masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 31 May 2024 04:02
nextcollapse
I mean, itās all runing on general purpose hardware. If we decoded 4k video on general purpose hardware weād use more power than every AI company put together, but once that became popular we developed chips capable of decoding it at the hardware level that consume barely any power.
And the exact same thing is starting to happen with dedicated machine learning chips / NPUs.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 19:33
nextcollapse
There was always something that was going to prevent this, they never seriously wanted it to happen, that would hurt fossil fuel donations to politicians
I like conspiracy theories like an average bloke does but have you seen quarterly reports from big tech? Their energy consumption and costs are skyrocketing. Are they in cahoots with big oil coal?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 19:42
collapse
What?
AI is the excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If it was just about AI, it could be used as an excuse to build up renewables.
What I meant was if the excuse wasnāt AI, it would be something else for the excuse.
The current admin (and trump if he wins) neither have any desire to cut back on fossil fuels. Itās one of the few things propping up āthe economyā which is why Biden is shattering the domestic fossil fuel production records that trump just set a few years ago.
AI is not an excuse to burn fossil fuels. AI exploded and itās energy consumption exploded, thereās lots of data to back it up. Youāre saying if not for AI there would be some other excuse. What excuse would that he? Would fossil fuel industry have to invent something that would consume this much energy?
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 20:08
collapse
AI is not an excuse to burn fossil fuels
AI is not a valid reasons to burn more fossil fuels
It is definitely being used as an excuse to do so.
And if it wasnt, something else would be.
Iām sorry if Iām still not explaining that in a clear way, but I donāt think weāre going to resolve this at this point if it still isnāt.
Microsoft and other big tech already power their data centers with their own renewables, and they will continue to do so. In the latest quarterly report from MS they admit they didnāt anticipate AI boom to be this big and so they have to buy more power externally. This is not good for them and they wouldnāt do this on purpose. They will catch up because itās profitable thing to do.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
on 31 May 2024 04:22
collapse
Thatās just a link to all datacenters and doesnāt break out how much energy is going to AI vs how much energy is being used to stream Netflix.
You might as well say we should shut down the internet because it uses too much electricity.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
on 31 May 2024 16:12
collapse
OKā¦ warning: wall of text incoming.
TL/DR: We end up comparing LLM executions with Google searches (a single prompt to ChatGPT uses about 10x as much electricity as a single Google search execution). How many Google searches and links do you need to click on vs requesting information from ChatGPT?
I also touch on different use cases beyond just the use of LLMs.
The true argument comes down to this:
Is the increase in productivity worth the boost in electricity?
Is there a better tool out there that makes more sense than using an AI Model?
For the first article:
The only somewhat useful number in here just says that Microsoft had 30% higher emissions than what itās goals were from 2020ā¦ that doesnāt breakdown how much more energy AI is using despite how much the article wants to blame the training of AI models.
The second article was mostly worthless, again pointing at numbers from all datacenters, but conveniently putting 100% of the blame on AI throughout most of the article. But, at the very end of the article it finally included something a bit more specific as well as an actual source:
AI could burn throughĀ 10 times as much electricity in 2026 as it did in 2023,Ā according to the International Energy Agency.
A 170 page document by the International Energy Agency.
Much better.
Page 8:
Electricity consumption from data centres, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cryptocurrency sector could double by 2026.
Not a very useful number since itās lumping in cryptocurrency with all Data centers and āAIā.
Moreover, we forecast that electricity consumption from data centres in the European Union in 2026 will be 30% higher than 2023 levels, as new data facilities are commissioned amid increased digitalisation and AI computations.
Again, mixing AI numbers with all datacenters.
Page 35:
By 2026, the AI industry is expected to have grown exponentially to consume at least ten times its demand in 2023.
OK, Iām assuming this is where they got their 10x figure, but this does not necessarily mean the same thing as using 10x more electricity especially if youāre trying to compare traditional energy use for specific tasks to the energy use required by executing a trained AI Model.
Page 34:
When comparing the average electricity demand of a typical Google search (0.3 Wh of electricity) to OpenAIās ChatGPT (2.9 Wh per request)
Itās behind a paywall, but if youāre on a college campus or at certain libraries you might be able to access it for free.
Finally we have some real numbers we can work with. Letās break this down. A single Google search uses a little more than 1/10th of a request made to ChatGPT.
So hereās the thing, how many times do you have to execute a Google search to get the right answer? And how many links do you need to click on to be satisfied?
