BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
I swear they looked at Bill Gates failing to launch SMRs and thought: “he’s a smart guy”
I am 100% in support of deploying nukes to Google and Amazon
You need to deploy them around the same time else contingency plans have it that everything just boots back up in another region, at least Google. us-east-1 otoh…
us-east-1 is Amazon’s Self-Nuking Technology™
Thanks for posting this good collection of links. HN has as hard-on for SMRs and as a first-order approximation that means they’re wrong, but it’s good to have something more than vibes backing it up.
I got a lot of them from very pro-nuclear guys too, but ones who can count
We buy tech of the future that might or might not work/get government approval/make actual sense to build so we can’t be blamed for ruining the climate with AI using up all the energy. That’s the more earth bound version of: I don’t care about climate change because we will live on Mars soon™.
500 megawatts? Pshhj that’s not even though to power the flux capacitor.
I can easily get 500 megawatts with a few power towers burning rocket fuel, plus I don’t have to worry about the logistics of recycling uranium and plutonium waste.
I’m unrelated news, the Satisfactory 1.0 update is pretty great. What are we talking about again? Oh sorry gotta go build another heavy modular frames factory
I’m more of a factorio guy myself. I’m going to become a hermit next monday
Great game, just sucks the main dev is a bit of a chud.
this game destroyed my life for weeks. I’m doing shapez 2 now and I’ll probably finish up my miserable tour of factory games with factorio afterward
EDIT: also rocket fuel seems extremely overpowered to me, I don’t think powering tier 9 should be as trivial as making some RF and slamming down fuel plants for ten minutes
BRING IT ON NITPICKY NUKE NERDS
Well acthtually we prefer to be called fission/fusion nerds
“greenwashing is cheaper than action” indeed.
Our local Swedish right-wingers in gov have a chubby for nukes too[1], because their main motivation besides hating on brown people is pissing off Greens. But in the Swedish way they handed this off to a researcher (“utredning”) who found out that to get the industry on board you need a) rock-solid political promises (so need to get the Social Democrats at least on board) and b) have a price guarantee for power for at least a decade, along with massive government loan guarantees.
It’s gonna be hard to get voters interested in 10 new reactor sites (NIMBY gets supercharged when it comes to nukes) if it slightly pushes up lending rates and power bills.
[1] the right-wing part of the opposition social democrats like them too to be fair
Caroline van der Plas and that entire gaggle of talking heads that call themselves a political party are a bunch of muppets. Muppets that are being puppeteered by a very wealthy dairy and agricultural industry
Deze post klopt! ;)
wouldn’t it make more sense to put NPP on seashore and just dump waste heat to ocean like everyone else does
Iirc at the sea in friesland was one of the options yes. But the farmer option was also landlocked, de achterhoek if you want to look it up.
BRB making a video for a cold fusion based kickstarter. I smell money
Remember to say it’s optimized for net zero datacenter operations
few months late, it’s called helion energy
If these nuclear plants manage to come to fruition, it’ll be the sole miniscule silver lining of the bubble. Considering its AI, though, I expect they’ll probably suffer some kind of horrific Chernobyl-grade accident which kills nuclear power for good, because we can’t have nice things when there’s AI involved.
even if you’re ardently pro-nuclear, SMRs are just a failure purely on the economics and always have been. And that’s before wind/solar/battery made them just obsolete. So SMRs are the perfect tech when you don’t want to do anything useful.
See, I feel like AI might have the actual solution to this problem. We can overcome the economic issues with setting up SMR infrastructure the same way AI has powered through all their economic problems: setting VC money in fire and trust that the smokescreen will hold out for another funding round.
Once the reactors exist, I’m assuming that their operation can be relatively cheap for whoever ends up owning the actual plants once the AI bubble pops and the datacenters around them are shut down or repurposed.
