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community weblog	

don't have energy for this

Amazon Web Services is reportedly making a deal for electricity from a nuclear power plant [quartz]
[wsj: exclusive! yesterday] [fortune] [wapo, 1 wk ago] [npr, 2 wks ago] [forbes, 3 wks ago] previously [bulletin of atomic scientists: "Arguably the most problematic aspect of Oklo's microreactor concept is the proliferation implications of its fuel cycle. Simply put, Oklo's concept could increase the availability of fissile materials needed for nuclear weapons"]
posted by HearHere on Jul 02, 2024 at 6:06 AM

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We are going to need nuclear reactors to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels, so this is a good thing. Yes, we'll need to protect the raw materials and effluence from seizure by bad actors, but that isn't an unsolvable problem. I'd rather AWS be using these plants than diverting water sources and burning up dead dinosaurs.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:21 AM

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Minor quibble- the datacenters still need a lot of cooling, so they're still going to be diverting water sources locally, above whatever water consumption is being done for cooling at the nuclear plant.
posted by notoriety public at 6:32 AM

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"Yes, we'll need to protect the raw materials and effluence from seizure by bad actors, but that isn't an unsolvable problem"

Yet so far it seems to have remained unsolved. Nukes are only as safe as those who run them; any instability in the society in which they are housed, or any lack of commitment to procedures, policy, or basic safety can result in Chernobyl. Given what I have seen out of society in general, especially of late, I do not think we have the common sense or maturity to handle that kind of responsibility. We have not even figured out what to do with the waste we have now in a safe manner, let alone the monstrous quantities that would be generated by a great number of nuke plants.

I live about 40 miles from the Columbia River, in a place littered with data centers, run by people who have never given Amazon anything but the answer "yes" in response to anything it ever wanted. If these folks get the idea that nukes are the way to go there won't be a salmon left, because they will line the upper Columbia with nuke plants for their precious AI and the river will be so hot it will not support life.

But we will be able to watch videos of what the fish used to look like, streaming on demand
posted by cybrcamper at 6:34 AM

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Good! We need more electricity. Nuclear power produces energy without CO2 emissions. Datacenter deals that result in building new nuclear power production is a good thing. Keeping giant consumers off-grid is probably a good thing too, the US grid has some serious capacity problems. Mostly you want the grid for balancing demand but a constant-supply source like a nuclear reactor is a good match to a constant-demand predictable load like a data center.

Note these links are about several different nuclear power companies. The WSJ article (paywall bypass) is about the large nuclear operator Constellation Energy repurposing an existing reactor for Amazon. That's not so exciting since it's not adding new capacity but maybe it creates more long term demand for nuclear investment. The NPR article is about TerraPower, Bezos' nuclear reactor startup. The "previously" is about Oklo, another reactor startup.

Datacenters have also been investing in hydroelectric and solar production for over 20 years now. Google's datacenters in The Dalles to use local hydropower were an early high profile example. And similar to cybercampr's concern, there is controversy over whether the water use hurts the Columbia. Also for cooling, although in this case it's to cool the datacenter itself and not the power source.
posted by Nelson at 6:47 AM

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I also think this makes a lot of sense. Nuclear power plants have a consistent ability to generate, datacenters have a consistent ability to consume. It'd be better yet if they were physically adjacent to each other so we could avoid transmission costs.

I imagine there is probably a reason why this is a terrible idea, but I've been thinking that naval sized reactors paired with datacenters might make sense. We could even have the navy run them as a service, possibly. It's a pipe dream, but it'd be better than the giant pile of coal a few miles down from me getting burned to the same effect.
posted by Kikujiro's Summer at 6:55 AM

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It's a terrible idea because the fuel and waste is ultra-toxic ultra-hazardous war materiel, the operation of a nuke plant is extremely fraught perched as it is on the knife edge of disaster, and the billions spent in building or rehabbing "acceptably safe" reactors could better be spent on literal square miles of solar panels and football arenas full of sodium batteries that have essentially zero hazard.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:58 AM

