I like things that don’t vibrate in such a way that it makes me want to vomit and die, true.
Why not both? \s
Are you nuts? And miss all the heat that data center will provide you yearly? Imagine in summer having heat from the data center!
You need to stop asking for nuclear power plants, data center is the feature, and you have to accept it! Period.Yeah! If there’s ONE thing lame-ass nuclear plants and their spicy rocks suck at, it’s making heat!
Since data centers will be run by nuclear power on-site in the future they will soon have both…
No they won’t. Natural gas turbines baybee.
The joke of the Grok AI is how it’s generating power in one of the least cost efficient manners possible.
Musk is just burning a ton of short term capital to avoid lobbying Mississippi (fucking Mississippi, the most easy state to bend over a rail with lobbyists in the country) for a hard-line to the existing grid and some upgrades to capacity funded on the public dime.
That’s what you get to do as a trillionaire. Make stupid business decisions and then dump the turd onto your investors when they want to invest in your lucrative network of federal Pentagon contracts.
Not if Trump keeps Hormuz fucked.
Trump already won that war 20 times. So it’s probably all fine.
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else’s price too? It’s cheaper for the data center operator.
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else’s price too
The national grid has raw physical limits that many data centers already exceed.
Silicon Valley’s AI Boom Hits a Wall: Data Centers Are Built but Can’t Turn On
Power shortages and high costs are stalling new data centers, leaving the Bay Area behind faster-growing markets like Atlanta and Northern Virginia.
What do Atlanta and Virginia have access to that Silicon Valley lacks?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant
Yes, but that’s not THEIR problem. It’s everyone’s problem and in the official country of privatize the gains and socialize the losses, that means it’s up to the taxpayer to fix it.
…because they will suck the grid dry.
Yes. And the taxpayers will have to fix it for them, that’s how the country works. So why would they care?
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much. If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical. Then it is profitable to build a power plant. If they are generous, they could even sell some electricity to the community for a “reasonable” price.
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much
Only a couple hundred mill a year per data center. Building a nuclear power plant costs several billion and isn’t free to operate either, so it’s not pure capex, there’s still opex involved.
If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical
Prices rise for everyone so it becomes the community’s problem as much as it becomes the data center’s problem. The US in particular has three grids, so in reality, the community is either the western US, the eastern US, or Texas.
Then it is profitable to build a power plant.
Profitable over a decade or more maybe. The data center isn’t guaranteed to be in operation for that long. You know those ~30-40k USD “graphics” cards they use? The ones that a single AI data center would likely have tens of thousands of, often even around 100k? They’re used for about 3 years usually, often less. They become obsolete in that timeframe, just unable to compete with newer products in terms of both raw performance as well as efficiency. That’s up to 3 billion dollars of GPUs every 3 years or less, per data center. Just a tiny economic downturn or people seriously realizing that this bubble is going to have to pop eventually and they’ll have to stop running these data centers.
NPPs also usually take many years to complete. It took nearly two decades for the Finns to get Olkiluoto 3 running. Data centers need to be ready in a few years because in 5 years the AI craze could be over and they’ll no longer be needed.
AI companies ain’t gonna do shit for electricity generation if they’re not forced to.
In my country, joining the grid or upgrading your circuit breaker has a one-time amperage-based fee (assuming you’re close to the substation, otherwise it gets more expensive). I propose that for companies looking to consume huge amounts of electricity, there should also be a mandatory generation capacity increase fee that could be paid out to a nearby municipal power company that then uses it to build more power plants, or to some level of local government that could then sponsor building a power plant or 10.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me must think that data center operators are going to do anything out of the good of their hearts lol
People on lemmy downvote you just for disagreeing ALL the time, even if you make (as you just did) an informed and thoughtful reply. It’s honestly just as bad as Reddit with the downvote shit
The lemms are peculiar like that
Well yeah. Nuclear power plant somehow manage to consume less water
I would honestly rather have a loaded nuclear silo right underneath my house than a massive AI data center within 1000 miles of me
It’s the dream. Imagine the reliable power & internet connections. Plus you could hang a sign on your door like:
"No Soliciting
Violators will be shot for reasons of national security"
Russia would like to talk to you.
