Hungry for Energy, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Turn to Nuclear Power | Large technology companies are investing billions of dollars in nuclear energy as an emissions-free source of electricity for AI
(www.nytimes.com)
from silence7@slrpnk.net to technology@lemmy.world on 16 Oct 2024 20:55
https://slrpnk.net/post/14316826
from silence7@slrpnk.net to technology@lemmy.world on 16 Oct 2024 20:55
https://slrpnk.net/post/14316826
My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.
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Honestly, I know this is a polarizing issue, but nuclear is clean and pretty much safe and you don’t need batteries for it. Lithium batteries of course being an ecological nightmare. Bring it on I say.
Mostly:
So it has the feel of a plan to promise to spend a lot of money several years from now, and get a lot of PR points today, and quietly cancel the project later.
Well that is, indeed, wack. I appreciate your perspective, I can’t believe I missed the “corporations lying for money” angle. I’m usually on top of it.
Not that much. Do remember there’s a lot of oil money pouring into FUDing about nuclear.
They’re talking about 5+ years on the new nuclear in these. And they haven’t done it before, so a 30% deadline slip is realistic.
You can put up a lot of wind and solar in that time.
Which needs a stable baseline to counteract lack of supply and/or a lot of lithium. And space.
The existing large-scale batteries are largely lithium. There are a bunch of iron-chemistry ones and sodium-ion ones which have been deployed over the past year, with factories going up to scale them up. I’m not expecting to be limited by lithium availability for stationary batteries.
Mining for nuclear is an ecological disaster, and is often done in poor countries under awful conditions, especially lung cancer due to the radon emissions of uranium.
Arguably it is better than mining for coal, lithium, etc. since those have similar issues, but one gram of uranium contains energy similar to 3 tons of coal.
Try Thorium.
As long as regulation stays in place. Or, better, add even harder regulation (for from security standpoints as well as fiscal) to ensure these fuckers are forced to be actively responsible for the safety and give them no way to back off and abandon a plant.
Let them donate excess power to the grid as well. Eh, fund housing nearby for the homeless.
Weren’t the headlines a week or two ago about Microsoft trying to get taxpayer funded aid for reopening 3-mile Island? Companies shouldn’t be asking for taxpayer funded handouts when they are basically printing money at this point.
In 10 years they’ll be swimming in waste with no permanent storage facilities in existence, a little will leak due to cist cutting, and they’ll let those shell companies go bankrupt to avoid ever having to deal with it.
Stop FUDing.
How is that FUD? A fuel rod lasts about 3-5 years. And there is no permanent storage place in the US (or any other countries for that matter) or reprocessing technology being developed anywhere. So in a decade, if they are running several reactors, they’ll have a bunch of rods sitting in giant pools with nowhere safe to put them.
If you… say so.
Are you sure?
Stop FUDing, i’ll stop feeding the troll,
Your links proved my point, not the opposite.
France doesn’t have a storage place and desperately needs one. Same with Japan or the Fukushima disaster would have been much less impactful. They are closer to having one, but many scientists say their solution is not going to work permanently due to corrosion and earthquakes. Similar reasons to why the US stopped building their own storage facilities. They aren’t permanent enough and eventually will probably leak and require expensive, dangerous maintenance or abandoning the land, among other issues and cost overruns.
As for reprocessing, the basic science is there, and has been for a long time. But it never has been and likely never will be profitable thus the headline using the word “could” and no one having built a prototype reactor. Fusion tech is closer to a usable state than these and different reactors produce different waste that requires different reactors to reprocess partially. Then to further process, a different reactor is required, etc. It’s not a simple process and the energy it produces might pay for maintaining the facilities, but not for the development costs to turn theoretical technology into workable engineering designs or the construction costs.
Renewable energy is much more profitable when you include the cist of storage or reprocessing of nuclear waste, so as soon as companies have too much to store, they’ll leave the rest to taxpayers and move on.
Conveniently, the heat from all this power being generated and subsequently used in the data centres doesn’t count as emmissions. Twats.
Fairly so - it isn’t emissions, and does not contribute to the problem in a meaningful way.
The reason why emissions are dangerous is because they trap solar heat at large enough scales to change the global climate. Server farm heating isn’t really anywhere near contributing at that scale.
Is “AI” (ie, large language modeling, also known as enhanced word prediction; and with no logical reasoning ability) really so important that this infrastructure needs to be built?
For the love of the gods, let this bubble burst already!
Let them build green energy before it bursts… although, as another user pointed out, this may be the usual money grab and nothing gets built in the end.