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There is no doubt that nuclear power is scary, mostly due to its association with nuclear arms as well as incidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. But the fact is that there have been only three INES level 5 or above incidents (out of 20 total incidents, 10 of which were in the US) in the last 45 years, with a grand total of ~50 deaths (excluding Chernobyl, which is Meltdowns Georg, and padding the Fukushima numbers to include stress-related deaths among the elderly) across all incidents regardless of level. We have 94 reactors in the US alone! There have been zero incidents of rogue actors stealing fissile material and creating dirty bombs which detonated anywhere. Things have been humming along smoothly. Nuclear power is, by and large, extremely safe. Solar and wind power are also awesome but can't even begin to compare to the power density of a nuclear reactor.

Of course, this is just data, and data doesn't convince people.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:13 AM

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the operation of a nuke plant is extremely fraught

That's interesting. There are currently 91 active nuclear reactors providing power in the U.S., and the first commercial power generation from one started in 1957.

In that time there has been one accident that rose to the level of having any effect on the public.

Explain to me how running a reactor is "fraught"?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:20 AM

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Fraught compared to solar power. C'mon, people. You don't need to argue on the side of nuclear or carbon-based power any more. There's no earthly reason. It's not even economically viable compared to solar. It's like that meme where the scientists are saying "we could have clean air and water and fewer health hazards and it would cost less too" and the politicians and oligarchs are saying "naaahhhh."
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:32 AM

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Explain to me how running a reactor is "fraught"?

Does it really need to be spelled out? The waste. I can't help notice a consistent theme here from the generally sharp folks who are excited at this prospect: none of them even *mention* the deeply difficult problem of where to store nuclear waste.

It seems intellectually dishonest to me to consistently fail to address the single biggest still-unsolved problem with nuclear power plants in your "Good! We need this!" discussion of their benefits. What's your plan? Yucca Mountain? Temporary on-site storage that you let slide into permanent on-site storage? What?

And to be clear, I do see a place for some limited nuclear power in our move away from fossil fuels. Completely ignoring the issue of where to put all of the radioactive waste it generates won't help us get there.
posted by mediareport at 7:34 AM

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Does it really need to be spelled out? The waste. I can't help notice a consistent theme here from the generally sharp folks who are excited at this prospect: none of them even *mention* the deeply difficult problem of where to store nuclear waste

There's no question that it is a problem. On the other hand, it has been a problem since 1957 and there have been zero incidents involving danger to the public.

Once again, not so much "fraught" as a serious problem requiring ongoing investigation.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:41 AM

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So you're saying that kicking the can of nuclear waste down the road for "ongoing investigation" since 1957 isn't fraught? The intellectual whiplash here is so disgusting I'm stepping out.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:43 AM

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it has been a problem since 1957

So what's your take on our best options for handling all of the radioactive waste a renewed push for nuclear power will generate? I'm not asking for you to have the solution, just wondering where you think we are with the various available options. Surely a supporter of nuclear power will have thought a lot about that?
posted by mediareport at 7:43 AM

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This is green wash bullshit so Amazon can claim to be low carbon. The remaining US nuclear fleet runs as baseline power. It runs all the time and would lower the price it offers if necessary to avoid shutting down. So all this low carbon power is used whenever available. Selling it to a particular buyer will just mean others are using an average of higher carbon per kWh used. No net effect on carbon but Amazon get some headlines and, I would guess, some risk management against future price volatility.
posted by biffa at 7:44 AM

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Selling it to a particular buyer will just mean others are using an average of higher carbon per kWh used. No net effect on carbon


Wouldn't adding low / no carbon power to the grid lower the percentage of all power that's high carbon, regardless of where it's used?
posted by condour75 at 7:51 AM

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Diversity. Diversify. We need to be as green as possible but there are edge cases. Every form of power has a place, some a very small place. I've suggested that coal as an extreme backup has a place due to perfect storage. Jets will always need high density fuel. There are very safe small nuclear systems in use in locations that have no sunlight ever (under oceans) and nuclear will be needed past Mars.
posted by sammyo at 7:55 AM

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there have been zero incidents involving danger to the public.

