This is focusing on the wrong thing. Electricity demands should be expected to drastically increase, with or without llms or other such programs. We need to be focusing on electrifying pretty much everything if we’re going to make a dent on carbon emissions, which will naturally lead to a significant increase in power demands. If that only leads to different and/or more carbon emissions, that’s a problem with the infrastructure of the grid, not what it’s powering.
And to be clear, I think these companies using stupid amounts of power to run these things is stupid as hell, but blaming them for problems that should have been addressed ages ago isn’t going to solve the problem. We need massive and sweeping infrastructure changes asap.
The problem is, there is no plan in the US to upgrade the power grid - either at privaty company level, state level or federal level. It’s just not in the cards. And the grid is headed straight for a complete collapse with the double whammy of electric cars and AI.
The other problem is, if you keep using coal to meet electrical demands, this will certainly make zero dent on carbon emissions. The other thing that needs to happen besides upgrading the grid is a massive increase in combined renewables / battery storage solution, or of course viable fusion power (fat chance…)
a massive increase in combined renewables / battery storage solution
This is happening.
Power utilities frequently complain about declining base load generation capacity. On this particular issue, they are actually correct. You have to have a consistent level of base load generation capacity that is capable of scaling to meet peak demand. Wind and solar power are great but are not available on demand.
So, you can either store excess power generated by renewable sources or generate with non-renewable sources. Utility scale storage just isn’t there at this point. Many of the coal plants that have been retired over the past two decades have been replaced by natural gas plants, which isn’t really an improvement.
One thing that probably exacerbates this problem is the fact that much of the power generated in the US has historically been fairly localized. Meaning, it’s generated pretty close to where it’s consumed. Moving away from a “local” generation model is not as easy as it sounds and makes utilities nervous, for legitimate reasons.
What we need in the interim is more small scale nuclear development. It’s far from a perfect solution but it’s way better than what we currently have.
Yep! Base load generation is the amount of energy that is constantly required and it has to be consistent. Any city or area will always use a certain minimum amount of energy, at every hour of the day. There is never a minute that demand dips below and this is called the base load. Intermittent renewables without storage can’t cover it, yet.
The other problem is economics. Hydro, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear, and coal can be operated to generate consistent reliable amounts of energy to cover it but at different costs. Removing hydro and geothermal as not all regions can leverage it - leaves, generally, coal, nat gas, and nuclear. Coal has been generally actively phased out over the last decade (in the US at least, I’m sure elsewhere), leaving natural gas and nuclear as options.
Nuclear with a substantially lower, if not negligible, carbon footprint outside of construction has so much red tape and lack of expertise and economies of scale that each plant and part ends up being close to bespoke with high costs and long construction times. Something like eight years and multiple billions of dollars.
Natural gas plants can be brought online in something like 1.5 to 2 years for substantially lower costs due to mass production, broader expertise, and less regulation.
What this leads to is a price per kW for being something like $.80+ for nuclear and like ~$.20 for natural gas over the lifetime of the plant.
These are all figures I loosely recall and haven’t confirmed or updated in my mind in a few years so I’m sure I’m off but the differences are roughly the same.
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are looking to innovate to solve this economic problem with nuclear by providing mass production capabilities of nuclear power but we aren’t there yet.
So, for now, economically, natural gas is often chosen over nuclear just as coal was before it. Hopefully that changes in the future sooner rather than later.
There are plenty of plans. They’re just wholly inadequate.
Looking at my state. Coal is long gone. We plan offshore wind farms …. That keep getting blocked. We plan to buy huge amounts of long distance hydro … but transmission lines are blocked by intervening states. The ideas are there, the plans are there, but follow through is not. Clearing the obstacles is not
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Way to completely miss my point.
Don’t blame the people wasting massive amounts of dirty energy for nothing. Blame the people who aren’t enabling them to waste massive amount of energy. Progress means wasting as much energy as possible.
Clearly not what I said, but keep focusing on the rage-bait instead of what is actually needed to fix the problems at hand.
When they say AI might destroy humanity, it’s not due to some Terminator scenario…
It’s just cause they’re trashing the planet.
Do I need to go dig in Grand Central Station trash cans for a floppy disc?
Wait, is that a hackers reference?!?
Is this the account number of the hidden bank account in the Bahamas that the money was supposed to be deposited into?
I think so!
we decided to slow plans to retire something no one wants to support something else that no one wants.
lets fuck the planet up just a little bit more so that Russia and billionaires can spam the internet with chatgpt bots and create fake images.
AI seems to be just more and more statistical probabilities hashed-out at record-breaking speeds and power-consumption of computing. Its like that adage, “sufficiently advanced that it is magic” we are doing that for AI. We are building more and more complex statistical analysis engines that spew out near-perfect answers from garbage inputs at the expense of actual analysis ,research and development.
You could train a model on all available research and use that to find holes that haven’t been explored in a way that no human possibly could.
