CorpoNations.
Businesses generating their own power is not anything new. The big auto manufacturers used to do it back in the day, and if you scale down the concept, every windmill (the grain grinding kind) and waterwheel built and operated for profit is the same thing. I’m just happy that Google is seemingly having their own built, instead of getting taxpayers to build it for them.
Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I’m counting it a win, but I won’t count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.
We have a city to burn?
Crazy how quickly we’ve gone from “Nuclear is a dead technology, it can’t work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y’all have to use fossil fuels instead” to “We’re building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing”.
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.
Everyone pays for not using nuclear too, a thousand fold more so.
Wind and solar are both cheaper forms of electricity than nuclear. It’s not like this is a two-way race between nuclear and fossil fuels. Nuclear is a losing tech, right next to fossil fuels.
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Tax them enough that they don’t have the cash to just up and build their own personal-use nuclear powered, nation spanning infrastructure.
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Use those taxes to build a nation spanning nuclear infrastructure that everyone can use.
I’ve got so many ads so far for how adding new taxes is bad even if it pays for good things, and all of the issues they are arguing about aren’t even adding any taxes. Actually adding taxes seems like a great way to make political enemies, even though it’s often the best tool there is for a thing.
Eh, I would say investment into R&D should be encouraged and maybe allow tax write offs. Even of the end goal is a private power source. Once that R&D turns into workable, operable, sellable products, then tax the fuck out of them. Perhaps disallow making things that can be a boon to public infrastructure from being deem proprietary, so that it can be more easily adapted to public use.
I dunno, I’m typing from my couch after a few beers.
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Well, once the AI hype calms down and people realize the current approach won’t lead to actual intelligence or “The Singularity”, there may be quite some nuclear plants left over. That or they will be used to mine shitcoins.
It’s almost like the brand spanking new tech to make small nuclear reactors are extremely cost prohibitive and risky, and to lower the cost someone needs to spend money to increase supply.
If only that was the government that invested in the R&D and tech to make it happen.
Gaining funds from taxes (meaningful taxes), and investing that money in making their country better.Hopefully this decision is because carbon taxes that will make consumer products representative of the actual cost of the item (not the exploitative cost). >
No no, let the free market decide.
Fucking AI threatening to replace basic jobs (when it’s more suited to replace the C-Suite) gobling up energy and money, too-big-to-fail bailouts and loophole tax rules bullshit.So yeh, someone needs to spend the money and that should be the government.
Because they should realise that carbon fuel sources are a death sentence.I’m glad you don’t make the decisions because I don’t want my taxes, that I work hard for and pay money into, to be spent by the government on highly-likely dogshit experimental brand new nuke tech that may eventually cost more money later on to maintain, and I prefer they spend it renovating existing infrastructure or building tried/true legacy nuke plant designs.
Your taxes already go towards this.
That’s how governments leverage capitalism to placate the people. Grants for green energy initiatives.
Private companies get free money for taking some amount of risk because they are likely to profit massively from it.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/nuclear/google-agrees-to-multi-reactor-power-deal-with-nuclear-startup-kairos
Kairos is getting free money (grants & tax breaks) and profits from this. Google is extremely likely (can’t find a source) to be getting free money for thisCompanies EXIST to extract profit.
Of one of the worlds most successful companies is doing this, it’s because “line goes up”.I’d prefer this happend so that “humans survive”.
But “humans don’t die faster” is fine for now.(I guess “humans” means “poor humans”. As in anyone that doesn’t outright own 2 homes.)
The day I lost all respect for my father was when he told me in all seriousness that the fundamental purpose of capitalism was to make people happy.
At first I wanted to reply about how one can HOPE that capitalism’s never ending extraction of value from labor might build a better future and enable more happiness.
But there’s a deeper assumption in that statement, and in my limited personal experience it affects conservatives the most. That is thinking that happiness is caused by external factors: money, toys, status, power, etc.
His thinking was that you can never sell anything unless you have something they want, so the fundamental idea of capitalism was that it tries to give people what they want.
To be fair here, no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either. The new techs make it worth trying though.
no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either
One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective. Very difficult to turn a profit on electricity when you’re practically giving it away. Nuclear energy functions great as a kind-of loss-leader, a spur to your economy in the form of ultra-low-cost utilities that can incentivize high-energy consumption activities (like steel manufacturing and bulk shipping and commercial grade city-wide climate control). But its miserable as a profit center, because you can’t easily regulate the rate of power generation to gouge the market during periods of relatively high demand. Nuclear has enormous up-front costs and a long payoff window. It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.
