Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 338 posts

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#191

Post by Filligree »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #189
jakewins wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…

Somehow you never hear these people say "What if the nuclear fuel supply chain becomes compromised for an arbitrarily extended period."

Because it’s reasonably cheap to buy two decades of fuel in advance, and it won’t take up much space. If such a thing were a concern, then people would do precisely that.

If it were still a problem towards the end of that period, then you can in fact extract uranium from seawater.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#192

Post by Ukv »

janice1999 wrote: post #159
Ukv wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is not safe Nothing is 100.0% safe - but as far as I can find nuclear comes incredibly close[0] even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Taking about just deaths is misleading. Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.

In terms of single-incident, I believe hydro takes the lead due to the Banqiao Dam failure (floods over 12,000 square kilometers killing ~30k directly then ~100k more from water contamination and famine). But even that's still dwarfed by the more gradual impact of climate change on the planet from fossil fuels.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#193

Post by lossolo »

jakewins wrote: post #51
atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

> No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. I don’t understand why wind solar is subject to absolutes devoid of probability - “what if the sun and wind stop simultaneously for 2 months?” We know the probability that the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing for N days, we can calculate it from historical data. You can absolutely build solar+wind+storage s…

Nuclear plants often operate at 90%+ capacity factors, while solar can range from 10-25% depending on location. So you might need 4-9 times more solar capacity to match total energy output. So depending on the region, you might need 4-9 gigawatts of solar capacity with a higher amount of battery storage to match 1 GW nuclear output. This is because you need to account for winter vs summer, for bad weather etc. Maybe it will take a lot more space and cost more to build than restarting a nuclear plant for 1.6 billion.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#194

Post by mhx1138 »

atomic128 wrote: post #30

No battery farm can protect a solar/wind grid from an arbitrarily extended period of bad weather. If you have N days of battery storage and the sun doesn't shine for N+1 days, you're in trouble. Nuclear fission is the answer. Today there are 440 nuclear reactors operating in 32 countries. Nuclear fission power plants are expensive to build but once built the plant can last 50 years (maybe 80 years, maybe more) and th…

I personally could tolerate it if Microsoft’s “Ai” is down for a few hours or days per year. Give clippy a break.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#195

Post by fergonco »

alright2565 wrote: post #35
fergonco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are nimby crowds insane? Accidents may happen. And did happen in the past in that same place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

Coal plants have killed a minimum of 500k people over the past 20 years[1]. It's not an accident in that case, it's known and planned for (or at least easily predicted enough that it should have been). But when a few hundred people, or really just 0 people[2] die in one place at one time, people lose their minds. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/23/coal-pow... [2]: An inter-agency analysis conclu…

Well, not coal plants but emissions. I guess those nymbis would also be against having all that pollution concentrated in their back yard.

My point is that it is not insane. Maybe selfish. Not willing to have risks with potential catastrophic results near your home is the most normal thing.

And with nuclear, the probability is very low, as with planes. Yet it happens. All the time. Our generation went through three once in a lifetime crisis in the last two decades.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#196

Post by johnchristopher »

f154hfds wrote: post #179
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thank-you for making the point that utilities should be socialized and not a profit center. EVERYBODY deserves clean water, electricity, housing and food.

Why stop there? EVERYBODY deserves healthcare and education too! I would say in a perfect world everyone should have all of these things. The problem is that the marginal cost to giving each of these things to everyone increases to infinity as we approach 100% of a sufficiently large and diverse population. For example, creating a city water system should efficiently deliver clean water to a large proportion of an ur…

> Many of these things you mention only exist because profit seekers developed and distributed them!

You mean governments signaled the creation of a market by printing and lending free money to build those systems ?

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#197

Post by piva00 »

RhysU wrote: post #181
bloopernova wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus if it's not sunny/windy in one part of the country, it may well be very sunny or windy in other parts of the country. We have a whole freaking energy grid! This isn't aimed at you, but more at the people dismissing the utility of solar and wind power.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

> Nuclear can be built most places.

Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#198

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

janice1999 wrote: post #159
Ukv wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear is not safe Nothing is 100.0% safe - but as far as I can find nuclear comes incredibly close[0] even when including Chernobyl and Fukushima. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Taking about just deaths is misleading. Accidents in other energy sources don't render 1,000 square miles of land uninhabitable.

Dam failures absolutely destroy vast areas and can contaminate them with oil and gasoline by flooding settlements. In fact hydroelectric power has killed a surprising amount of people.

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#199

Post by doublepg23 »

piva00 wrote: post #197
RhysU wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geopolitics is largely determined by who controls energy resources. We've seen, over and over, how borders between energy producers and consumers are inevitably messy. Nuclear can be built most places. Sun and wind cannot.

> Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

Re: Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

#200

Post by piva00 »

doublepg23 wrote: post #199
piva00 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nuclear can be built most places. Nukes require lots of cooling, needing access to large amounts of water from water bodies, that's definitely not "most places" by definition.

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.

Post reply on HN