Honestly thank god they’re vaporware. Somehow I don’t think we should have startups building actual nuclear reactors.
hol up google wants 500MW? that’s 1. one regular sized reactor that could be delivered in the same timeframe, and 2. google uses already almost 3GW on average (2023), this is compared to about 2.5GW for ms of which something in the ballpark of 700MW just for ai. they’re gonna need much more, like five regular sized reactors if they want to use entire baseload (that’s how NPPs work best. the french made load-following NPPs but i guess it’d be harder to make them small) or swing wildly with power consumption to conform to renewables
I don’t claim to be an expert on nuclear power, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but from what I’ve seen, smaller reactors don’t seem to make much sense. The trend seems to be towards bigger reactors with bigger power output. Some of it thanks to the bureaucracy of getting permits per reactor, but also the physics, engineering, real estate and economics involved. Conventional (i.e. existent) reactors are typically a fairly small part of a nuclear power plant’s footprint, so no matter how much you miniaturize them you will have the overhead of security, operations, cooling and electrical infrastucture.
If someone can fill me in on the benefits of smaller, more modular nuclear reactors and how they might outweight those of large installations, I’m interested.
The hypothetical benefit is that prefabricated parts are a lot less dependent on the site. This will make the reactor cheaper to build.
There’s also a perception sleight of hand - “modular” doesn’t mean the reactor is a module you ship in on a big truck, put some uranium in and away you go. You’re building a power station in a fixed location.
Also you still need a shitload of water.
square-cube law is in full force there
one argument in favour of SMRs i’ve seen is that while less efficient than regular sized reactors, these are cheaper per unit (but not for MW) so some of them can be built earlier than bigger reactors. which doesn’t matter because these things don’t exist
I’m looking forward to seeing the tech attitude of “move fast and break things” being brought to nuclear reactors.
What could possibly go wrong? Better ask for forgiveness then plant permissions!
Alright so you can have them funding the next generation of nuclear power, which would eventually bring this new form into the mainstream by having them deal with the costs associated with ironing out any issues they have and very likely making it economically viable…
Or…
These tech companies can use fossil fuels to power their AI. Like it or not, they arent going to stop developing AI and data centers. They need the power either way. Solar and wind won’t keep up with that level of demand and tech companies know it. So choose. Nuclear, or fossil fuels?
Try option three. No one is going to pay for any of that because LLMs are useless machines.
Fun Fact: it took 42 years to start Watts Bar Unit 2.
as you will discover if you read, the use case for SMRs is to keep doing coal
Reading the linked article? But it is 1/16th a ssc post long! Nobody got time for that.
as you will discover if you read,
Hey, man, that’s a lot to ask, you know, brah
The more I read, the more I’m convinced SMRs are to clean energy as gadgetbahns are to public transit.
Like it or not, they arent going to stop developing AI and data centers.
Well they should. I’m not giving them credit for investing in vaporware nuclear plants when the ostensible plan is to waste all the power on glue pizza recipes.
I wish they at least put that money in real and known working designs available right now so at least when the fad is dead, we can maybe use that power for something else. Or they can maybe have the tiniest decency to unfuck their search engine or whatever.
Well they should. I’m not giving them credit for investing in vaporware nuclear plants when the ostensible plan is to waste all the power on glue pizza recipes.
man, fuck this timeline… what are we even doing
You’re correct that I can’t stop them from making pants on head stupid decisions, but I’m not going to stop making fun of them.
very likely making it economically viable…
They’re going to fund currently economically nonviable nuclear plants to power their currently economically nonviable genAI schemes? Over the time horizon of
25 yearsa decade (edit: misread the article) before they scale up energy capacity at all past the rnd stage? Maybe pants on head is too generous.I’m not crunching the numbers over here, but they must be making money off AI if they’re doing this. I’m sure they have further plans that aren’t public yet.
I’m not a fan of AI, so if Microsoft or Google ends up in a dumpster fire because of all this I will never stop laughing about it. I just don’t expect it.
I’m not crunching the numbers over here, but they must be making money off AI if they’re doing this.
