Investors are going nuclear to keep UK's AI datacenters fed

Investors are backing nuclear power as a solution to fuel the UK's datacenter buildout, according to researchers tracking investment activity. Tracxn, a market intelligence biz that monitors startups, says institutional capital is "quietly but aggressively pivoting toward private nuclear innovation as a sustainable, sovereign …

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Okay

The AI data centres need the electricity when they're built*, though. Not in 10-20 years when the nuclear power station opens.

* We know they're not getting built...

[Doctor Syntax]

global industrial giants like Hitachi and Toshiba making "strategic buyouts" of British atomic businesses.

The old, old story.

[Like a badger]

Well, Toshiba did us a favour by taking Westinghouse off our hands a few years back, didn't they? Otherwise it would have been the UK taxpayer picking up the $9bn tab for US losses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fusion

Fusion - still only a decade away?

[cyberdemon]

Re: Fusion

Yes - and it always will be

That said, "aneutronic" fusion could be interesting, but it requires much higher energies (pressure, temperature) than regular D-T fusion

[cyberdemon]

Re: Aneutronic Fusion

Too late to edit, but the link above talks about temperatures "in excess" of 300 million degrees C (K); other sources say 1-5 billion Kelvin.

At those temperatures, matter glows in the gamma ray spectrum due to its sheer temperature, and it glows obscenely bright. So while you'd have no nasty neutrons, you'd have a LOT of gamma. And you'd need to somehow get it up to that temperature (and keep it away from the walls of your vacuum vessel) before fusion can start.

[AVR]

Re: Fusion

Forty years ago fusion power was thirty years off. It might just come through in my lifetime.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Fusion

I don't think so - it's just too infeasible. As I said before, Deuterium-Tritium fusion is possible but makes everything around it radioactive due to its neutron emissions, while aneutronic fusion is totally infeasible due to the even-more-mind-boggling temperatures required.

Frankly, fusion is a distraction from R&D into better fission designs.

[Sorry that handle is already taken.]

Re: Fusion

Frankly, fusion is a distraction from R&D into better fission designs.

The latter of which themselves are a distraction from investment in renewables.

[werdsmith]

Re: Fusion

Fusion has been a thing for at least 13 billion years.

It powers the ISS and the Integrity Orion spacecraft.

And charges my car.

[thames]

A "small" amount of gas?

el Reg said: "Though this was disputed by the Centre for Net Zero (CNZ), which issued a report last year estimating that it would cost less to power a 120 MW datacenter with renewables and a small amount of gas-generated energy."

It was a 120MW data centre with an 80 MW gas turbine. In other words, it was mostly gas. And the wind was from offshore wind farms which were constrained by lack of transmission lines, which meant that the wind power couldn't get to the data centre anyway.

In other words, it was greenwashing gas turbines for data centres.

[thames]

The Beginning Before the AI Money

I have been listening to interviews of people involved in the nuclear industry, including many from the UK. The renewed interest in nuclear power in the UK started well before the AI bubble and was mainly driven by the perceived coming end of burning fossil fuels throughout the world.

These people identified two countries as being the most promising in terms of being a good place in which to develop new nuclear technology. These were the UK and Canada. Both had very similar nuclear regulatory systems which were receptive to evaluating designs on their individual merits from first principles. They call this results oriented regulation. That is, your design passes regulatory review if it results in a safe design.

They contrasted this with the regulatory system in the US where it is all about following the right steps in a very bureaucratic process and ticking the right boxes. They call this process oriented regulation. This makes it very hard to do anything new that is nuclear related in the US in terms of taking something from the drawing board to reality.

The UK and Canada also have very good national nuclear laboratories which will provide technical assistance and advice. Most of the technology required in a nuclear reactor is actually chemistry and metallurgy rather than nuclear physics, and this is actually the hard part that needs testing. The UK and Canada also have research reactors which can be used to test materials when required as well.

The result is that many of the innovations are taking place in the UK and Canada, even for companies which have headquarters elsewhere. Most have been working on this for at least a decade, long before the AI bubble. The foundations where laid at least 15 years ago.

