Google, like Microsoft then begs for taxpayer money to run this operation and the government, being in bed with all companies agrees to sell its citizens out...yet again.
Inb4 Microsoft and google electricity services for residents.
If it results in the nuclear plants remaining online and providing energy after the AI bubble pops, that doesn't seem so bad.
Fission is one of the cleanest energy sources we have today.
The AI bubble isn't going to pop, it's just going to transition to a rebranded cloud computing business.
A nuclear fission power plant generates about as much CO2 as wind turbines if you have a look at it's whole lifecycle. That's because just operation doesn't generate CO2. But nonetheless that power plant is made from materials like lots of concrete. It needs to be built, decommissioned, etc. You need to mine the uranium ore, ... All of that generates quite some CO2. So it's far off from being carbon neutral. And we already have alternatives that are in the same ballpark as a nuclear power plant with that. Just that the fission also generates this additional nuclear waste that is a nightmare to deal with. And SMRs are less efficient than big nuclear power plants. So they'll be considerably less "clean" than for example regenerative energy. I'd say they're definitely not amongst the cleanest energy sources we have today. That'd be something like a hydroelectric power. However, it's way better than oil or natural gas or coal. At least if comparing CO2 emissions.
It definitely is amongst the cleanest energy sources we have today, especially when the choice for most is either oil, coal or nuclear, the choice is easy. Hydro, solar or wind are often not viable because of climate or location reasons. Not to mention that all of these need to be built using concrete, that is not unique to nuclear. Also important is that hydro electricity also dramatically alters the area, killing many animals and moving many species out of their home.
Until you get the bill, again.
There’s nothing clean about fission. It produces expensive poisonous waste that has to be stored for 1000 years. And in the US, no one wants it in their state, driving the price up further. And when you’re unlucky, you end up with superfund sites like Fukushima and Chernobyl.
It is very clean. The image below shows what 20 years worth of spent nuclear fuel looks like at the former Maine Yankee plant. This is way smaller than most supermarkets in north america, let alone their parking lots!
To add to this, spent fuel is over 90% recyclable. If the US were to instate a comprehensive recycling program like France has done, the spent fuel cache could be reduced to negligible amounts.
Nuclear might be better than coal or fossil fuels, but it’s still dirty and expensive.
Spent fuel recycling costs a fortune. Only France is currently invested in it.
“In 1996 it estimated that reprocessing of existing used nuclear fuel could cost more than $100 billion.”
Most waste is stored in underground salt mines and requires special transportation, handling, and storage. That storage includes providing space between the spent rods to prevent interaction (you can’t just stack them compactly together). So while you may read that we produce half a swimming pool worth of waste, it takes a lot more space to store the spent rods than a “grocery store”. We produce about 2000 metric tons of spent rods per year. In addition, there’s all the other waste created when you run a nuclear plant — that includes garments and other materials. That adds up to “160,000 cubic feet (4,530 cubic meters) of radioactive material from its nuclear power plants annually”.
Disposing of spent rod storage casks costs $1 million per cask.
And then there’s the waste produced when decommissioning plants, or when plants go awry.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-lethal-trash-or-renewable-energy-source/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
There’s a great video DW tv did on reprocessing and still having to store spent nuclear waste here:
"clean energy"
Don't nuclear power plants produce waste which is highly problematic because it's hazardous and radioactive? I wouldn't call that clean. And SMRs generate even more waste than big nuclear plants.
highly problematic because it's hazardous and radioactive?
Thing is, there's very little of that waste, with much less impact than say, burning coal.
Also, it's highly radioactive only when taken fresh out of reactor - this waste is stored in pools, until it decays. What you're left is weakly radioactive, long term waste that needs to be buried for a long time.
Burying the small amount of waste in a stable non-actively forming mountain for a few thousand years is 1000x better than burning things and putting them into the air.
I'm not so sure about that. We already had to pay a lot of taxpayers' money to fix bad issues with those storage facilities. And it's just been a few decades with at least tens of thousands of years to go. That could become very, very expensive. And nasty to deal with for future generations.
I'd say just burying your waste where no one can see it isn't a good solution. Neither is just dumping it into the ocean. And knowing a worse alternative doesn't make it right.
You're correct, burning yet more oil and coal and putting that CO2 into the atmosphere isn't a viable option either. That'd ruin the climate and be unhealthy for us.
If the choice is spend more to hold onto the byproducts or let the byproducts slowly make the entire earth uninhabitable I'm kinda in favour of the former. Ideally completely green energy would be preferred but I guess it just doesn't scale well with consumer demands and patterns :/.
It does, and it's cheaper and faster to implement. Solar and wind are dirt cheap. Storage has long been the bottleneck, but we've made gargantuan progress in scalable battery technology (sodium batteries, for example).
A green grid would also help distribute energy production closer to where people live, and reduce single points of failure. It goes to increase grid resilience and reduce dependence on a few large energy corporations.
Nuclear was a useful technology, and likely safer than coal. But anyone pushing for nuclear (over 100% renewables) nowadays is helping uphold the status quo of centralized energy production in the hands of a a few rich capitalists.
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