The power required for this level of AI won’t be used for faster delivery of pizzas. It will be used for surveillance and control. For world domination shit.
Who had Atompunk on their 2024 Bingo card?
Great, so when they abandon the nuclear project in 18mths who will maintain them?
And what happens when you kill a sack of puppies you monster?
They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.
So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.
They are planning to buy
So far so good
or maybe just electricity
Uh oh
although you gotta admit it’s gonna be funny seeing “Google Reactor” on killedbygoogle.com
I have no issue with the safety of nuclear power plants, however: fissile material is no more renewable than fossil fuels even if it’s much greener. Also, in terms of more localized ecological damage, uranium mining is a disaster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_and_the_Navajo_people
Maybe Google should focus on building its plants near geothermal hotspots instead if it’s forced to suck up vast amounts of power for AI no one wants.
These are the small, buried reactors right? The ones that we tested on paper but haven’t gotten NRC/DOE to sign off on?
I know they are MSRs but still…
I am suprised to see all the negativity. I for one think this is awesome and would love to see SMRs become more mainstream.
How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn’t?
Do they store wind turbines after EOL? I thought they’d just get scrapped and recycled.
The turbine blades are made of carbon fiber. There is no process in effect to deal with them. Too big to crush, not worth scraping or recycling. They all go landfilla.
There currently are processes to deal with them, multiple companies are working on the problem.
Current solutions include shredding them and reconstituting into some sort of alternative building material, chemically separating the parts of the composite and creating recycled resin, and mechanically separating and sorting apart the different materials which are then recombined for alternative use.
This is a good place to look at recent american efforts, but there is more recent information available elsewhere: https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-turbine-materials-recycling-prize
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn’t the cleanest either.
What’s the grand scheme of things mean to you? If we average it out over 40 years? How does nuclear even fit in when solar and wind are cheaper? Nuclear plants don’t provide on demand energy to fill in the gaps, they provide energy constantly.
The only reason it works for microsoft is because they plan to use all that energy consistently. But besides that why should we trust a for-profit company to do anything safely in the first place? Do we have a long history of companies being regulated well or self-regulating well?
The nuclear industry is heavily regulated by the government via the NRC, but they impose even stricter regulations upon themselves. Solar and wind are cheaper, but they are less reliable. A grid comprised of a mix of solar and wind, bolstered by nuclear is the most effective and least environmentally harmful option that we currently have.
I think the negativity is more about it being used for AI than to solve any important problems with the world.
Expecting corporations to “solve important problems in the world” is foolish though. You should expect your government to tax them fairly so that they can work on people problems and maybe it takes corporations a few years longer to afford their own fleet of nuclear power stations.
Man imagine a world where that could have been what we were voting on next month.
Governments aren’t going to solve these problems either because they’re 100% for sale. Only we can solve them, through direct action.
Why? It just sounds nice bouncing around your head for a few seconds?
I would love to see large and small scale nuclear reactors become more common.
So because it makes you feel happy when you think about it?
You did reply with the reason you support these reactors right?
I would like to see nuclear power grow in use.
I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking “why do we need to go to the moon?!”.Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.
Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.
GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.
This time it is commercial.
I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.
Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it’s Google. So… Kind of a win?I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources
Is nuclear not?
The article mentions Kairos Power but doesn’t mention that their reactors in development are molten-salt cooled. While they’ll still use Uranium, its a great step in the right direction for safer nuclear power.
If development continues on this path with thorium molten-salt fueled and cooled reactors, we could see safe and commercially viable nuclear (thorium) energy within our lifetimes.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
To my layman’s knowledge, using thorium molten-salt instead of uranium means the reactor can be designed in a way where it can’t melt down like Chernobyl or Fukushima.
We fixed the glitch.
The meltdown that happened in Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement. Yes, there were design flaws in the system, but lots of rules had to be broken before the design flaws were triggered.
Nah, mismagement happened yes, but any other nuclear plant wouldn’t have exploded, they used a old technology even for that age, for cust cutting or faster to build idk that’s why it exploded
A safer design is insurance against bad management long after all of us are dead.
If development continues on this path
If we continue down the path of wasting energy and polluting to produce useless shit humanity is screwed.
There is a whole universe of resources and our needs for them will never be fully satisfied. Every step towards cleaner, more sustainable energy is a good one.
Thank goodness we can now get a little nuclear waste with our cat pics.
Growing from a broad research effort at U.S. universities and national laboratories, Kairos Power was founded to accelerate the development of an innovative nuclear technology …
Kairos Power is focused on reducing technical risk through a novel approach to test iteration often lacking in the nuclear space. Our schedule is driven by the goal of a U.S. demonstration plant before 2030 and a rapid deployment thereafter. The challenge is great, but so too is the opportunity.
