Can you link a source that isn’t pay walled?

Believe it or not you can turn a reactor off if necessary, or up and down. Crazy I know.

Biomass isn’t practical as it releases far too much emissions to be worth it, you almost might as well use gas. Actually thinking about how much land use it would take, it might actually be worse than gas overall. Biomass is only really sensible when talking about material we would waste anyway like food waste and other waste that can be burned, but that would barely make a dent in our energy needs.

Not everything is about economics, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be talking about renewables at all.

As for “free energy”, no energy is free. Solar panels and wind turbines still have a finite life span. Nuclear fuel is cheap enough to the point where it too might as well be free if we are willing to call wind turbines free. This is especially true for Thorium technology or actinide burners. Actinide burners literally reuse nuclear waste.

Not really, no.

Have you actually looked at the data? You might be surprised.

As opposed to the ever so clean extraction and storage of nuclear fuel? Come on.

Yes actually. Uranium mining isn’t nearly as bad as needing tons of lithium, cobalt, and who knows what that goes into solar panels. Thorium containing materials are literally a byproduct of other mining operations that gets thrown away.

From what I gather, wind is on par with nuclear. Other renewables have slightly more than either wind or nuclear, but compared to the other nonrenewable alternatives either option is far better.

Nope. Wind generates 11 tons of CO2 where Nuclear only makes 6. Solar isn’t even close. Biomass is the worst of the renewables and is closer to fossil fuels in its pollution levels than the other clean sources of energy.

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

And all of this leaves out the most important aspect - nuclear is incredibly expensive compared to renewables, and is trending more expensive each year, while renewables are trending in the opposite direction. This means that for the same amount of resources, we will be able to displace more nonrenewables, leading to a net reduction in deaths/emissions pursuing this route as opposed to nuclear.

Is it? Most people aren’t factoring the cost of energy storage. No one is suggesting Nuclear as the only source of energy. It is very helpful though for grid firming and reducing the amount of expensive and environmentally destructive energy storage therefore reducing the overall cost of operating the grid while increasing reliability and reducing land usage and environmental damage.

While the upfront investment in reactors is large, the cost per energy produced and ongoing costs are quite low. Lower in many cases than fossil fuels like gas. Plus reactors last longer than solar panels and wind turbines.

Of course, I have nothing against fully privately funded nuclear. If private actors can make the economics work under safe conditions, then nuclear construction is an obvious net positive. When they displace public investment in renewables, however, then they are a net negative.

What happened to the idea that renewables didn’t need public funding anymore? If it’s really so cheap as you say that wouldn’t be necessary.

The reality is both renewables and nuclear needed huge state investments to get off the ground.

That’s a lie. Renewables produce more CO2 than Nuclear reactors per unit energy produces. They can also be significantly more dangerous (higher number of deaths per unit energy) in the case of hydro power or biomass. Solar and batteries require various rare materials and produce significant pollution when manufactured and must be replaced every 20 or 30 years.

AGI and ASI are what I am referring to. Of course we don’t actually have that right now, I never claimed we did.

It is hilarious and insulting you trying to “erm actually” me when I literally work in this field doing research on uses of current gen ML/AI models. Go fuck yourself.

If and until the abilities of AI reach the point where they can compensate tech illiteracy and we no longer need to worry about the exorbitant heat production, it shouldn’t be deployed at scale at all, and even then its use needs to be scrutinised, regulated and that regulation is appropriately enforced (which basically requires significant social and political change, so good luck).

Why wouldn’t you deploy that kind of AI at scale?

To be honest I think people keep forgetting that AI strong enough would be smarter than a human, and would probably end up deploying us at scale rather than the other way around. Terminator could one day actually happen. I am not even sure that would be a bad thing given how flawed humans are.

It seems basic logic like this doesn’t actually work on these people. Most really can’t get their heads around the fact that energy costs money and companies want to use less of it wherever possible and practical to do so.

I didn’t realize coal plants were concerned about data centers or AI. TIL.

What? How does that relate to anything I just said?

But in the interest of being slightly less of a dick and responding to what you said even though it’s kinda a non sequitur, companies are only vaguely interested in efficiency.

How is it a non sequitur? If anything the thing you just said makes no sense. Energy is probably the biggest cost these companies have. This I believe is true even for regular data centers and cloud services which is why they always try to use the latest most energy efficient hardware. It’s still not as bad as most anti-AI people seem to believe, mainly because the most energy intensive part happens only once per model (training).

I think it’s more accurate to say that AI is hot for everyone right now so there’s more eyes on it which makes the concept you laid out valid. Where it’s invalid in my experience is that efficiency is just based on “where x executive is paying attention” not an honest attempt to look at return on investment in a rigorous way across the enterprise.

Human labour is expensive. So trying to replace it with AI, even if AI is also expensive, is typically still worth it.

You talk about experience, but I honestly don’t think you have any. Do you actually work in tech? What are your qualifications? Most of the people coming here to complain about this stuff don’t actually have a functional understanding of the thing they are complaining about.

Nuclear actually releases less CO2 than renewables, because renewables aren’t nearly as clean as you think they are. Those solar panels and wind turbines have to be made somehow. The things needed to make solar panels and batteries aren’t exactly great for the planet to mine and manufacture.

This concept of 100% clean energy is a myth, there are just more and less polluting sources. Nuclear being the least polluting, with fossil fuels being the worst, and renewables in the middle.

Oh I already knew about the alt one. I thought you were talking about IDEs lol. Was very sleep deprived when I read this the first time.

I like the middle click one. I knew you could use it to paste, but not copy.

What do those do?

Mainly because energy and data centers are both expensive and companies want to use as little as possible of both - especially on the energy side. OpenAI isn’t exactly profitable. There is a reason companies like Microsoft release smaller models like Phi-2 that can be run on individual devices rather than data centers.

That’s because people are actually more educated than ever at least in part thanks to the internet. In most places the standard of living has actually gone up, in some cases quite drastically. So people are more comfortable. A lot of the doomerism stuff doesn’t take into account any of the awful stuff that happened in the past, and most are only focused on the USA which is having weird problems at the moment. In most of the world the material wealth of the average person has gone up, not down.

I know manufacturing panels and batteries have a significant environmental cost. Being a net negative though I am not sure about. Could you link some sources?

Yes it can. Pretending it’s that dangerous in doses normally consumed by humans in say coffee would be silly though and that’s exactly what you are doing. Like you could make a dirty bomb from spent fuel rods, but that’s irresponsible. You could build outdated and unsafe reactors, but again that’s irresponsible. You could also burn people to death using the power of the sun and some mirrors. Do you get my point?

You can’t call nuclear dangerous when it’s literally safer than many other energy sources. It’s like calling Caffeine dangerous when meth exists.

Wait are you saying that renewables have too much environmental cost to make?

You do know what a city is, right? The regulations on nuclear are also around population density if I remember. So it is literally a requirement that says you can’t build reactors in high population density areas.

Which cities? I haven’t heard of any cities being made unlivable, only towns and villages.

Since when? There are dams all over the place.