Comment on Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors
docmox@lemmy.world 8 months agoThis 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.
Dogyote@slrpnk.net 8 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 8 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will be at massive extraction efforts ripping apart landscapes to provide fuel for a method of generating power that is obsolete since at least three decades by now.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 8 months ago
Don’t need to, just down-blend from the available fuel used from weapons put out of commission as a result of disarmament treaties.
docmox@lemmy.world 8 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.