That feeling when your society is so dysfunctional that only corporations can build much needed advanced infrastructure.
this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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Solar Panels are really cheap now.
Which is great when the sun's up and the weather is good. Similar deal for wind power, it's great when the conditions are good. We still haven't got very large scale storage where we need it to rely on renewables full time. Nuclear helps while we sort out storage but we need to be very, very careful about corruption - if corporations can screw over the public for money they've demonstrated that they will, and nuclear implementations cost a lot of money.
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.
It can be a net gain, who knows what one of these reactors will output?
If they do feed the grid, they'll probably get some credit back which ultimately lines their pockets instead of funding public infrastructure.
How is that any different from my putting solar panels and selling my excess?
Yes, you're not a corporation, you're an individual person. The difference is scale.
Government doesn't build infrastructure either, it mostly just funds private companies to build it for them.
Theres a whole contract bidding process and everything
Clippy: it looks like you are trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown….
Oh yes, what could go wrong. Windows can’t even run an advertising board without blue screening…
“The core is about to melt down! Hit the shutdown button!!” “I can’t, it’s installing updates!!!”
Microsoft cloud runs mostly on Linux.
It mostly runs. An Azure-optimized HyperV build is the primary hypervisor I think, but I'd wager that most customer VMs on Azure are running Linux. However, if you want to run Windows in the cloud, it's a decent option.
My experience with Azure has been less than stellar. They have good API documentation, but tooling & core compute is a bit janky. The web UI is also a throwback to a past era, but you can't really avoid it when debugging issues which you have to do often during development. Then the developers want to forget all about it ... which is a problem when something inevitably breaks.
Somewhere in some timeline relatively close to ours this actually happens, the idea of 3 mile island/Chernobyl 2.0 event happening to microsofts personal reactor because a forced windows update screws over emergency override software is peak absurdist dystopia that I get chuckles from
This would wrap up the whole story arc of Mr Robot to 1 season. Lol
Somehow, the idea that a company with a safety and security issues history like Microsoft would run a nuclear reactor sounds like a very, very bad idea.
Do you remember the Aegis cruiser debacle? They didn't even manage to run a f-ing diesel engine under Windows.
Not the worry you should be worried about. Once they can cut the governmental power cord corporations would have exactly zero limits.
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.
Microsoft and nuclear reactor are words that should never be in the same sentence - easy recipe for disaster
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.
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
There are many companies developing small nuclear reactors for deployment in a lot wider locations compared to current nuclear. This is something humanity needs a lot of focus on to help protect the environment and meet our ever growing energy needs. The more companies working on SMRs the better in my opinion.
Nuclear waste is an overblown argument compared to the benefits nuclear power provides.
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.
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.
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.