yes, let’s use nuclear energy to generate half assed AI assistants, images and videos instead of making clean energy cheaper
What is the motive behind this push to ram AI down out throats?
They already have all my emails, photographs. location and browsing data.
What do they gain from providing unreliable information at many times the power use? Or having me ask “write a sincere-sounding thank-you email”.
I feel like I’m missing some big revelation that will make it make sense.
Money.
AI will improve and this will be a multi trillion dollar market. Big tech is in a race to be the biggest.
We don’t need it and should be focussing on important things but yay capitalism right?
Yeah but big tech is also the customer. So it doesnt make sense. How will they make money if the only way to do so is to trick other giant tech companies into buying and using your product?
break up big tech. regulate monopolies before we get the second great depression.
Google, like Microsoft then begs for taxpayer money to run this operation and the government, being in bed with all companies agrees to sell its citizens out…yet again.
Inb4 Microsoft and google electricity services for residents.
If it results in the nuclear plants remaining online and providing energy after the AI bubble pops, that doesn’t seem so bad.
Fission is one of the cleanest energy sources we have today.
The AI bubble isn’t going to pop, it’s just going to transition to a rebranded cloud computing business.
A nuclear fission power plant generates about as much CO2 as wind turbines if you have a look at it’s whole lifecycle. That’s because just operation doesn’t generate CO2. But nonetheless that power plant is made from materials like lots of concrete. It needs to be built, decommissioned, etc. You need to mine the uranium ore, … All of that generates quite some CO2. So it’s far off from being carbon neutral. And we already have alternatives that are in the same ballpark as a nuclear power plant with that. Just that the fission also generates this additional nuclear waste that is a nightmare to deal with. And SMRs are less efficient than big nuclear power plants. So they’ll be considerably less “clean” than for example regenerative energy. I’d say they’re definitely not amongst the cleanest energy sources we have today. That’d be something like a hydroelectric power. However, it’s way better than oil or natural gas or coal. At least if comparing CO2 emissions.
For over a century, the standard way we’ve been disposing of hazardous materials that can’t be easily recycled is to permanently bury it. We’re doing it with thousands of tonnes of hazardous materials daily.
A nuclear power plant only generates about 3 cubic meters of hazardous nuclear waste per year.
At the typical sizes we’re currently building them, you need 50-100 solar or wind farms to match the electricity output of a single nuclear reactor.
When we eventually dispose of the solar panels from those farms we literally end up with more toxic waste in heavy metals like cadmium than the nuclear power plant produced.
No solution is perfect.
But contrary to the propaganda, nuclear is one of our cleanest options.
For over a century, the standard way we’ve been disposing of hazardous materials […]
Until 1994, one standard way of disposing of radioactive waste was throwing it into the ocean. There are at least 90.000 containers that got dumped along the shores of the USA alone. (Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altlasten_in_den_Meeren#Atommüllverklappung )
I’d agree that “No solution is perfect” qualifies for the history of nuclear energy.
The question is, why do we look at recycling solar panels, but compare that to nuclear and ignore that these have to be decomissioned and dismantled, too? And the whole process of mining uranium etc. While it may be true that the depleted uranium is low in volume, that’s far from being the actual amount of waste in the end. You’d have to compare the entire lifecycle of the plant to the entire lifecycle of a solar panel. (And solar isn’t the best option anyways.) Also who’s paying for 40.000 years of storage of those 3 cubic meters? The power companies certainly aren’t.
We’re [burying] thousands of tonnes of hazardous materials daily.
Are we though?
About 400,000 tonnes of used fuel has been discharged from reactors worldwide, but only about one-third has been reprocessed.
It definitely is amongst the cleanest energy sources we have today, especially when the choice for most is either oil, coal or nuclear, the choice is easy. Hydro, solar or wind are often not viable because of climate or location reasons. Not to mention that all of these need to be built using concrete, that is not unique to nuclear. Also important is that hydro electricity also dramatically alters the area, killing many animals and moving many species out of their home.
Btw, wind turbines aren’t made of concrete, the towers are metal tubes. But the blades are problematic, since they’re made from fiberglass. And solar panels aren’t concrete either. While - if I drive past a nuclear power plant, those are really huge concrete structures. And the problematic things about hydro plants are the reservoirs. It’s flooding a vast area to build a new reservoir and changing the flow in the river that destroys ecosystems. The plant itself isn’t that bad. So ideally you build it into an existing flow of water or use tidal energy instead of building a new dam. I’m not an expert on north american geography, but I bet there are some opportunities left for power plants with a lesser impact on the ecosystem.
You don’t need much concrete for wind, and only a single slab for the solar transformer.
The problem is the assumption that the datacenter must be running at 100% power 24/7
Until you get the bill, again.
There’s nothing clean about fission. It produces expensive poisonous waste that has to be stored for 1000 years. And in the US, no one wants it in their state, driving the price up further. And when you’re unlucky, you end up with superfund sites like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
It is very clean. The image below shows what 20 years worth of spent nuclear fuel looks like at the former Maine Yankee plant. This is way smaller than most supermarkets in north america, let alone their parking lots!
To add to this, spent fuel is over 90% recyclable. If the US were to instate a comprehensive recycling program like France has done, the spent fuel cache could be reduced to negligible amounts.