By contrast, natural gas generators are perfect for profit-maximzing. Turning the electric generation on or off is not much more difficult than operating a gas stove. You can form a cartel with your friends, then wait for electric price-demand to peak, and command thousands of dollars a MWh to fill the sudden acute need for electricity. Natural gas plants can pay for themselves in a matter of months, under ideal conditions.
So I wouldn’t say the problem is that we don’t know their cost-efficiency. I’d say the problem is that we do know. And for consumer electricity, nuclear doesn’t make investment sense. But for internally consumed electricity on the scale of industrial data centers, it is exactly what a profit-motivated power consumer wants.
One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective.
I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants.
For what it’s worth, before the late 90’s there was no such thing as market pricing for electricity, as prices were set by tariff, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. FERC opened the door to market pricing with its Order 888 (hugely controversial, heavily litigated). And there were growing pains there: California experienced rolling blackouts, Enron was able to hide immense accounting fraud, etc. By the end of the 2000’s decade, pretty much every major generator and distributor in the market managed to offload the risk of price volatility on willing speculators, by negotiating long term power purchase agreements that actually stabilize long term prices regardless of short term fluctuations on the spot markets.
So now nuclear needs to survive in an environment that actually isn’t functionally all that different from the 1960’s: they need to project costs to see if they can turn a profit on the electricity market, even while paying interest on loans for their immense up front costs, through guaranteed pricing. It’s just that they have to persuade buyers to pay those guaranteed prices, rather than persuading FERC to approve the tariff.
As a matter of business model, it’s the same result, just through a different path. A nuclear plant can’t get financing without a path to profit, and that path to profit needs to come from long term commitments.
It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you’re operating at market rates.
Shit, it can take over a decade to start operations, and several decades after that to break even. Vogtle reactors 3 and 4 in Georgia took something like 20 years between planning and actual operational status.
Now maybe small modular reactors will be faster and cheaper to build. But in this particular case, this is cutting edge technology that will probably have some hurdles to clear, both anticipated and unanticipated. Molten fluoride salt cooling and pebble bed design are exciting because of the novelty, but that swings both ways.
I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on financial feasibility of power plants
If you don’t get a high ROI, you’re not going to have lots of investors offering up their cash at low interest rates.
That was true in the 70’s, too. You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
The big changes since the 70’s has been that competing sources of power are much cheaper and that the construction costs of large projects (not just nuclear reactors, but even highways and bridges and tall buildings) have skyrocketed.
There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive, and cheaper stuff has come along.
You always needed a way to show that people would pay the long term prices necessary to cover the cost of construction.
Not when the federal government was just building them to generate fissile material and giving the electricity away after that.
There’s less room to make money because nuclear is expensive
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh. Long term, nuclear is cheaper.
Upfront costs are expensive. But operational and fuel costs are very low, per MWh.
So take the upfront costs at the beginning and the decommissioning costs at the end, and amortize them over the expected lifespan of the plant, and add that to the per MWh cost. When you do that, the nuclear plants built this century are nowhere near competitive. Vogtle cost $35 billion to add 2 gigawatts of capacity, and obviously any plant isn’t going to run at full capacity all the time. As a result, Georgia’s ratepayers have been eating the cost with a series of price hikes ($700+ million per year in rate increases) as the new Vogtle reactors went online. Plus the plant owners had to absorb some of the costs, as did Westinghouse in bankruptcy. And that’s all with $12 billion in federal taxpayer guarantees.
NuScale just canceled their SMR project in Idaho because their customers in Utah refused to fund the cost overruns there.
Maybe Kairos will do better. But the track record of nuclear hasn’t been great.
And all the while, wind and solar are much, much cheaper, so there’s less buffer for nuclear to find that sweet spot that actually works economically.
Nuclear plants cost a lot to produce but electricity from a nuclear plant sells for the same as electricity from anything else. Since many other options are cheaper to produce and maintain, nuclear is less cost efficient, not highly cost efficient as you claim. That’s why it’s not successful.
electricity from a nuclear plant sells for the same as electricity from anything else
The high production capacity drives down the market rate by flooding the retail market
It costs more to produce that electricy with nuclear than it does to produce it with other technology. Making lots of cost inefficient electricity is still making cost inefficient electricity.
