Right, let’s welcome throwing millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium, I mean that’s such a nice thing, we need much more of it! It’s not like we already have perfectly renewable solutions to providing power…
Comment on Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors
mojo@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
ricdeh@lemmy.world 11 months ago
PlexSheep@feddit.de 11 months ago
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
Steve@communick.news 11 months ago
In their specific use case that won’t really work.
They want to use all of their available property for server racks. Covering the roof with solar won’t give enough power/area for them. A small reactor would use a tiny fraction of the space, and generate several times the power. That’s why it’d be worth the extra cost.
eestileib@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
For those who haven’t seen this discussion before, I feel like doing the next step in the dance. Cheers Plex.
It’s important to note that nuclear is capable of satisfying baseload demand, which is particularly important for things like a commercial AI model training facility, which will be scheduled to run at full blast for multiple nines.
Solar+storage is considerably more unreliable than a local power plant (be it coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear). I have solar panels in an area that gets wildfire smoke (i.e. soon to be the entire planet), and visible smoke in the air effectively nullifies solar.
Solar is fantastic for covering the amount of load that is correlated with insolation: for example colocated with facilities that use air-conditioning (which do include data centers, but the processing is driving the power there).
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
While you are right about baseload, you are wrong that it’s in any way important for AI model training. This is one of the best uses for solar energy: you train while you have lots of energy, and you pause training while you don’t. Baseload is important for things that absolutely need to get done (e.g. powering machines in hospitals), or for things that have a high startup cost (e.g. furnaces). AI model training is the opposite of both, so baseload isn’t relevant at all.
eestileib@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
It’s not life-critical but it is financially-critical to the company. You aren’t going to build a project on the scale of a data center that is capable of running 24/7 and not run it as much as possible.
That equipment is expensive, and has a relatively short useful lifespan even if not running.
This is why tire factories and refineries run three shifts, this isn’t a phenomenon unique to data centers.
guacupado@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“And you pause training while you dont.” lmao I don’t know why people keep giving advice in spaces they’ve never worked in.
docmox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/…/LCOE.pdf
Dogyote@slrpnk.net 11 months ago
Yo better check your fuel prices: economist.com/…/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It’ll be the new oil.
ricdeh@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Not only that, imagine how thrilled nature and the environment will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.
docmox@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Raw material is usually a small fraction of the cost of refueling. I would also argue that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is a small blip in the lifetime of a reactor, ~80 years. Transient pricing will have a negligible effect on the LCOE.
thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The more people who invest the better the tech becomes the more the price comes down. Nuclear is excellent base energy
wrinkletip@feddit.nl 11 months ago
Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Do you seriously think that Bing trains an AI model when you send a request? Why would they do that?
frezik@midwest.social 11 months ago
Oh, they’re working on it. It’s dumb, but it’s happening.
eestileib@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
You’d get used to it awfully fast though.