Tbh the statistics are pretty great for nuclear.
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They’re right
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Ambiguous delivery on your part, came off as sarcastic
Generation IV power plants can be designed so that they are physically incapable of going into meltdown. And the technology is getting better and better at reusing the waste.
So, of course, one would prefer a nuclear power plant.
If anything, we really need to update old power plants and replace all other non-renewable plants with cleaner power, renewable or not.
Bruh I think most of the people answering this are imagining 3-Mile Island…
That’s why they’re saying modern plants aren’t like that.
You mean the thing that was a bunch of panic but has never actually been shown to of caused any long term issues?
I live in the other city in America which had a nuclear disaster, but no one talks about it really. It created a cancer cluster in part of my city. People died.
I’d rather have nuclear than data centers. Nuclear of today isn’t the nuclear of the 50’s / 60’s. It’s pretty easy to understand why it’s safe these days.
Obviously nuclear fission is the real “fuck yeah” choice though
Promises, promises. I haven’t heard of one that’s actually in commercial operation right now.
But, apples and oranges… it’s a bullshit choice. Power plants generate power, DC’s consume power.
If you going to generate power, why look beyond solar/wind and batteries? At a much lower price, and much faster build times, they too are ‘physically incapable of going into meltdown’, and are already in use worldwide, no wait time.
As far as DC’s go, they depend on very new technology (enjoying a trendy fad) which -will- get far less power-hungry than they are. Or else. (The grid’s not ready for them.)
The only people in a rush seem to be the people who invested in all the snake oil promises that LLM’s are real A.I. … which they aren’t.
The only problem is that the newer, safer nuke plants are going to be built and managed by the same old Sociopaths, who will cut every corner they can, bribe inspectors, exploit their employees, lobby for losser regulations, etc.
With a nuclear plant, there’s a teeny teeny tiny chance I’ll get Hulk powers.
With AI, I’ll probably just lose my job and destroy the planet.
Yeah, sure but will an AI you can boil off a lake to generate pictures of me as a hulk, me as a hulk wearing no shirt, me as a hulk wearing ripped pants and I have something in my pants, can you generate nudity, can you generate pictures of naked if it’s non sexual, pictures of me as a hulk getting changed and I just took off my pants to put on other pants non sexual, generate a picture of an eggplant, make the eggplant green, make the tip of the eggplant a darker shade, take the eggplant from @image2 and place it over the crotch of @image1, animate this image, do it again, do it again, starrjummps, do it again, delete my account.
Well yeah. Nuclear power plant somehow manage to consume less water
Since data centers will be run by nuclear power on-site in the future they will soon have both…
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else’s price too? It’s cheaper for the data center operator.
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else’s price too
The national grid has raw physical limits that many data centers already exceed.
Silicon Valley’s AI Boom Hits a Wall: Data Centers Are Built but Can’t Turn On
Power shortages and high costs are stalling new data centers, leaving the Bay Area behind faster-growing markets like Atlanta and Northern Virginia.
What do Atlanta and Virginia have access to that Silicon Valley lacks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
Yes, but that’s not THEIR problem. It’s everyone’s problem and in the official country of privatize the gains and socialize the losses, that means it’s up to the taxpayer to fix it.
…because they will suck the grid dry.
Yes. And the taxpayers will have to fix it for them, that’s how the country works. So why would they care?
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much. If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical. Then it is profitable to build a power plant. If they are generous, they could even sell some electricity to the community for a “reasonable” price.
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much
Only a couple hundred mill a year per data center. Building a nuclear power plant costs several billion and isn’t free to operate either, so it’s not pure capex, there’s still opex involved.
If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical
Prices rise for everyone so it becomes the community’s problem as much as it becomes the data center’s problem. The US in particular has three grids, so in reality, the community is either the western US, the eastern US, or Texas.
Then it is profitable to build a power plant.
Profitable over a decade or more maybe. The data center isn’t guaranteed to be in operation for that long. You know those ~30-40k USD “graphics” cards they use? The ones that a single AI data center would likely have tens of thousands of, often even around 100k? They’re used for about 3 years usually, often less. They become obsolete in that timeframe, just unable to compete with newer products in terms of both raw performance as well as efficiency. That’s up to 3 billion dollars of GPUs every 3 years or less, per data center. Just a tiny economic downturn or people seriously realizing that this bubble is going to have to pop eventually and they’ll have to stop running these data centers.
NPPs also usually take many years to complete. It took nearly two decades for the Finns to get Olkiluoto 3 running. Data centers need to be ready in a few years because in 5 years the AI craze could be over and they’ll no longer be needed.
AI companies ain’t gonna do shit for electricity generation if they’re not forced to.
In my country, joining the grid or upgrading your circuit breaker has a one-time amperage-based fee (assuming you’re close to the substation, otherwise it gets more expensive). I propose that for companies looking to consume huge amounts of electricity, there should also be a mandatory generation capacity increase fee that could be paid out to a nearby municipal power company that then uses it to build more power plants, or to some level of local government that could then sponsor building a power plant or 10.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me must think that data center operators are going to do anything out of the good of their hearts lol
People on lemmy downvote you just for disagreeing ALL the time, even if you make (as you just did) an informed and thoughtful reply. It’s honestly just as bad as Reddit with the downvote shit
The lemms are peculiar like that
Now I’m just wondering who downvoted you for a literal nothingburger comment
That is public info btw -> https://lemvotes.org/
No they won’t. Natural gas turbines baybee.
The joke of the Grok AI is how it’s generating power in one of the least cost efficient manners possible.
