CorpoNations.
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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We're living in a cyberpunk nightmare
Not yet we're not!
Still plenty of nature to kill before humanity cannot survive in any capacity without corpo supply chains.
If you're breathing free air, drinking real water, and actual food can grow out of the ground we're comparably in cyber paradise given how much worse AI spycraft and corporate ownership will worsen everything exponentially for the non-connected over the next decades
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But without the cool neon aesthetic. ☹️
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Businesses generating their own power is not anything new. The big auto manufacturers used to do it back in the day, and if you scale down the concept, every windmill (the grain grinding kind) and waterwheel built and operated for profit is the same thing. I'm just happy that Google is seemingly having their own built, instead of getting taxpayers to build it for them.
Yeah, if this is what it takes to get new design nuclear facilities in the US, then I'm counting it a win, but I won't count it either way until the watts come out. Who knows: if they run ok, an actual power company might even try one.
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Crazy how quickly we've gone from "Nuclear is a dead technology, it can't work and its simply too expensive to build more of. Y'all have to use fossil fuels instead" to "We're building nuclear plants as quickly as our contractors can draft them, but only for doing experiments in high end algorithmic brute-forcing".
Would be nice if some of that dirt-cheap, low-emission, industrial capacity electricity was available for the rest of us.
Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.
The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.
I'm aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it's the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.
Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.
Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what's the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades. Probably 30+ years at the minimum.
Nuclear should only be done by the state. Any commercial company doing nuclear HAS TO CARE FOR THE WASTE. It has to be in the calculation, but no on ecan guarantee 10000 years of anything. Same with fossils... execute the fossil fuel industry. They destroyed so much, they don't deserve to earn a single cent.
That funky startup is producing waste. Imagine a startup selling Asbestos as the new hot shit in 2024.
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Tax them enough that they don't have the cash to just up and build their own personal-use nuclear powered, nation spanning infrastructure.
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Use those taxes to build a nation spanning nuclear infrastructure that everyone can use.
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Well, once the AI hype calms down and people realize the current approach won't lead to actual intelligence or "The Singularity", there may be quite some nuclear plants left over. That or they will be used to mine shitcoins.
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At last, we'll be seeing nuclear reactors being created using Agile! Fail early, fail often, hopefully don't kill everyone!
Amazon has a space program with rockets, Google is acquiring the nuclear facilities, will Microsoft develop a weapons manufacturing facility?
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The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn't mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they'll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman's knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can't melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
Edit: The other implication of not using uranium is that the leftover material is harder to make in to bombs, so the technology around molten-salt thorium reactors could be spread to current non-nuclear states to meet their energy needs and reduce reliance on coal plants around the planet.
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For some reason this doesn't feel like good news.
Any nuclear adoption is good news. This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale. Overall, while it's extremely questionable, depending on how many companies get on board it could be net positive
This WILL help destigmatize them and help reduce cost by production at scale.
I'm not saying this won't have any benefits. I'm saying that I don't trust Google or the AI craze much, let alone huge corporations in general.
So I'm worried that there might be unforeseen fuckups or "savings procedures" or other ways of squeezing out profit until something breaks.
And those fuckups can easily outweigh the benefits.
If we had good governments and reliable regulation, this would be absolutely thrilling. But we don't, do we?
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Cyberpunk dystopias weren't supposed to be guidelines dammit
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking "why do we need to go to the moon?!".
Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.
Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.
GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.
This time it is commercial.
I'd rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.
For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.
Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it's Google. So.... Kind of a win?
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I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
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So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn't replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that...cool
The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they'll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.
And it seems like Google's funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don't run on uranium.
And it seems like Google's funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs
Hopefully.
But the cynic in me is always concerned when shareholder owned companies are operating something that has the potential to go very wrong very quickly if/when they cut too many corners in the pursuit of that extra 0.5% of profit.
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Boy are they gonna look stupid when they realize that no one outside their little bubble has a use for AI.
It’s not even close to ready for launch and why are we wasting energy on it?
because idiots like me who have no marketable skills can use it to fool ourselves into thinking we can do code/art/literature/etc.
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After they decide to abandon their AI project can we use them for something meaningful?
Probably not... It's a pretty outdated energy source already.
The single most energy dense source of power we have that uses the least amount of land including mining and refining compared to everything else, and still preferred method by NASA for powering anything bigger than a camera... is outdated? Yeah okay.
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Not at all! Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective. They're also really useful in situations where renewables just aren't an option such as large scale shipping. Obviously we haven't seen any nuclear container ships yet but that's mostly around startup and infrastructure costs as well as outdated regulations.
With small nuclear reactors becoming commonplace I wouldn't be supprised if we start to see nuclear shipping becoming a thing in industry in the next 20-50 years.
