this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024
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Microsoft inks deal to restart Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to fuel its voracious AI ambitions (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 2 months ago by irreticent to c/technology
152 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] homesweethomeMrL 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nuclear safety and ~~penny-pinchers~~ capitalism don't make good bedfellows.

ftfy. Possibly ironically, nuclear safety and communism (or totalitarianism) don’t work either. It’s odd, innit.

[–] Doomsider 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] homesweethomeMrL 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't that design and operation get created by the economic or governmental system it's under?

[–] Doomsider 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

They were actually designed to be very safe. It was thought that they literally couldn't fail dangerously. Chernobyl was a huge fluke (that had preventions put in place to ensure it never happened again) that was just a lot of weird things combining at once. The other reactors at Chernobyl continued operating for decades safely, similarly to three mile island which only stopped on 2019 because it wasn't profitable, but now it appears it is again. Both of these nations (and child nations/successors) continued to operate many more nuclear plants without issues. Nuclear is, by far, the safest energy source, including green energy like solar.

[–] Doomsider 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Thanks for that. I am not an expert by any means about reactors. I am just going off what my step dad has said and he was a nuclear engineer at Hanford. I did find an article that talks about the shortcomings of the Chernobyl reactor design.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/appendices/rbmk-reactors

Totally agree about nuclear for sure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How exactly is nuclear energy safer than solar energy?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Mining isn't particularly safe, then refining and construction.

It must have shifted at some point, because the data I see now shows solar as 0.01 death per twh less than nuclear, which is effectively equal because that's the smallest unit of increment they have. Nuclear still produces the lowest CO2 per twh.

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy