Is Belarus using nuclear power to mine Bitcoin economically?

According to the Wall Street Journal[1], Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko expressed his intention to develop digital currency mining with the whole country’s strength, saying that he would allow cryptocurrency mining factories to be set up in the country and would soon use excess nuclear power to power new cryptocurrency mines.

The nuclear power plant the president was referring to is a new nuclear power plant being built in the Astravyets district of the Grodno region, right next to the Lithuanian border. The plant has two nuclear reactors. The first unit is scheduled to be operational by the end of the year, and the second will start generating electricity in the summer of 2020. The total capacity of the new nuclear power plants will be around 2,400 megawatts. The nuclear power plants are still under construction and are expected to be fully operational by the end of 2019. By then, Belarus will become the first country in the world to use electricity from nuclear power plants for mining.

As we all know, the mainstream Bitcoin mining factories in the world currently mostly use hydropower and wind power, and some use traditional thermal power (coal power). It is very common for a mining factory to subcontract a small hydropower plant to directly supply the Bitcoin mining factory next to it. Compared with these, does the nuclear power mining that Belarus is going to do seem more powerful? It depends on the economic benefits. Let's take a look at the cost research of nuclear power.

The scientific journal Energy published a paper on the economic analysis of nuclear fusion in volume 152 published on June 1, 2018 [2]. The paper provides a comparative chart of power generation from various energy sources.

First, let’s look at the LCOE (levelized cost of electricity):

Image source: ScienceDirect[2]

It can be seen that the power generation cost of nuclear fission technology is the lowest, and thermal power is also very cheap.

Let’s look at the external costs (intuitively, whether it is environmentally friendly or not):

Image source: ScienceDirect[2]

Thermal power is still very destructive to the environment, and its external costs are ranked last (the least environmentally friendly). Nuclear fusion technology, on the other hand, is very environmentally friendly, but it is still a long way from being put into practical use. The Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences built the world's first all-superconducting magnet tokamak nuclear fusion reaction experimental device in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, China[3]. On July 3, 2017, it achieved 101.2 seconds of stable long-pulse high-confinement plasma operation. This is the world's first tokamak device to achieve stable high confinement of hundreds of seconds. This ultra-long stable confinement time set a world record[4].

So, on the whole, the nuclear fission reactor has the lowest TCOE (total cost of electricity) and is currently technically practical :

Image source: ScienceDirect[2]

If the Belarusian nuclear reactor can be put into operation as scheduled, it seems that it can indeed provide cheaper, cleaner and more sustainable electricity supply for Bitcoin mining.

Since the birth of Bitcoin, the fact that it consumes electricity to mint Bitcoin has been criticized. Some people criticize it for being wasteful, and some people criticize it for being unfriendly to the environment. However, from another perspective, this design of Bitcoin may promote the leapfrog progress of human civilization!

In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev first proposed using energy levels to divide civilizations into three levels: Type I, Type II, and Type III[5].

Type I civilization uses all the energy available on its home planet (e.g. Earth), Type II civilization uses all the energy of the star its planet orbits (e.g. Sun), and Type III civilization uses all the energy of its galaxy (e.g. the entire Milky Way). It is generally believed that human civilization is close to but has not yet reached Type I civilization, currently at around 0.7-0.8.

Image source: Wikipedia[5]

Perhaps in the near future, in order to better carry out Bitcoin mining, humans will speed up the pace of research and application of better power generation technology and energy technology, thereby greatly accelerating the progress of human civilization!

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References:

[1] https://wallstreetcn.com/articles/3516283

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218305395

[3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully-superconducting-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-experimental-device

[4] https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/40595242

[5] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_Scale

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