Its already been proven as a reliable, safe, and effective power source in a naval context. The main hangup people seem to have is with accidents at sea, however again, the militaries of the world have already proven nuclear reactors safe in a number of accidents where a nuclear vessel has been lost and the reactors shut down safely and did not cause release of nuclear material.
Nuclear is an excellent compliment to renewables and as a companion source to support the grid they are actually really effective.
No, it isn't. The nuclear industry wants this to be true, but an overview of the benefits and problems with wind, solar, and nuclear put it to rest.
What nuclear is really good at is providing baseload power; it runs for 30+ years at the same output with relatively little maintenance and fuel costs. Wind is good at being cheap when the wind is blowing. Solar is good at being cheap when the sun is shining.
The problem with nuclear is it has incredibly high up front costs, which need to be amortized over its lifetime; you can ramp it down, but you're cutting into your profits by doing so. The problem with wind is that the wind doesn't always blow, and the problem with solar is that the sun doesn't always shine.
Solar and wind are both incredibly cheap when they work. So cheap that we wouldn't want to use anything else if we can avoid it. Meaning we'd need to ramp down what nuclear and anything else is doing. Except now we're just making nuclear's up front cost issue worse; we can't amortize the cost as well when it's ramped down. You could try adding storage capacity so you can run all three at once and use it later, but then we could just use that storage for wind and solar on their own.
What you can do is take historical data on wind and sun patterns for a given region. The wind is often blowing when the sun isn't shining, and vice versa. We have lots of data on that, and we can calculate the maximum length of lull when neither will provide enough. So what you can do is put in enough storage capacity to handle that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
This ends up being a lot less storage than you might think. Getting to 95% renewables would be relatively cheap; Australia almost has enough storage capacity under construction right now to pull that off. That last 5% is harder, but even getting to 95% in industrialized nation states would be a big fucking deal.
Add in HVDC lines to this, and you've really got something. The longest one right now is in Brazil, and is 1300 miles long. That kind of distance in the US would mean solar panels in Arizona could power Chicago, and wind in Nebraska could power New York. At that point, the wind is always blowing somewhere, and sun is always shining somewhere else. You can also take advantage of existing hydro pumped storage anywhere you like--there may be enough of it right now that we wouldn't need to build any other storage.
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While! I love nuclear's possibilities. I've seen commercial, shippings safety and maintenance records. I don't think that would be a good idea
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I'll be amazed if this ever comes to fruition.
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power. After that there's nuclear power and it's much, much more expensive:
After that, and even more expensive are SMRs. Also, they don't actually exist yet as a means of generating power.
From the article, "For example, it has already received the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Registry Commission (the first one to do so) to build its Hermes non-powered demonstrator reactor in Tennessee. Although it still doesn’t have nuclear fuel on-site, this is a major step in its design process, allowing the company to see its system in real life and learn more about its deployment and operation."
Generally speaking renewables + storage are the cheapest way of generating non-polluting power.
At variable scale, based on time of year and weather. Nuclear is much better for base-load, particularly at the scale of GWs. You know exactly how much electricity you're going to get 24/7, and the fuel costs aren't exposed to a market that can vary by 150-300% annually.
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The high price of nuclear power comes from it being a stagnant and obsolete technology for 30 years.
As well as being choked to death in red tape.
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AI seems perfect for renewables load balancing. Got extra power to burn because it is windy at night? Train your models
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I have no issue with the safety of nuclear power plants, however: fissile material is no more renewable than fossil fuels even if it's much greener. Also, in terms of more localized ecological damage, uranium mining is a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
Maybe Google should focus on building its plants near geothermal hotspots instead if it's forced to suck up vast amounts of power for AI no one wants.
Great, so when they abandon the nuclear project in 18mths who will maintain them?
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Nuclear has never been profitable without massive government subsidies and guarantees, and ~~Google~~ Kairos too will either manage to collect those or lose money.
It’s unclear how Google and Kairos set up the deal — whether the former is providing direct funding or if it just promised to buy the power that the latter generates when its reactors are up and running. Nevertheless, Kairos has already passed several milestones, making it one of the more promising startups in the field of nuclear energy.
I guarantee you, they are shouldering on none of the risk (like the Chinese and French at Hinkley Point), and this startup will be going down.
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Growing from a broad research effort at U.S. universities and national laboratories, Kairos Power was founded to accelerate the development of an innovative nuclear technology ...
Kairos Power is focused on reducing technical risk through a novel approach to test iteration often lacking in the nuclear space. Our schedule is driven by the goal of a U.S. demonstration plant before 2030 and a rapid deployment thereafter. The challenge is great, but so too is the opportunity.
So basically academics finding people to fund a large scale lab experiment, they want to get working by 2030. It sounds like they sold Google on an idea (for funding) and now have to move their idea from the lab to the real world. It does sound safer than water cooled plants of old at least.
The power required for this level of AI won't be used for faster delivery of pizzas. It will be used for surveillance and control. For world domination shit.
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