- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
- cross-posted to:
- tech@kbin.social
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The thought of a nuclear reactor running on Windows is terrifying.
They’re going to build it in 2026 but it’ll still somehow be running on XP.
“What operating system is that running?”
“Uh… vista.”
“We’re all going to die!”
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
XP is still a solid OS as long as you don’t connect to the internet.
A nuclear reactor connected to the internet sounds like a bad idea.
I mean it’s fine so long as someone remembers to pay the Mcafee bill right???
„Your reactor has been temporarily disabled due to license payment issues. Please consult support@mcaffee.com“
Not that you’re safe even if it’s not connected to the internet (stuxnet comes to mind)
I’m not sure why you think it would be connected to the internet.
Even Microsoft does not trust Windows on Azure 🤣
They’ll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX
They should run Arch, btw
More stable than Windows I guess
Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there’s very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they’re able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Fuck that. Take all the government grants and subsidies that would surely exist, and then use it for their own good/profit/power hoarding? No thanks.
Putting billionaires in control of our nuclear power infrastructure after “building” them with mostly taxpayer money, when it’s all said and done, is an absolutely bone chilling thought. Terrifying.
I don’t know why you think government subsidies exist - so impoverished single moms can build power plants? No. They’re pork for billionaires by design, to get them off their asses and steer them into directions we want to go. Like venture capital, they are also high risk. Our federal budget can support some level of this and it’s frankly needed to drive change in new or stalled industries where the motive for immediate profit isn’t strong enough to overcome the cold start problem. If your hatred of billionaires keeps you from making smart energy choices to address climate change, then your priorities are wrong.
The picture they show is from terrapower, the company Bill Gates funded, which is a thorium reactor. Thorium liquid salt reactors are still difficult because of the metallurgy. I believe they were supposed to fit the small modular concept though.
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Hm… risk of nuclear disaster? Or more expense? Hm… I’ll have to think about this one.
Your logic is fallacious: the solution is not to build a nuclear reactor but seek an alternative.
Yes I understand. It was a cheeky reply. But alternatives are actually limited if you consider all the benefits of nuclear: high energy output, limited land use, no dependence on weather or time of day, no massive subsidy to Chinese manufacturing, no carbon, all resources mineable in the US, waste all physically contained…
Got alternatives to that?
The best alternative is probably a diversified system of sustainable energy sources, along with batteries.
Hm… invest into your companies cybersecurity before or after you get hacked?
Companies don’t care enough about risks if they are not forced to account for them.
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
But… Developers!.. /s
Lol, even Microsoft wouldn’t use Windows to train AI.
Could be worse, could be running MacOS. Surely nothing bad can happen while the entire system freezes for no reason for 15 minutes or more without any possible input from the user. It will always fix it self… (hopefully before the reactor achieves a run away meltdown chain.)
What are you running? I’ve never had an issue like that at all
Reminds me of that time the technodork ran his minecraft reactor with opencomputers and lost his base because the computer blue screened. Almost as funny as that time the entire city lit up because they were using raw radio signals to control their reactor and a nearby thunderstrike instructed the reactor to drop all the fuel and go supercritical. This is why you add realism to video games, it leads to hilarious stuff like this.
EDIT: That was actually the same server where they sabotaged the entire electrical grid to blow up everyone’s base as a send-off and mine was the only one standing at the end because I was the only one who bothered to set up a surge protector under OHSA (Omega Haxors? Safety!? AHAHAHAH!) it just so happened that the system designed to save the grid from my many exploits just so happened to work in reverse.
A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.
This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
I’d play that, the fact that you’d include this content sounds dope
I just like element-based levels in video games. Even water levels. Some even can present some time-based challenges, like saving a nuclear reactor from meltdown, or retrieving something from an area like that.
I wanna play your game lol
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I thought this crazy energy consumption shit would cool off a bit after assholes stopped bitcoin mining.
Glad AI stepped up so we can generate bad art and prose while buttfucking the planet
So we finally get thorium power, but its only used to make celebrity porn for incels.
Hey, whatever keeps them out of Walmart parking lots at 1am.
Like there’s somewhere better to buy celebrity porn at 1am. Psh. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Nice!