So basically academics finding people to fund a large scale lab experiment, they want to get working by 2030. It sounds like they sold Google on an idea (for funding) and now have to move their idea from the lab to the real world. It does sound safer than water cooled plants of old at least.
So not replacing current energy, but adding onto it. Just like how we didn’t replace fossil fuels with the solar and wind unprecedented advancements the last 30 years but only added more energy consumption on top of that…cool
The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they’ll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don’t run on uranium.
And it seems like Google’s funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs
Hopefully.
But the cynic in me is always concerned when shareholder owned companies are operating something that has the potential to go very wrong very quickly if/when they cut too many corners in the pursuit of that extra 0.5% of profit.
For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.
Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.
Yes it’s obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody’s arguing that. What I’m talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.
No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It’s not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that’s just one of the problems. It’s the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).
It’s also that Google could have been taxed more(I’m sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.
It’s almost like our population has continued to increase for the last 30 years
It’s almost like you have no clue what you are talking about lol. The global population growth for the last 30 years is 50%, while the global GDP growth is 500%. Not only that but the wealth inequalities in the world have been steadily rising for the last 60 years. In the US alone (that we have data on) the wealth of the bottom 80% has been roughly stagnant since the 1990s while that of the top 1% has skyrocketed - it’s basically them that have absorbed this economic growth profit.
So yeah, you got a lot of confidence in things you clearly don’t know about.
You weren’t talking about wealth, you said that our energy consumption continued to rise.
You have to understand that GDP and energy demands are intrinsically tied. That’s a fact, both theoretically and empirically verified with historical data. When the GDP rises, energy demands rise. And the reason why energy demands rise is not to meet people’s needs but because the 1% seek to increase GDP (through individual corporation stock values) which in turn increases their profits, since like I said they absorb all of it. That is why it is relevant, because it’s a matter of wealth accumulation by the 1%, not because people need more energy. That is backed both by the fact that the common people don’t get anything out of the increase in economic production(the bottom 80% like I’ve said have had a stagnant wealth since the 1990s in the US, although the global GDP has risen 5-fold, even though the population has risen and hence the people in that 80% has risen as well) and by the fact that the population increase has been just 50% and the increase in wealth ten times that.
So our population has increased by 50% and you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease? All countries have increased energy production, including China, I’m not sure why you’re making this sound like a US centric problem.
What in the world do you mean “you expect our energy demands to stay the same or decrease?”. What does expect mean??? I don’t expect anything, I’m stating what needs to be done if we want our planet to remain habitable…have you heard about climate change or…? Also how do you keep ignoring the fact that our wealth has increased by 500% in the last 30 years and the 1% gets all the profit? We don’t need to increase our economic activities for all the people to be able to live comfortably, we need distribute wealth fairly and when we get to a point where everyone can live well, (in the West we are way past that point) then we need to scale down unnecessary economic activities, if we want to meet the scientific guidelines to avoid the 3 degrees by the end of the century, which would spell absolute irreversible disaster.
I never said it’s a US problem, and I didn’t make it sound like so, I was only using some data from the US for convenience. It’s a worldwide problem, but the US dictates the trajectory and policies of a very big part of the world including Europe, Canada, Australia and the gulf countries, all of which are essentially controlled by them. Also the US has by far the most CO2 emissions historically, making that country the single biggest contributor to climate change, again, by far. So it bears the biggest responsibility of any country. But you are right, it’s a worldwide problem.
This is good news, relatively speaking.
SMR technology is one of the most promising pieces of technological development in the nuclear power space.
Standardized factory production and completely sealed, so refueling is only at the factory, never on-site. Their also, small, but scalable depending on the needs of each site.
I’m not sure of the design this company is using, but I’m assuming they’re leveraging a fail safe reactor, as in, it requires properly running systems to generate fission, but if those systems fail, the fission process stops.
As opposed to systems like Chernobyl, or 3 Mile Island, that required separate active safety systems to guard against catastrophic failures.
Glad they’re choosing nano-nukes and supplying their own juice.
Cyberpunk dystopias weren’t supposed to be guidelines dammit
Had me excited there for the first half, ngl…
Nuclear has never been profitable without massive government subsidies and guarantees, and
GoogleKairos too will either manage to collect those or lose money.It’s unclear how Google and Kairos set up the deal — whether the former is providing direct funding or if it just promised to buy the power that the latter generates when its reactors are up and running. Nevertheless, Kairos has already passed several milestones, making it one of the more promising startups in the field of nuclear energy.
I guarantee you, they are shouldering on none of the risk (like the Chinese and French at Hinkley Point), and this startup will be going down.
Yay, more ads to pay for Google’s reactors.