Nuclear might be better than coal or fossil fuels, but it’s still dirty and expensive.
Spent fuel recycling costs a fortune. Only France is currently invested in it.
“In 1996 it estimated that reprocessing of existing used nuclear fuel could cost more than $100 billion.”
Most waste is stored in underground salt mines and requires special transportation, handling, and storage. That storage includes providing space between the spent rods to prevent interaction (you can’t just stack them compactly together). So while you may read that we produce half a swimming pool worth of waste, it takes a lot more space to store the spent rods than a “grocery store”. We produce about 2000 metric tons of spent rods per year. In addition, there’s all the other waste created when you run a nuclear plant — that includes garments and other materials. That adds up to “160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annually”.
Disposing of spent rod storage casks costs $1 million per cask.
And then there’s the waste produced when decommissioning plants, or when plants go awry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-lethal-trash-or-renewable-energy-source/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
There’s a great video DW tv did on reprocessing and still having to store spent nuclear waste here:
I don’t see where this is being paid for with tax dollars. It looks like it’s all privately funded to me.
It’s billions of public dollars, and if we don’t find a solution, it’s going to become more: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/steep-costs-nuclear-waste-us
“clean energy”
Don’t nuclear power plants produce waste which is highly problematic because it’s hazardous and radioactive? I wouldn’t call that clean. And SMRs generate even more waste than big nuclear plants.
highly problematic because it’s hazardous and radioactive?
Thing is, there’s very little of that waste, with much less impact than say, burning coal.
Also, it’s highly radioactive only when taken fresh out of reactor - this waste is stored in pools, until it decays. What you’re left is weakly radioactive, long term waste that needs to be buried for a long time.
much less impact than say, burning coal.
Why compare to coal, not wind & solar + batteries.
Adding to this. The waste has been used to fuel subsequent reactions and could be used to produce more power
I mean they seem to be still figuring this out… But isn’t the whole SMR harardous waste after it got decommissioned? That depends a bit on the technology used. But that’d be a huge pile of mildly radioactive steel, plumbing and concrete in addition to the depleted fuel, which is highly radioactive. And as far as I know the re-use to get the rest of the energy out also isn’t solved yet. I mean obviously that should be done. Only taking out parts of the energy and wasting the rest isn’t very efficient. Sadly that seems to be exactly what we’re doing in reality.
Burying the small amount of waste in a stable non-actively forming mountain for a few thousand years is 1000x better than burning things and putting them into the air.
I’m not so sure about that. We already had to pay a lot of taxpayers’ money to fix bad issues with those storage facilities. And it’s just been a few decades with at least tens of thousands of years to go. That could become very, very expensive. And nasty to deal with for future generations.
I’d say just burying your waste where no one can see it isn’t a good solution. Neither is just dumping it into the ocean. And knowing a worse alternative doesn’t make it right.
You’re correct, burning yet more oil and coal and putting that CO2 into the atmosphere isn’t a viable option either. That’d ruin the climate and be unhealthy for us.
If the choice is spend more to hold onto the byproducts or let the byproducts slowly make the entire earth uninhabitable I’m kinda in favour of the former. Ideally completely green energy would be preferred but I guess it just doesn’t scale well with consumer demands and patterns :/.
There is rarely only a binary choice. Arguing like there is creates a false dilemma.
The combination of Wind solar and batteries is greener, more cost effective and more scalable than nuclear.
Or we could pop the AI bubble and concentrate on reducing consumption.
It does, and it’s cheaper and faster to implement. Solar and wind are dirt cheap. Storage has long been the bottleneck, but we’ve made gargantuan progress in scalable battery technology (sodium batteries, for example).
A green grid would also help distribute energy production closer to where people live, and reduce single points of failure. It goes to increase grid resilience and reduce dependence on a few large energy corporations.
Nuclear was a useful technology, and likely safer than coal. But anyone pushing for nuclear (over 100% renewables) nowadays is helping uphold the status quo of centralized energy production in the hands of a a few rich capitalists.
Lol. Seems the nuclear lobby is here and down-voting everyone who likes progress.
I read renewable energy is way cheaper than nuclear energy. And it comes with a low carbon footprint and without nuclear waste. (We have some actual historical numbers in the World Nuclear Report P. 293 which show nuclear is pretty expensive compared to renewable these days.)
So the solution is pretty obvious. Sign a contract over a few billion dollars with renewable energy instead of nuclear. It’ll be cheaper anyways. And has the added benefit that it’s available now. Whereas the SMR startups still have to figure out a few engineering challenges. And we’d avoid all the nuclear waste that’ll become a problem for future generations. And I mean it’s not that uranium or the other ores are super abundant anyways. Nuclear fission is a temporary solution in the first place. And not a particularly good one.
And investing in renewable will then grow that industry and make the energy even cheaper.
Only downside I see is: you can’t build renewable (and the datacentre) anywhere. It’d have to be for example in Texas for solar, or close to the mountains or some water flow for hydro. Or somewhere windy or at the shore for wind energy. The latter two have the benefit that they’re available during the night, too. And I guess the USA has some potential for thermal energy, too. But I don’t consider this a major issue since we have internet pretty much everywhere. They’d just need to lay some more fibre network to the site.