It costs more to produce that electricy with nuclear than it does to produce it with other technology.
Electricity production costs of new power plants in €/MWh per the 2015 column are consistently some of the lowest across sources, with Hydro being the only serious competition.
The other table has newer studies than 2015, where nuclear is not cheaper, but you’ve only pointed out the column where they found it was cheaper 10 years ago. Wind and solar have gotten cheaper to produce, and nuclear more expensive. It is not cost efficient compared to other modern options.
One of the things with AI is that it’s a largely constant load factor. Nuclear is really good for that.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts. SMRs haven’t even been proven in practice yet, and this is the first good news they’ve had in a while. Restarting Three Mile Island isn’t expected to work before 2028. The hype bubble could easily burst in the next year, and even if it doesn’t, keeping it going to 2028 is highly unlikely.
So we’ll probably have some new nuclear around that isn’t going into AI, because those datacenters will be dead when the hype passes. Might as well use them, I guess.
However, I highly doubt any of these new nuclear plants are finished before the AI bubble bursts.
Given the military applications of the technology, I don’t think it is ever really going away. Consumer AI (those user facing image generators and chatbots, for instance) might lose funding. But Israel’s Lavender AI is going to become a permanent fixture in our lives, as it’s rolled out for the policing of more and more territory.
You don’t think there’s any chance that AI as it exists today might be just the start of a huge industry?
As it exists now, no. The models are reaching their limit, and they aren’t good enough. They can’t absorb any more information than they have, and more training iterations aren’t making them better. They’ll do some useful things; a recent find of the longest black hole jet ever found was done in part from AI classification of astronomy data. It’s going to get implemented into existing tools and that’s about it. It won’t be enough to justify the money that’s already been dumped in.
Historically, the field has been very bursty. Lots of money gets dumped into it, it makes some big improvements, and then hits a wall. Funding dries up because it’s not meeting goals anymore, and the whole thing goes into slumber for a decade or two. A new breakthrough eventually comes, and then money gets dumped in again. We’ve about maxed out what the last breakthrough can give us. I expect we’ll need at least one more cycle of this before AGI works out.
I still think it’s too expensive, and this contract doesn’t change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.
Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).
But now Google has committed and said “if you get it working, we’ll buy power from you.” That isn’t itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.
Plus time. My perspective was that building a new nuclear power industry and any significant number of reactors would take too long: we need to have fixed climate change in less time.
So seven “small” reactors over the next eleven years …… faster than I expected but still takes decades to make a noticeable difference.
So seven “small” reactors over the next eleven years ……
Is more than we’ve built in the last 40. And, assuming energy demands continue to accelerate, I doubt they’ll be the last seven reactors these companies construct.
I don’t think they’re even building many. The article uses the word “adopt” because they’re kinda reviving old power plants. Three Mile Island being one of them.
I don’t think they’re even building many.
You might want to read the article.
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At last, we’ll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don’t kill everyone!
Amazon has a space program with rockets, Google is acquiring the nuclear facilities, will Microsoft develop a weapons manufacturing facility?
Ah I see don’t know about Microsoft’s 22 billion dollar HaloLens contract with the Department of Defence.
https://www.techspot.com/news/94353-dod-oversight-agency-warns-22-billion-microsoft-hololens.html
Microsoft already acquired a nuclear plant.
They don’t need weapons to support genocide.
The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn’t mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they’ll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman’s knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can’t melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
The meltdown that happened in Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement. Yes, there were design flaws in the system, but lots of rules had to be broken before the design flaws were triggered.
A safer design is insurance against bad management long after all of us are dead.
Nah, mismagement happened yes, but any other nuclear plant wouldn’t have exploded, they used a old technology even for that age, for cust cutting or faster to build idk that’s why it exploded
If development continues on this path
If we continue down the path of wasting energy and polluting to produce useless shit humanity is screwed.
We fixed the glitch.
For some reason this doesn’t feel like good news.
Any nuclear adoption is good news. This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale. Overall, while it’s extremely questionable, depending on how many companies get on board it could be net positive
This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale.
I’m not saying this won’t have any benefits. I’m saying that I don’t trust Google or the AI craze much, let alone huge corporations in general.
