Modern AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, and it looks like they will get even more power-hungry in the coming years as companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI strive towards artificial general intelligence (AGI). Oracle has already outlined plans to use nuclear power plants for its 1-gigawatt datacenters. It looks like Microsoft plans to do the same as it just inked a deal to restart a nuclear power plant to feed its data centers, reports Bloomberg.
Lol. I just love it how so many people complain that Nuclear doesnt make financial sense, and then the most financially motivated companies just actually figure out that using a nuclear reactor completely privately is best.
Fuck sake, world.
Microsoft jumped fully on the AI hype bandwagon with their partnership in OpenAI and their strategy of forcing GenAI down our throats. Instead of realizing that GenAI is not much more than a novel parlor trick that can’t really solve problems, they are now fully committing.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and reactivating 3 Mile Island is estimated at $1.6 billion. And any return on these investments are not guaranteed. Generally, GenAI is failing to live up to its promises and there is hardly any GenAI use case that actually makes money.
This actually has the potential of greatly damaging Microsoft, so I wouldn’t say all their decisions are financially rational and sound.
On the other hand, if they ever admit the whole genAI thing doesn’t work, they could just sell the electricity produced by the plant.
if they ever admit the whole genAI thing doesn’t work
. . . The entire multi-billion-dollar hype train goes off the cliff. All the executives that backed it look like clowns, the layoffs come back to bite them - hard - and Microsoft wont recover for a decade.
I mean . . . a boy can dream
My org’s Microsoft reps gave a demo of their upcoming copilot 365 stuff. It can summarize an email chain, use the transcript of a teams meeting to write a report, generate a PowerPoint of the key parts of that report, and write python code that generates charts and whatnot in excel. Assuming it works as advertised, this is going to be really big in offices. All of that would save a ton of time.
Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.
The issue that I’ve got with GenAI is that it has no expert knowledge in your field, knows nothing of your organization, your processes, your products or your problems. It might miss something important and it’s your responsibility to review the output. It also makes stuff up instead of admitting not knowing, gives you different answers for the same prompt, and forgets everything when you exhaust the context window.
So if I’ve got emails full of fluff it might work, but if you’ve got requirements from your client or some regulation you need to implement you’ll have to review the output. And then what’s the point?
Keep in mind that that was a demo to sell Copilot.
And whether it works as well as they described remains to be seen. However, they did prove that there’s a legitimate use case for generative AI in the office, in most offices. It’s not just a toy.
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Nuclear safety and penny-pinchers don’t make good bedfellows.
Nuclear safety and
penny-pincherscapitalism don’t make good bedfellows.ftfy. Possibly ironically, nuclear safety and communism (or totalitarianism) don’t work either. It’s odd, innit.
Pretty sure it has to do with how the plant is designed and operated as opposed to what economic or governmental system it happens to exist under.
Doesn’t that design and operation get created by the economic or governmental system it’s under?
I think with the USSR at least, that their reactor designs were supposed to be less safe than western reactor designs.
Was it because they were a shitty oligarchy claiming to be communist? Maybe, they did make a lot of garbage decisions.
I think the US has the record for most nuclear disasters by a lot but two of the worst were in the USSR.
Honestly it seems crazy that companies that are so focused on short-term profits in 2024 would be able to make nuclear work.
Every once in a while they get faced with a line on a chart somewhere so unbelievably vertical that they have no choice but to look beyond next quarter. Power consumption going 10x in 2 years is one of those times.
Have they solved the disposal questions?
Like most things with environmental impact, we just let later generations deal with it. Somehow.
Mostly, yes. Use breeder reactors to turn long term radioactive waste to sort term radioactive waste, store for short time and done. The downside: it’s more expensive to move and process the stuff so nobody wants to do that.
Relatively yes. There are disposal sites under construction that are in highly stable and environmentally safe locations. One good thing right now is that radioactive waste is temporarily easily stored. Transport of waste is an issue still, but far less of a problem than transporting oil and oil products.
I’m firmly in the “building new nuclear doesn’t make financial sense” camp, but I do think that extending the life of any existing nuclear plant does. Restarting a previously operational nuclear plant lies somewhere in between.
