th, The Department of Energy's Idaho Operations Office (DOE-ID) approved the Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) for the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, advancing Aalo into its final pre-operations phase, the Operational Readiness Review. The DSA is the authoritative safety basis for a DOE nuclear facility. It demonstrates that a facility can be operated safely across its full range of normal, off-normal, and accident conditions. In the Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor, Aalo will test its full-scale nuclear core. The reactor contains nuclear fuel, moderator, control rod drive mechanisms, shielding, and instrumentation systems that are direct analogs of what will operate in the 10 MWe Aalo-X reactor being built next door. To further the CTR as an on-ramp to commercial deployment, no components used to achieve this milestone were repurposed: - Fuel assemblies were designed and assembled in-house. - The entirely new, compliant reactor facility was completed in a matter of months. - The commercial fuel supply chain was excercised from mining through on-site uranium delivery. - The reactor was designed and built modularly in-house and transported on commercial trucks to Idaho. - The reactor was built to NQA-1, the standard for commercial reactor quality, rather than ANS 15.8, which governs prototype reactors. A regulatory milestone at this level is the output of many people doing difficult, detailed work over a long period. We want to thank DOE leadership and the review staff who executed the DOE-STD-1271 framework, along with the modernized NE orders. We also want to give a huge thank you to the team at Aalo who carried out this work, along with our partners and advisors. The final phase before criticality is the DOE-led Readiness Review, in which DOE verifies that the people, facility, and programs can be cleared to operate as documented. Today’s DSA milestone proves our team’s execution discipline, and we are looking forward to next steps. Onward to criticality.

I’m no expert but the idea that blue team countermeasure design & distribution can ever reach the pace of AI-enabled pathogen design seems very far fetched and I find it terrifying that this tactic is such a prominent part of so many plans for addressing the risk

You cannot buy a new gas turbine until 2030. Order books at GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi stretch to 2029. Turbine prices have nearly tripled since 2019. Every AI data center needs power and every gas plant needs a turbine. And every turbine has one part that bottlenecks the entire industry: The blade. It has to survive in gas 500°C above the melting point of the metal it's made from and spin at up to 20,000 RPM under 10,000 g of centrifugal force. Each blade is grown as a single crystal of nickel superalloy, pulled through a vacuum furnace at 3 mm per minute. A set of blades costs $600,000 and takes 90 weeks to grow. The same metallurgy powers modern jet engines. Only 3 companies on Earth can build one. China spent $42 billion trying to catch up. They bought a Russian fighter engine, took it apart, and copied every part. Their copy ran 30 hours between overhauls versus 400 for the original. Modern Western engines run 4,000. You can reverse engineer the shape of a turbine blade. You cannot reverse engineer 60 years of metallurgy.