this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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"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.
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 :/.
There is rarely only a binary choice. Arguing like there is creates a false dilemma.
The combination of Wind solar and batteries is greener, more cost effective and more scalable than nuclear.
Or we could pop the AI bubble and concentrate on reducing consumption.
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.
Lol. Seems the nuclear lobby is here and down-voting everyone who likes progress.
I read renewable energy is way cheaper than nuclear energy. And it comes with a low carbon footprint and without nuclear waste. (We have some actual historical numbers in the World Nuclear Report P. 293 which show nuclear is pretty expensive compared to renewable these days.)
So the solution is pretty obvious. Sign a contract over a few billion dollars with renewable energy instead of nuclear. It'll be cheaper anyways. And has the added benefit that it's available now. Whereas the SMR startups still have to figure out a few engineering challenges. And we'd avoid all the nuclear waste that'll become a problem for future generations. And I mean it's not that uranium or the other ores are super abundant anyways. Nuclear fission is a temporary solution in the first place. And not a particularly good one.
And investing in renewable will then grow that industry and make the energy even cheaper.
Only downside I see is: you can't build renewable (and the datacentre) anywhere. It'd have to be for example in Texas for solar, or close to the mountains or some water flow for hydro. Or somewhere windy or at the shore for wind energy. The latter two have the benefit that they're available during the night, too. And I guess the USA has some minor potential for thermal energy, too. But I don't consider this a major issue since we have internet pretty much everywhere. They'd just need to lay some more fibre network to the site.
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.
Why compare to coal, not wind & solar + batteries.
Because wind and solar don't have the on-demand capacity. Even with batteries, you can't count on them to deliver power reliably
Maybe the AI training could be paused until the sun comes out again.
Coal and nuclear are not on demand either. Only hydro and gas offer any real flexibility.
Adding to this. The waste has been used to fuel subsequent reactions and could be used to produce more power
I mean they seem to be still figuring this out... But isn't the whole SMR harardous waste after it got decommissioned? That depends a bit on the technology used. But that'd be a huge pile of mildly radioactive steel, plumbing and concrete in addition to the depleted fuel, which is highly radioactive. And as far as I know the re-use to get the rest of the energy out also isn't solved yet. I mean obviously that should be done. Only taking out parts of the energy and wasting the rest isn't very efficient. Sadly that seems to be exactly what we're doing in reality.