Comment on ‘Just an unbelievable amount of pollution’: how big a threat is AI to the climate?

• nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨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.

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  • Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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  • markon@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    So fossil fuels better? Nuclear works great for France.

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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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• 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.

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• kalkulat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Nuclear energy is never good news.

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  • 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.

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    • 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.

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    • 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.

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• frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’d rather just not build them

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  • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Is Coal and Gas is your preferred energy source? Because that’s what nuclear would be replacing.

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    • morto@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Nuclear investments will probably just meet the increase in energy consumption due to new datacenters, not make an energy transition

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    • 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.

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      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        There are no other alternatives for baseline power generation.

        You can’t run a national grid on 100% renewables and batteries. If you’re not using nuclear then you’re using fossil and fossil fuels are not only polluting but the dependence on them creates a huge amount of political instability around the world.

        Nuclear plants use less uranium than Coal plants burn into the atmosphere. Coal has trace amount of radioactive uranium and if you burn hundreds of thousands of tons of it every year then you’re putting pounds of radioactive uranium into the atmosphere.

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    • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The datacenters.

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      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I’d rather it didn’t rain today, but it did and I still needed to bring an umbrella no matter how much I didn’t like the rain.

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