So I’m worried that there might be unforeseen fuckups or “savings procedures” or other ways of squeezing out profit until something breaks.
And those fuckups can easily outweigh the benefits.
If we had good governments and reliable regulation, this would be absolutely thrilling. But we don’t, do we?
Except nuclear does not scale, especially not downward. Because any safety measures that have become standard, are required also on the smaller reactors. Except there, they cost relatively more per kWh output when compared to large plants.
I don’t really see this going to work, renewables are continuing to become cheaper and cheaper, and do scale.
But, I’d like to be pleasantly surprised.
One step closer to the Fallout games becoming reality, which is at least potentially cool in some ways.
Cyberpunk dystopias weren’t supposed to be guidelines dammit
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking “why do we need to go to the moon?!”.Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.
Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.
GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.
This time it is commercial.
I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.
Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it’s Google. So… Kind of a win?I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources
Is nuclear not?
I forgot what I was trying to say there.
I think it’s along the lines of “I’d rather we didn’t need a ridiculous amount of new power, but at least it’s being covered by non-carbon sources”.
I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
Expecting corporations to “solve important problems in the world” is foolish though. You should expect your government to tax them fairly so that they can work on people problems and maybe it takes corporations a few years longer to afford their own fleet of nuclear power stations.
Man imagine a world where that could have been what we were voting on next month.
Governments aren’t going to solve these problems either because they’re 100% for sale. Only we can solve them, through direct action.
How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.
Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn’t?
Do they store wind turbines after EOL? I thought they’d just get scrapped and recycled.
The turbine blades are made of fiber glass or carbon fiber. There is no process in effect to deal with them. Too big to crush, not worth scraping or recycling. They all go landfilla.
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.
Exactly, and it seems like that is a realistic outcome.
So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn’t replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that…cool
The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs
Hopefully.
But the cynic in me is always concerned when shareholder owned companies are operating something that has the potential to go very wrong very quickly if/when they cut too many corners in the pursuit of that extra 0.5% of profit.
For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.
Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.
Not familiar with the current US situation, but AFAIK, in my country the governments have a stake in the operation and maintenance of nuclear facilities.
Yes it’s obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody’s arguing that. What I’m talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.
No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It’s not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that’s just one of the problems. It’s the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).
It’s also that Google could have been taxed more(I’m sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.
It’s almost like our population has continued to increase for the last 30 years
It’s almost like you have no clue what you are talking about lol. The global population growth for the last 30 years is 50%, while the global GDP growth is 500%. Not only that but the wealth inequality in the world has been steadily rising for the last 60 years. In the US alone (that we have data on) the wealth of the bottom 80% has been roughly stagnant since the 1990s while that of the top 1% has skyrocketed - it’s basically them that have absorbed this economic growth profit.
So yeah, you got a lot of confidence in things you clearly don’t know about.
You weren’t talking about wealth, you said that our energy consumption continued to rise.
You have to understand that GDP and energy demands are intrinsically tied. That’s a fact, both theoretically and empirically verified with historical data. When the GDP rises, energy demands rise. And the reason why energy demands rise is not to meet people’s needs but because the 1% seek to increase GDP (through individual corporation stock values) which in turn increases their profits, since like I said they absorb all of it. That is why it is relevant, because it’s a matter of wealth accumulation by the 1%, not because people need more energy. That is backed both by the fact that the common people don’t get anything out of the increase in economic production(the bottom 80% like I’ve said have had a stagnant wealth since the 1990s in the US, although the global GDP has risen 5-fold, even though the population has risen and hence the people in that 80% has risen as well) and by the fact that the population increase has been just 50% and the increase in wealth ten times that.
So our population has increased by 50% and you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease? All countries have increased energy production, including China, I’m not sure why you’re making this sound like a US centric problem.
What in the world do you mean “you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease?”. What does expect mean??? I don’t expect anything, I’m stating what needs to be done if we want our planet to remain habitable…have you heard about climate change or…? Also how do you keep ignoring the fact that our wealth has increased by 500% in the last 30 years and the 1% gets all the profit? We don’t need to increase our economic activities for all the people to be able to live comfortably, we need distribute wealth fairly and when we get to a point where everyone can live well, (in the West we are way past that point) then we need to scale down unnecessary economic activities, if we want to meet the scientific guidelines to avoid the 3 degrees by the end of the century, which would spell absolute irreversible disaster.