Honestly getting Thorium power AND never having Incels leave their home or interact with society again sounds like a win-win.
We already know how well Microsoft optimizes code, so this comes as no surprise.
Nuclear power is actually way cheaper.
You just need to find a geologically safe place to put it and you need to make sure everyone involved follows safety protocols to the letter. And you can’t have anyone cutting corners to save money. You need to spare no expense when it comes to safety.
The only issue is that people don’t stay strict with keeping everything safe sometimes. People are terrified of it because when something goes wrong, everyone can see the very gruesome results very quickly
But I don’t think microsoft or any company should be making an AI at the rate they are if it’s going to take as much resources as it seems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Capital_costs
No, it isnt.
Safety isnt what makes nuclear expensive. You actually got rawdogged by Nuclear fanatics.
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of “work pod” and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It’d be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
It’s called meth.
I mean you could have the AI make interesting scenarios for them!
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this is the matrix
woosh
NO, this is Patrick
That’s the joke. The Wachowskis both ended up being trans sometime after they made The Matrix.
This is lemmy but it’s cool you can access it from matrix.
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
That’s just energy conversion. Loss is expected.
This is what happens when you don’t teach your kids the Laws of Thermodynamics in school…
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The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
Edit: Glad to see a nice instance of the discussion going here.
In their specific use case that won’t really work.
They want to use all of their available property for server racks. Covering the roof with solar won’t give enough power/area for them. A small reactor would use a tiny fraction of the space, and generate several times the power. That’s why it’d be worth the extra cost.
For those who haven’t seen this discussion before, I feel like doing the next step in the dance. Cheers Plex.
It’s important to note that nuclear is capable of satisfying baseload demand, which is particularly important for things like a commercial AI model training facility, which will be scheduled to run at full blast for multiple nines.
Solar+storage is considerably more unreliable than a local power plant (be it coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear). I have solar panels in an area that gets wildfire smoke (i.e. soon to be the entire planet), and visible smoke in the air effectively nullifies solar.
Solar is fantastic for covering the amount of load that is correlated with insolation: for example colocated with facilities that use air-conditioning (which do include data centers, but the processing is driving the power there).
While you are right about baseload being more satisfiable through nuclear, you are wrong that it’s in any way important for AI model training. This is one of the best uses for solar energy: you train while you have lots of energy, and you pause training while you don’t. Baseload is important for things that absolutely need to get done (e.g. powering machines in hospitals), or for things that have a high startup cost (e.g. furnaces). AI model training is the opposite of both, so baseload isn’t relevant at all.
It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.
It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
Sorry, but that’s wrong. You’ll run it as much as is profitable. If electricity cost goes up, there is a point where you’ll stop running it, since it becomes too expensive. Even more so considering that AI models don’t have a set goal to reach - you train them as long as you want and can, but training a little bit extra will have diminishing returns after a while.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
Not really, the limiting factors in AI training are mostly supply of cards. The cards already in use will stay in use until they fail, they won’t be replaced with newer cards the second they get released.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.
This is comparing apples and oranges, since tire factories:
-
have long-term planning and production goals to reach
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have employees who must be planned
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have resource input costs that are higher than electricity
Of course you want the highest utilisation that you can economically reach, but a better comparison would be crypto mining - which also has expensive equipment that has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running, and yet they stop mining when electricity is too expensive.
-
“And you pause training while you dont.” lmao I don’t know why people keep giving advice in spaces they’ve never worked in.
What are you trying to imply? That training Transformer models necessarily needs to be a continuous process? You know it’s pretty easy to stop and continue training, right?
I don’t know why people keep commenting in spaces they’ve never worked in.
No datacenter is shutting off of a leg, hall, row, or rack because “We have enough data, guys.” Maybe at your university server room where CS majors are interning. These things are running 24/7/365 with UU tracking specifically to keep them up.
What are you talking about? Who said anything close to “we have enough data, guys”?
Are you ok? You came in with a very snippy and completely wrong comment, and you’re continuing with something completely random.
The more people who invest the better the tech becomes the more the price comes down. Nuclear is excellent base energy
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
Yo better check your fuel prices: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It’ll be the new oil.