I expect the nuclear companies will take the AI money while it lasts, but they aren't predicated on it. The actual business cases for nuclear rest heavily on environmental requirements to stop burning fossil fuels, and nuclear power is the only alternative that isn't limited by geography (like hydro electric is) and can deliver energy 24/7 on demand.

Most of these people in the nuclear start up industry see fusion power as being many decades away at best, and more than a few have doubts about whether it will ever be economically competitive with conventional nuclear fission.

[Like a badger]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Yes, we have strong expertise, but unfortunately the UK regulatory system is designed to stop almost anything being built quickly or at good value, and especially to screw over nuclear, with thousands of design changes required by the UK authorities on the Hinkley EPR, compared to the French version.

Separate to that, government have screwed up the electricity system by spending £400bn to date on renewables which are an appalling bedfellow for nuclear, and these are not only on long term index linked subsidies, but they get paid if they're used or not. That's not a promising environment for financing any other type of power plant. Decades of government idiocy have gifted us the most expensive electricity system in the world, and despite that it's insecure, and wholly reliant upon foreign technologies and upon imported power from France. There's plans to build a modified EPR at Sizewell (can't have any standardisation, you know), then another new design the Hualong One at Bradwell, then we have all this "lets have loads of SMRs" bollocks, and at the same time Milliband is continuing to carpet bomb the countryside with subsidised solar power plants that are the worst choice of any technology for the British grid, plus of course grand schemes for new wind farms.

The core problem here is that most energy ministers are fuckwits, they understand nothing about the energy industry, how the system works, what the technologies and costs are, and they don't want to learn anything about it. As a result we have humanities graduates like Milliband and so many before him who make persistently poor choices, and serially fail to create a coherent, long term affordable energy strategy. But why would they? Government makes policy, takes all the big decisions, but the overwhelming majority of the costs are simply heaped on bill payers, rather than being government spending.

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, you got that wrong

this:-

"The core problem here is that most energy ministers are fuckwits,"

should be:-

"The core problem here is that all ministers are fuckwits,"

Especially from the Labor benches as most (AFAIK) have never had a real job in their life. School-> University (PPE) -> Researcher for MP -> PPC for a marginal seat -> PPC for a safe seat -> Government Minister.

PPE : Politics, Philosophy and Economics

PPC: Prospective Parliamentary Candidate

At least a few of the LibDems and Tories have held jobs before becoming an MP. Reform is full of liars and hot air salesmen.

[Korev]

Re: sorry, you got that wrong

> Reform is full of liars and hot air salesmen.

Can we use that hot air to drive a turbine ?

[LionelB]

Re: sorry, you got that wrong

No, it's low-grade heat, and highly toxic.

[cyberdemon]

> Decades of government idiocy

That really stretches "Hanlon's razor" to it's limit.

For some government ministers and advisers it really is malice (or at least self-interested greed / corruption) rather than plain old fuckwittery. The incompetence award goes to those who knew about it but failed to do anything about it.

It goes all the way back to Thatcher's government selling off the National Grid and the rest of the state utilities to the private sector.

[LionelB]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Out of genuine interest, why do you describe renewables as an "appalling bedfellow for nuclear"? Especially as I don't think it's unreasonable to suppose that we will see significant technical advances in energy storage technologies for renewables in the not-so-distant future (well, certainly not-so-distant as fusion).

[cyberdemon]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

> why do you describe renewables as an "appalling bedfellow for nuclear"?

Because nuclear can't exactly turn itself off when it is not needed - especially not at the speed at which the wind changes. If it does so, it usually doesn't save any fuel or costs (indeed it may cost more to reduce output on demand) and so any unused energy just goes up the cooling tower.

As for long-duration storage - sadly it is only marginally more feasible than fusion.

If you look at the world's total battery manufacturing capacity, China dominates with 6 TWh/y "announced" capacity to be online by 2030. As of now it is more like 2 TWh/y for the entire world's production, and China is polluting swathes of its land and abusing its people to try to get to that 6 TWh figure.