Of course, one of them actually does good for my community.
Nuclear shills out in force in the comments 😬
I mean better nuclear than burning coal. I don’t get why nuclear has such a bad wrap, it’s a reliable zero emissions way to produce power, takes up way less space than a solar or wind farm and the only down side is the nuclear waste produced. Its not the best option sure, but far from the worst! Lots of fear mongering about melt downs, but if your gonna cry about that u better not advocate for electric cars because God forbid those batteries can light up too once in a blue moon! Hell just a few weeks ago an electric car and seperate incident an elec bus burnt down a set of toll booths not too far from me. Then then one lit up again while on the roll back. Can’t remember the last nuclear melt down around here though ;)
Article pitches this as either/or when it’s very obviously going to be more of one producing more of the other.
I do get tired of the “nuclear energy is better than climate change!” as though our voracious demand for cheap energy will neatly cap itself the moment we get X new nuclear facilities online.
But I also get tired of hearing people insist that nuclear energy is on the horizon, when nobody is building new plants. This is a vaporware technology. It isn’t in the production pipeline and there’s no reason to believe posting your Nuke-Love online will change that
Excuse me, nobody outside of China is building new reactors
And India. So you know, half of all people.
And India.
Building 5x the number of fossil fuel plants as nuclear plants.
If you believe nuclear is preventing climate change, you need to square these figures
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.
Gravity is also ultimately why the winds blows, hot air rises by being less dense only because colder denser air is pulled down displacing the hot air up. Burning a candle in microgravity is very different than on the surface of Earth
Well no shit. One of those things is actually useful.
I want to say “no shit” but then I remembered that most people have no idea how safe nuclear reactors actually are
There’s a huge anti-nuclear crowd, I’d prefer we focus on renewables as much as possible but it’s stupid not to phase out oil/gas for nuclear as a more consistent source.
There’s a huge anti-nuclear crowd
Which was grass-rooted by oil companies back in the 70s.
astroturfed. Because it’s fake grass-roots.
Yes! That’s the term I was trying to think of.
Source? Most if not all in “anti-nuclear crowd“ (in Germany) are also against the burning of fossil fuels. Instead they really like renewable energy like solar or wind. See the history of the German Green party for reference which was founded out of the anti-nuclear grass roots movement and they are also opposed to the burning of fossil fuels. I don‘t know if that‘s different in other countries.
Ah, yes, the German Green party which famously shut down nuclear plants in favor of…
check notes
COAL plants
This is simply not true. The shutdown of all nuclear plants (second attempt) has been decided by the CDU after Fukushima. The last government where the Greens were part of actually postponed the shutdown for a couple month because of the energy crisis cause by the war in Ukraine.
Germany also decided to shutdown all coal power plants until 2038. Yes, Germany has historically a lot of coal power plants, but the future is renewable. Let me remind you that my comment was in response to someone saying the oil industry started the grass roots anti-nuclear movement.
Here ist good chart of Germany‘s energy mix:
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-strompreis-gaspreis-erneuerbare-energien-ausbau
Greenpeace Energy sells fossil fuels while fighting nuclear power. After it became a scandal, Greenpeace officially divested and changed the name but they still share the same office building in Hamburg so I think it’s more than fair to say they are strongly ideologically aligned.
I’m sure on paper they would rather renewable than fossil, but they clearly are willing to compromise with them, unlike with nuclear. When they combine forces with the openly pro-fossil fuel lobby right wing, you get the exact mess Germany is in: inexcusably high reliance on gas and a consistently worst-in-class CO2 footprint per kWh for Western Europe.
Yes, I’m extremely bitter about this. The environmentalist political class being unyielding on nuclear but soft on gas set us back more than a decade with the green transition.