Sounds familiar…
they’re not. chatgpt4 burns more energy than subscription is worth, and that was text only and before that 4o shitshow
Look, Sam Altman is a billionaire and a genius. He has a plan! So what if OpenAI is losing money on every request that ChatGPT serves? They’ll make it up in volume! Any idiot can see the genius in that.
Meta’s happy to give away models for free, so models are evidently worth $0.
but they must be making money off X if they’re doing this.
is such a laughable, ridiculous thing to say, like what the fuck dude, where did you get this idea from even
Yeah corporations love spending massive amounts of money on projects with no return on their investment. Microsoft is signing a 20 year contract for massive amounts of power for funsies, and totally handing out copilot licenses for free to all the other corporations that are adopting it.
Have you ever sat in a meeting with corporate people? All they every think about is money money and more money. Laugh all you want - MS is doing the laughing as every company scrambles to adopt AI purely out of fear of being left behind, and they are paying for it. The install base is already so huge for the OS, this is the easiest payout they could ask for. They have to shit the bed HARD to fuck this up.
The tech industry runs on investors spurred on by hype and promises of huge profits somewhere in the future
MS is doing the laughing as every company scrambles to adopt AI purely out of fear of being left behind
Hey man, as someone who literally worked at MSFT in Azure Identity a year ago, let me assure you, this is exactly what MSFT is also doing while their devs scratch their heads in bewilderment on how on earth they’re going to incorporate genAI into the auth token service.
I’ll take “comments posted with extremely definite and concrete knowledge of current operator spend and market dynamics” for 2c, Alex
Fortune named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years.
Some Wikipedia editor has a nice sense of comedic timing, placing this right before the article picture and the infobox before dropping the
At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron’s reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal.
Man the internet is wild. I say MS probably has a plan to profit from AI based on their 20 year contract for nuclear power and you guys are like “but Enron failed!” Holy fuck ya really reaching to pick those cherries now
There’s a full cherry tree, you can pick as many cherries as you can eat.
Your blithe trust in capital fails to be endearing.
has a plan to profit
You say “plan” but I think what you really mean is that Satya crossed his fingers and hoped for the best
Yeah corporations love spending massive amounts of money on projects with no return on their investment.
This message squirted into the ether from my Zune
They have to shit the bed HARD to fuck this up.
Fun fact: The default color for the Zune was brown.
thank you for reminding me of this which I forget
I’m sure they have further plans that aren’t public yet.
Nah dawg you’re just too stupid to see how bubbles work.
but they must be making money off AI if they’re doing this.
They don’t have to be, just the fear of another platform developing the same AI SaaS shit which could drive customers away/make it harder to convince C-level management to up their spending could cause fomo at the people building the AI. similar as with the same with the cryptocurrency/blockchain shit. Think we linked an article talking about things like this here a short while ago.
E: Here
This is promising. The high energy demands of AI has big tech investing in the field of small modular reactors (SMR).
how do you do, fellow kid. tell me more about the field of shitty muclear reactors (SMR)
Criticize all you’d like. I just think it’s better to let corporations foot the research, especially if it turns out to be a fruitless attempt at progress.
imagine having takes about tech
Imagine repeatedly being critical of another’s opinion without offering a counterargument.
I’m sure you’ll develop adult conversational skills as you mature.
christ alfucking mighty all your posts are this boring
and since that “counterargument” shit means you definitely didn’t read the sidebar, off you fuck, debatebro
imagine dropping into the takes lounge for techs, and instead pouting
but also holy fuck this is the second “waaaaaaah just you wait until you grow up” we’ve had recently, wtf. are the promptfans okay?
it’s a really weird week for them to do this, as my spinal column has decided to finally, painfully turn into dust
Self “Chalky” @ Awful dot Systems
For the non-banned people who think this is a good take. It is not. Corps due to competing with each other keep the research private, which if it doesn’t work out will lead others to do similar research (wasting that time/money again) or they will patent it which causes a slowdown in further research due to all the license payment shit. (Or worse, they go the before patents were a thing way, and keep it all a secret, wasting more time and money).
@dgerard somebody should found a startup and sell ASMRs to Google and Amazon