I never said it’s a US problem, and I didn’t make it sound like so, I was only using some data from the US for convenience. It’s a worldwide problem, but the US dictates the trajectory and policies of a very big part of the world including Europe, Canada, Australia and the gulf countries, all of which are essentially controlled by them. Also the US has by far the most CO2 emissions historically, making that country the single biggest contributor to climate change, again, by far. So it bears the biggest responsibility of any country. But you are right, it’s a worldwide problem.
Boy are they gonna look stupid when they realize that no one outside their little bubble has a use for AI.
It’s not even close to ready for launch and why are we wasting energy on it?
because idiots like me who have no marketable skills can use it to fool ourselves into thinking we can do code/art/literature/etc.
Hey don’t be so hard on yourself
You can also use it to fool the rubes around you
sadly, I have a moral compass. I’m not sure where I put the damn thing, but I have one.
Oh damn
I guess you’re normal
My moral compass is also why I dont use search engines. It’s absolutely cheating to use modern technology to find out something.
actually this (yes, I’m replying to myself). I’m an idiot with no marketable skills. I put boxes on shelves for a living. I want to be an artist, a musician, a programmer, an author. I am so bad at all of these, and between having a full time job, a significant other, and several neglected hobbies, I don’t have time to learn to get better at something I suck at. So I cheat. If I want art done, I could commission a real artist, or for the cost of one image I could pay for dalle and have as many images as I want (sure, none of them will be quite what I want but they’ll all be at least good). I could hire a programmer, or I could have chatgpt whip up a script for me since I’m already paying for it anyway since I want access to dalle for my art stuff. Since I have chatgpt anyway, I might as well use it to help flesh out my lore for the book I’ll never write. I haven’t found a good solution for music.
I have in my brain a vision for a thing that is so fucking cool (to me), and nobody else can see it. I need to get it out of my brain, and the only way to do that is to actualize it into reality. I don’t have the skills necessary to do it myself, and I don’t have the money to convince anyone else to help me do it. generative AI is the only way I’m going to be able to make this work. Sure, I wish that the creators of the content that were stolen from to train the ai’s were fairly compensated. I’d be ok with my chatgpt subscription cost going up a few dollars if that meant real living artists got paid, I’m poor but I’m not broke.
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
Makes sense. Sometimes only once out into reality then only we’ll know if it is a great idea, or not. But it doesn’t hurt to have the tools to try. Those who want really high quality stuffs can go to the humans (and pay them good money) to make it even better.
If I find any degree of success, then absolutely I will hire real humans to help me with my vision.
I wish you the best of luck with your endeavours!
These are the opinions of an idiot with no marketable skills.
Certainly doesn’t sound like an idiot with no marketable skills to me. You’re coming up with creative ideas and finding ways to try to prove them out in disciplines that you aren’t terribly familiar with. You’re really selling yourself way too short here and should be A LOT more compassionate towards you.
Really, it sounds like you are in a similar place to Product Management.
The way that you are approaching things is about diametrically opposite to the sort of problematic behavior that the corpos using LLMs to bludgeon labor are participating in.
Actually this going to be great news when the AI Bust happens because we’ll still have more clean power and we won’t be wasting it on stupid bullshit.
immediately turns AI datacenters into Bitcoin mining centers
Bitcoin is dead it’s all about digital pogs now
Imagine a future 2032 where all BTC has been mined ahead of schedule and Alphabet is the world’s largest lender after reorganisation into a banking platform.
checks notes Shareholders?!
Because they have successfully lied and manipulated their current marketing material to make a sizeable portion of the population believe some kind of technological rapture is imminent, and that all we need is to invest, invest invest in AI tech. It’s a full-on cult now. The people they have roped in are fanatical, unpaid marketing mobs who don’t sleep, don’t waver, and can’t be reasoned with. They are the engine that is driving the hype train.
They had a legit, non-satirical post on reddit the other day making their plans for what they’re going to do when Artificial Superintelligence comes and changes the world and makes every human rich and immortal without the need to work. I am not even exaggerating, this is what they believe and there are probably millions of them.
