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Tech bosses think nuclear fusion is the solution to AI’s energy demands – here’s what they’re missing.
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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I don't see why we are hating on the waste like this. Yes it's very dangerous waste, but the amount is quite small, and if we store them safely, as shown in Tom Scott's video on Nuclear Storage in Finland, it's actually a very good solution for the time being.
Maybe Tom Scott should make a video about the Asse salt mine. It's where the "yellow barrel == nuclear waste" meme comes from look here a picture.
This stuff is the driving factor behind nuclear energy being a political no-go in Germany: We just don't trust anyone, including ourselves, to do it properly. Sufficiently failure-proof humans have yet to be invented. Then, aside from that: Fission is expensive AF, and that's before considering that they don't have to pay for their own insurance because no insurance company would take on the contract.
Fusion OTOH has progressed to a point where it's actually around the corner, when the Max Planck institute is spinning out a company to commercialise it you know it's the real deal. And they did.
It's also not as if there are not other nuclear power stations in existence. There is plenty of storage capacity as you say.
This is just the standard hating everything tech companies do because, AI equals bad
"if we store them safely" - here's the problem with the entire argument. Nobody wants to pay for it, so they won't unless they are forced to. Carbon capture is a viable technology but it costs money to implement at a net financial loss, so nobody uses that if they don't have to either. The problem is the same as always - nobody who stands to lose money gives a damn. The planet dying is somebody else's concern tomorrow, and profits are their concern today.
We've already paid for it though. That's why we built Yucca Mountain.
Are you talking about the USA? Because I don't see this mentality much outside of it.
But yeah, make it a law and force them.
At least in Germany it's the same. It gets ignored in the discussions concerning nuclear exit but it's actually the main reason why I'm not aggressively against it: we have save areas for nuclear storage but those fight bitterly to not have it. The areas which are currently used are... Not good. Paying someone else (such as Finland) is out of budget for both state and energy companies. The latter anyway want to do the running but not the maintenance and the building, state should pay for that.
It's really white sad for me. The (true) statement that the dangerous waste needs to be stored carefully got corrupted to "it can't be stored".
I think a even better solution might be to not unnecessarily waste energies 😉
The real solution is the thing that the fossil fuel companies have been buying up the tech for and burying it for decades...batteries.
Fusion will likely happen in this century. Fission is a great temporary power source to get us there alongside renewables.
The best way I have heard it described is that Fusion is going to happen next year but probably not in the next 12 months.
We think Fusion must be coming soon because we understand all of the fundamental principles around how it works, so what we need to do is put those principles into practice. For some reason though that doesn't quite work what we end up with is a machine that makes a lot of noise but doesn't really achieve anything
Tech bosses think nuclear fusion is the solution
No they don't; this is literally the first thing I've ever read claiming that. Tech bosses are perfect happy to power AI with nuclear fission and don't give the slightest fuck about the waste.
(As well they shouldn't, TBH, since it really ought to get reprocessed anyway. But that doesn't excuse them for wanting to waste the power on bullshit.)
Also nuclear fusion has essentially zero waste.
If it ends up working though it's not a waste of power is it? And if it doesn't work then, oh well.
Big tech companies do a lot of cramp, but this one I actually don't really mind. You never know we might actually get the Star Trek utopia we've always wanted from this, it's unlikely but it's not impossible.
They're missing a fusion reactor capable of positive energy output?
"Tech bosses think warp drive might get us to Mars faster..."
It seems that today's elites have made that Soviet transition from doing more to support their prestige to promising more to support their prestige.
I bet they think that wormholes are even better
I like girls' wormholes too, but not sure they produce energy
Folds paper
Stabs it with a pen
That's the absolute worst analogy of wormholes as well. They don't fold space, so stop folding the piece of paper.
Renewable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power suffer from “intermittency”, meaning they do not consistently produce energy at all hours of the day.
If only we had some way of storing energy for use later. Oh well.
We do not currently have the battery tech to have a fully renewables-powered grid where batteries are used for the regular dips in production wind and solar have.
We likely won't have infrastructure like that in place for decades.
Do you know what they do in Norway with out-of-use old mines? They lift a load when there's energy to be stored. They lower it when there's energy to be spent. I'm sure you know how electric engines work and that the conversion is symmetric.
No battery tech involved.
Battery tech is in general mostly relevant for autonomous devices we carry, for airplanes and ships, for cars.
For the central grid the ways to store energy are almost inifinite.
Can you back this up with links to reputable sources?
Can you back up your original claim - that we can sufficiently power all of our grids with current batteries, and that current battery manufacturing is enough to do so?
With reputable sources.
Lithium batteries and their associated wastes and byproducts are an ecological catastrophe though in fairness
Theyre missing the fact that cold fusion doesn't (currently) exist? (haven't read the article)?
They've seen it being always reached in computer games like Civilization
They think the hard part is in becoming the big boss to decide things. The civilization part is easy, just direct resources where you need the "cool thing completed" notification to appear.
But still right on though
So maybe they will invest to get it further. It's not a 9 women can make a baby in a month .. but sufficient funding for next gen nuclear and fusion will help progress.
Fusion. What they’re missing is fusion powe
Maybe AI can help us break the fusion hurdles. Oh. It's still telling people to eat rocks, just used to create waifu porn and as a mass spy application? Nothing else, really? Well shit.
It's even bad at porn. Very limited means of describing the process, forgetting that there are no bed sheets in a park, same repeating metaphors. Boring.
I know you're being reflexively downvoted by who hate everything AI, but this is the sort of thing AI should be most useful for, which is finding patterns within large problem spaces with many variables.
They're mocking AI, why would they be being downvoted by people who reflexively hate anything AI?
Nothing else? Please do not speak for other people if you can not grasp what others do with this tool.
What do others do with this tool?
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Sorry, I didn't mean to leave out the bestiality porn creation as well. That was unintentional on my part.