Itās going to depend based on what youāre looking for.
For example, if Iām working on doing some research or solving a problem, Iāll probably end up with about 10-20 browser tabs open at the same time by the time I get all of the information I need.
And donāt forget that I have to click on a website and load it up to get more info.
However, when Iām finally done, I get the sweet satisfaction of closing all the tabs down.
Compare that to using an LLM, I get a direct answer to what I need, I then do a little double checking to verify that the answer is legitimate (maybe 1-2 Google equivalent searches), and Iām good to go. Not only have I spent less time overall on the problem, but in some cases I might have even used less electricity after factoring everything in.
Letās try a different use case: Images.
I could spend hours working in Photoshop to create some image that I can use as my Avatar on a website.
Or I can take a few minutes generating a bunch of images through Stable Diffusion and then pick out one I like. Not only have I saved time in this task, but I have used less electricity.
In another example I could spend time/electricity to watch a Video over and over again trying to translate what someone said from one language to another, or I could use Whisper to quickly translate and transcribe what was said in a matter of seconds.
On the other hand, there are absolutely use cases where using some ML model is incredibly wasteful.
Take, for example, a rain sensor on your car.
Now, you could setup some AI mo
I think we can use Bitcoin difficulty chart to approximate how much crypto weighs in the AI / crypto mix. BTC difficulty stopped increasing in 2024 which could be partially explained by both competing for same resources. The other big one, Ethereum moved to proof of stake fairly recently and I think itās an attractive proposition for other crypto given the above. With this in mind itās fair to say crypto wonāt be a big factor compared to AI growth and I would expect researchers to come to somewhat similar conclusions.
As to how good AI is at things:
Effectiveness of AI powered search is debatable but itās a subjective thing so I donāt want to get into it.
Translation tech was one of the early ML implementations and itās good to see it improving even more. Transcription is one of the great uses but how many people need that on frequent basis?
I remain unconvinced that many multimedia generative AI use is legal due to how training data was obtained. Weāre in a limbo until this gets decided by US / EU etc.
As youāve mentioned there is concern that weāll see a lot of wasteful applications of AI. I was horrified when Googled demoed assistant that would find your car plates by scanning your photo library.
The last one is key I think. Since AI is the current buzzword companies will try to shoehorn it everywhere, regardless of it making sense.
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world
on 31 May 2024 22:01
collapse
Bitcoin difficulty chart - good point.
Effectiveness of AI powered search - Agreed, it is a very subjective topic. I donāt use LLMs for the majority of my searches (who needs hallucinated dates and times for the movies playing at a cinema near me?) and it sounds like Google is trying to use their LLM with every search nowā¦ In my opinion we should have a button to activate the LLM on a search rather than have it respond every time (but I donāt really use Google search anyway).
Translation/Transcription tech - Itās incredibly useful for anyone whoās deaf.
Your average person doesnāt need this, although Iām sure they benefit from the auto-generated subtitles if theyāre trying to watch a video in a noisy environment (or with the volume off).
In my own personal use Iāve found it useful for cutting through the nonsense posted by both sides of either the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Gaza conflict (in the case of misinformation targeting those who donāt speak the language).
Generative AI - Yeah, this will be interesting to see how it plays out in courts. I definitely see good points raised by both sides, although Iām personally leaning towards a ruling that would allow smaller startups/research groups to be able to compete with larger corporations (when they will be able to buy their way into training data).
Itāll be interesting to see how these cases proceed on the text vs audio vs image/art fronts.
Wasteful AI - Agreedā¦ too many companies are jumping in on the āAIā bandwagon without properly evaluating whether thereās a better way to do something.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read through everything.
I don't understand, clean nuclear power has never been easier. Why not just build some current gen nuke plants?
cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
on 30 May 2024 20:06
nextcollapse
It takes a long time to get a nuclear plant up and running. While it would be great to replace coal plants with nuclear, it wouldnāt help with all of the power being wasted on AI right now.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 20:33
collapse
Timeā¦
And a lot of concrete.
It takes a long time to see the climate gains from a nuclear reactor.
Hell, depending on size it can take a decade or longer to finish curing, and part of curing is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
I always bring up waste disposal, and always get waved away.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 20:42
collapse
Nuclear waste isnt that big of an issue.
That part is kind of overblown.
Hell, for nuclear waste from naval nuclear reactors, Iām pretty sure we still sell it to France. I know we did up to at least a decade ago. They just refine it again and keep using it.
