Today has been a pretty boring day for me at work but man have some cool stories recently come out! My favorite one so far is nuclear-powered bitcoin mining! When El Salvador's President made his comments about volcano's powering Bitcoin mining it sounded really cool and it was catchy even. However, once I actually looked into the countries infrastructure to see what they had I was shocked to see the mess that existed. Just in general they need to produce power as they currently do import quiet a bit which I wrote about previous and you can find here.
Green energy is becoming a bigger and more important thing in all aspects of life and so seeing the shift in miners from fossil fuels to renewables has been amazing to see. While nuclear may not be "clean" most people want its results are hard to argue. At the end of the day it not only gets the job done but is extremely efficient in doing so. The two companies that came together to form this partnership are Oklo and Compass Mining. Oklo is supplying the mini-nuclear reactors to Compass specifically to mine Bitcoin. These reactors can be used as a proof of concept and how well they work. Its honestly like an experiment for both parties!
A few weeks ago I had actually stumbled across Oklo because of what they want to do. Oklo whole idea is to take the biggest argument against nuclear power and to utilize it to create more power! A huge reason this works is because they have scaled down the size of the generators. Why are their mini reactors different you must be asking? Well their mini reactors are not powered by new uranium rods but rather SPENT fuel rods from other nuclear power plants. Rather than having to store the radioactive spent uranium rods Oklo is willing to that them off your hands from you to use! The reacts are also truly miniature as they only produce 1.5 megawatts of power which is enough to power between 400 and 900 home for a year.
The partnership between Oklo and Compass Mining is a huge step in cleaning up Bitcoins mining image as now they are taking something people associate with negative reactions and transform it into something useful! Compass functions as the place for miners to "drop" their equipment off at and they take care of the rest. Compass will find a hosting facility and operate the machines for the miner and as such they fit together really well with the idea Oklo is trying to accomplish. Oklo does hope to have its first reactors "rolling" out in 2023 or 2024. With the price of renewables continuing to decrease is this the solution to end fossil fuel mining? Probably not as nuclear is expensive as well BUT the image that could be captured by taking these crappy old rods and giving them a new purpose could be a really important thing for Bitcoins image in the long run!
