Microsoft Looking to Use Nuclear Reactors to Power Its Data Centers::undefined
That’s … actually pretty neat.
Makes a lot of sense given the amount of power needed to run a data centers like that. Definitely cleaner in the long run too.
They’ll still need backup power/generators but they’ll need a lot less of them and they’ll mostly be needed for the nuclear parts.
There is another thread stating it is because training AI takes a lot of energy. Any reason to boost nuclear plants is good to me.
Right, any reason to throw millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium is a good one to you, I wouldn’t have expected anything else.
… study more.
because you have? yeah right
The whole plan has only one minor flaw: It’ll never work. Building a nuclear power plant never was, never is and never will be economical. The current boom in nuclear grandiose announcements is nothing but a smokescreen. The purpose is to delay the adoption of renewable energy with lofty promises that will never come to fruition. Then we’d be forced to keep using fossil fuels, which is the end goal.
You comment has one minor flaw.
Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.
Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.
The NRC approved the design, so now they can start building it. That is still a looong way off from having a working reactor. And all those companies are way behind their originally planned schedules. Which is my whole point. I’m not saying they might not get this stuff to work some day. I’m saying that it will take way too long to make any contribution to fighting climate change. We need to decarbonise now and and we have the technology to do it now.
That’s got nothing to do with Microsoft though. Their reactor wouldn’t be used to power other people, only their own data centers.
They currently buy that from the grid, and they don’t really have any control over the source of that electricity generation. We should absolutely be pushing the power generators to go with renewables, but Microsoft isn’t a generator. They’re a customer like you or me.
They’re looking at moving to small reactors eventually because of the cost of buying from the grid, not for the environment.
It would still be far cheaper to deploy the same kind of capacity in renewables. Whoever came up with this brilliant plan can’t do basic math.
They could just run renewables since they already need batteries as you said.
Also i dont want incompetent people operating nuclear reactors. We saw what happened with that multiple times already and you still shouldnt eat boars in eastern Europe bc. auf radiation levels thanks to fucking Tschernobyl.
You should research this a bit more because ironically more people get exposed to radiation in the coal industry than in nuclear, percentage wise. Also I live in Eastern Europe and all game is safe to eat.
Also I live in Eastern Europe and all game is safe to eat.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-germanys-wild-boars-are-radioactive-180982856/
https://www.grs.de/en/news/contamination-mushrooms-and-wild-boar-radioactive-caesium-137
Your government is probably lying to you then.
I don’t think Bill Gates has any significant involvement with Microsoft these days, but wasn’t he pushing for greater nucleus power usage, including trialing reactors in India?
He was promoting something called traveling wave reactors. Which never panned out. Just like nothing will become of this.
This is talking about SMRs and not traditional reactors. SMRs still haven’t left the prototype stage, but maybe they’ll start to be useful in a decade’s time, who knows.
That would be a wildly optimistic timeline. And even if they managed to produce a working system by then, it would still take decades longer to scale up to the point where these things could make a meaningful contribution. That’s time we simply don’t have.
That feeling when your society is so dysfunctional that only corporations can build much needed advanced infrastructure.
much needed? Nuclear Power for AI?
Nuclear power
what?
Nuclear power is not exclusively used for AI. Additionally, if they have their own power, then that frees up whatever energy they use for AI from other plants to be used for other purposes.
it still isn‘t a net gain for public infrastructure. which already lacks much needed investment.
Solar Panels are really cheap now.
What could go wrong?
This for-profit company will finally come up with a solution to nuclear waste that has eluded the industry for decades. But if that turns out to be expensive, Microsoft will be around for thousands of years to ensure that nothing leaks that shouldn’t. Of course the US government will help them with the cost of establishing the reactors and when something goes wrong (because “nuclear”).
/s
Shrug. It’s better than nothing or throwing ones hands up and saying “oh well crank up the coal burners!”
Yeah in the meantime they could just build centifold that power in renewables and an electricity grid to make it available everywhere.
Everyone who is strongly pro nuclear is also pro coal and other fossil fuels because they do fhe bidding of the cirrent fossil industries. Just using uranium instead of carbon.
companies like Microsoft are always considering novel methods for powering (and cooling) their data centers
If they are near population centers, they could use the excess heat from both for remote heating.
But mostly adding a nuclear power plant to a data center will require additional cooling.
