41–50 of 52 posts
Matching base load with base production in this way is actually sensible move. And for maintenance periods you can just plan for and buy the power from market.
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That's wrong. Nuclear power plants were started after the "breaking things" part.
Right, that's why public sentiment around nuclear was and has been so hard fought, because it had never failed in a catastrophic manner in history.
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> This is just PR and carbon greenwashing. > All current power plants are completely unsuitable as single power source for a data center I don’t think this is a fair assessment. For example, there is a data center being built in New Zealand that will be grid connected but the power will be supplied from a huge hydro dam that has to have generators shutdown if the load is not great enough. Its primarily purpose is to…
I call this greenwashing because Meta throws minor amounts of money at an existing plant, then basically claims all the credit for all the CO2-less electricity that is produced there. This is IMO just a CO2 accounting trick, basically, and does not really achieve anything, because all that happens is that the average electricity user in that area gets a bit "dirtier" (on paper) while Meta becomes "zero emission" (on…
https://sustainability.google/operating-sustainably/stories/...
> To ensure that Google is the driver for bringing new clean energy onto the grid, we insist that all projects be “additional.” This means that we seek to purchase energy from not-yet-constructed generation facilities that will be built above and beyond what’s required by existing energy regulations.
Unless the nuclear plant would shut down without their money, they're just taking carbon credits from the wider grid. Amazon had one of their nuclear plans rejected for this exact reason.
From TFA > Meta and its Big Tech peers have fallen head over heels for nuclear power lately. Meta announced earlier this year that it was soliciting proposals for new nuclear power plants that would generate between 1 and 4 gigawatts of power. Today, the company said it has received over 50 qualified submissions for sites in more than 20 states. I would like to see one of those submissions. Is Meta getting into the u…
> Have they figured out how to store the waste yet? Not the power plants problem, as per law the government is responsible for it and the utilities have to pay them. The govt is in breach of this by not opening Yucca Mountain. For contrast, in Finland the utilies are responsible for their waste and they have Onkalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo... > How to insure the power plant Thats w…
> Not the power plants problem, as per law the government is responsible for it and the utilities have to pay them. The govt is in breach of this by not opening Yucca Mountain.
Strange, we assigned blame, yet the problem persists. What are they going to do with nuclear waste until the government acts? [1] I guess you wouldn't be willing to put a barrel or two into your garage, would you?
> Thats what insurance pools like the "American Nuclear Insurers" are for
I have heard of those. Let's check how much they disbursed for Fukushima. Apparently Fukushima was insured by the German Nuclear Reactor Insurance Association. And apparently the Association did pay out... nothing [2]. Furthermore, liability is often capped for those insurance associations, just like in the USA [3]. In the end the public will pay anyway.
> German commercial nuclear power plants for example never received ANY subsidies and they still made a lot of money.
The science service of the German Bundestag seems to disagree [4]. A more comprehensive study is here [5].
[1] And "act" could just mean to revoke the law and institute something like in Finland. Proper compensation of risk could certainly speed up finding suited locations. I'm all for it.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Nuclear_Reactor_Insuran...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
[4] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...
[5] https://foes.de/publikationen/2020/2020-09_FOES_Kosten_Atome...
EDIT: typos, grammar
> The social media company will buy all the “clean energy attributes” of Constellation Energy’s Clinton Clean Energy Center, a 1.1 gigawatt nuclear power plant in central Illinois, starting in June 2027. Creative bookkeeping is a thing when it comes to carbon neutrality. They are still using electrons produced with gas power. But others in a place where Meta doesn't require much power get to use nuclear power now. It…
This achieves almost nothing: Emissions stay the same, no additional clean power is generated and there is no reduction in power consumption either.
The only notable result is that Meta is now "blameless" on paper.
As long as you can get carbon credits cheaply from peers that don't really need/profit/care about them, the whole scheme is rather useless.
From TFA > Meta and its Big Tech peers have fallen head over heels for nuclear power lately. Meta announced earlier this year that it was soliciting proposals for new nuclear power plants that would generate between 1 and 4 gigawatts of power. Today, the company said it has received over 50 qualified submissions for sites in more than 20 states. I would like to see one of those submissions. Is Meta getting into the u…
Storing nuclear waste is a solved problem.
surely having public infrastructure only working when private companies are willing to pay for it is a good idea and not a problem at all for the future
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Storing nuclear waste is a solved problem.
How so?
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Depends on the use case. Dedicated datacenters for ML training can trade off power reliability vs. other factors like cost or carbon emissions.
You absolutely could do that if you wanted to basically burn money. Datacenters and especially ML training hardware is highly capital intensive and depreciates at basically constant rate regardless of utilization. I see currently no scenario where you wwould be willing to idle this expensive infrastructure just to save pennies on the dollar on a grid connection; carbon credits would have to be nonsensically expensive…
See e.g. this post from Urs Hölze, one of the fathers of hyperscale computing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/urs-h%C3%B6lzle_rethinking-lo...
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You absolutely could do that if you wanted to basically burn money. Datacenters and especially ML training hardware is highly capital intensive and depreciates at basically constant rate regardless of utilization. I see currently no scenario where you wwould be willing to idle this expensive infrastructure just to save pennies on the dollar on a grid connection; carbon credits would have to be nonsensically expensive…
Adding more 9s is costly, and AI training is very suitable to be throttled and/or interrupted. I'm not talking about days or weeks of downtime, but these things are definitely being considered. Source: I'm working at a Google datacenter. See e.g. this post from Urs Hölze, one of the fathers of hyperscale computing: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/urs-h%C3%B6lzle_rethinking-lo...
Assuming ~$10M of capex (to buy the datacenter) per MW of electrical power (required by the datacenter), and hardware that is obsolete after 5 years (or even 10!), turning that datacenter off for an hour just to save like ~50$/MWh (or whatever spot price is) seems extremely counterproductive, because your hardware running for that additional hour is worth multiple times that (you spent like >$100 per operating hour on the hardware alone assuming 10 year lifetime).
It seems much more attractive (and credible) to just install more batteries (or even a gas turbine), instead of chasing demand-side-regulation pretensions.
edit: thx for the link though, that is a very interesting study/data even if I disagree with that conclusion!