Raw material is usually a small fraction of the cost of refueling. I would also argue that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a small blip in the lifetime of a reactor, ~80 years. Transient pricing will have a negligible effect on the LCOE.
Not only that, imagine how thrilled nature and the environment will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.
Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.
Now, about those materials used to construct solar panels…
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Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.
Do you seriously think that Bing trains an AI model when you send a request? Why would they do that?
Oh, they’re working on it. It’s dumb, but it’s happening.
I can’t imagine they are. What would the training data of those models be? Why would you train the model when the user sent a request? Why would you wait responding to the request until the model is trained?
Often, these models are a feedback loop. The input from one search query is itself training data that affects the result of the next query.
Sure, but that’s not done with the kind of model this thread is about (separate training and inference). You’re talking about classical ML models with continuous updates, which you wouldn’t run on this kind of GPU infrastructure.
You’d get used to it awfully fast though.
are you arguing solar is more economical than nucleae cause if so youre wrong by a longshot
That was true 20 years ago. You are working off extremely outdated information.
No, you are. Solar is much cheaper than nuclear is.
Yeah, I don’t know where nuclear advocates got the idea that their preferred method is the cheapest. It’s ludicrously untrue. Just a bunch of talking points that were designed to take on Greenpeace in the 90s, but were never updated with changing economics of energy.
I can see why Microsoft would go for it in this use case. It’s a steady load of power all the time. Their use case is also of questionable benefit to the rest of humanity, but I see why they’d go for it.
The people who actually put money into energy projects are signalling their preferences quite clearly. They took a look at nuclear’s long history of cost and schedule overruns, and then invested in the one that can be up and running in six months. The US government has been willing to issue licenses for new nuclear if companies have their shit in order. Nobody is buying.
The article here is literally talking about a company that wants to.
Invest in a next generation technology that is yet unproven, but hopes to solve the financial problems that have plagued traditional reactor projects. And years away from actual implementation, if it happens at all.
Yes, because humans in a capitalist society are always well known for making the best decisions possible based on the good of humankind. Nothing else factors in whatsoever.
For anyone too thick, profit. Profit factors in above literally everything else. And short term profit at that. We shouldn’t make decisions of what’s best for society based on what massive corporations decide is best for their bottom line.
If you’re implying nuclear would be the better option outside of profit motive, please stop. We have better options now.
If we cleared every hurdle and started building reactors en mass, it would be at least five years before a single GW came online. Often more like ten. Solar and wind will use that time to run the table.
Edit: Also, this is a thread about a company dedicating a nuclear reactor to training AI models to sell people shit. This isn’t the anti-capitalist hill to die on.
Right, let’s welcome throwing millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium, I mean that’s such a nice thing, we need much more of it! It’s not like we already have perfectly renewable solutions to providing power…
This seems kind of ideal though, computers provide a near constant load (relatively speaking) that combines very well with nuclear energy.
Perhaps we should be asking why we haven’t already been doing this for the past decade?
Because it costs less money
to push the cost tofor taxpayers to subsidize it than owning itCorrection
Those data centers are paying for their electrical usage. Economies of scale just make it more favorable for them over building their own power generation (solar/wind excluded).
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Tell me you know nothing about data centers without telling me.
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Or you get an overlord ai that isn’t dependent on the larger power grid so it doesn’t have any reason not to launch the nukes. You know they’re going to harden these things.
One of the important skills you learn as a science fiction fan is the ability to understand what fiction means.
Then please learn what a facetious joke is.
God pls send the singularity I tire of this meat 🙏
Yeah, being ruled over by something without any accountability or oversight is a terrible thing. I’m so glad we don’t live in a world like that. /s
Honestly, I’m not sure an AI could fuck it up any worse than humans are.
It definitely could because AI can only reflect what it’s trained off of and the only sapience to train off of is humans.
This comment was a joke right? “Launch the nukes”? What nukes?!? Do you not know the difference between nuclear power generation and nuclear bombs?
Yes. It’s just a joke about Skynet and AM. People are really quick to jump to dogpile without realizing it’s a joke. The idea wasn’t that it would use its reactor as a weapon, but it would access the military’s weapons. Without needing outside power, it have no reason not to.
