Nuclear safety and penny-pinchers don’t make good bedfellows.
Comment on Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions
Eximius@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Lol. I just love it how so many people complain that Nuclear doesnt make financial sense, and then the most financially motivated companies just actually figure out that using a nuclear reactor completely privately is best.
Fuck sake, world.
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Nuclear safety and
penny-pincherscapitalism don’t make good bedfellows.ftfy. Possibly ironically, nuclear safety and communism (or totalitarianism) don’t work either. It’s odd, innit.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Pretty sure it has to do with how the plant is designed and operated as opposed to what economic or governmental system it happens to exist under.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Doesn’t that design and operation get created by the economic or governmental system it’s under?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Honestly it seems crazy that companies that are so focused on short-term profits in 2024 would be able to make nuclear work.
krashmo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Every once in a while they get faced with a line on a chart somewhere so unbelievably vertical that they have no choice but to look beyond next quarter. Power consumption going 10x in 2 years is one of those times.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Have they solved the disposal questions?
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Mostly, yes. Use breeder reactors to turn long term radioactive waste to sort term radioactive waste, store for short time and done. The downside: it’s more expensive to move and process the stuff so nobody wants to do that.
uzay@infosec.pub 5 days ago
How short is short-term?
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Hundred years. Big difference with the 100.000 years of the current waste.
datendefekt@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Relatively yes. There are disposal sites under construction that are in highly stable and environmentally safe locations. One good thing right now is that radioactive waste is temporarily easily stored. Transport of waste is an issue still, but far less of a problem than transporting oil and oil products.
Hiko0@feddit.org 1 week ago
Next question would be:
Who pays for disposal and dismantling old nuclear power plants? Might also be relevant for @Eximius@lemmy.world claim. I guess it‘ll be the tax payer. And then we might have a different answer to the question of financial sense.
Privatizing gains and collectivizing costs still seems to be en vogue.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m firmly in the “building new nuclear doesn’t make financial sense” camp, but I do think that extending the life of any existing nuclear plant does. Restarting a previously operational nuclear plant lies somewhere in between.
grudan@programming.dev 1 week ago
I think when you start looking at how expensive other forms of green energy are (like wind) long term, nuclear looks really good. Short term, yeah it’s expensive, but we need long term solutions.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t think that math works out, even when looking over the entire 70+ year life cycle of a nuclear reactor. When it costs $35 billion to build two 1MW reactors, even if it will last 70 years, the construction cost being amortized over every year or every megawatt hour generated is still really expensive, especially when accounting for interest.
And it bakes in that huge cost irreversibly up front, so any future improvements will only make the existing plant less competitive. Wind and solar and geothermal and maybe even fusion will get cheaper over time, but a nuclear plant with most of its costs up front can’t. 70 years is a long time to commit to something.
grudan@programming.dev 1 week ago
Can you explain how wind and solar get cheaper over time? Especially wind, those blades have to be replaced fairly often and they are expensive.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
It has been operated privately for a long time, unit 1 (this one) being operated by constellation energy. It stopped in 2019 because Methane had undercut it, and MS has now made an agreement to buy 100% of unit 1s output, but they aren’t buying the facility. Most power generation in the US is private, for better or worse (usually worse).
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The fact that they want to buy an old nuclear reactor instead of building a new one should be all you need to know to realise that it’s not financially viable.
eskimofry@lemm.ee 6 days ago
It’s not quite equivalent right? Using an existing plant is cheaper and faster than building a new one?
Its like saying a datacenter is not financially viable only because top brass decided to use a perfectly good existing one.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
No, that’s only because the US has constructed barriers to make it cost more and take longer, to protect conventional dirty energy. Those barriers do not need to be as large. A new reactor being built would take several years, and they don’t want to wait for that. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be profitable, although again the barriers may make it unprofitable or at least a riskier investment.
rainynight65@feddit.org 5 days ago
Three Mile Island is the epitome of
conventional dirty energy
Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
How so? It’s easy to say things so bold, but I’d like to hear your reasoning.
And009@reddthat.com 6 days ago
I see this as a good thing because they’ll invest more on making energy efficient. That’s something bound to trickle down and help poorer regions unless they die off first.
polle@feddit.org 6 days ago
Yeah for sure it is cheaper, if they only have to pay the operational costs. Not the ones of building and decomissioning the plant. Lol.
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.world 6 days ago
OP really thought they had something there.
rainynight65@feddit.org 5 days ago
It doesn’t make financial sense to build new nuclear power plants. They’re hugely expensive and such projects routinely run well over time as well as budget. If it did make sense, Microsoft would be building them, instead of reviving the site of one of the worst nuclear disasters in the US. Thing is, they want lots of power, and they want it yesterday. By the time you can build a new nuclear plant to satisfy these needs, AI will have run its course and big tech will be on to the next scam.
But hey, why pay attention to such nuances?
datendefekt@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on this investments are not guaranteed. Generally, AI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.
This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 1 week ago
On the other hand, if they ever admit the whole genAI thing doesn’t work, they could just sell the electricity produced by the plant.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 1 week ago
. . . The entire multi-billion-dollar hype train goes off the cliff. All the executives that backed it look like clowns, the layoffs come back to bite them - hard - and Microsoft wont recover for a decade.
I mean . . . a boy can dream
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 6 days ago
The workers will take the blunt of the executive’s mismanagement.
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
My org’s Microsoft reps gave a demo of their upcoming copilot 365 stuff. It can summarize an email chain, use the transcript of a teams meeting to write a report, generate a PowerPoint of the key parts of that report, and write python code that generates charts and whatnot in excel. Assuming it works as advertised, this is going to be really big in offices. All of that would save a ton of time.
datendefekt@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.
The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.
So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
And whether it works as well as they described remains to be seen. However, they did prove that there’s a legitimate use case for generative AI in the office, in most offices. It’s not just a toy.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 week ago
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
GenAI = Generative AI AGI = Artificial General Intelligence
You are talking about the latter. They were talking about the former.