The fact that they want to buy an old nuclear reactor instead of building a new one should be all you need to know to realise that it’s not financially viable.
It’s not quite equivalent right? Using an existing plant is cheaper and faster than building a new one?
Its like saying a datacenter is not financially viable only because top brass decided to use a perfectly good existing one.
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you deleted your comment saying “you’re saying exactly what i am saying with different words”
I want you to think about it like this. Some folk don’t throw out their old stuff even if they could afford a new one. It’s called “not being wasteful”.
Personally? I don’t think this is a bad idea. The less they drain from the grid, the less they consume fossil fuel.
The reactor isn’t active right now, and they are a PWR design, and like the 1979 incident showed, they do fail safely.
So long as Microsoft pays for the operation of the plant? Seems reasonable to me if they’re going to consume an assload of energy with or without public support.
we could use that extra energy to offset a bunch of existing carbon emissions now. This is still waste. If it’s going to be started up again, and its energy used for something useless, it’s waste.
Microsoft would do it with or without the power plant. Make no mistake about that.
The same argument could be said if they made a 1GW solar farm, or any other form of power generation. Unless you have a way to legislatively prevent Microsoft from producing their own energy or prevent acquisition of decommissioned plants, I don’t see how you can prevent waste.
Is it going to be started up again?
If M$ doesn’t invest into this for their own purposes, is it still going to be started up? Or is your position that M$ should be investing in a nuclear power plant for the good of the world?
Because while I can agree with the idea, we all know that would never happen. So if it was never going to be started up again, we are at 0 gain or loss no matter what they do with it.
And that’s ignoring the fact that they are apparently intending on using that energy anyway.
it would be a missed opportunity in the sense of “if they can allow it to be turned it back on to waste its power on this dead-end tech, why couldn’t it have been allowed to operate again (earlier) for reasons we actually need?”
I’m not putting the blame on microsoft here, even though it might seem that way. But it’s not microsoft who need to give the go-ahead for this to happen. It’s the higher ups who decided to give the capacity to microsoft.
Yes it was still going to be used, but they could have been paying out the ass for it, which could fund other projects.
If there were plans for it to be used, then I’m with you. But if I’m being honest, I’d put money on the original plan consisting of letting it sit there for decades to come without being used.
And “paying out the ass” is what they will likely be doing, just to the private corpos that own the plant. It’s not government run, the money would never circle back to taxpayers beyond normal taxation.
that’s what I’m complaining about. If there can be plans now, why was the original plan just “let it rot”?
Greed? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think you’re going to get the answer you want here. But I’d be willing to bet M$ is dropping the $$$ for whatever retrofits and repairs need to be done, with the agreement being they get the power near cost for a set duration.
Obviously that’s speculation on my part, but would explain the situation quite cleanly.
If it also shifts their current load off the existing grid, that might be beneficial.
Are we eventually gonna get more fusion because billionaires are demanding more energy for their stupid projects?
Sure, knock yourselves out.
Are we eventually gonna get more fusion […]
Either you mean fission, or the “more” could be omitted.
Most likely more fossil fuels because they’re faster and cheaper to roll out.
This is how I’m able to sleep without worrying about death, one of these billionaires has got to be funding research so they can live forever. No guarantee they’ll share but that’s at least a less dread inducing issue.
Yeah, too bad there’s no long-term storage for the waste so it will mean more and more leaks polluting land for centuries since the power companies will just go bankrupt when it’s time to do anything about it like with most forms of pollution.
The amount of waste is tiny. Coal plants cause more radiation than nuclear plants because of tiny amounts of radioactive matter in coal. You need to burn so much coal the amount of radioactivity is higher per unit of energy.