The UK uses between 0.7 and 1 TWh of electricity per day, and does not produce any batteries, and certainly could not afford to buy half the world's yearly supply of batteries just to give it a couple of days' dunkelflaute protection

But even if we could buy that many batteries - their service life is about the same as the depreciation rate of an nvidia GPU - the more we have in service, the more we'd have to replace each year just to stay at the same level of installed capacity. And what would we do with all the old ones?

As for "advances in technology" - unfortunately from an electrochemistry point of view, Lithium is about the best there is. Sure, Sodium is more abundant and therefore (should) be cheaper, but it is not as good in terms of density, and as such, there are very few people producing sodium batteries.

Pumped hydro is great - but it's bulky, you need a mountain with a lake on the top - and we can't exactly manufacture those.

[LionelB]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Thanks.

> As for long-duration storage - sadly it is only marginally more feasible than fusion.

I do think that's wildly pessimistic, however. Electro-chemical is not the only option (and even there I wouldn't rule out new technologies).

[cyberdemon]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Ok I should have said LDES is "more feasible than fusion" ;)

I do think pumped hydro is good, and probably our best option. Dinorwig has about 9 GWh, but it is literally a mountain. A few more would be a big help. Maybe we could use an old oil well or something and pump seawater in and out.. but I am not a geo-engineer. (edit: lol, yeah that could get messy)

Flow batteries (e.g. Vanadium Redox) I don't have much faith in - we'd need huge quantities of reagent, and at least one of the oxidation states is pretty toxic.

Fuel cells and electrolysers need catalytic materials (usually platinum) which makes them again infeasible for grid-scale use.

Any large-scale energy storage system actually NEEDS to be low-density IMO (like pumped hydro) because if you store huge amounts of energy at high density then you have yourself a bomb. Fossil fuels only get around this issue because the second reagent is the air, so only half of the system is high-density.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

MoX solutions instead of catalysts are already being tested.

[Like a badger]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Having worked in the energy sector and alongside some pioneering technology projects, the main problem with long term storage isn't technical feasibility, it's economics. And there's no cutting edge research that will change the laws of economics and business finance.

[cyberdemon]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Just like there's no economics that will change the laws of Physics.. But try telling Elon Musk that

[LionelB]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Hmm… I would have said that historically, research that was at one time cutting-edge has certainly been known to change the "laws" of economics/business finance, at least insofar as economics/finance may be said to have "laws" – it's not physics – or, perhaps more apposite to say that technological advances have drastically altered the context in which those "laws" operate.

_{In the early noughties I found myself uncharacteristically working as a mathematical analyst for a hedge fund, one of, if not the first in the UK, to go fully-automated algorithmic trading. That, I'd say, turned out to be a game-changer in the way that global finance (and even economies) function. It was, of course, enabled by once cutting-edge computing and communications technologies. Let's say that up until that time, if you'd asked I would've claimed to have at least some understanding of what "money" means. Not so much since. But mostly, I discovered that I am also not sufficiently interested in money, which is a shame. I lasted two years, then jumped ship to academic research. Some of it quite cutting-edge, as it happens. (Meanwhile, my old company went stellar, went offshore, then imploded in a mess of fraud claims, counter-claims, intellectual property disputes and domestic strife – it's quite a story, that I was rather pleased not to be part of.)}

[thames]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

If you have a nuclear power plant you would just run it. There's no economic reason to turn it off and on. You would turn something else off first as it is mainly fixed cost rather than variable cost.

If you have more nuclear capacity than there is total demand for electricity at a given time, then you would throttle the reactor output down, but not turn it off. Nuclear plants do that on a regular basis in places where they use a lot of it. However, they are always the last thing you would throttle down or turn off.

As for batteries, I expect they will pair very well with nuclear power to handle daily peaking. Batteries can really only economically handle short term loads, so you could charge them at night with reliable nuclear power and use that stored power the next day to handle daily peaks.

Batteries are not much use for long term or unpredictable storage as they represent a high capital cost and so can't pay for themselves if they are not being charged and discharged on a daily basis. You want to charge and discharge them on a regular and predictable daily cycle, and so need a reliable and predictable source of power to charge them during off peak hours. They will typically discharge over a period of an hour or so during the maximum peak during the day. You then need a source of energy which you can guaranty will be able to charge them during low demand to be ready for the next peak the following day.