You misread that comment, they are saying that the power generation will be detached from the grid if they go this way and then if the AI gains control of nuclear bombs (separate thing from what the article is about) like shown in fictional stories they’ll not have a reason to not use it as they won’t be afraid of affecting their own power generation
Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can’t make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An efficient allocation isn’t necessarily equitable.
And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.
I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
I guess history does repeat itself. Next you’ll be telling me that 640GB of RAM is enough.
Someone let me know when personal computers need TB of RAM
Windows 13 isn’t that far away.
!Remindthem 6 years
Will the LLMs be useful for dating?
LLM stole your girl
LLM seemed really impressive at first, but it made it to “this year’s NFTs” in record time.
with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
Fusion won’t be ready by then
Energy should be public
energy, water, food and housing should not be used for profit. Everything else is fair game.
Nah, not everything else. You can add healthcare to the list.
The irony is very funny considering your username :)
Agreed! Idk why that didn’t come to mind.
And healthcare. You know, all the stuff to keep us alive.
But there’s so much profit to be made in things required to survive.
There isn’t a price point at which I’ll choose to quit using food and water.
Max Planck seems to have learned from the Fraunhofer mp3 thing and is getting their hands dirty with commercialising Stellerators. “In the 2030s”, right now they’re drafting, maybe simulating. Awfully short on details right now if you understand anything about fusion.
The ultimate “AI product” will be a videogame that keeps you playing as long as possible. Indefinitely even.
“But of course, in Bedford Falls, it was always Christmas Eve.”
(If there are any Red Dwarf fans)
Edit: Its probably rude for me not to leave a summary: Red Dwarf was a phenomenal BBC sci-fi comedy in the 80s. I’m referencing the book Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers wherein a game, Better than Life, leaves people festering and wasting away in reality as they’re hooked up to a headset living a virtual utopia.
Festering and wasting away in reality… that’s me between beat saber levels
Thank you extremely fucking much. I am always looking for good scifi.
(I strongly recommend the works of Greg Egan and Sam Hughes, if you aren’t already familiar.)
There was a similar story in Heavy Metal once upon a time (illus by Corben I think). Desperate people in a nightmare maze running from monsters for years… decades. Turns out it’s all a synthetic reality for rehabilitating terrorists. When they finally pop the protag out of his sensosuit he’s introduced to an eden of lush jungles and big-tittied women. I won’t reveal the punchline.
It’s more comedy.
so if we were the player characters right now, who the heck picked me, why would they play me this way? what kind of person would want to play this out - someone very like me or very different? couldn’t they have rolled again for better hair? i dunno, interesting thought experiment. 🤔
I think we’re just the auto-generated NPCs, friendo
Yup, and the system has a limited number of face combinations when generating NPCs, which is why doppelgangers exist
You should try out Rimworld. Find out why someone would play you this way.
Check to see if there is an item chest underneath you.
That’s a funny name for a toilet.
Have you never been full of hope while opening an item chest in-game, only to realise it was full of shit?
I suspect that human will doesn’t enter into it. It’s a natural kind of Matrix. Came about by forces similar to friction and gravity.
I think we are playing it right now omg
Have you tried dwarf fortress? XD
Just fill the Country with Solar, Wind and Water… won’t take 10 years and will be cheaper too.
Hydropower is about as bad for most ecosystems as burning fossil fuels. And its definitely not something that can be done quick or cheaply.
Whats the source on it being about as bad?
It releases methane, yes.
We don’t have to do hydro. Wind and the Sun are already plenty enough.UNs IPCC Reports https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/Chapter-5-Hydropower-1.pdf See fig 5.15. The outliers are the concern (and yes, it’s pretty much methane)
Edit: I reread the parent comment, the above won’t address what you asked for, but is interesting nonetheless so I’ll leave it
Thank you for the paper.
This does indeed clarify exact numbers that i didnt have.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Nuclear produces the least emissions over it’s life cycle and has a safety rating that flip flops with solar depending on how they want to classify accidents in construction and preparation.
If you want a sustainable, clean and reliable future, your power grid needs Wind, Solar and Nuclear. There is absolutely no reason to exclude Nuclear Power from any green energy plan.