If itās radioactive nuclear waste, that means itās still radioactive.
All you gotta do is get rid of the non radioactive bits and itās fuel again. By the time you canāt do it anymore due to prohibitive cost to gain ratio, itās not a big problem to get rid of it, because itās not that radioactive
The above comment is an example of this getting waved away.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 21:03
nextcollapse
I mean yeahā¦
Because that part should beā¦
I mean, statistically speaking Iām probably the only person that will see this thread that had the US government drop over six figures on teaching nuclear engineeringā¦
But feel to do some googling about reusing spent fuel to verify for yourself.
This is the part that has always confused me. Radioactive āwasteā should either be radioactive enough that it can continue to be used in some capacity, or itās inert enough that itās not too complicated to just bury it, given the relatively small scale. I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert and that must have been the problem with managing waste, but if spent fuel can be refined back into new fuel and inert waste, then I donāt see the issue.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 22:20
collapse
I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert
Itās a matter of money and access.
If you can get nuclear fuel, itās cheaper/easier to buy new.
But itās not like we canāt just not use money as the sole deciding factor on whether we recycle or bury in a mountain.
But like, say you have 100% pure fuel and use it till itās 50%, itās not like you use it from the top down, itās on an atom by atom basis throughout the fuel. So the more you use it before you refine again, the harder it is for it to be cost effective.
Thatās why while we sell the āusedā fuel from military ships, the stuff in an civilian reactor gets thrown under a mountain. The military want to keep theirs ātopped offā in case new fuel becomes inaccessible.
We could easily change the pipeline to:
Military use > civilian use > refinement > military use
And just keep adding more fissible material as needed.
It might not be ācost effectiveā but it completely elimates the nuclear waste issue. It just all comes down to the price our leaders put on the environment.
Quick edit:
Obviously refinement isnāt as easy as popping it into a microwave for five minutes, and comes with itās own energy needs and other things that would effect if we should do this, nothing is a perfect solution.
But if weāre just talking about eliminating nuclear waste, this is a valid path.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation! I really believe we need to invest in refinement tech to get more use out of fuel instead of worrying about how to infinitely store (and therefore waste) still-useful fuel.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 23:19
collapse
No worries.
And we already have the tech to do it. Thats how we get the fuel in the first place.
Because it decays naturally, youāll never have āpureā nuclear material out in the wild. A certain amount is going to naturally decay. And the more pure it is, the faster it decays naturally.
Itās just when fuel is used to the point itās less pure than available ore for cheaper than it costs to refine the used fuelā¦
We chuck it under a mountain.
To get real specific, the remaining issue would be the stuff around the reactor (primarily the primary coolant loop) building up stuff like cobalt 60.
We can keep refining the fuel forever, but itās going to make non-fuel stuff also radioactive, and we canāt refine that stuff into fuel. That stuff tho, yeah, throwing it under a mountain, burying it in the desert, itās not going to cause an issue any bigger than burying non radioactive steel in the same place.
Windex007@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 23:53
collapse
Yes, because if you read their previous comment youāll see their primary concern is the CO2 released by curing concrete that is the equivalent of running a coal plant for DOZENS of seconds.
placatedmayhem@lemmy.world
on 30 May 2024 20:11
collapse
As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isnāt a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.
I think itās fair to predict energy consumption will continue to rise. With that timescale, itās basically āthe best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is todayā. Doesnāt solve the immediate issue, but if we keep not starting new nuclear projects, itās going to remain an issue forever.
placatedmayhem@lemmy.world
on 31 May 2024 02:52
collapse
Oh, I totally agree ā didnāt mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is whatās happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of whatās being brought up this year:
Iāve said it before, and Iāll say it again: Fuck this āAIā nonsense, the techbros shoving it into everything, and the Bitcoin cryptobros that came before them.
Blackout@kbin.run
on 30 May 2024 20:50
nextcollapse
What kind of world are we going to leave behind for the AI though?
Itāll be a coal-powered Dyson sphere sustaining data center tasked with generating pictures of celebrity porn, Jesus, flight attendants, babies and seafood. By then AI will enjoy them as much as my mother does.
Technus@lemmy.zip
on 30 May 2024 22:04
nextcollapse
Letās have a round of slow claps for the tech industry.
First the āwhole ass country of energy use to make fake moneyā that is bitcoin and now this?
Lovely.
