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Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal

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

#211

Post by burningChrome »

bloopernova wrote: post #88
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…

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.

Can't we do both?

This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack.

As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia for the shortfall of renewables, then Russia invaded Ukraine and Russia used their energy production as leverage to essentially blackmail Germany into not going along with UN sanctions against them.

However we need to get to total energy independence, I'm all for, and this whole idea it has to be one or the other only lengthens the process of getting there. In the mean time, it puts us in a precarious position to be involved with countries and regime's that don't like us and will never have our best interests in mind.

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

#212

Post by giantg2 »

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."

Generally agree. However, I want to point out that it could defined be possible if designed the right way. You can use "batteries" like pumped hydro, which could protect against longer duration outages. Bonus is that when there's no sun, there's usually rain, which one would hope would also offset some of the draining of the water.

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

#213

Post by anigbrowl »

Ukv wrote: post #152
greenthrow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. If you're going to cite arbitrary "N+1 days of bad weather" then I can cite "N+1 severe natural disasters" where the nuclear reactor is engineered to withstand N. And unlike the theoretical "disaster" due to extended bad weather taking renewables down, this has actually happened in recent memory with Fukushima. And this was a true disaster, not just a power outage. Nuclear is not safe. Every time pr…

> 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

Suppose you have a devastating earthquake that wrecks renewable power sources in an area. Bad part is you're out of power for a good while. But the second-order risks are very low - maybe some people are killed by falling wind turbines or solar panels, but there isn't any equivalent of radioactive contamination making the place uninhabitable for years.

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

#214

Post by greenthrow »

burningChrome wrote: post #211
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.

Can't we do both? This is what happened to Germany. They tried going 100% renewables and then had Russia take up the slack for the rest of what they needed. Then they realized they had a massive shortfall and then was leaning far too much on Russia to take up the slack. As someone else pointed out, geopolitics always weighs heavy in energy production. Just like in Germany's case where they relied too heavy on Russia…

Germany did not make a real effort at truly going 100% renewable. There are other European countries doing it for real and having wild success.

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

#215

Post by greenthrow »

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.

Bullshit. Sun and wind can be built everywhere. They're just more effective some places than others. But they are cheaper than nuclear everywhere.

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

#216

Post by riedel »

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…

Three mile island already hit jackpot once in the statistics game and it didn't only go offline for a few days. And it is true that fuel cost are not the driving factor for fision. I am all in, if power companies really have to pay for all security and lifecycle costs upfront.

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

#217

Post by jandrese »

Yawrehto wrote: post #206

Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data ( https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more…

This was the original dream from the 60s, where we would be building so many plants that the power would be too cheap to meter.

This of course is nonsense because it requires the entire industry to ignore market conditions for no good reason. You can't fight the market, not on a large scale, and especially not in the US. Power plants are only built if they will be profitable in a reasonable time frame. If power was too cheap to meter then nobody would be building new plants, there would be no return on the investment.

This is also why nobody builds nuclear power plants anymore. They are too expensive to build and can't compete on price. Especially not with renewables cratering the price. There's a reason solar installs are outpacing even the most optimistic projections from a few years ago. You can argue theory all day long on the Internet, but the people doing the actual work have made their decision.

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

#218

Post by krunck »

Maybe we should take some the money being put into AI and direct it towards fusion research. The rest of the funds can be spent on AI to help with fusion research. Once we have fusion we can forget about the awful fission era and also get on with healing the planet.

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

#219

Post by hintymad »

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…

> Nuclear fission is safe, clean, secure, and reliable.

I never understood the hysteria of the anti-nuclear people. I mean, the stats are out there for everyone to verify. Even the worst nuclear disaster killed no more than 100 people[1]. Plus, the new generation of the nuclear reactor can auto shut down when the temperature keeps rising. As for the nuclear waste, we need just one football field to store all the waste even before the recycling, which can recoup 90% of the material.

I'm also aware of the argument that even one death is too many. But if we follow this argument, wouldn't we need to account for the deaths caused by the alternative energy source, like coal? And the death would be in the thousands, right? And why won't we protest that?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...

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

#220

Post by southernplaces7 »

While I love to see nuclear get a comeback from new tech ventures and commercial impetus, it's also interesting to point out how one now mostly hears crickets from the people who screamed about the energy consumption of crypto. AI has so far mainly managed to generate enormous amounts of spam sludge, pollute the already toxic landscape of social media with auto-generated garbage, and lead to a level of data prying and mass data ripping by the big tech companies that makes their previous efforts seem almost quaint.

This shit is largely what this voracious drive for more power is helping build. Even crypto wasn't this shitty, since at least its fundamental application wasn't nearly so broadly parasitic. Yet now I hear very little about uselessly burning vast loads of energy.

I guess if the companies responsible for the above trash heap are largely the same ones that hire or indirectly subsidize the jobs of so many people in the tech world as represented by a site like HN, then the whole dumpster fire is okay.

I'm also fairly sure that OpenAI, Microsoft and others would happily burn baby seals in coal furnaces if it meant powering their precious AI data needs. It's only for PR that they make useful noises about using clean power.

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