OWID is probably the shittiest source on this topic. It’s funded by Bill Gates, who also directly funds nuclear power companies.
I hear a lot of people trash talking OWID but never see anyone disputing the data or otherwise proving it’s wrong. And the information it presents on a whole lines up with other information provided by other research, surveys and data points.
And a dam failure isn’t that much better than a nuclear accident, and far more common and less regulated
Just building and completing a damn is worse for the environment and local ecosystems than a category seven catastrophic nuclear accident.
You’re getting downvoted, but there’s some truth in it. You don’t just build a dam, you flood thousands of square miles and destroy hundreds of microcosms. Species have gone extinct due to dams. Not to mention that you can literally never remove them, because stupid humans build cities at their feet.
Ive come to find on reddit and lemmu that people don’t actually understand anything about nuclear energy, citing how bad Chernobyl is yet ignoring that not only is there still life in the exclusion zone, new species have emerged and been identified, where as successful dams that didn’t have any failures irrevocably damage and destroyed ecosystem upstream and downstream.
Not to mention that in the hundred years of nuclear plants, 30 people have died in TOTAL. Coal mines have killed a hundred thousand in the US alone, and windmills kill a few thousand in the UK alone each year. Nuclear has only killed 30 people. In a hundred years. Fukishima didn’t hurt a single person.
Nonsense, Microsoft will just put lots of PMs and Scrum masters on the task and they’ll have a working reactor in 1 year max.
/s, just in case any PMs are reading this and think it’s totally reasonable
Estimate is 10 years? OK let’s 10x the workforce and get it done in 1
Also, little known fact, 9 women can deliver one single baby in 1 month from conception!
Can’t argue with those numbers.
Power density matters. And nuclear is pretty fucking dense haha
… for some applications. Not most tho. Really like 5. Everything else should be solar/wind/hydro
… And cause a lot of pollution and ecological stress, unless you funnel a LARGE amount of money and time into it.
Do you want to argue, that the construction of a nuclear power plant causes significantly less ecological stress and pollution than solar panels and windturbines?
Think about if you really want to claim that as a thing you actually believe in.
I’m just gonna throw some words in a pool.
concrete, steel, space, deforestation, river, 10+ Years construction time, heavy machinery, dust, natural habitats, fuel, mining, waste, noise, cost, france…
Thank you. i rest my case.Half of those aren’t even relevant.
The actual construction takes about 4 years, but legal issues such as rules changing and politics, legal issues, and additional planning tend to push this up to 6-15 years in extreme cases. To draw a parallel: building a 1GW windmill farm, such as the Thorsminde off shore windmill farm is estimated to take 5 years of pure construction time, and politics and legal issues have so far added 4 years to this from the day it was announced, giving a total construction time of about 9 years without delays.
Cost wise, Thorsminde is projected to cost 2.1 billion USD, and that’s without running costs, possible delays, or deconstruction costs at its 30 year end of life. The construction of a nuclear plant usually ( as in the projects that have been finished and we know the total construction costs of) costs anywhere from 6 to 9 billion USD. So yes, nuclear is more expensive, as you said.
Of course windmills don’t just pop out of the ground, so heavy machinery will also be required, and the sound of the hammers building the foundation will likely drive away any sound sensitive life in a 100-200 km radius, such as whales. This can be partly mitigated by running the hammers at lower power, adding about 30-50% (might be more, foundations take a long time to build) additional construction time and driving up the price.
The windmills will also change the life of the area dramatically throughout its life, VS nuclear, which requires mines that cause decent damage, but do not pollute in any significant way at the reactor site (unless you pump the waste water from the usually closed first loop directly out to the rivers and sea, or swear on running the power plant without cooling towers during droughts).
Also the resources needed to make a 1GW wind farm are immense, and contrary to nuclear, we can’t currently reuse the waste from deconstruction, which there also is quite a lot more of. Furthermore, maintenance will be hell, as you have much more moving parts (not per windmill, but per farm, which has multiple windmills) as a nuclear plant.
Do you realise that you can also build windmills… where you would put the Power Plant? On Land? And that would reduce the time and cost of construction?
You could also fill barren fields with solar panels and use space that not even a solar plant could use, this in turn also gives animals shade and helps biodiversity and bug species.