MajorHavoc@programming.dev
on 30 May 2024 22:06
nextcollapse
āIāve cut out these goatees made of felt for us all to wear until we can grow real ones.ā
unreasonabro@lemmy.world
on 31 May 2024 01:39
nextcollapse
thereās that window closed.
masterspace@lemmy.ca
on 31 May 2024 04:04
collapse
This is a bad article, with a misleading headline.
It shows no direct connection between the two, it just talks about how AI models are less power efficient than search engines, and then talks about how all industries including normal, non AI data centers, manufacturing, etc, are all increasing power usage.
threaded - newest
Very sustainable technology, this AI š
I mean, itās all runing on general purpose hardware. If we decoded 4k video on general purpose hardware weād use more power than every AI company put together, but once that became popular we developed chips capable of decoding it at the hardware level that consume barely any power.
And the exact same thing is starting to happen with dedicated machine learning chips / NPUs.
.
There was always something that was going to prevent this, they never seriously wanted it to happen, that would hurt fossil fuel donations to politicians
I like conspiracy theories like an average bloke does but have you seen quarterly reports from big tech? Their energy consumption and costs are skyrocketing. Are they in cahoots with big
oilcoal?What?
AI is the excuse to burn more fossil fuels.
If it was just about AI, it could be used as an excuse to build up renewables.
What I meant was if the excuse wasnāt AI, it would be something else for the excuse.
The current admin (and trump if he wins) neither have any desire to cut back on fossil fuels. Itās one of the few things propping up āthe economyā which is why Biden is shattering the domestic fossil fuel production records that trump just set a few years ago.
There is tangible data on how much energy itās using.
reuters.com/ā¦/data-centers-could-use-9-us-electriā¦
ā¦
Iām sorry, I just donāt seem to follow these train of comments.
Each reply just seems kind of random and not related to what Iām saying.
AI is not an excuse to burn fossil fuels. AI exploded and itās energy consumption exploded, thereās lots of data to back it up. Youāre saying if not for AI there would be some other excuse. What excuse would that he? Would fossil fuel industry have to invent something that would consume this much energy?
AI is not a valid reasons to burn more fossil fuels
It is definitely being used as an excuse to do so.
And if it wasnt, something else would be.
Iām sorry if Iām still not explaining that in a clear way, but I donāt think weāre going to resolve this at this point if it still isnāt.
Microsoft and other big tech already power their data centers with their own renewables, and they will continue to do so. In the latest quarterly report from MS they admit they didnāt anticipate AI boom to be this big and so they have to buy more power externally. This is not good for them and they wouldnāt do this on purpose. They will catch up because itās profitable thing to do.
Thatās just a link to all datacenters and doesnāt break out how much energy is going to AI vs how much energy is being used to stream Netflix.
You might as well say we should shut down the internet because it uses too much electricity.
Lmgtfy
theverge.com/ā¦/microsoft-ai-carbon-footprint-greeā¦
theverge.com/ā¦/microsoft-ai-data-center-record-reā¦
OKā¦ warning: wall of text incoming.
TL/DR: We end up comparing LLM executions with Google searches (a single prompt to ChatGPT uses about 10x as much electricity as a single Google search execution). How many Google searches and links do you need to click on vs requesting information from ChatGPT? I also touch on different use cases beyond just the use of LLMs.
The true argument comes down to this: Is the increase in productivity worth the boost in electricity? Is there a better tool out there that makes more sense than using an AI Model?
For the first article:
The only somewhat useful number in here just says that Microsoft had 30% higher emissions than what itās goals were from 2020ā¦ that doesnāt breakdown how much more energy AI is using despite how much the article wants to blame the training of AI models.
The second article was mostly worthless, again pointing at numbers from all datacenters, but conveniently putting 100% of the blame on AI throughout most of the article. But, at the very end of the article it finally included something a bit more specific as well as an actual source:
Link to source: www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2024
A 170 page document by the International Energy Agency.
Much better.
Page 8:
Not a very useful number since itās lumping in cryptocurrency with all Data centers and āAIā.
Again, mixing AI numbers with all datacenters.
Page 35:
OK, Iām assuming this is where they got their 10x figure, but this does not necessarily mean the same thing as using 10x more electricity especially if youāre trying to compare traditional energy use for specific tasks to the energy use required by executing a trained AI Model.
Page 34:
Link to source of that number: www.sciencedirect.com/ā¦/S2542435123003653?dgcid=aā¦
Itās behind a paywall, but if youāre on a college campus or at certain libraries you might be able to access it for free.