That's a joke, right?

Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste

You don't have to look particularly hard to find journalism about harms from nuclear waste, and the official cover-ups of those harms and/or minimizing that has been going on for decades.

Have you spent much time reading about nuclear waste as a problem? Honestly curious.
posted by mediareport at 7:56 AM

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Condour75: Adding would, the main article here is about existing nuclear selling to AWS.
posted by biffa at 7:57 AM

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Given the longevity of nuclear waste, saying that it's been mostly safe since 1957 is a little like saying that, since you got to the bottom of your stairs without breaking your neck, your miles-long race will be perfectly safe.

And I'm not even anti-nuclear power.

I've read some stuff over the last few years that suggest energy production and use generates waste heat, which is still a problem, even if CO2 emissions get dealt with. Assuming we can't get off the planet (which, argument for a different thread), we still will have to moderate our energy consumption, and that flies in the face of all the big money-making schemes lately. The solution to all the problems seems to be "more power," but when does "more power" become the problem?
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:33 AM

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I have no doubt that in 100 years, presuming the world hasn't burned up, that we will look back at this phase of energy production and nuclear fear and think "how primitive we were."
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:50 AM

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Simple risk estimation is frequency times consequences of a failure. We can reduce the frequency with good engineering and practices and security, but in nuclear power, and with nuclear waste, failure consequence is very hard to limit.

Hey, did you see that, after a $7bn cleanup, plutonium levels at Rocky Flats have exceeded state safety limits last month? Hanford is still leaking waste. And Chernobyl continues to claim lives.

It's literally a "for the rest of human history" problem. Why would we volunteer for more of that?
posted by SunSnork at 8:50 AM

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I am a big fan of nuclear power, its one of the best ways to ensure that when the crops fail and the lights go out and that neither humans nor most other life gets a second bite at the apple. A few hundred thousand years of ore dumps and refineries and spent fuel leaking into the air should give microorganism the clean slate they deserve.

If we are to achieve our deathwish, its going to take more than climate chaos and microplastics and pfas, we need the unpredictable daughter isotopes of decay.

Its worth paying double or tripple price for that peace of mind.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 8:59 AM

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Somewhere, a dumbass copper thief is all: do the what now?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:02 AM

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It is a good thing that very smart people with more objective views of how to solve our global energy problem than the general public are working on neutralizing nuclear waste so that it has a much shorter half-life.

The fact of the matter is that untold advances in the science of energy (and healthcare, and pretty much everything else) lie ahead of us which will make moot many of the concerns we have now. Thankfully it looks like "how to prevent spent nuclear fuel from contaminating the Earth forever" is already on track to be one of them. That will also, no doubt, pay dividends when it comes to interstellar habitation and travel, for those of us who think leaving Earth is the only or best option. Because interstellar travel will require an extremely stable, long-lived energy source, and space, well, it ain't that bright.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:14 AM

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The whole "nuclear power for AI datacenters" thing is an overblown distraction.

Datacenter power consumption in general has been rapidly growing but it's only a low single-digit percentage of energy use. Much of the projected growth would have happened in the absence of AI anyway and it's not a dramatic unexpected change to global energy use overall - the world is just doing a whole lot more with computers over time.

Meanwhile, renewables + storage are so cheap and nuclear so expensive that the idea that big tech companies are suddenly going to build a bunch of net new nuke plants from scratch is laughable - the lead time on new construction is very long. These articles are mostly about deals with existing or planned nuclear generation, other than Sam Altman continuing his crusade to find new and exciting grift opportunities by funding a small nuclear startup - and that's what is really driving this press cycle.
posted by allegedly at 9:14 AM

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Of course, this is just data

Here's some more data.

Levelised cost of electricity, 2023, US. Lazard's.