And doesnt have a third of its construction cost as running costs forever.
You can also scale wind turbines in minutes. Look at France how much it costs to have nuclear plants not running.In what way can we reuse the nuclear waste?
You do realise how much space windmills would need to produce as much power as a single nuclear plant, right? That is also the reason we try to build them in the water.
And when did I write anything about nuclear waste? I specifically pointed out that I was talking about deconstruction waste, where cooling towers turbines, and general facilities can be reused, and only the core shielding of the nuclear reactor has to be specially disposed of, versus the wings and foundation of windmills, which we don’t really know what to do with right now, so we kinda just bury them wherever and hope it doesn’t come back to bite us later.
You didn’t. I did. What about nuclear waste? It doesnt go away and if we build so much nuclear we also have so much more waste.
The blades can be recycled btw. we just dont do it because we dont have capacity for them.
Which brings me back to the nuclear waste. Oh and Fukushima. Chernobyl. When are we getting rid of those?The amount of waste produced is extremely small for how much power you get, and is dealt with in exactly the same we we deal with literally all of our garbage: put it under ground and call it a day.
Those wind turbines and solar panels also get constructed, and affect a much larger area. It’s not an obvious comparison
Duh, Yes things have to be built. A Windmill is built in a few weeks by way less people and has no risk of exploding into a huge cloud of death.
Obviously building one wind turbine is less disruptive, but you need hundreds to get the same output, and they only work when it’s windy.
It’s always windy. We live on a spinning planet.
Solar needs sun. Nuclear needs water to cool. Hydro needs water.
If you combine solar and wind you can replace many nuclear plants by just using the space we are already using.There are a lot of good arguments for wind, and I’m not arguing against it, but density and consistency are well known issues. You absolutely cannot replace a nuclear plant with a wind farm of the same size and get the same output. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, wind farms can often coexist with other land uses, but that’s still a disruptive environment.
It’s good to put pressure on nuclear, the reason it’s so incredibly safe is because it’s highly regulated, but to completely ignore it is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
The question isn’t “are nuclear plants perfectly safe”, the question is “will adding nuclear plants to our energy portfolio reduce the risks from climate change enough to offset the risks they introduce.”
I think, in that framework, replacing existing coal power plants with modern nuclear reactors is a huge overall benefit.
Wind and solar are great but there’s still a lot of work needed on storage and transmission before they can be viable grid scale. Realistically, saying no to nuclear doesn’t mean more wind, it means more natural gas. And those LNG tankers really are floating bombs.
A dam has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor. A WIND TURBINE has a higher probability of exploding than a Nuclear Reactor.
I havent heard of a Wind Turbine causing Fukushima. I think it was Nuclear.
What was the other one… Chernobyl Wind and Solar Farm?Wow two whole accidents in a hundred years? One of them didn’t hurt a single person? The other only killed 30 people? Crazy! That’s SO dangerous?
What…? Coal mining killed a hundred thousand people in the last century? In the US alone? Wind turbines kill a few dozen a year in just the UK alone?
More people have died working in Wind than Nuclear. And Nuclear has lower carbon emissions than Wind Turbines to boot. I’m not arguing we shouldn’t be using Wind Turbines, we absolutely should, but the best, cleanest energy grid human kind can hope for right now is a combination of Solar, Wind and Nuclear, because each of three has very distinct advantages and disadvantages that complement each other while doing the least ecological and environmental damage compared to other alternatives.
Building dams literally kills whole ecosystems. Reduce biodiversity and razes woodland. They also do tend to take 10+ year of construction, just like nuclear power, while taking several times more materials. Your point is really stupid, nuclear power plants do not cause any more ecological stress than a moderate building in any city. They do consume vasts amounts of water, which can be an ecological issue, but not to the level that a dam creates. Wind turbines, for example, are not recyclable (materials used are too complex and use a lot of plastic) and they disrupt birds population. Just like solar panels, they have a very very short lifespan. Windturbines must be replaced every 5 years or so. So does solar panels but for different reasons. A nuclear power plant can create power for several decades if well maintained.
