231–240 of 308 posts
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And died horrendous dead? Because guy who did this was in nuclear plant and was buried in lead coffin in closed zone. His skin was falling from body while he was still breathing
The Chernobyl disaster wasn't caused by a single person, as you note in your comment "proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience."
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Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese g…
Also it worth mentioning deaths caused by respiratory diseases from coal power plant pollution. This goes in millions
" Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity. "
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland. No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data. ... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
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Okay, that is a fair argument, but the policy that that argument inspires should be implemented in a more agnostic way. There should be some objective measure of "positive economic externalities generated per megawatt of electricity consumed". And projects should be judged on that basis, with projects below a certain threshold either being disallowed or being forced to pay more per megawatt of power consumed on that…
It's always good to set up objective criteria for decision so as to prevent corruption, yes. But when ad-hoc deals are made anyway, then it is more important that principles like those have been applied than that everything is ideal.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
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Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
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Finland’s electricity consumption is not projected to rise rapidly. Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu... Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear…
"Electricity consumption will increase from the current approximately 83 TWh to 103–123 TWh by 2030 and 104–159 TWh by 2035." That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things. https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut... In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear…
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
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That's the CAP part. The annual co2 emissions of electricity production and industries is capped to X gigatons per year. If a datacenter buys all clean electric production of the country, electric companies will have to either have to make up the gap by building more new clean energy or tell other customers "sorry all sold out". Of course, would the latter happen, political actions would be done before people freeze.…
The EU has a large problem with carbon leakage from electricity generation to oil and gas use. For example, gas heating is exempt from the EU carbon trade, so people are encouraged to use that rather than electric heating. In countries like Germany, gas heating is popular largely for tax reasons.
carbon leakage is mostly industrial and data centers (why do so many europeans run code at us-east-1 ?)
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Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
Yeah I know. Sadly, burning gas and coal is still the cheapest easiest way to rapidly deploy a lot of power, and Texas is all about it. Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
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Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries? I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before t…
The principle prevents governments from taking actual realities of any specific scenario into account, so it seams bad.