Until we shut down all coal plants we shouldn’t even think about closing nuclear plants
That’s for normal activity and it’s totally irrelevant. So these are some stats about ionizing radiation dosages:
- Average from all sources for an average person for 1 year: 4mSv
- Additional if living within 50 miles of a nuclear reactor for 1 year: 0.09 µSv
- Additional of living within 50 miles of a coal plant for 1 year: 0.3 µSv
- Living within 30 km of Chernobyl before evacuation (10 days): 3-150 mSv
- Maximum allowed dose for radiation workers over 1 year: 50mSv
- 10 minutes next to the Chernobyl reactor after the meltdown: 50Sv
- fatal lifetime dosage beyond our ability to treat: ~8Sv
So, yes, nuclear power plants and storage pools are designed to shield radiation and thus during normal operation release an insignificant amount of radiation so much so that even coal burning releases a heck of a lot more.
But both of those are extremely insignificant if you consider that living near a coal plant will only give you a tiny fraction of additional exposure as the amount of radiation you receive normally from natural sources.
The problem is that with nuclear fission waste, a tiny leak can cause fatal amounts of exposure in a very short time. If a storage pool cracks after the 100 years or so they’re designed to last, or if a flood happens and overflows a storage pool, or a tornado picks up that storage water, or any number of other catastrophic events happen within the 10,000-1,000,000 years before that waste is safe, depending on the type, the people living nearby will likely not survive very long and that area will be contaminated for many times longer than human life has existed.
Fukushima was a good example and had to rely on the vast Pacific ocean to disperse the radiation. Chernobyl will be unsafe for 10s of thousands of years even if the coffin is maintained for all that time.
The radioactivity from the long half-life radionuclides is much less intense.
Radioactive iodine is still dangerous because it can stay in your thyroid gland
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-lived_fission_product
You can still use newer technology to get rid of the most potent LLFPs, though
Right I only got as far as talking about the ionizing radiation itself not even what happens if the radioation emitting materials themselves escape and so other types of radiation become dangerous through ingestion, not just incidental exposure.
And who is going to pay the trillions of dollars to develop those technologies to reduce the ionizing radiation into a usable product? The energy companies won’t because they’d go bankrupt. And what happened when we left companies to dispose of the waste? They sank it to the bottom of the ocean in barrels that some have since resurfaced. So instead we tried to build a temporary solution by dumping it in a mountain bunker, but that was too costly and we gave up and it’s all just sitting out in the open still in every country with nuclear power. No country has come up with a solution yet and that solution is part of the cost of generating the energy.
So how is nuclear power profitable if it’s exorbitantly expensive to store it indefinitely and exponentially more expensive to develop the technology to make it slightly safer to store indefinitely. And it costs billions and takes decades to decommission a reactor once it’s exceeded its lifespan. Which is why three mile island is still there and containment is still necessary. Again, how is nuclear power cost effective in the long term?
It’s not cost effective, but it’s more green than gas or coal
More green if nothing goes wrong and in the short term. I’m not saying fossil fuels are the answer. I believe they need to be phased out ASAP.
But there are lots of alternatives that are lower cost to build, lower cost to operate, lower cost in case of accidents, and exponentially lower cost to future generations relates to waste storage.
I’m sure that everyone will recognize that this was a great idea in a couple of years when generative LLM AI goes the way of the NFT.
LLMs have real uses, even if they’re being overhyped right now. Even if they do fail, though, more nuclear power is a great outcome
Nfts were a scam from the start something that has no actual purpose utility or value being given value through hype.
Generative AI is very different. In my honest opinion you have to have your head in the sand if you don’t believe that AI is only going to incrementally improve and expand in capabilities. Just like it has year over year for the last 5 to 10 years. And just like for the last decade it continues to solve more and more real-world problems in increasingly effective manners.
It isn’t just constrained to llms either.
The creators who made the LLM boom said they cannot improve it any more with the current technique due to diminishing returns.
It’s worthless in its current state.
Should be dying out faster imo.
One of the major problems with LLMs is it’s a “boom”. People are rightfully soured on them as a concept because jackasses trying to make money lie about their capabilities and utility – never mind the ethics of obtaining the datasets used to train them.
They’re absolutely limited, flawed, and there are better solutions for most problems … but beyond the bullshit LLMs are a useful tool for some problems and they’re not going away.
I cannot think of one single application where an LLM is better or even equivalent than having a person do the job. Its real only use is to trade human workers for cheaper but inferior output, at the detriment to mankind as a whole because we have in excess labor and in shortage power.