Solar - utility scale: $29-92/MWh
Wind - onshore: $27-73/MWh

Nuclear: $142-222/MWh
posted by biffa at 9:15 AM

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No one has mentioned that we don't need AI. It's just another way to claim economic "growth" and keep the markets going a few more years. It's not going to solve us electing Trump or dealing with a shit ton of kids having social anxiety because they are on screens all day.
posted by caviar2d2 at 9:16 AM

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Contracting for nuclear power to make AI green is the latest hotness in Silicon Valley. I recently worked with a Google team exploring long term nuclear power purchases, futures, etc.

Watching "move fast and break things" run headlong into 20year lead times and utilities permitting was interesting

One major issue is that companies that construct civilian nuclear power have learned that it is lucrative to never actually finish construction.
posted by pdoege at 9:21 AM

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In other private energy news, Genshin Impact is trying to fund nuclear fusion.
posted by one for the books at 9:25 AM

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The fact of the matter is that untold advances in the science of energy (and healthcare, and pretty much everything else) lie ahead of us which will make moot many of the concerns we have now.

Well we're pretty much at the stage that if an advance isn't 'told' by now then it's not going to be much use in limiting climate change up to 2050.

The more likely thing that will end up moot is the global ecology. Wishing for (or depending on) some amazing techno-solution ignores the realities of what it takes to come up with solutions, test them to work out what works (and what doesn't), and then implement the good options at scale.
posted by biffa at 9:26 AM

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Nuclear waste has a radiotoxic lifetime of approximately 5,000 years, so after 67 years we are just 1.3% of the way along in the "finding out" part of this adventure.
posted by Lanark at 9:32 AM

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I've read some stuff over the last few years that suggest energy production and use generates waste heat, which is still a problem, even if CO2 emissions get dealt with

This is a fascinating problem for imagining the constraints on far future civilizations but the most credible* assessment I have seen is that waste heat accounts for no more than 1% of global warming so far. If we managed to get CO2 all the way back down (currently on track for....never) and the world's population stays high (despite declining birth rates) and per capita energy consumption keeps growing (okay this one is likely) and we don't get off the planet, distant future humans will need a tiny little bit of geoengineering to kick that can down the road.

* Note that there are climate change deniers who argue that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not actually doing anything and it's all waste heat.
posted by allegedly at 9:33 AM

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I feel bad for people that have spent half their lives doing micro-optimizations for compilers to save tiny bits of energy here and there, and now "haha fuck you guys we're just multiplying huge matrices now"
posted by credulous at 9:40 AM

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The truth is that we don't have a "solution" for any of our trash. If you cannot compost it, it is an unsolved problem. Municipal waste will remain dangerous for thousands of years and is dumped in liners that will last decades. Greenhouse gas emissions are an existential threat to our planet. Who knows how long microplastics are going to stick around? At least with spent nuclear fuel, we have a smaller amount of stuff we can make into a glass brick and hopefully keep an eye on so it doesn't get into anything.

Nuclear power is a tradeoff - trading larger quantities of less dangerous waste for much smaller quantities of highly dangerous waste. Fission produces frightening amounts of energy. The danger of it is all very concentrated, and that makes it scary. But that also means it's replacing a lot of more conventional waste in terms of carbon emissions or the vast amounts of mining and industrial production it takes to make solar panels and wind turbines.

In terms of replacing fossil fuels, it's probably a no brainer. This American Chemical Society article puts the total total amount of high level radioactive waste (which is what spent nuclear fuel is) at 90,000 metric tons. Now, that may seem like a lot, but that's about the same mass as the lifetime CO2 emissions of only a couple thousand cars. Compared to all spent nuclear fuel waste the US has produced ever. How many internal combustion engine cars have we made in that time? Sure the nuclear fuel is more dangerous, pound for pound, but there is so much less of it and it's not just being thrown into the atmosphere.

Whether it's a good tradeoff for renewables, honestly I'd side with people here that renewables are probably better for most places where wind and sun are abundant enough. But it's not really dangerous and dirty vs. clean and pure. All industrial problems are going to leave you with waste to deal with. And some fraction of that, heavy metal contamination especially, is just never going away.