Thank you for your reply. I was not aware of that. However I do think that there is a nuance between a selling natural gas product (for heating) vs. electricity produced with natural gas. Greenpeace did the former, because there was/is no way to get enough green gas at the moment. I think this is legitimate, because at the moment that’s the case for every natural gas provider. Then in the future they can transition with their already client base. To be clear Greenpeace never sold non-renewable electricity.
Nonetheless is extremely disappointing that it takes so long and I also understand if current customers feel betrayed.
Does anyone know if there is a better natural gas provider with a higher percentage of green gas in the mix?
Given the massive amount of land we have renewables are the clear winner. Densely populated countries, with little to no coastline, would get better use out of nuclear.
Yes that’s why I said both, renewables require a lot of space both for generation and storage and generally has peaks and valleys on generation, vs nuclear which can consistently provide a stable amount generally.
I’m anti-nuclear, but it’s because nuclear is so much slower to build and more expensive than solar or wind so the fossil fuel industry is pushing for nuclear to delay the transition away from fossil fuels and use up all the funding.
If you have nuclear plants, you’ve paid to build them and you’re on the hook for decommissioning costs, sure, keep running them. Starting construction on new nuclear in 2026? That’s a terrible idea.
You won’t be up and running before 2040 and you’re not going to be competitive against 2040’s renewables and batteries, never mind 2070’s.
The 20+ year time to build is at best the direct result of lobbying and NIMBY and realistically just propoganda by antinuclear. The US mean for nuclear construction to production is 8 years. Japan has it down to under 5.
You want to drop safety standards on reactors?
That’s a bad faith argument. As someone who spent years in the nuclear industry, a lot of the regulation exists to strangle the industry.
An example was at Vogtle in Georgia, where a section of pipe was determined by the NRC inspectors to be too small and ordered it redesigned.
When that happens, that’s where huge delays come in. The design has to go back to home office and be redesigned and bench tested. While that happens, worm is stalled on that section of the plant. That costs money because all the workers still need to be paid.
They redesigned the pipe and installed it just for the NRC to go back and say that the original pipe was correct and to put it back.
The cost of nuclear also comes from the way we manage energy utilities. When a solar farm is built, the builders can just sell it to the utility and walk away, no consideration for decommissioning or waste disposal or environmental considerations.
A nuclear plant requires a whole plan and money on how it will be decommissioned by the builders themselves. Nuclear is the only power type held to this standard.
Nuclear power is a good thing, and its time the greens and people left of center get on board. Its scientifically sound and immensely powerful with no greenhouse gasses released.
I think they want to drop the lobbying red tape, not the safety standards
That is exactly what they want to do.
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump
China is building them in 5-6 years, the best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago and the second best time is now.
We can’t build them in China, though. Only China can do that. My country doesn’t even have an existing nuclear industry.
Sure we could start building reactors now, but we can get enough solar and battery storage through the night for less than nuclear would cost.
I’d like to see scientific proof of that
Everyone who’s looking to make money is building wind, solar and batteries. Nobody’s looking to invest in nuclear. That’s what the people with all the financial data and feasability studies are doing.
The only people we’ve got pushing for nuclear are the people who were trying to build new coal plants a few years ago.
Props to China, but I know how long building projects take in my country. The plan will say 15 years and it will be done in 25 for 3x the price. And all that to have it produce a kWh for 0.50€. No, thanks.
So don’t build 1-off designs, look at the most expensive parts of plant construction, and lower those costs. China’s nuclear industry isn’t just some construction company that commissions bespoke parts for each nuclear plant, it extends to from heavy forging capacity shared with ship-building to colleges producing construction managers.
I work in construction, and that’s just not the way things work in America. Any government project is required to have a bidding phase with multiple options for nearly every required item so that every company has a fair chance to compete.
