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

261–270 of 338 posts

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

#261

Post by akvadrako »

Filligree wrote: post #191
BobaFloutist wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's also plentiful in many countries, it's just not mined because it's too cheap. But since fuel is under 1% of the cost of Nuclear, if it was a problem we could easy mine more difficult places.

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

#262

Post by danielbln »

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…

This user account is spamming the same message into various threads. Correct or not, it leaves a taste.

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

#263

Post by CaptainFever »

throwaway48540 wrote: post #37
lopis wrote: post #12

While this is better than loading up a coal power plant, the way I see it, it's still a tragic situation. Even if AI used purely fossil-free electricity (which it doesn't), it's still putting pressure on our grids and energy production. The green energy AI consumes if the green energy some other less lucrative industry will not consume. Big tech is currently scraping their net neutrality plans left and right...

What exactly is the problem? That they're using any energy at all? Well, I don't like that people have lights on after 7 PM...

Yeah. The only way the sentiment "I don't like that ___ is using energy, even though the energy is completely clean" makes sense is if they've already made up their minds that ___ is bad, and thus any energy usage is bad. The energy usage argument is a red herring; it's actually just a value judgment on AI itself.

> If you're an AI hater, it's frustrating to see what you consider a useless technology growing to take up more and more of our energy mix, eating into climate gains being made from the immense growth of renewable energy. If you're an AI maximalist, on the other hand, the significant energy use projected for AI is a small price to pay for a technology that you think will revolutionize our lives much more than technologies like air conditioning, refrigeration, or the automobile ever did.

> The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In the long run, AI's energy use will likely level off at a significant but not grid-melting level that's roughly commensurate with the collective economic value we as a society get from it. Whether the trade-offs inherent in that shift are "worth it" involves a lot of value judgements that go well beyond how much electricity a bunch of servers are using.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...

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

#264

Post by geysersam »

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 energy is not free from disruptions caused by natural events or other unexpected causes. See for example the nuclear power plants in France that have to shut down in summer because if low water in the nearby rivers used for cooling.

It's always a question of probability and risk. If we get extreme weather conditions that our storage cannot keep up then we have to temporarily reduce usage and in the longer term increase storage capacity.

That said, I'm not against nuclear. But I'm against simplisticly dismissing renewables.

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

#265

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

India has nine nuclear plants actively under construction to be completed between 2024-27 as well.

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

#266

Post by lenkite »

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…

Very few people talk about the land requirements for solar and consequence of de-greening. To generate 1 MW of solar power, approximately 5 acres are needed. This means a 1 MW solar farm fits on a 10-acre space. This overlaps with croplands and grasslands used for livestock grazing. This affects animal movement patterns. Removing native vegetation to make room for solar farms threatens endangered animals and insects which rely on the vegetation for food and habitat.

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

#267

Post by CaptainFever »

modeless wrote: post #226

It's unfortunate that Three Mile Island is a meme. Objectively this is a good thing, but it will create headlines and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption.

> and stoke more pearl clutching around AI power consumption

Yeah, as shown by this very thread (and that your comment is greyed out).

Nuclear energy is good. Whether or not AI consuming that energy is good or not, depends on how much you value AI as a technology. No one cares about how much energy gaming PCs or refrigerators uses, because their existence is not currently controversial.

See: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/06/is-generative-ai-really-g...

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

#268

Post by oezi »

lm28469 wrote: post #177
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…

The problem is that you need to plan for the absolute worst case, once in a century, scenario and size your batteries accordingly. Same reason why almost no one goes 100% solar at home deep in the south/north because you'd need 20x your needed capacity in batteries to account for that once in a decade bleak winter week

You absolutely don't. You just keep some gas peaker plants around for those rare occasions.

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

#269

Post by oezi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #161
akamaka wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you didn’t mention is the effect that renewables have on the cost of nuclear power. When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop. Because nuclear power has high up front costs, its economics are increasingly eroded as more renewables and batteries are added to the grid. You’re totally correct that renewables and batteries…

> When you get plentiful and nearly free solar energy at certain times of the year, the utilization of your nuclear power plant will drop In the short run, sure. In the long run, cheap power builds its own demand. A country that commits to a certain amount of nuclear baseload, even if run at a loss in the short term, is injecting a very real industrial subsidy into its system. (The way to ensure you don’t get a dog i…

You are right which means that the cheap excess solar energy during summer and during the day will drive a boom in those industries which can leverage such intermittent availability of very cheap energy.

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

#270

Post by incrudible »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #258
bryanlarsen wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No real effort? >50% of Germany's power came from renewables in 2023. That sounds like a massive effort to me.

There was definitely a period where the "renewables are too expensive" propaganda was winning and right wing German parties were successful in slowing renewables, particularly offshore wind rollout in Germany. This will have cost them Billions, similar to the British right wing effectively banning onshore wind in Emgland at roughly the same time. Both nations have done well with renewables, but could have done better…

The cost of the renewables rollout in Germany is on the order of 2 trillion euros. They produce so much renewable energy that the prices regularly go negative, but then import at much higher prices when they don’t. They pay among the highest prices in Europe, and still their CO2 emissions are among the worst. If wind/solar as a whole were both as cheap as touted and as environmentally friendly, that should not be the case.
Post reply on HN