Also, a large part of the US's nuclear waste that is actually causing problems, is less the result of civilian nuclear power and more the nuclear weapon program in the middle of the last century and the military being unaccountable and just tossing who knows what into big barrels of sludge that are way, way harder to deal with than a planned industrial process involving radioactive materials.
posted by Zalzidrax at 9:41 AM

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The problem with nuclear waste is that nobody wants to be the politician that allows nuclear waste to be stored in their state, so the can gets kicked down the road for another generation.

Instead, we get shitty "temporary" solutions in terrible places that weren't designed to store nuclesr waste long-term, damaging the environment and hurting people. And even worse, all these "temporary" solutions will have to be dug up and removed in the future once a permanent site is actually established. The worst ones being the shitty barrels the US government used back before it knew/cared how dangerous radiation was.

Nuclear waste is not a problem without a solution. Other countries had better luck designating a safe permanent waste storage facility that a community will accept. Finland, for example. We've literally spent billions trying to build our own. Yucca Mountain was finally killed by Harry Reid and Obama after $7 billion was spent studying the site and much controversy. Now we're back to square one.

But again, the lack of a permanent nuclear waste storage site in the US is political and cultural, not technical. The US has plenty of sites to choose from, but everyone wants the benefits of cheap fossil fuel-free energy but no one wants to bite the bullet when it comes to dealing with the waste. Until the federal government gets its shit together, we're stuck with ticking time bombs all over the nation.
posted by lock robster at 9:41 AM

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Let's store the nuclear waste on the moon. What could happen?
posted by wittgenstein at 9:45 AM

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I've also seen estimates in the 1-2% range for waste heat compared to heat trapped by CO2.

Its also worth mentioning not all energy use puts out the same waste heat. Burning a ton of coal in a power station will typically put 60% of the energy up the chimney. Gas about 40% of the heat up the chimney. So to get 1 TWH of electricity from coal you produce 2.5 TWh of heat and convert 1TWh of it into electricity, then bung the other 1.5TWh into the air or the sea, or if you are sensible into a district heating network (but there are lots that don't). The stuff that does convert will mostly end up as heat too once used, after you get some work from it. If you generate 1 TWh from wind then you are effectively drawing on solar power, which builds up in the atmosphere and causes air mass to move as wind. So that solar energy naturally converts to kinetic, the kinetic drives the wind turbine and converts into electrical energy, and that is used in meeting whatever demand and ends up back in the atmosphere? So minimal addition of heat to the atmosphere.

The same point of comparison also explains why renewables show up badly in charts of total primary energy use. There is much less wasted energy conversion from wind and solar.
posted by biffa at 9:50 AM

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North Korea managed to source lithium-6 deuteride just fine for their September 2017 test (you don't get yields much in excess of 20kT without it), which means someone fucking handed them the fissile material we need to worry about and the list of feasible suspects for that looks like:
Russia,
Pakistan

Everyone else with capability - China very much included - has damned good strategic reasons not to.

Point being: proliferation in general is an empty barn and distant horse chasing the horizon. US energy policy will not alter it one iota in any direction when there are active bad faith participants. The problem here is legitimately somebody else's behavior and we should not be holding back any plans over it.

Waste on the other hand is actually a much more serious concern than it was a week ago, back before a pack of dogfuckers calling themselves the Supreme Court's conservative members declared themselves the final arbiters of all environmental policy. And back then I would've said who cares? Find the deepest mine in the middle of the most tectonically stable portion of the North American continental plate, throw it in there followed by at least a hundred meters worth of concrete. Even if that were reasonably near my backyard (and I have close family in a couple of the more likely areas) once you're at a multiple of the deepest point in any local aquifer who gives a a shit?

Today, this week, is a different country. We are on the fast track to recapitulating Nazi Germany and until I see some strong indications that has ceased to be the case I am not a fan of any buildouts that presuppose responsible or even just not-fully-insane / deliberately-harmful environmental policy. Bad faith comes assumed for the time being and until that changes the US should not be trusted with the nuclear infrastructure and waste management we already have, nevermind tackling anything new.
posted by Ryvar at 10:04 AM

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Let's store the nuclear waste on the moon. What could happen?