Musk is just burning a ton of short term capital to avoid lobbying Mississippi (fucking Mississippi, the most easy state to bend over a rail with lobbyists in the country) for a hard-line to the existing grid and some upgrades to capacity funded on the public dime.
That’s what you get to do as a trillionaire. Make stupid business decisions and then dump the turd onto your investors when they want to invest in your lucrative network of federal Pentagon contracts.
Not if Trump keeps Hormuz fucked.
Trump already won that war 20 times. So it’s probably all fine.
Our oil and refinery situation in the US is fucked, but we have a ton of domestic natural gas.
Doesn’t really matter if you have local production if it goes on the global market. One global price set by global supply and demand. What happens in the middle east drives the price up in Michigan.
It’ll cost more, but polluting our country is more important above all.
You also have a ton of domestic oil. The only reason fuel prices are up in the US is because the market is global so American companies can sell it abroad.
Either issue could be solved if Trump had the balls to forbid American companies to sell oil and gas abroad. But that’s not gonna happen now is it.
I like things that don’t vibrate in such a way that it makes me want to vomit and die, true.
Why not both? \s
Actually what is going to happen lol
Of course, one of them actually does good for my community.
Why would anyone care to have a power plant near them? The last one in the US that failed was almost 50 years ago. I’m not saying there can’t be accidents, but they’re pretty safe. You’re like 1,000,000x more likely to die on your commute to work.
And all our plants are old and unsafe as fuck compared to new modern designs. So building new ones would likely be even more safe
gotta be careful here because they’ll take that as consent for both. “GEE IF THE POWER IS ALREADY THERE…”
Are you nuts? And miss all the heat that data center will provide you yearly? Imagine in summer having heat from the data center!
You need to stop asking for nuclear power plants, data center is the feature, and you have to accept it! Period.Yeah! If there’s ONE thing lame-ass nuclear plants and their spicy rocks suck at, it’s making heat!
Pretty sure the nuclear plant will provide significantly more heat. I mean, those giant cooling towers are specifically designed to unload heat into the atmosphere.
You joke (I think) but community heating schemes off these places would be a good byproduct. Not enough to make them worthwhile, but it would offset their impact.
IIRC that’s being done in some places because it takes care of two issues at once. But certainly not the majority of data centers.
On a scale several orders of magnitude smaller, it’s also how car heating systems work. Waste engine heat is transferred to the heater core and then air is blown through it. Engine gets cooled, cabin gets heated.
Do they even make enough heat for that to be viable option? Most computer systems can handle a pretty low temperature before they start having problems because they’re over-heating.
It’s not going to be steam pipes, but warm water. Maybe 60°C but lots of it. Warm enough for underfloor heating to be sure.
Biggest problem in my head is that you’d need to design buildings to take advantage of it, and I doubt data centres would be permanent enough to warrant the commitment.
There are many busy data centers in the southern US states (and other places within a similar proximity to the equator) where community heating would be massively unwelcome for most of the year.
It’s not a bad idea for cold climate areas that might benefit more from it though. Much better than letting it go to waste while paying extra for heat.
Move into the machine city, probably they keep the machines cool inside.
I would honestly rather have a loaded nuclear silo right underneath my house than a massive AI data center within 1000 miles of me
It’s the dream. Imagine the reliable power & internet connections. Plus you could hang a sign on your door like:
"No Soliciting
Violators will be shot for reasons of national security"
Russia would like to talk to you.
I want both nuclear power and AI to be commonplace.
Where the latter is concerned, it should be decentralized by law: Individual households can own a home server, and in turn, rent or loan their compute to organizations. The reason for this, is to limit the power of corporations and force them to abide by the will of ordinary people, rather than being able to hoard technological power to fuck over the government and citizens. The same applies to robots capable of replacing human labor.
We should not reject AI nor automation, and instead seek to ensure that they can’t be used against the interests of the public good. Mindless rejection, just ensures that bad actors will eventually have sole mastery over these resources.
It’s not mindless rejection. It´s just the argument taken one step further - the system we live in will put the fruits of AI into corporate and therefore capital’s (the bad actors) hands, along with the power and control that come with it. We won’t reap much of the benefits and we’ll suffer the costs. Without a fundamental change to the system we take that as the almost certain outcome. Hence the rejection. I think the rejection would change with a material change in the system.
Can you tell us more about these Bad Actors? Are they in the room with us, right now?
All sorts: the Epstein Class, corporations like Blackrock or Blackwater, the Heritage Foundation, cults, corrupt government officials, grifters, and so forth. They might not be physically in our rooms, but their influence colors our everyday life, in ways great and small, often beyond our perception.
Fact of the matter is that there are many forms of power and methods of applying it - AI is no different. Like any tool, it doesn’t care about how it is used or abused. Humans have to decide whether they wield the power of the tool, and to what end.
A shovel can dig gardens and mass graves alike. A good person tries to prevent whatever causes the latter outcome, and encourage the former.
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I don’t want either please.
Centralized energy sources should be considered a bad idea in Europe after what happened in Ukraine.
I think nuclear power safety has improved significantly over what they had in the USSR 40 years ago.
That’s fine, but even if it was 100% safe, a centralized energy source can be taken over (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2022_Russian_occupation_of_the_plant) or destroyed (like a lot of other Ukrainian energy infrastructure) and then, people are without energy. Decentralized energy solves that problem.
Destroying or taking over 1 nuclear power plant is far easier than taking over or destroying the solar panels on every house in a country.
Which was what?
- Russia broke a dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Kakhovka_Dam
- Russia took over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and did things with it that were considered highly dangerous by IAEA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2022_Russian_occupation_of_the_plant
Chernobyl
