Small Modular Reactor technology is the future, and it’s really promising.
Self-contained (no onsite refueling), mass produced (cheap, higher quality), and modular (add more for more power, or small enough to power a data center).
Here’s some quick videos from a professor of Nuclear Energy covering topic:
Just go to Chernobyl and build there. Deal with the aftermarch now instead of later. The order matter because then they will understand there is a big problem with nuclear power.
Yes, it have even happened in modern time. Look at what happened at Japan 2011 fukushima. It will happen again. Political/economic/misstakes will happen again. Just look at Russia firing at nuclear plants… we are doomed.
How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.
It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.
Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.
You know that if we look at for example Chernobyl how many did varies a lot between who you ask. That is even today. You also need to think of those who did not die but survived with some damages. Chernobyl is not over so you can’t even stop counting who died from it. It will take very long time before it is over.
Yes, I agree with you that pollution is a even bigger problem that I can’t understand that no one cares about it. Seeing on TV that people going to work in a smog of smoke and they don’t react. It is deadly! Personally, I agree that fossil fuel should banned for example for cars. There are alternatives, maybe not as good but you will survive. Teleports does not exist yet but we survive somehow anyway.
Not sure if you’re making fun or actually not understanding? To clarify, they need the power for training AI models. No trains are involved, neither passenger nor cargo – though atom powered trains sounds interesting as well!
Well, there’s only so much training you can do before it has ingested all of Garfield lore and fan creations, so you start over fitting and can’t generate new Garfield material anymore, and at that point, what’s even the point of going on?
I’m not sure if you’re serious, but just in case: that wouldn’t work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you’re not doing that, you may earn crypto by “mining”, but you can’t spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.
Mining is a “proof of work”, in the case of Bitcoin it’s competing to be the first to find a hash that meets certain parameters (difficulty), for a block referencing the previous top one. Whether the new block has transactions in it or not, you get the same reward for being the first one to find and broadcast it.
Verifying is done by every node in the P2P network, both when deciding whether to relay candidate transactions, and when checking whether a new block’s hash meets the mining requirements.
The Bitcoin blockchain has plenty of valid blocks with no transactions in them (part of a speculative mining strategy used by some to get the block reward faster than others).
The whole scheme works the same with any other kind of “proof of work”, as long as the nodes relaying the new block can check whether the work happened or not (there are many ways in which that could be accomplished for AI training, the easiest of them by publishing the new model and having nodes check whether it meets some quality parameters).
I mean, yeah. I knew most of that, but I just wanted to keep it short and simple.
I don’t really understand how it would work with AI training. If your computers are working on training AI instead of finding blocks, I don’t see how you can support transactions. Just sounds like distributed computing with rewards to me, where you might be able to cash out at some central portal or smth, but you can’t send other people that money directly (at least not over a blockchain, but would be possible vis that portal maybe, although, again, that wouldn’t be a blockchain).
The tricky bit is finding a problem that is hard to solve but easy to verify. I’m not sure AI tasks fall into that category.
They actually do. Training an AI involves changing some values in the model in an attempt for it to better fit an optimization function. It takes many tries to find a set of values that perform better, but a single try to confirm it does.
Both sides require much more computing power than for a single hash, but the difficulty imbalance is still there, and verifiers could change “how much better fit” the next model needs to be, just like they do by changing difficulty requirements right now.
There is no “finding blocks” in Bitcoin, it isn’t Minecraft. Miners work on “finding a better hash”, for whatever block they want to propose. The two actions, creating a block, and working on finding a hash, are separate.
In a “proof of training an AI” blockchain, there would still be a hash linking one block to the previous one, just the proof for accepting a new block would no longer be looking for another (useless) hash.
Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It’s all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.
With AI, at least, we know bad art can be generated on nothing but tacquitos and rum. Every big-iron exercise in training reduces power use per-boobie. Soon enough it will be trivial for even pocket computers to make up any bullshit you can describe.
Almost anything has the potential to negatively affect tens of thousands of people when it’s managed as recklessly and negligently as Chernobyl.
Chernobyl was less a reactor and more a bomb with a very long fuse. Saying we shouldn’t build nuclear reactors today is like saying you shouldn’t take a modern cruise because 14th century sailing ships sank all the time.
To be fair, though, the top comment said “nothing wrong” and the guy just followed up with the wrong
I still think we have access to this energy source and are basically just ignoring it so oil and coal and continue to soak up tax payer funded subsidies and ruin our planet.
Half of them were off at some point which means they lost over a third of their entire energy production which means they had to import a ton.
Some of them are still not back online.
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.
Capital costs is incomplete, you need to look at lifetime costs versus lifetime production to get a more useful average - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE)
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.
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.
Aren’t you forgetting something?
Liquidators also died way after the explosion from having to clean up all the rubble.
You can still not live in the area and will probably not be able to in many lifetimes.
Oh man one whole accident from obvious negligence which is easily resolved by the absolute most basic of regulation. Are you implying we’re as bad as the USSR when it comes to basic safety? There have been hundreds of thousands of reactors going perfectly fine since then. Modern reactors can literally not fail in the same way that caused Chernobyl.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
France has a lot of nuclear plants not producing electricity and is importing electricity like crazy.
It’s not 4 plants being shut down because they are old. Its plants shut down because they have corrosion. And the Water required for cooling isnt sufficient.
Windmills dont need to be completely replaced. they are not shut down forever after 30 years. they will just have their parts replaced. For a tiny fraction of the price of a new nuclear plant.
False, France has been a net exporter of electricity for over four decades. They had to import electricity, once, in 2022. Because of the corrosion issue that, as I said in another comment, is already solved. Because of the war on Ukraine, just like every single country in Europe. And because, guess what? there was a drought and hydroelectric dams were dry!
Do you do this all day, just go around telling lies? Are you just ignorant, someone brainwashed you or is someone paying you? You are truly irrational about this. Just accept that maybe your worldview is not accurate and update your existence to something other than black and white thinking.
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.
You must be fuming to how this could happen when Nuclear is so awesome and has no problems and is cheap and safe and the most effective.
Except when it isnt.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m not one to be all doom and gloom about ai, but giving one its own small nuclear reactor, presumably one that’s in close proximity to it and separate from the local power grid… that’s obviously going to have substantial security measures around it… and be that much more difficult to cut off if need be…
I mean, it’s starting to sound a lot like an unbelievable plot hole in a bad sci fi movie isn’t it?
That’s a nice sci-fi thought, but also not really how it works irl.
Physical proximity is not really a factor here.
There’s a lot more going on at all levels that makes this absurd at best. Movies are not a good representation of reality, they can’t be if they are meant to be entertaining.
Why are you saying this as if the AI would have control over the reactor.
It’s unlikely they’d even be in the same building, or even the same campus. We have these crazy things called “wires” that let us transmit a lot of power over distances, so your small nuclear reactor can be remote, safe and secure and your AI lab can just be on your main campus.
You do konw, that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a nuclear reactor to explode in a nuclear fission explosion, aka become a nuclear bomb. Reaching critical mass isn’t possible. Nuclear reactors can catch on fire, if built using graphite, that isn’t done anymore, or have a steam explosion. but that’s it.
They can also get hot enough to melt the metallic components (including the fuel itself) if the reaction isn’t properly regulated (hence, “meltdown”), but you’re correct that that’s still not a fission explosion.
“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.
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.
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 have read scifi (Bear : Blood Music, Egan : I forget) where packing enough computation into a small enough space caused reality to warp. So look out!
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