The thing is, no human intervention in any place is sustainable. Our mere mode of existence is so energy intensive that we are going to destroy the planet’s habitability no matter what we do. The time to change to 100% nuclear was 5 decades ago. The time to stop using fossil fuels was 4 decades ago. The time to change to sustainable energy was 3 decades ago. We lost the train. The planet won’t support us in any form in the long run. Hell, mammals might also be fucked within the next million years. The planet will never ever be the same it was during the past 2 million years. And it’s because of us.
Look at France to see how 100% nuclear would have gone.
Really well, with the lowest carbon emission dependence index and the cleanest air in Europe? France has also never had a nuclear incident ever. As they are actually one of the rarest events of all the known forms of energy creation. Actually, a joke amongst wind turbine installers is that wind power has killed more people than nuclear power. Because of how frequent incidents with cranes and helicopters are.
“French electricity group EDF said Thursday that shutdowns of four nuclear reactors would be extended for several weeks because of corrosion problems, potenti…”
“France has pledged to reduce its reliance on nuclear power by shutting down 12 nuclear reactors by 2035”
“The country relies on nuclear energy for 70% of its electricity”
Doesn’t seem to be going so well, does it?
If it’s going so well, why are they shutting down reactors at all?Because Greenpeace actively protested to prevent maintenance to some of them, lol. Use your brain, stop zealously repeating catch phrases and actually think critically.
Let me give you some examples, you said:
- “the country relies on nuclear energy for 70% of its electricity”
And all of that power is provided by 59 moderately sized buildings. 34 of them were built in the 70’s and have been refurbished and maintained to this day, because mad irrational regulation doesn’t let them just tear the damn things down and build newer ones that are more efficient and use recyclable fuel. You won’t find a single wind turbine or solar panel that lasts over 50 years, none.
- “French electricity group EDF said Thursday that shutdowns of four nuclear reactors would be extended for several weeks because of corrosion problems, potenti…”
Ok, that wasn’t this Thursday, that was some Thursday in 2021. Guess what? it was a design flaw only present on the N4 model. They closed those four, because there are only four of them. And they figured out how to fix them and now they fix them regularly and today all those four reactors are operational. They learned a lot and are now applying the same good practices to all the nuclear reactors to avoid corrosion issues in any of the plants.
- “France has pledged to reduce its reliance on nuclear power by shutting down 12 nuclear reactors by 2035”
Again, that was in 2014. A policy that originally aimed to reduce nuclear power reactors to 50% of the country’s energy generation by 2025 amid the push of fossil fuel funded anti-nuclear activism. This was delayed in 2019 to 2035. But this year it was completely reversed. They plan to build 6 more instead and potentially expand that to 8 later this year. Because it turns out, they’re really not that much more expensive than other sustainable sources and just as good at reducing fossil dependency now that Russia, the main oil exporter for EU, decided to blow their neighbor to smithereens.
Are you this dense and uninformed on purpose, or are you just trolling us?I’ll apologies for that remark, it does not contribute to the discussion, though your points are rather misinformed.France has a lot of old plants who will be at their end of life after some 50 years of service.
The exact same thing you just said also counts for windmills. Contrary to popular belief, windmills do not last forever and will need to be rebuilt or deconstructed at the latest after some 30 years.
Does this mean that windmills do not work because they aren’t perpetual machines? No! There’s a myriad of problems with wind and solar, but them having a finite lifespan is very normal.
Goddamnit France. Classic France.
Microreactors aren’t that big. The one in the picture is from terrapower, the nuclear company Gates is funding, but they aren’t that close to production. The ones that have or are close to have DOE approval, are the size of a garden shed, and can power something like a couple of neighborhoods, or a datacenter. Might need two for a datacenter. They are self-sufficient, small, clean, and take almost no hand holding.
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/what-nuclear-microreactor
The article is talking about small modular reactors, which is basically taking hte micro reactor concept and scaling it just a little larger, and creating a power plant, that you can add more modules on to increase the size and power output. It’s kind of a hybrid concept between a standard power plant and a classic nuclear plant. They don’t take 10 years to build, you’re not bulding that giant containment building, because the reactors are small and easy to replace and manage. China has already done this in several places while we dwaddle and waste time being scared of old ways of thinking.