So nuclear plus battery makes sense.

Wind plus coal or natural gas makes sense from a technical perspective (I'll leave the economics for another discussion).

But wind plus battery makes no sense at all. Their characteristics just don't match up if you are trying to make them the core of your grid. They may make sense to power an isolate home with no other source of power, but that is due to lack of any better alternatives in that case. It's not what you would want to do for something on a national scale however.

[cyberdemon]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

> But wind plus battery makes no sense at all.

Hmm, really? I have often thought that it would be a very good policy for the UK to mandate a minimum on-site storage requirement for large renewable generators - e.g. one hour of rated capacity. That would force wind-farm operators who are building e.g. a 4GW wind farm to buy at least 4GWh of batteries to put next to it, which would buffer their output. The curtailment payments that they get are absurd, that could be removed if they had batteries. But obviously renewable lobbyists would be horrified at this idea because it means no more free money and lots more costs to them.

Curious to see what Mr Badger-like thinks of this idea

[thames]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

What you are talking about is a regulatory issue rather than a technical one.

The main reason why electricity is so expensive in many countries is because they use an hour by hour bidding market which puts electric power in a higher risk category in financial markets and so drives up the cost of finance in a capital intensive industry. If suppliers had long term contracts to deliver known amounts of electric energy at known prices the financial risk would be much less and they would be able to finance projects at lower interest rates on the bond market and so drastically reduce costs. Of course the suppliers have to be able to actually deliver or find someone else who can, but this is what would produce the best outcome for consumers.

If you are really wedded to a variable bidding market, then you at least need a day ahead market. Suppliers would bid to commit to providing a set amount of power at a specific time at least 24 hours in advance, and to pay a penalty if they can't deliver. If they need batteries to do that, then so be it, they can judge how much they need rather than the government simply setting targets.

What the day ahead market does is prevent profiteering from short term weather events when the price goes through the roof. The very short term spikes in price is where the real money is bidding markets. Too often the markets are organized to suit the suppliers rather than being run to benefit the consumer.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Actually, the costs of switching to renewables are mainly about the costs of extra generation, connections, stabilisers and backup. Both the auctions for capacity and the spot market were designed to move generation to systems with lowest unit costs. These need updating to reflect current market situations: marginal costs for renewables are now competitive so they don't need additional subsidies; we need to reduce aggegrate demand to reduce prices.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

You are making the same mistake that so many of the renewables lobby make - ignoring uncomfortable facts.

One hour backup is pretty meaningless when we can have one to two WEEKS of low renewables output. I still recall December 2010 when for about 2 weeks we had very cold temperatures (so increased demand for heating), next to no wind (so forget about any meaningful output from the windmills), and short days which while sunny, the sun was low in the sky and so not well orientated for most solar panels (so not a lot of solar, and what there was only came for a few hours a day.) Unusually for where I live, it barely got above freezing at any time during that fortnight and snow/ice stayed on the ground. OK, 2010 was for an unusually long period, but those conditions are far from rare.

This is the reality that is usually ignored by the scientifically illiterate/innumerate part of the renewables lobby when they crow about how much wind power contributed during the year, about how many days there were when no fossil fuels were burnt, and so on. Yes, summer is great - lots of solar due to long days and sun high in the sky, low demand for heating, and so on, meaning that renewables can supply most (if not all a lot fo the time) of the demand over and above what little nuclear we still have available. They seem keen to ignore the reality in winter, and especially when we get those prolonged spells with no wind.

Oh yes, and those dunkleflautes can cover entire regions - so just when we'd like to import power from abroad (the other claim "we can just import from our neighbours") they are likely suffering the same problems and won't have spare power.

So the reality is that we'd need battery storage for something in excess of a week - hard to put a figure on it, it's a case of diminishing returns as you go longer. When UK winter demand can reach into the 50-60GW region, a week (168 hours) of backup suddenly takes on a different meaning - we're talking in the order of 5-10TWHr of storage, or taking some figures from a previous poster, several years worth of the entire global production of batteries for the UK requirements alone.