There are jobs where it’s not feasible or practical to pay an actual human to do.
Human translators exist and are far superior to machine translators. Do you hire one every time you need something translated in a casual setting, or do you use something Google translate? LLMs are the reason modern machine translation is is infinitely better than it was a few years ago.
Google Translate was functional BEFORE llms were a hit, arguably moreso, and we had datasets on human language which are now polluted by AI making it harder now to build dictionaries than it was before.
That’s one groups opinion, we still see improving LLMs I’m sure they will continue to improve and be adapted for whatever future use we need them. I mean I personally find them great in their current state for what I use them for
What skin do you have in this game? Leading industry experts, who btw want to SELL IT TO YOU, told you it has hit a ceiling. Why do you refute it so much? Let it die, we will all be better off.
Even if it didn’t improve further there are still uses for LLMs we have today. That’s only one kind of AI as well, the kind that makes all the images and videos is completely separate. That has come on a long way too.
I made this chart for you:
------ Expectations for AI
----- LLM’s actual usefulness
----- What I think if it
----- LLM’ usefulness after accounting for costs
Bruh you have no idea about the costs. Doubt you have even tried running AI models on your own hardware. There are literally some models that will run on a decent smartphone. Not every LLM is ChatGPT that’s enormous in size and resource consumption, and hidden behind a vail of closed source technology.
Also that trick isn’t going to work just looking at a comment. Lemmy compresses whitespace because it uses Markdown. It only shows the extra lines when replying.
Can I ask you something? What did Machine Learning do to you? Did a robot kill your wife?
I use them regularly for personal and work projects, they work great at outlining what I need to do in a project as well as identifying oversights in my project. If industry experts are saying this, then why are there still improvements being made, why are they still providing value to people, just because you don’t use them doesn’t mean they aren’t useful.
Maybe you saw the news about a major hit to US Cybersecurity due to morons like you copy-pasting from the GeePeeTee? Or about a wave of falsified research papers generated by AI? Or how a lawyer tried to use an AI assistant resulting in fines and a bar reviewal?
There are always new techniques and improvements. If you look at the current state, we haven’t even had a slowdown
Nah
I suspect you’re right. But there really is never a good way to tell with these kinds of experimental techs. It could be a runaway chain of improvement. Or it is probably even odds that there is a visible and clear decline before it peters out, or just suddenly slams into a beick wall with no warning.
Ironically, the power hungriness of AI might actually do good for the environment if it normalizes nuclear energy.
Quite the twist
I had to do a double take to make sure this wasn’t an onion article.
especially since just reading the headline made me cry.
This sounds like the intro to a bad post-apocalypse sci-fi movie.
I think pre post-apocalypse is just the apocalypse. If you read the news these days that sounds like a pretty accurate description of the time we’re living in. We’re all just pretending it hasn’t started yet.
Turns out planetary extinction without an asteroid is slow AF.
Based on their Windows updates history, this seems like a bad idea. Nuclear boogaloo let’s goooooo
I am all for nuclear power, but I’d rather it be from modern reactor designs and builds, and I’d rather it not be wasted on bullshit.
Hey now that’s not fair. AI can randomize your music playlists, summarize an email, write terrible code, steal others work, and completely invade your privacy.
What’s that? Oh, I guess you’re right, we could do all that stuff already.
I’d rather it be from modern reactor designs and builds
There’s a reason new nuclear loses out to renewables and storage, it’s just too expensive. Microsoft are paying to start up an existing reactor.
So they fixed the leak?
Different reactor. Unit 2 partially melted down, there’s no turning it back on. Unit 1 continued running after Unit 2’s failure, and was only shut down because it became economically unviable
Oic
I think I saw a movie like this.
It doesn’t end well. 💀
There is something society could learn about itself if we spent anytime thinking honestly about how much of a dead end it is politically speaking to increase our use of nuclear power as a means of reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. Yet, when big corporate interests want it for their own reasons, it is no big thing and almost no politician will speak ill of it. Even though if some kind of disaster comes about because of it they will be left holding the bag of public opinion since that industry is so heavily regulated.
