Good news is there is increased investment in nuclear energy for data centers, which will go a long way to combat this.
Comment on ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?
slacktoid@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
AI is exacerbating the damage we are causing by staying on fossil fuels. I see the issue is mainly political as we have green energy and all
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 3 days ago
nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 3 days ago
God no, it will not. Aside from the discussion whether nuclear is really a good way to generate electricity (and I think it’s not): The demand is so insanely huge that it’s actually stacked: green plus coal plus gas plus oil plus nuclear is currently getting “assigned” to genai.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 days ago
What do you think will replace fossil fuels as our baseload source? Because (to my understanding) renewables don’t have the output and stability required to fill that void.
Watt for watt, nuclear is one of the safest methods of generation and generates tons of energy with minimal waste (which already has methods of storage and reprocessing).
random, barely related thought
It always amuses me to point out that fossil fuel plants like coal are more radioactive than nuclear power plants. Because nuclear plants have strict regulations they have to follow, but coal plants concentrate radioactive materials into the ash as part of their normal operation, which can make it to the outside.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
(to my understanding) renewables don’t have the output and stability required to fill that void.
Your understanding would change if you actually looked into the facts and the numbers, and change even more if you’d been keeping track of what financial markets have put their money into for well over a decade.
nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Please see my other comment: whether nuclear power is good or bad is not my point, the monstrously power hungry genai shit is.
markon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
So fossil fuels better? Nuclear works great for France.
nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl 1 day ago
All nice and well but it is not my point here. My point is that I disagree that adding nuclear is good as it doesn’t remove fossils from the mix in the first place. LLM/genai is a problem no matter how much power you throw at it.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
What has worked great for France is keeping their nuclear mishaps very well hidden… as it did for the Saint-Laurent meltdown in 1980, and at the Centraco plant in 2011, for two examples.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 1 day ago
not going to happen lol, nuclear takes at least a decade or more to build, and then approve by regulatory bodies, and people are not keen on having nuclear plants built near cities.
kalkulat@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Nuclear energy is never good news.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Crazy people still get downvoted in Lemmy for reminding everyone that Nuclear energy is the most expensive form of generating power while solar, wind, and water are the cheapest.
LwL@lemmy.world 2 days ago
People just eat the “nuclear waste isn’t a problem actually ignore that in some places we’re already seeing it wasn’t stored safely aftet all” propaganda from the nuclear lobby right up.
And forget that just because nuclear plants are pretty damn safe when everything is done properly, people are notoriously great at not doing things properly, hence why 2 of the things have melted down so far (though i should say the same applies to hydro, except I only know of 1 disaster instead of 2, and the financial damage is less because water doesnt contaminate the ground for forever. Killed a lot of people though).
I’ll take it over fossil fuels still because co2 is also a huge problem, and having nuclear waste at all is a bigger problem than adding slightly more while we transition to full renewables.
RamRabbit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
generating power while solar, wind, and water are the cheapest
When you include storage, this is far, far from the case. Otherwise you are pairing solar with natural gas peaker plants, which defeat a good bit of the point of renewables.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I’d rather just not build them
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Is Coal and Gas is your preferred energy source? Because that’s what nuclear would be replacing.
morto@piefed.social 3 days ago
Nuclear investments will probably just meet the increase in energy consumption due to new datacenters, not make an energy transition
kalkulat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That expenditure would displace the 10x the power which renewables + storage have already proven to do all over the world… that’s what nuclear would replace. Nuclear is never good news.
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 3 days ago
I disagree. AI is causing huge increases in the demand for energy in general. Renewables are the most economic energy source and pretty much all new generation will be renewable since its cheaper. AI is just accelerating the transition process.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There’s also a huge issue around water use which isn’t mentioned in the article.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 days ago
The water use issue is largely blown out of proportion or not compared to other sources of water use.
The US Corn industry alone uses 80x the water usage of the entire global AI industry.
Hank Green on YT goes over it in more details and with citations: www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
Ashtear@piefed.social 3 days ago
It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?
The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.
alsimoneau@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Yeah but when but gets 20% more efficient they build a second one. You still end up with a net increase.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Fair, but corn has a use. (Also not one I agree with but you get my meaning.)
ObtuseDoorFrame@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is eaten by people. Most of it is used as animal feed (which is catastrophic on their systems as their stomachs aren’t designed to digest corn, so their corn diet slowly kills them) and rest is made into ethanol and added to gasoline. The corn subsidies are so dumb that they require a minimum amount of the corn being grown to be turned into ethanol, which is extremely inefficient.
flowers_galore2@lemmynsfw.com 3 days ago
This was a subtly sponsored video for which he got a lot of shit iirc. Didn’t he retract this?
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I haven’t seen anything saying it was sponsored and getting a lot of shit on the Internet isn’t any indication of being incorrect. The video is still up and no mention of anything like what you’re talking about.