The alternatives are what's increasingly happening now: a mixture of subsidies to fossil fuelled plants to keep them available as the economics make that less and less feasible without subsidies, and "demand management" which is really a euphemism for rationing and what the (so called" "smart" meter rollout is all about. To put that another way, as we get more and more renewables, then we either spend increasing amounts in subsidies to fossil fuelled plants to get them to stay available, or the lights go out when the wind isn't there.

[Cav]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

"the scientifically illiterate/innumerate part of the renewables lobby"

Renders any further comment of yours worthless.

[Cav]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

"They seem keen to ignore the reality in winter" and you ignore the fact that other sources of energy are available: geothermal, heat exchangers etc. It isn't all windmills and solar.

[JLV]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Yeah, as just a baseload backup they don’t make much sense since they don’t like being turned on and off, unlike natural gas plants. You might as well leave them running if you’re trying to fully cover renewables and then you don’t need the renewables.

But I think that’s a bit of a simplistic view and abundant nuclear could be part of the mix. For example, use them as backup to renewable drops but make green hydrogen when renewables suffice. Or suck atmospheric CO2 out since we’ll probably have to do that at some point. Or desal plants in dry coastal regions.

Bill Gates’s book has a pretty bit about the sizing issues of grid-scale batteries for more than a few days. He’s big on nukes. So was Lovelock.

[Charlie Clark]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Methanol fuel cells provide long-duration storage and already available. Because of hydrolysis, making methanol from renewables is currently more expensive at scale than using steam reformation. But other alternatives are available and, in a closed-loop situation the costs don't matter because you don't need to buy any more.

[Jim84]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

> If you look at the world's total battery manufacturing capacity, China dominates with 6 TWh/y "announced" capacity to be online by 2030. As of now it is more like 2 TWh/y for the entire world's production, and China is polluting swathes of its land and abusing its people to try to get to that 6 TWh figure.

The UK uses between 0.7 and 1 TWh of electricity per day, and does not produce any batteries, and certainly could not afford to buy half the world's yearly supply of batteries just to give it a couple of days' dunkelflaute protection

This is why the future of transportation is probably eFuels (methanol) produced by nuclear/renewables and burned in interanal combustion engines or fuel cells. It is why car manufacturers continue to investigate the technology.

[LionelB]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

You'd have thought that France would be our natural partner in this enterprise, with their long-term historic commitment to nuclear, and after all they're conveniently close geographically, and we're both part of a powerful economic blo… oh… wait.

[JLV]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

I hear you, but color me a bit skeptical that Canada will actually get reactors built here. We have developed such a culture of NIMBYism and cost overruns on public construction projects that I see us taking the lead in deployments as a very low probability. Our Greens don't win many elections, but are influential to some extent and would be dead set against it. Whereas our Conservatives do like nuclear but also generally deny global warming and like pumping gas out.

[thames]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

I'm not entirely sure what "here" means in your case. If you referring to Canada, there are four SMRs currently under construction east of Toronto.

Ontario have also announced plans to build a 10,000 MW nuclear power plant a bit further east (on the site of the old Wesleyville oil fired plant), and add another 4,000 MW at the Bruce plant (northwest of Toronto). Being able to build near existing transmission lines relatively near to Toronto is important to avoid having to build long and very expensive transmission lines. I suspect these plants will be large reactors rather than more SMRs.

New Brunswick and Saskatchewan both plan to build SMRs once they have seen the figures from the first SMR in Ontario. They plan to use these to replace old coal fired plants which will be going out of service. They want SMRs as large plants are simply too big for small provinces.

Alberta have announced plans to build nuclear power plants as their love affair with wind and deregulated markets seems to have worn off when the public saw the resulting high electricity bills. There are also big plans to use SMRs to provide process heat to run the oil sands extraction plants and so output more oil.

Most of the rest of the country relies almost entirely on hydro electric power except for Nova Scotia who are big fans of wind power, which apparently means in actual practice mainly using coal and natural gas.

All of this is for providing electricity for the grid, not for AI bit barns. Alberta are promoting the province as a location for AI bit barns, but those will use gas turbines of course.

If you are referring to the UK as "here", then the plans I have seen revolve around building Rolls Royce SMRs on a more or less continuous basis, starting with the old nuclear site at Wylfa in North Wales. That will start once the RR SMR is ready for production.