You could do that training… and the “AI” can print out some lines that have the same writing styles as the articles. Because that’s all LLMs can do. Don’t buy the hype, they’re just energy sucking predictive text bots. Nothing more. The whole thing is a dead end as far as finding the actual systems behind intelligence.
The first car didn’t even have a roof on it and good luck finding a gas station. The first computers took up entire buildings. 25 years ago we didn’t have broadband Internet, you had dialup.
No, it’s a dead end. Not immature. Not “a burgeoning technology’s with some kinks to iron out”. It’s the wrong proverbial tree to bark up. This is as good as this tech can ever get, which is why it’s being sold so hard right now. Because it’s turned into a grift to try and claw back the wasted R&D dollars.
yea I don’t think you can be that confident about it.
That requires intelligence to determine. “AI” ain’t got none of that. It can tell you a recipe for muffins that definitely is probably edible, except for the obvious poisons.
You could build a rocket in your backyard, fly to Mars, and come back to tell humanity about your trip.
Sand, Lots of sand.
someone has to find the holes to input into the AI training data :'D so i guess that wont work.
Give me an N!
N!
Give me a U!
U!
Give me a C!
C!
Give me an L!
L!
Give me an E!
E!
Give me an A!
A!
Give me an R!
R!
What does that make?
NUCLEAR!
Let the big tech pay for it.
Sure!
Please don’t let venture capital get it’s fingers around the power grid that can’t possibly end well
Yes, cut them off from the grid. Let them fend for themselves.
A plant blew up one time due to being poorly mismanaged and an earthquake broke another one. Meanwhile nothing bad has ever happened in the history of non-nuclear power generation. /s
I never said that nothing bad has happened with nuclear power.
Nuclear disasters are local, the ongoing climate change disaster powered by coal plants (which let our a hell of a lot more radiation than nuclear plants) is global.
I’ll take a local disaster any day over a global disaster
Ofc! Oil gas and coal ONLY burn when placed in a funace. Attempt to light it on fire anywhere else and it will know and refuse catch fire. Its a safety feature. /s
With nuclear, you cant reason with it! Thats why we have to keep the brightest minds around th facility, to trick it into stopping via reverse psycology. /s
Centralia became a portal to hell… and they are claimimg it’s burning coal. SMH! /s
Nuclear plants cannot be built fast enough for the ever growing demands of “AI”.
Those modular small scale reactors won’t take long.
That’s a great theory, but remember they’re really not in use yet. Well see
I am not talking about expantion, I am talking about replacement
No.
Ok, then let’s boil the planet despite having safe and working alternatives.
The problem isn’t function or safety, it’s cost. It isn’t cost effective to build or renovate a nuclear plant compared to wind or solar. If you have one in good condition, it makes sense to let it run its lifetime, but it makes little sense to build new.
Well it’s probably cheaper to keep coal plants running, if money is the metric we care about.
Standardization and modularity.
Yes, the first plant would be expensive, but the cost would drasticly go down once production gets under way.
Make the plant design modular as well, so if the plant it built next to water, it can use the water to discharge heat, and not need cooling towers.
This isn’t a huge problem.
The problem is cost and time. Its all fine and dandy to say we just need to make it modular, but the required R&D for that will take many years and then you need to build up production capacity and actually install them.
If this were the 1990ties, I would agree, but it isn’t, so let’s please be realistic and focus on what can be done now, which isn’t modular nuclear reactors.
All you achieve by focussing on nuclear is letting the coal plants run at least a decade longer, while we do have better and cheaper alternatives right now that just need to be installed.
I am not blind to the issues with developing nuclear power, but nothing good will come from just standing still.
Start small scale development of nuclear power today, we will never get rid of baseload, and solar/wind can’t deal with it well enough, sure we could deply batteries and have solar/wind charge them up ahead of a still night, but batteries degrade, so you’ll soon need to rebuild them.
The environmental movement psycosis around nuclear power has caused immesurable harm to the planet, and I am quite distrustful of their evaluations of nuclear energy.
Here is a very interesting documentary from BBC Horizon from 2006, it concerns our fear of radiation: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7pqwo8
I don’t think it will be easy to restart nuclear energy construction, no, I know it will be dificult, but I don’t think it will be as dificult as the environmental movement claims.
Battery technology is an extremely well developed field with already existing and currently under construction large production facilities. Battery degradation is also much less on an issue with stationary installations, both due to how they can distribute the load to avoid deep discharging and due to the fact that some drop in total capacity is less relevant. Furthermore, redox-flow batteries basically do not have this issue.
Its pointless to argue what-ifs, when renewables combined with grid level battery storage is the cheaper and more easily scalable solution. Nuclear is an outdated relic of the past, just let it die.
This study says otherwise: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544223015980
- We present a unique cost data set on 19 small modular reactors.
- Manufacturer cost estimates are mostly too optimistic compared to production theory.
