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 ten 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.
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?
Let’s be honest, with AI you’ll get both right next to you competing for the use of water.
And you know when the Nuclear plant needs the water to prevent a meltdown, you know who will get the water.
Unpopular opinion: wouldn’t it be nice if the government wasn’t against renewable energy? That way the data centers could use that instead of leech off of our supply.
Doesn’t fix the issue with water though…
If they would use a closed water cooling system it would be less of an issue.
They could also use geothermal for significantly cheaper and environmentally friendly long term climate control but they don’t want to pay the up front construction costs.
Nearly 50,000 residents of Lake Tahoe, a popular tourist destination in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, have been told their utility company will stop providing them with electricity in 2027. The utility, NV Energy, will instead use that power for data centers in northern Nevada, one of the fastest growing data center corridors in the nation and where Google, Microsoft and Apple have all either built or planned facilities, Fortune reported. Residents have until next May to find a new electric provider.
Wow, that’s rather appalling. Ars has a longer write-up about it.
“You will no longer be provided power in 7 months time, good luck.” - Their local power company.
12 months, but yea
Utah just approved a data center that is supposed to be larger then Manhattan. And uses more power then the entire state currently. We are so fucked.
twice as large as manhattan.
Well no shit. One of those things is actually useful.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Tbh the statistics are pretty great for nuclear.
Good one lol
They’re right
They are. I was just saying that the pun was good 😭 did you guys think I was disagreeing?
I should just get used to be hated on randomly…
Ambiguous delivery on your part, came off as sarcastic
Why not both? \s
Actually what is going to happen lol
Technically speaking, everything is nuclear power. The sun, our star, is a fusion generator.
Wind? winds are caused by weather patterns, which are caused by the sun, either through radiative heating or tidal forces.
Solar? Also the sun.
Hell, nearly every element in existence is the result of fusion in stars. Like coal and natural gas.
Even chemical reactions in batteries are an indirect result of nuclear power.
to make an apple pie from scratch…
Start by planting an apple tree.
Yes that’s the joke.
Yes, but the line from Carl Sagan is if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe
Geothermal energy is not nuclear power, tidal energy isn’t either.
Considering that everything comes from stars, even planets themselves, yes. Yes it is 🤣
That’s not really how energy works. If you want to be that pedantic then all energy comes from gravity, because gravity is required for stars to fuse hydrogen.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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
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?
No they won’t. Natural gas turbines baybee.
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.
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.
Well nuclear power plants create something more useful than ai data centers, nuclear waste.
Nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused. France has been doing it for decades. Or you could reuse it in a thorium reactor, which needs less reprocessing.
Another thing people forget about is that nuclear power is the main source for tritium, which we have a shortage of and it’s getting worse as more nuclear plants are decommissioned. Tritium has a lot of uses, but it’s most noteworthy use is fuel for fusion power. If decommission all nuclear plants, fusion research is effectively dead in the water
Much of which can be used in hospitals for life saving medical uses! Double dunk on AI failures.
Masterful comment delivery, kudos
Some groups have started to extract materials from nuclear waste that can provide Targeted Alpha Therapy for cancer patients, so very true.
Hell, some of the more modern designs barely produce that…
What’s the point then?!
I still remember learning that and about breeder reactors (they produce fissile material from common isotopes) and feeling so betrayed by the common zeitgeist
Non-fissile material goes in, nuclear power comes out. Can’t explain that.
Indeed, nuclear is among the safest and cleanest forms of energy currently available to us! All the waste in the world for life barely fills a few football fields’ worth of space, if I recall correctly.
One football field 10 meters high to be precise.
I knew it was something around there, thanks!
One football field 10 meters high
You’re mixing US and metric measurement systems there. You should either stick to meters or come up with a sports analogy for the height.
What if their from the parts of the world that call “soccer” football and also use metric? Which is basically everyone.
That’s only true now because for decades, the UK called it Soccer from a shortening of Association Football to separate it from “Rugger” or Rugby Football.
Now, Rugby has dropped the “football” and soccer is now only an American term because the brits decided to stop using the term THEY coined.
One futball field 10 meters high to be precise.
FTFY
11.574 standard National Baseball League baseball bats high
The issue with waste is not the volume but the duration.
But surely you’d agree that we have more than enough space for even lifetime storage, no? Compare that to the junk emitted from nearly everything else. What is your proposed alternative?
Electricity too
That you can use for gardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening
Came here to say that one gives and the other one takes.
Loads depleted uranium rounds with militaristic intent
Well yeah. Nuclear power plant somehow manage to consume less water
Of course, one of them actually does good for my community.