[JLV]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Ah, BCer here. I was aware that Canada had historical reactors (Candus) but unaware that Ontario is building new ones. As to BC, at least near the coast, they’re a lousy idea due to earthquake risks. Put them elsewhere and pipe the power in.

(and God knows if we were building any in BC I’d have heard about it. 25 years of Greens whining about our new Site C hydro dam)

Wrt wind there is a bit of under deployment - 4 sites only IIRC, possibly due to overreliance on hydro - our provincial utility is BC Hydro. I worry a bit about the change to rainfall patterns and loss of glaciers when it comes to betting all on hydro.

We also ought to think more about tidal generation, but I am sure environmentalists would have a fit.

Sheepish and I stand corrected. txs.

LLMs or no LLMs the way forward has to be through more non-emitting power generation.

[thames]

Re: The Beginning Before the AI Money

Ontario has plans for capacity expansion which extend out to 2050 as part of Net Zero plans. These are the nuclear power plants mentioned, which will be used to power the electric cars etc.

BC's plans have revolved around "but we have Site C". Now that Site C is here, there is a notable lack of plans for what comes next aside from adding a few turbines to some existing plants. This is despite projecting a doubling of demand by 2050 to meet Net Zero plus population growth. Meanwhile already announced industrial projects will use up all of Site C and then some.

BC are going to have to come up with an actual plan for the 2030 to 2050 period, but so far I have not seen anyone putting actual numbers to paper on how and where to meet it and how much it will cost, just a lot of hand waving.

[Steve Davies 3]

re: fusion power is likely at least a decade away

They (the PR Droids, not the boffins) have been saying that since around 1960. My guess that it will still be a decade away in 2060. My grandchildrens, grandkids might get to enjoy it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorium ?

Yes, not quite the same bangs per buck as Uranium. However there's a lot of it around and it leaves far less mess. Also can't be used for nukes.

If Iran really wants nuclear power, this is the way forward.

[thames]

Re: Thorium ?

Thorium is more expensive than uranium for fuel, as you need to reprocess it and you also still need uranium cycle reactors to produce the plutonium to drive the thorium cycle. Thorium fuel research in the 1950s was based on a perceived shortage of uranium, but then huge new uranium deposits were found which negated that.

India are still interested because they have lots of thorium but not a lot of uranium so they see it as a national security issue. The hold up in terms of using thorium there has been the need to develop the plutonium breeder reactors needed to drive the thorium cycle reactors.

If you don't want to see uranium enrichment then just use natural uranium reactors. There are plenty of those in commercial service on a large scale around the world and have been for decades.

Oh, and most of these natural uranium reactors can use thorium fuel as is or with minor modification, so if you really want to use thorium some day then this is the place to start.

[IGotOut]

You think this war is about nukes? How cute. I guess they must have been hidden in Venezuela really well not to have been found.

BTW has anyone found those WMDs in Iraq yet, or are they still looking.

[JLV]

Anyone else feeling rather sad that the renewed push for nuclear energy, and especially fusion research, isn't due to more important reasons - say global warming or energy security - than feeding our friendly neighborhood stochastic parrots? Even if the renewed interest predated LLMs, its high profile and public awareness is only coming in now.

[JimmyPage]

The end justifies the excuse ?

[thames]

The renewed push for nuclear started more than a decade ago (before 2010 in many cases) and so long predates the AI bubble. Nobody magicked a new nuclear reactor design out of thin air in the space of a few months. It takes many years of hard core engineering.

The renewed interest in nuclear has been driven by the exact factors you state, global warming and energy security. I have been listening to interviews of the people working in the field and this is what they were saying before AI was even on the horizon.

The new nuclear companies will be happy to take the AI money that is getting thrown around, but they were working on this problem long before the AI companies existed, and they will still be around after the AI companies have crashed and burned.

[JLV]

At an engineering level, totally agree with you. At a financial, moving things forward and _build_ stuff level however this renaissance needed serious backing and deep pockets, from outsiders. Hadn’t been forthcoming until now, for this rather icky reason.