We party like it's Space: 1999?
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:12 AM

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We party like it's Space: 1999?

That must have very recently moved to Netflix as grumpybearbride and I watched the first episode two nights ago, and my first thought was "this was clearly made during an era of nuclear panic."

Also: they can drive the moon!
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:25 AM

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Fusion energy is the only sensible energy solution!

And we have a very large source relatively nearby providing all the energy we can handle!
posted by nofundy at 10:27 AM

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nuclear waste on the moon. What could happen?
Seveneves [g: Neal Stephenson]
posted by HearHere at 10:46 AM

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Gives a new meaning to the phrase "AWS meltdown."

Joking aside, i don't see why new nukes are even under consideration given that they're so freaking expansive.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:42 AM

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The two things I love most about MetaFilter conversations on subjects I'm not deeply familiar with are that (1) I learn a whole lot of new things about history, context, and technique, and (2) the tone of 95% of those comments are "Are you fucking kidding me with your opinion? What are you, a big dumb baby? Is this BigDumbBabies.com?"
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:07 PM

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if anyone's interested, looks like that domain's available
posted by HearHere at 12:13 PM

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The fact of the matter is that untold advances in the science of energy (and healthcare, and pretty much everything else) lie ahead of us which will make moot many of the concerns we have now.

I've been hearing this my entire life in some fashion or another (sure we lost the jobs, but there'll be new, better ones with retraining! Don't worry, we will recapture all the carbon! Carbon credits will allow the free market to solve this! Don't worry about plastic waste, we have a blue bin! Just make all the cars electric!). Every single time it's been complete and utter bullshit. You'll beg my forgiveness if I'm not believing it this time, especially when the consequences of failure is a very, very, long period of waste leeching out into the world.
posted by whm at 12:20 PM

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No one has mentioned that we don't need AI

We also don't have AI. It's really a crime that tech industry salesmen have managed to abscond with the term and apply it to autocomplete on billions of dollars of steroids.

I'm not anti-nuclear, but I don't think we need to incur the costs and concerns of said technology in order to fuel the fever dreams of the tech industry.
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:20 PM

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How does the moon look as a waste receptacle? We have a space force, no? (/s)
posted by JakeEXTREME at 12:48 PM

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yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah [rem]
posted by HearHere at 1:06 PM

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Finland, for example

That's a detailed and interesting article, lock robster, thanks. It notes the specific reasons Finland was able to make that permanent high-level waste repository site work are gonna be hard to replicate elsewhere:

Many experts view permanent deep repositories like Onkalo as the best solution, but getting community buy-in is often a deal breaker..."The U.S. approach didn't pay sufficient attention to community acceptance or engagement," says Isaacs, who was the lead adviser on a 2012 blue-ribbon report commissioned by DOE to chart a way forward. "The original approach led to conflict rather than cooperation."

Finland, however, has run into remarkably few problems with Onkalo, which the government approved as a site in 2000. It helped that the residents of Eurajoki, the town closest to Onkalo and the nearby reactors, were comfortable with nuclear power. "Almost everyone in Eurajoki has a friend or relative who has worked in the nuclear power plants, so they know how we operate," says Janne Mokka, CEO of Posiva, the nuclear waste company set up by two nuclear power utilities to develop and manage Onkalo.

But experts say the success of Onkalo also reflects unique cultural and political conditions in Finland: high trust in institutions, community engagement, a lack of state-level power centers, and a balance of power between industry and stakeholders. "If you tried to implement the same thing in a country with much lower levels of trust, it would probably fail..."

posted by mediareport at 1:14 PM

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(Add nuclear power to list of things MF doesn't do well.)
posted by maxwelton at 1:17 PM

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the tone of 95% of those comments are "Are you fucking kidding me with your opinion?"

