Submitted 6 months ago by Dot@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/can-us-tech-giants-deliver-promise-nuclear-power
These renewables, however, are intermittent sources of power, while data centers need a steady supply to run all the time. The tech companies are currently reliant on the grid whenever the wind isn’t blowing or sun isn’t shining.
Gee, if only if they could have, say, containers of substances that could hold an electrical charge: perhaps—if you will—a “battery” of such containers.
I get your point, but have you looked into the power demands of data centers? They already have room filling batteries for power outages, but those are just enough to keep the lights on while the diesel generators start.
There are immense capacity utility scale batteries available now from 100s of vendors. They would be roughly 100x easier, no exaggeration, to build than a nuclear power plant.
With how they treat the things they are supposedly good at, I can only imagine how catastrophic this could be. I don’t think you’d want the people working at a nuclear power plant to be so overwhelmed with work they need to piss in bottles.
That’s basically how medicine is run these days, and that’s a result of the artificial supply restriction government places on medical facilities and staff.
All doctors are forced through a narrow gauntlet which is basically designed by government regulations. The result of that process is doctors that have reduced empathy (it’s been documented, look it up), sleep deprivation, enormous debt, and a huge workload.
As a result, the third leading cause of death is medical malpractice, and people go into financial ruin to get medical care.
Medicine is one of those things we deemed “too important for a free market”, and so we’ve created a horrible hybrid of profit and government regulation that consistently produces horrible outcomes.
We need to be careful with this notion that something vitally important will be made safer, or more reliable, or less damaging by getting government involved.
If we aren’t careful (and let’s face it: government cannot be careful because it operates on a feedback loop of years, not days like private enterprise does), regulating the fuck out of a growing nuclear sector could lead to error and burnout rates similar to our medical sector, with similarly disastrous results.
No
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So long as they keep international regulations in place - or, rather, bolster them - it might work.
LostMyRedditLogin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Enshittification of nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen. I hope I’m wrong.
RedditWanderer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Not just that, but it’s so they can profit from even more taxpayer subsidies. That’s why theyre trying to convince us it’s all for humanity.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Subsidies seriously distort the market.
IMO the only kind of subsidy should he “If you’re a human, you get some money on a regular basis”. That’s the only way to subsidize economic activity without distorting market signals, because humanity’s choices is exactly the signal source that the market should be responding to.
Tarogar@feddit.org 6 months ago
Come on… Shitty safety measures have never, ever, in the history of mankind led to catastrophic events with a lasting fallout. -some government that collapsed
After all after some point safety is just pure waste of money. -some dead CEO
It doesn’t take enshittification for something real bad to happen. All it takes is time. Add the mentioned enshittification and corner cutting and we know for sure what will happen…
Or how the saying in EvE online goes : it’s not a question on if your ship gets blown up but a question of when it gets blown up.
RedditWanderer@lemmy.world 6 months ago
They know taxpayers will foot the bill and they will make astronomical amounts of money off it. Plus they get a stranglehold on energy.
Tech companies aren’t going to buy power plants and enshitify them. Allowing the tech giants at the table at all is far passed enshitification of democracy (and your tax dollars). They should have built the energy using the people’s money, and profited off businesses using extreme amounts of it (bringing a lot of dollars back). Instead they’ll use the corporate money to build energy, and profiting off the people who need to pay the corporation