Currently over 80% of AI startups fail, and the remaining ones are often bought up by larger companies trying to control intellectual property and future patents. And we have ZERO useful models in our hands. I still don’t use my copilot app for anything other than setting a 30-minute timer for my lunch break. I tried to activate an AI helper on Adobe to see if it could help my productivity. The thing can’t read graphs and charts and has zero contextual awareness and can’t do math. WTF GOOD IS IT?
!remind me in 1 year
After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not… It’s a pretty outdated energy source already.
Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They’re also really useful in situations where renewables just aren’t an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven’t seen any nuclear container ships yet but that’s mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn’t be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.
No, it isn’t. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.
What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.
The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you’re cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine.
Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn’t want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we’d need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we’re just making nuclear’s up front cost issue worse; we can’t amortize the cost as well when it’s ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.
What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn’t shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.
Add in HVDC lines to this, and you’ve really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like–there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn’t need to build any other storage.
Your opinion is not really appreciated here with the nuclear industry trying to capitalise on the renaissance that seems to be fashionable these days. But I fully agree with your assessment, China is of course building nuclear plants, but have also seen the light in the sense that they are building more renewable generation capacity than all other generation sources combined.
Nuclear will not make a full ‘come back’, literally no one in their right mind is going to invest in 15 year projects when grid connected battery capacity is tripling every 6 months.
While! I love nuclear’s possibilities. I’ve seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don’t think that would be a good idea
Eh, it’s honestly safer than you’d think. The size of the reactor plays a huge role in safety.
A reactor sized for a container ship would be literally incapable of melting down, because there just isn’t enough fuel to get to those temperatures. You could then limit the ship’s speed, and over build the reactor a bit, so that the reactor is never truly stressed during normal operation.
Then for refueling, you just remove the entire reactor and replace it with a new, fully fueled one every 10 years or so.
That’s where you want your controls.
Other than that, yeah it would be safer than oil. A crash just means your reactor casing gets wet.
The main worry is someone cutting into the reactor to take out the spicy rocks… and there are easier ways to get spicy rocks.
The single most energy dense source of power we have that uses the least amount of land including mining and refining compared to everything else, and still preferred method by NASA for powering anything bigger than a camera… is outdated? Yeah okay.
While I agree with most of your statements, the RTGs that NASA uses (assuming that’s what you are referring to) don’t really have much of a connection at all to Nuclear power plants. They are very useful for small scale projects like rovers but really have no commercial uses for anything near people. Plus I think NASA generally prefers solar power whenever they can use it as it’s far cheaper and safer to get into orbit.
I’ll be amazed if this ever comes to fruition.
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power. After that there’s nuclear power and it’s much, much more expensive:
After that, and even more expensive are SMRs. Also, they don’t actually exist yet as a means of generating power.
From the article, “For example, it has already received the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Registry Commission (the first one to do so) to build its Hermes non-powered demonstrator reactor in Tennessee. Although it still doesn’t have nuclear fuel on-site, this is a major step in its design process, allowing the company to see its system in real life and learn more about its deployment and operation.”
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.
At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you’re going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren’t exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.
See my comment here:
I have no issue with the safety of nuclear power plants, however: fissile material is no more renewable than fossil fuels even if it’s much greener. Also, in terms of more localized ecological damage, uranium mining is a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
Maybe Google should focus on building its plants near geothermal hotspots instead if it’s forced to suck up vast amounts of power for AI no one wants.
AI seems perfect for renewables load balancing. Got extra power to burn because it is windy at night? Train your models
AI power cost has quickly outscaled increases in power production. AI Datacenters alone are projected to consume more power than Japan sooner than 2030.
Great, so when they abandon the nuclear project in 18mths who will maintain them?
They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.
So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.
although you gotta admit it’s gonna be funny seeing “Google Reactor” on killedbygoogle.com
They are planning to buy
So far so good
or maybe just electricity
Uh oh
And what happens when you kill a sack of puppies you monster?
Nuclear has never been profitable without massive government subsidies and guarantees, and
GoogleKairos too will either manage to collect those or lose money.It’s unclear how Google and Kairos set up the deal — whether the former is providing direct funding or if it just promised to buy the power that the latter generates when its reactors are up and running. Nevertheless, Kairos has already passed several milestones, making it one of the more promising startups in the field of nuclear energy.
I guarantee you, they are shouldering on none of the risk (like the Chinese and French at Hinkley Point), and this startup will be going down.
Yay, more ads to pay for Google’s reactors.