Finally we have some real numbers we can work with. Letās break this down. A single Google search uses a little more than 1/10th of a request made to ChatGPT.
So hereās the thing, how many times do you have to execute a Google search to get the right answer? And how many links do you need to click on to be satisfied? Itās going to depend based on what youāre looking for. For example, if Iām working on doing some research or solving a problem, Iāll probably end up with about 10-20 browser tabs open at the same time by the time I get all of the information I need. And donāt forget that I have to click on a website and load it up to get more info. However, when Iām finally done, I get the sweet satisfaction of closing all the tabs down.
Compare that to using an LLM, I get a direct answer to what I need, I then do a little double checking to verify that the answer is legitimate (maybe 1-2 Google equivalent searches), and Iām good to go. Not only have I spent less time overall on the problem, but in some cases I might have even used less electricity after factoring everything in.
Letās try a different use case: Images. I could spend hours working in Photoshop to create some image that I can use as my Avatar on a website. Or I can take a few minutes generating a bunch of images through Stable Diffusion and then pick out one I like. Not only have I saved time in this task, but I have used less electricity.
In another example I could spend time/electricity to watch a Video over and over again trying to translate what someone said from one language to another, or I could use Whisper to quickly translate and transcribe what was said in a matter of seconds.
On the other hand, there are absolutely use cases where using some ML model is incredibly wasteful. Take, for example, a rain sensor on your car. Now, you could setup some AI mo
Thank you for your effort.
Couple of takeaways:
I think we can use Bitcoin difficulty chart to approximate how much crypto weighs in the AI / crypto mix. BTC difficulty stopped increasing in 2024 which could be partially explained by both competing for same resources. The other big one, Ethereum moved to proof of stake fairly recently and I think itās an attractive proposition for other crypto given the above. With this in mind itās fair to say crypto wonāt be a big factor compared to AI growth and I would expect researchers to come to somewhat similar conclusions.
As to how good AI is at things:
The last one is key I think. Since AI is the current buzzword companies will try to shoehorn it everywhere, regardless of it making sense.
Bitcoin difficulty chart - good point.
Effectiveness of AI powered search - Agreed, it is a very subjective topic. I donāt use LLMs for the majority of my searches (who needs hallucinated dates and times for the movies playing at a cinema near me?) and it sounds like Google is trying to use their LLM with every search nowā¦ In my opinion we should have a button to activate the LLM on a search rather than have it respond every time (but I donāt really use Google search anyway).
Translation/Transcription tech - Itās incredibly useful for anyone whoās deaf. Your average person doesnāt need this, although Iām sure they benefit from the auto-generated subtitles if theyāre trying to watch a video in a noisy environment (or with the volume off).
In my own personal use Iāve found it useful for cutting through the nonsense posted by both sides of either the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Gaza conflict (in the case of misinformation targeting those who donāt speak the language).
Generative AI - Yeah, this will be interesting to see how it plays out in courts. I definitely see good points raised by both sides, although Iām personally leaning towards a ruling that would allow smaller startups/research groups to be able to compete with larger corporations (when they will be able to buy their way into training data). Itāll be interesting to see how these cases proceed on the text vs audio vs image/art fronts.
Wasteful AI - Agreedā¦ too many companies are jumping in on the āAIā bandwagon without properly evaluating whether thereās a better way to do something.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read through everything.
I don't understand, clean nuclear power has never been easier. Why not just build some current gen nuke plants?
It takes a long time to get a nuclear plant up and running. While it would be great to replace coal plants with nuclear, it wouldnāt help with all of the power being wasted on AI right now.
Timeā¦
And a lot of concrete.
It takes a long time to see the climate gains from a nuclear reactor.
Hell, depending on size it can take a decade or longer to finish curing, and part of curing is releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
I always bring up waste disposal, and always get waved away.
Nuclear waste isnt that big of an issue.
That part is kind of overblown.
Hell, for nuclear waste from naval nuclear reactors, Iām pretty sure we still sell it to France. I know we did up to at least a decade ago. They just refine it again and keep using it.
If itās radioactive nuclear waste, that means itās still radioactive.
All you gotta do is get rid of the non radioactive bits and itās fuel again. By the time you canāt do it anymore due to prohibitive cost to gain ratio, itās not a big problem to get rid of it, because itās not that radioactive
The above comment is an example of this getting waved away.
I mean yeahā¦
Because that part should beā¦
I mean, statistically speaking Iām probably the only person that will see this thread that had the US government drop over six figures on teaching nuclear engineeringā¦
But feel to do some googling about reusing spent fuel to verify for yourself.
