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Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

2-5-10.com

1–10 of 19 posts

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#3
This seems to boil down to AI uses lots of power and some of that currently comes from nuclear so we’re going to definitely ramp up nuclear energy production. It in no way addresses the cost, regulatory, or public acceptance issues. It also completely ignores things like grid storage that could make renewables a viable alternative. I don’t know if nuclear energy production is going to increase and after reading this I’m absolutely no closer to a deeper understanding of the issue.

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#4
It's a measure of the failure of nuclear power that a blogger making wild predictions is estimating that the country with the most nuclear plants installed will be getting less than half their new power from it in a decade.

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#5

This seems to boil down to AI uses lots of power and some of that currently comes from nuclear so we’re going to definitely ramp up nuclear energy production. It in no way addresses the cost, regulatory, or public acceptance issues. It also completely ignores things like grid storage that could make renewables a viable alternative. I don’t know if nuclear energy production is going to increase and after reading this…

Perhaps the biggest issue isn't public acceptance, but simply we stuck at building fission plants, even when we intend to.

I was pro nuclear power sixteen years sixteen years ago (these days I'm more ambivalent). In that time the UK has built maybe three quarters of a nuclear power plant.

Nuclear waste sucks but carbon in the atmosphere is way worse. But we're incapable of increasing nuclear production. Meanwhile renewables have gotten way cheaper and storage is beginning to look feasible.

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#7
Anybody can predict anything. This seems extremely unlikely, unless we magically start building a whole lot of plants today, and they somehow are able to be finished in 10 years. The author of this blog seems completely out of touch.

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#8
At the risk of looking like [0] guy, i suggest this is incredibly far from the truth.

First of all, because building a new nuclear plant in 10 years is all but impossible. Therefore, since there isn't many of them under construction now already, not many will be built within 10 years regardless of demand.

Secondly, if demand comes from AI, it is used for training AI models and is thus not very time-sensitive. If those data centres can buy electricity very cheaply, they will happily do it half of the time, especially as GPUs wear out from constant use, and have a longer "moral" lifespan due to obsolescence than physical, so they won't be losing much from keeping them off for part of the day if that buys them much cheaper power - and buying it NOW, not in 10 years. In this case, AI can even help deployment of renewables because they can feed extra "free" electricity during peak production hours, to the data centres, getting something rather than nothing for it, thus reducing "duck curve" problem of curtailment.

[0] https://external-preview.redd.it/nv9Rv16O4tFC4rWm443AW3oBdyK...

Re: Prediction-Nuclear Pwr Will Be > 30% of New Installed Capacity in 10 Years in US

#10

This seems to boil down to AI uses lots of power and some of that currently comes from nuclear so we’re going to definitely ramp up nuclear energy production. It in no way addresses the cost, regulatory, or public acceptance issues. It also completely ignores things like grid storage that could make renewables a viable alternative. I don’t know if nuclear energy production is going to increase and after reading this…

Nobody needs a kind of AI that consumes that much energy. There's no way that's commercially viable and carries its own weight. Also, the whole discussion is taking place in the context of present day GenAI where nobody has found a marketable use case for it. This whole bubble would be long bust by the time construction puts its boots on the ground.

A better justification for more nuclear energy is to electrify transportation and residential heating/cooling while navigating the climate catastrophe, don't you think?

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