Over at my energy blog, Second Power, I’ve published a guest post by Twitter mutual Brett Maverick_, entitled Electric Money: Flywheel for the Neo-Atomic Age, which dives into the nexus of nuclear energy and Bitcoin mining.
An excerpt:
Given what we know about electricity, our goal here is to catalyze the nuclear industry into a sustainable growth spurt. What we need is an industrial source of demand that is highly reliable, scalable, flexible, interruptible, and can go anywhere a nuclear reactor (of any size) might be. We’re hunting for a unicorn demand load to provide the revenue necessary to make the economics of not only keeping plants on-line but also bringing new types of nuclear power plants to life…
…what we have in Bitcoin mining is a simple, highly reliable, expandable (growth prospects) source of demand that is dispatchable (portable) to any energy source in the world and responds quickly to the needs of any particular grid. This is the purest form we know of a flexible, heavy, portable, and interruptible commercial load. A unicorn industrial load.
Proof of work mining has the rare multiplicity of qualities necessary to materially increase the revenue potential of atomic power, improving its economic feasibility, making it more appealing to attract capital in all its forms. Electric money is the sly workaround to the problem of costliness and the lack of reliable, flexible, scalable, and location agnostic demand for nuclear power.
As the appetite for atomic power starts to reclaim the public imagination, a timely fire has been catalyzed in cyberspace by Crypto-Prometheans that will serve as the economic engine needed to restart the Neo-Atomic Age.
Please check it out and subscribe if you feel so inclined.