Ok, I'll police my tone better. But folks making broad unsupported pronouncements in conversations like this should probably be ready for the occasional "Really?!"
posted by mediareport at 1:18 PM

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MF on happiness, bike lanes: We should be like Finland!

MF on nuclear power: We can't be like Finland!
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:19 PM

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*shrug* I'd sign on to "should be like Finland" for this as well. It's a good article, though; you should read it if you haven't yet.
posted by mediareport at 1:22 PM

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the billions spent in building or rehabbing "acceptably safe" reactors could better be spent on literal square miles of solar panels and football arenas full of sodium batteries

Manufacturing and disposing of those panels isn't free, either, and the space solar farms are placed on are most often delicate desert ecosystems. You're not getting a free lunch no matter what you do. Nuclear waste is dangerous but it's also generated in very small quantities - particularly compared to coal which also generates radioactive waste that they've historically been allowed to just vent into the air alongside everything else. Also the project described isn't actually building new reactors.

To be clear, when it comes to the US, I agree that solar should be prioritized over nuclear power but mostly because it's WAY more politically feasible. Nuclear downscaling with the same rationale didn't work out that well for Germany, for one.
posted by Galimatazo at 1:36 PM

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Nuclear Energy & Free Market Capitalism Aren't Compatible

"The fiscal ideologues who seem to like nuclear power the most are ignoring the lessons of the past because their cognitive biases don't allow them to understand that free market economics and nuclear generation go together like flame throwers and gas stations. It just doesn't compute for them that the market sucks for some things, and that nuclear energy is one of them."

Caveats: The author's career is in renewable energy. Also according to their author avatar they moonlight as a first person shooter protagonist. Plus the article is illustrated with a shitty AI illustration.
posted by gamera at 1:58 PM

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Finland, however, has run into remarkably few problems with Onkalo

Well it's good that there's good news from Finland's nuclear programme. After all the bad news about their new nuclear capacity, which has been a shit show from start to whenever the finish actually happens. Olkilouoto-3 build started in 2005 and was due to be commissioned in 2010. It actually came online in 2023. It was contracted to cost €3.5bn but came in at €9bn and the contracting parties sued each other well before commissioning happened. So unreliable in terms of delivery and cost.

Olkilouoto-4 was cancelled some time ago.
posted by biffa at 2:24 PM

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Add nuclear power to list of things MF doesn't do well

Add nuclear power to list of things nuclear power plant operators don't do well.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:34 PM

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Every time the "we need nuclear power" argument comes up the option for corporate interests in particular to simply reduce power use or have regulation about power use just seems to go totally missing.

Especially when it's in the context of massive server farms that should probably be doing a whole lot less of everything that they're doing, like collecting vast quantities of marketable private information for advertising, or running massively power hunger LLM models being used for bullshit that's mainly chasing venture dollars and putting people out of work at the same time.

Maybe Amazon should try eating less avocado toast, drinking less coffee and learn to be more frugal and stop asking for free handouts.
posted by loquacious at 3:46 PM

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One major issue is that companies that construct civilian nuclear power have learned that it is lucrative to never actually finish construction.

Ha, if you can even start construction without 20 years of environmental impact studies and legal challenges first.
posted by ctmf at 5:23 PM

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The environmental impact of nuclear waste is much more limited in scope vs the waste products of burning coal or natural gas.
posted by interogative mood at 5:40 PM

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In other news, Google is missing its net zero targets and is up 48% from 2019. Blames AI
posted by pdoege at 6:26 PM

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The environmental impact of nuclear waste is much more limited in scope vs the waste products of burning coal or natural gas.


Absolutely nobody here is saying it's worse than coal. They're saying it's still bad, and not a magic panacea for all energy needs, and it really gets presented as that often enough that I can understand why people get short tempered about it.