I do doors, and even when a government project is calling for some hyper-specific Blast+RF+STC door that only one company can even make, my manager still makes me reach out to a bunch of other companies to get a second number just to have something, even if I then have to qualify that what they’re able to make doesn’t actually fit the specifications.
It’s not uncommon for a large, complex project to spend 4+ years in the bidding phase alone, getting rebid over and over with dozens of addendums and RFI’s working out all the kinks, without even mentioning the time spent in the planning phase beforehand and the lengthy construction phase afterward.
Any government project is required to have a bidding phase with multiple options for nearly every required item so that every company has a fair chance to compete.
The issue here isn’t that there is a bidding process, it’s that only 1 company makes the thing, and that company isn’t even an SoE so it has no reason not to charge infinity dollars while delivering as little as possible.
It’s not uncommon for a large, complex project to spend 4+ years in the bidding phase alone, getting rebid over and over with dozens of addendums and RFI’s working out all the kinks, without even mentioning the time spent in the planning phase beforehand and the lengthy construction phase afterward.
I am not familiar with the specifics of how large complex projects happen over here, but it’s not magic, it’s insane that we’ve seen them lap us in every productive measure, and aren’t trying to study what they’re doing right.
Even if/when we replace fossil fuels with renewables, we still need a solution for surges, and nuclear would fit that very well
I thought nuclear was slow to ramp up and down and basically has to operate 24/7, providing a baseload. Batteries otoh are the quickest source to respond to surges from my understanding. Renewables+batteries are have been cheap enough for years that they’re also good for baseload.
I’m in favor of nuclear, but no. Nuclear can’t handle surges. It takes up to 3 days for a plant to sync to the grid.
The only power sources that can handle surges are hydro, batteries, and natural gas turbines.
Then nuclear power is good at is providing baseline power and slowly ramping that up and down to handle seasonal fluctuations, since solar power peaks during summer. Something else is needed to pick up the slack during winter
I live in a dry but mountainous area. I’d like to see them pump water uphill with any overpower so we can just use turbines to recapture that energy later. The average american keeps impressing me with their turnip-level intellect to the point where I don’t want them running a carwash, much less a nuclear reactor. There are a lot of IRL Homer Simpsons out there.
And also really depends on the needs of the community. Solar, especially, can be deployed cheaply and relatively quickly, and may meet the needs of the community while phasing out oil and gas. Nuclear power plants are very expensive to build and take a really long time, but provide a large amount of power. A local community may not need a nuclear power plant.
Nuclear power plants are also expensive to maintain and tend to attract questionable investors.
“tend to attract questionable investors” what does this even mean, every industry attracts questionable investors and there’s basically zero nuclear in the US to even gauge that from.
He’s talking about that shady coyote who’s always chasing after that flightless bird.
Tangentially related, anyone else excited for Coyote Vs. Acme? It looks fantastic IMO, the premise is a 10/10 idea.
Nuclear is THE single most expensive source of electricity on this planet. So economically it makes zero sense to switch to nuclear. Other than that I agree with you.
I didn’t realize we put a dollar price on fixing the climate.
Because of all the red tape and overzealous safety regulations slapped on it because of fossil fuel lobbying. The fact that it can be profitable or exist at all today despite having a boot on its neck for the last 60+ years says a lot about its viability.
Well when annoying orange decided to cut the safety regulations on nuclear they became a bit more sketchy but yeah still would rather have that than a data center… One benefits all and the other benefits shareholders feelings till the bubble pops
Great Bubble 2: Meltdown
Why dont we have nuclear cars then. Thinking
Same reason we don’t have wind powered cars.
What about hydroelectric powered cars, huh? Checkmate.
Fairly different reason actually, I’d say.
I mean in both cases it’s physics, but it’s different issues!
I know how safe they haven’t been - so that’s something.
I know environmental regulations mean nothing anymore and safety costs a lot of money. And profit is always the aim.
I’m sure it’s decades ahead of what was tried in the 70s and 80s. I’m sure it’s light years over coal and gas. And yet, I’m hesitant.