This is the part that has always confused me. Radioactive āwasteā should either be radioactive enough that it can continue to be used in some capacity, or itās inert enough that itās not too complicated to just bury it, given the relatively small scale. I guess I assumed that there must have been a large gap between being useful and being inert and that must have been the problem with managing waste, but if spent fuel can be refined back into new fuel and inert waste, then I donāt see the issue.
Itās a matter of money and access.
If you can get nuclear fuel, itās cheaper/easier to buy new.
But itās not like we canāt just not use money as the sole deciding factor on whether we recycle or bury in a mountain.
But like, say you have 100% pure fuel and use it till itās 50%, itās not like you use it from the top down, itās on an atom by atom basis throughout the fuel. So the more you use it before you refine again, the harder it is for it to be cost effective.
Thatās why while we sell the āusedā fuel from military ships, the stuff in an civilian reactor gets thrown under a mountain. The military want to keep theirs ātopped offā in case new fuel becomes inaccessible.
We could easily change the pipeline to:
Military use > civilian use > refinement > military use
And just keep adding more fissible material as needed.
It might not be ācost effectiveā but it completely elimates the nuclear waste issue. It just all comes down to the price our leaders put on the environment.
Quick edit:
Obviously refinement isnāt as easy as popping it into a microwave for five minutes, and comes with itās own energy needs and other things that would effect if we should do this, nothing is a perfect solution.
But if weāre just talking about eliminating nuclear waste, this is a valid path.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation! I really believe we need to invest in refinement tech to get more use out of fuel instead of worrying about how to infinitely store (and therefore waste) still-useful fuel.
No worries.
And we already have the tech to do it. Thats how we get the fuel in the first place.
Because it decays naturally, youāll never have āpureā nuclear material out in the wild. A certain amount is going to naturally decay. And the more pure it is, the faster it decays naturally.
Itās just when fuel is used to the point itās less pure than available ore for cheaper than it costs to refine the used fuelā¦
We chuck it under a mountain.
To get real specific, the remaining issue would be the stuff around the reactor (primarily the primary coolant loop) building up stuff like cobalt 60.
We can keep refining the fuel forever, but itās going to make non-fuel stuff also radioactive, and we canāt refine that stuff into fuel. That stuff tho, yeah, throwing it under a mountain, burying it in the desert, itās not going to cause an issue any bigger than burying non radioactive steel in the same place.
Yes, because if you read their previous comment youāll see their primary concern is the CO2 released by curing concrete that is the equivalent of running a coal plant for DOZENS of seconds.
As I understand it, planning new, grid-scale nuclear power plants takes 10-20 years. While this isnāt a reason not to start that process now, it does mean something needs to fill the demand gap until the nuke plants (and other clean sources) come online to displace the dirty generation, or demand has to be artificially held down, through usage regulation or techniques like rolling blackouts, all of which I would imagine is pretty unpalatable.
I think itās fair to predict energy consumption will continue to rise. With that timescale, itās basically āthe best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is todayā. Doesnāt solve the immediate issue, but if we keep not starting new nuclear projects, itās going to remain an issue forever.
Oh, I totally agree ā didnāt mean to give any impression otherwise. Filling the energy demand gap as quickly as possible with the least impactful generation source should be very high on societal goals, IMO. And it seems like that is whatās happening, mostly. Solar, wind, and storage are the largest share of whatās being brought up this year:
canarymedia.com/ā¦/chart-nearly-all-new-us-power-pā¦
Thatās an amazing chart!
How fucking convenient.
Iāve said it before, and Iāll say it again: Fuck this āAIā nonsense, the techbros shoving it into everything, and the Bitcoin cryptobros that came before them.
What kind of world are we going to leave behind for the AI though?
Itāll be a coal-powered Dyson sphere sustaining data center tasked with generating pictures of celebrity porn, Jesus, flight attendants, babies and seafood. By then AI will enjoy them as much as my mother does.
Letās have a round of slow claps for the tech industry.
First the āwhole ass country of energy use to make fake moneyā that is bitcoin and now this?
Lovely.
āIāve cut out these goatees made of felt for us all to wear until we can grow real ones.ā
thereās that window closed.
This is a bad article, with a misleading headline.
It shows no direct connection between the two, it just talks about how AI models are less power efficient than search engines, and then talks about how all industries including normal, non AI data centers, manufacturing, etc, are all increasing power usage.