The solution is to waste less energy (we could burn DALL-E to the ground for starters), and shift to genuine renewables, not to continue to consume at record rates and say "hey! now it's slightly less bad". Every time we've found a less bad solution to something, we've mostly patted ourselves on the back and then increased consumption to ensure that we were doing as much, if not more, damage.
posted by whm at 8:03 PM

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Add nuclear power to list of things nuclear power plant operators don't do well.

seriously how do you build a fucking nuclear power plant on an earthquake fault line
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:08 PM

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"We are going to need nuclear reactors to divorce ourselves from fossil fuels"
This statement is true, so long as the following things are also true:
A) Wealthy Comfortable people accept no alteration or limitation to the timing or scale of their consumption or demand.
B) The utility companies that Wealthy Comfortable people also choose not to combine the cheapest renewables with the cheapest batteries
C) We somehow have the money to pay for the most expensive and least demand-responsive power source, that also commits us to centuries of post-benefit costly waste management, while also not having the money to do anything else that negates the need for such facilities, and also that the absurd and already broken promises of the cult of engineering that these things can't go wrong will someone hold for centuries, all so that we can... mine bitcoin and replace call-center employees with shite software?

the case for nuclear is so bad even the companies currently engaged in nuclear don't invest in it.

Why are start-ups building nuclear power? Because only Si Valley is high-on-their-own supply enough to believe that using private money to subsidize government weapons programs is a *pro-gamer move*.

It will never be enough. Even when the seas rise, the forests burn, the permanent evacuation zones expand, the crops fail, the poles melt, the deserts and wastelands expand, the holocene species disappear, the permafrost thaws, the soil dries, the aquifers drop, the ore grade drops, the sea-grasses die, the fish stocks plummet, the rain is filled with microplastics and pfas, the food is plastic and the google-searches become reddit-regurgitations, there will always be one more sucker ready to believe in fusion, micronuke reactors, space colonization, geoengineering and synergy.

We will go extinct before the empirical evidence of our suicidal consumption convinces us not to double down.

I for one welcome this extinction, it is our only contribution to intelligence in the universe, namely
to remove ourselves as an obstacle from it's development elsewhere.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 9:08 PM

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MF on happiness, bike lanes: We should be like Finland!

MF on nuclear power: We can't be like Finland!


I have pointed this out in other threads on MF before (and was harshly ridiculed for it) but the US will never, ever be like Finland or any of the Nordics. They are low-population countries with a homogeneous population and brutal winter climates where working together is the only way to survive. Compound that over many, many centuries it not surprisingly led to an extremely cooperative society with a high degree of trust in institutions and government.

I would love to live somewhere like that, but I think it's impossible in the US - our origin story is literally the exact opposite. The country wants conflict and anger, it was built on it, it's in the cultural DNA and it's universal. And people wonder why I'm so pessimistic on the country's future.

We will go extinct before the empirical evidence of our suicidal consumption convinces us not to double down.

100% agree.
posted by photo guy at 12:40 AM

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For the >10 billion dollars it costs to construct a nuclear plant these days you can get much more value in building grid connected batteries.

You don't even have to subsidise renewables directly at this point, just pay for large grid batteries (or new long distance transmission lines, or pumped hydro) and people will immediately start queueing up to connect new solar farms.
posted by zymil at 3:37 AM

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Of note is the fact that the US has been using pretty much the same amount of energy since 1997, while China and India have been going up and up. China now uses almost 50% more energy than we do. India has gone up by 500% since 1990. The data runs through 2022, so I don't know what the last year or two look like, but the US is at least not on a runaway energy train, and neither is Canada.

The US residential sector represented 16% of total energy consumption in 2022. Among all sources of energy, electricity (including nuclear (25%), renewables (43%) and coal (32%)) represented 31% of total output. Of that 31%, only 35% actually made it to customers. 65% of the total electrical output of the US energy sector is just lost due to inefficiencies.

US residential usage of electricity represents 5.19% of total yearly energy output. I'm not sure what portion of that is Wealthy Comfortable People but it isn't enough to move the needle in a meaningful way if they turned off their AC or stopped heating their pools. Moving our transportation and industrial sectors off of petroleum and natural gas will go much farther towards hitting our climate goals, and that requires A Lot More Electricity. Even to maintain the status quo or reduce our total energy consumption by like 50%.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:56 AM

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