Can we just have renewables please? Look- other people got ‘em all over now. Wind, solar, wave, geothermal, battery types and capacities improving all the time. Ffs this was what it was it was supposed to be the whole time.
You can probably name every major nuclear accident or incident that’s ever happened. Not because they were all major catastrophes that caused mass loss of life. But because they happen so infrequently and blown out of proportion.
Fukashima was the worst accident in the last 30 years with 0 fatalities. In the US alone over 100 people died due to wind turbines from things like falling ice or structural integrity failure. None of those people worked on turbines and happened to be bystanders to the incident.
Things like fossil fuels have thousands of deaths. But you’re trying to say nuclear is dangerous?
There is at least one fatality. Reported in 2018, a worker has died from a lung cancer. 2400 people died during the evacuation.
The number of deaths in these “accidents” is minimized, partly due to a lack of transparency and government interests, and partly because it is often difficult to establish causal links. Finally, the calculation models are outdated and rely on datas from Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
and partly because it is often difficult to establish causal links.
In other words, “there is no causal link”
I know how safe they haven’t been
No, you really don’t.
Compare what you think you know with the reality of how nuclear power is used all over the world and safely.
Even Fukushima wasn’t that bad in terms of human casualties. It was the tsunami that caused all the loss of life and damage.
Not to say that the Fukushima nuclear incident wasn’t a disaster. But there were no direct deaths from it, and as far as anyone knows, no one has died of even indirect causes.
And there are a LOT of operating nuclear plants all over the world.
Edit: nuclear power generation has the 2nd least amount of deaths attributed to it out of all energy sources, beaten only by solar and only by a small margin.
Ok, how safe haven’t they been? How many were worse than deepwater horizon?
I’m guessing you’ve happily consumed what was given to you on a spoon and accepted that it was representative of the bigger picture.
I grew up an hour from a 1GW reactor that got shut down in part due to “concerned citizens” like yourself. The site it stood on is still periodically checked by the DOE but is now a recreational area. How often do old coal plants do that?
I know how safe they haven’t been - so that’s something.
do you? Nuclear, Solar, and Wind are all roughly equally safe.
Hydropower causes more deaths than nuclear reactors
Edit: sorry, changed the link because I had copied the wrong one. New one is not AI slop, I apologize
the website appears to be an ai slop farm
And those windmills are probably chopping up squirrel suit base jumpers on like a daily basis now too.
Yeah I could see that. But it’s not a particularly strong argument for nuclear. Just a strong argument against terraforming.
Well nuclear power plants create something more useful than ai data centers, nuclear waste.
Loads depleted uranium rounds with militaristic intent
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.
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
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.
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?
One football field 10 meters high to be precise.
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.
One futball field 10 meters high to be precise.
FTFY
11.574 standard National Baseball League baseball bats high
What if their from the parts of the world that call “soccer” football and also use metric? Which is basically everyone.
I knew it was something around there, thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
“You will no longer be provided power in 7 months time, good luck.” - Their local power company.
12 months, but yea
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.
Can you tell us more about these Bad Actors? Are they in the room with us, right now?
All sorts: the Epstein Class, corporations like Blackrock or Blackwater, the Heritage Foundation, cults, corrupt government officials, grifters, and so forth. They might not be physically in our rooms, but their influence colors our everyday life, in ways great and small, often beyond our perception.
Fact of the matter is that there are many forms of power and methods of applying it - AI is no different. Like any tool, it doesn’t care about how it is used or abused. Humans have to decide whether they wield the power of the tool, and to what end.
A shovel can dig gardens and mass graves alike. A good person tries to prevent whatever causes the latter outcome, and encourage the former.
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.
Geothermal power is limited to specific locations, and the best source in the US, Yellowstone, can’t have power plants built by law.
And I just realized you meant geothermal HVAC. You’d probably need a lot of space to dissipate that heat, but should technically be possible
