The AI industry is desperate for data centre power anywhere it can get it. They can’t get gas turbines without years of delay. Even the repurposed jet engine gas turbines they were really hoping wo…
  • rook@awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    Given the state of renewables and energy storage, this feels a lot like the final opportunity for nuclear power in its current state to actually do anything at all, and the “move fast and break things” crowd have no idea about building physical things more complex than a datacentre which honestly, isn’t that challenging in comparison.

    openai will be a smoking crater well before site for the first plant will get selected

    Other things that might not last that long include the government of the country in which you’re trying to build massive piece of infrastructure that represents a significant ongoing maintenance burden and risk.

    • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
      3·
      2 days ago

      renewable generation, i’m with you, but i’m not sold on storage. i’m not even sure if there’s enough lithium for grid batteries to seriously matter, so it might need to use something else. the boring, working option (geographically limited) is of course pumped storage hydro, but other than that, i think that the right way to do things is to use energy when it’s made, not when it’s needed. in particular, water heaters have tiny duty cycle and hot water just sits there, which means you could, in principle, make it so that water heaters soak up all, or at least as much as practical, of excess power, wherever it is available

      some countries do fund nuclear power as a kind of strategic energy independence hedge* no matter costs, most prominently france and russia, and to some degree india and a couple of others

      *also for military use

      • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        i hear sodium batteries are emerging as an alternative to lithium, but note that I also don’t know shit about this domain

        • fullsquare@awful.systemsEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          sounds good, no obvious critical materials but also first facilities are just in single MW range and came online like two months ago. needs like four orders of magnitude more. already matches lead acid on durability, still less than li-ion. maybe it’s solvable, but in case it’s not you can just burn it down because there’s nothing worthwhile to recycle and it’s nontoxic

          this happens a lot. lithium anything has this problem obviously, but so do flow batteries (vanadium or zinc bromide - bromine is commercially sourced just from either dead sea or some american underground brines). some lithium batteries also use cobalt. hydrogen generation or fuel cells use a lot of platinum, (some of) new power electronics are made from GaN. etc etc

          • swlabr@awful.systemsEnglish
            4·
            1 day ago

            We should transition to NIMH technology. As in, let’s experiment on some rats to make them superintelligent and get them to solve all our problems.