- A Monte Carlo simulation shows that no concept is profitable or competitive.
- Median NPVs are negative ranging from 3 (HTR) to 293 (SFR) million USD/MWel.
- Median LCOEs start at 116 USD/MWh for HTRs and at 218 USD/MWh for PWRs.
As long we don’t have a way to deal with the nuclear waste, nuclear is not safe.
And even if we had a way to deal with this, Mining, preprocessing, building the reactor, running the reactor and treating the waste has to be cheaper than renewabls, which I doubt.
Last, but not least, building such powerplants takes years, if not decades, to build, which we don’t have. At the current rate of emission, we have less than 6 years left before we miss the 1.5°C target[1], which is way to short for any nuclear facility.
Nuclear waste is a solved problem.
Dig a deep hole, put the nuclear waste in the hole, backfill with clay.
Solved.
Now I understand that different places on earth have less suitable bedrock for this storage, so I voulenteer my home municipality in Sweden as a global storage site, we have stable bedrock, the technical skill and a stable government.
As for the “we don’t have time” bullshit, I have heard that for more than ten years, it is pure bullshit, the best time to build nuclear power was ten years ago, the second best time is today.
You can yell about solar/wind as much as you ever want, but they can’t deal with the baseload as well as nuclear or coal can, coal is buring the entire planet, nuclear MIGHT at worst create a temporary inconvenience where a relatively small area has to be closed to humans. Continued use of coal will cause far, far worse harm.
Your language is rude. Please adress your point in a more formal way, without claiming that I would be yelling or bullshitting.
I still don’t see the deposition of nuclear waste as straight forward as you claim. We have accumulated waste for many decades and, so far, have establiahed only a single site. If this was new technology I would give it the benefit of the doubt, but we have decaying castors, wich will become more and more difficult to handle, as the fule rods become brittle. Just building new Reactors and think we will handle the waste eventually, is not enough to convince me.
If we had the resources to build nuclear powerplants and renewables, we should do both, but we have not. Thus, every Cent spent on nuclear is not spent on renewables which give more power per invested money.[1]
Baseload: The grids might not yet handle a widespread dunkelflaute, but they can be, and currently are, extended to shift energy from production places to the regions where they are needed. Furthermore the cost of energy storage is falling every every year[2], while the the cost of nuclear remains more or less stagnant.[3]
I agree that coal does more harm than nuclear, but as states above, we should put our effort in renewables.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2024/may/24/nuclear-power-australia-liberal-coalition-peter-dutton-cost
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184754/cost-of-nuclear-electricity-production-in-the-us-since-2000/Sorry for being rude, I have just heard the same arguments over and over and over, and I am getting tired of them.
The reason as to why we haven’t built more storage sites is our fear, our fear of radiation, most people don’t understand how radiation works and have seen horrible photos and videos from Chernobyl and think that it is impossible to go there still.
It is the nimby crowd who has messed it up so completely.
Add to that the odd report about how to prevent future humans from the waste sites, something not needed, which plays on the fears.
I agree that fear and NIMBYs are one key issue that hinders us into progressing into a green future. Although we may not agree how to proceed best, it is important that we take quick and large steps, and stay united against continuing the emissions of CO2.
Thanks for the discussion :)
Sure, for nuclear to help not reach the 1.5°C threshold it should have been built decades ago.
For nuclear to help not reach the 2°C threshold it can be built now. But surely in a few decades it will also take too long to build.
Right now there are new fossil fuel plants being built, I think nuclear is a better alternative than that.
If we had to decide between nuclear and coal, the clear winner is nuclear. As I stated in the other comment that renewables are more cost effective than nuclear, and thus, we can convert more coal to emission free energy than with nuclear.
As I’ve stated fossil fuel plants are being built right now. I just say that we should build nuclear instead of fossil, not nuclear instead of renewables.
Clearly we can all agree there should not be fossil fuel power plants being built.
We need all the clean energy solutions and we need to build them much faster. I’m not optimistic about nuclear because it is by far the most expensive and time consuming to build out: we need to make a difference sooner than possible fr nuclear to help. But by all means, let’s give it a try: if we can get past this crisis, there will always be increasing energy needs …… as long as we stop fossil fuels, and are going gangbusters with renewables
Should i nuclear or should i coal now?
If i coal there will be trouble.
And if i nuclear it will be double.
What?
Coal is far, far, far worse than nuclear, even in terms in radiation.
If we replaced all coal plants with nuclear power we would hugely reduce the ammount of Co2 and radiation released.
I meant in terms of if an accident happens.
On all other points i agree completely.
If an accident happens, it won’t be the end of the world, at worst a relatively limited area will need to be closed to humans for a temporary time.
Globally it is not a big deal, compare that to cooking the entrie planet, I’d gladly take a few more exclusion zones if that enavled us to get rid of all coal plants.
There is also another point to this, nature is thriving in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Non-paywall link?
