Enshittification of nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen. I hope I’m wrong.
Come on… Shitty safety measures have never, ever, in the history of mankind led to catastrophic events with a lasting fallout. -some government that collapsed
After all after some point safety is just pure waste of money. -some dead CEO
It doesn’t take enshittification for something real bad to happen. All it takes is time. Add the mentioned enshittification and corner cutting and we know for sure what will happen…
Or how the saying in EvE online goes : it’s not a question on if your ship gets blown up but a question of when it gets blown up.
They know taxpayers will foot the bill and they will make astronomical amounts of money off it. Plus they get a stranglehold on energy.
Tech companies aren’t going to buy power plants and enshitify them. Allowing the tech giants at the table at all is far passed enshitification of democracy (and your tax dollars). Governments should have built the energy using the people’s money, and profited off businesses using extreme amounts of it (bringing a lot of dollars back). Instead they’ll use the corporate money to build energy, and profiting off the people who need to pay the corporation
Not just that, but it’s so they can profit from even more taxpayer subsidies. That’s why theyre trying to convince us it’s all for humanity.
Subsidies seriously distort the market.
IMO the only kind of subsidy should he “If you’re a human, you get some money on a regular basis”. That’s the only way to subsidize economic activity without distorting market signals, because humanity’s choices is exactly the signal source that the market should be responding to.
Subsidies are important. You pay enough tax dollars that some of those should be used to help the country be stronger economically. You don’t want all farmers to disappear from the US because China can make food with slaves for waaaay cheaper.
The problem is theyre laughing at you helping their friends with that money, and calling it capitalism. It’s socialism for corporations using the people’s money really
These renewables, however, are intermittent sources of power, while data centers need a steady supply to run all the time. The tech companies are currently reliant on the grid whenever the wind isn’t blowing or sun isn’t shining.
Gee, if only if they could have, say, containers of substances that could hold an electrical charge: perhaps—if you will—a “battery” of such containers.
I get your point, but have you looked into the power demands of data centers? They already have room filling batteries for power outages, but those are just enough to keep the lights on while the diesel generators start.
There are immense capacity utility scale batteries available now from dozens of vendors. They would be roughly 100x easier to build than a nuclear power plant, even with a solar farm attached.
The most recent nuclear power plant built in the US was the 2 new units at the Vogtle plant in Georgia. They took 11 years and 34 billion dollars to build to output a roughly 2.4 gw of steady power.
A 1gw solar + battery plant was built in Nevada that cost 1.9 billion. They secured financing in 2022, and finished building it in 2024.
So we can get a solar array built to do the above with battery storage for 4 billion, in 2-4 years. For the same cost as that added 2.4GW nuclear, we could build 18GW of solar with 12.6gwh of storage.
So nuclear will do 2.4GW of peak, with 2.4gwh of “storage” available 24/7.
I have no doubt that the above 18GWh of solar could be traded in for more battery, to a more sane ratio that could compete with that “storage” while also providing 4-5x of total power. Based on what I can find, the batteries were about 1/2 the cost, so if we knock the solar generation to 9GW, we can increase battery to 25.2GWh. Now you still have huge power generation, a huge power storage that you can use all at once or over a long period, and it matches the “storage” that that nuclear plant offers for 12hrs, I.e the time when the sun is down.
It’s honestly baffling why these companies are trying to spin up nuclear plants instead of pushing ahead with more grid renewables.
This is just the peak power. The average power is much less. And batteries can maybe work on a grid scale for smoothing, but not for an individual consumer like a data center.
These are grid scale projects. Each one is designed to power 100s of thousands of homes.
Based on the data I can find, 35MW datacenters are what AI will require by 2030. The project I linked above could power 20+ of them at once by itself.
With how they treat the things they are supposedly good at, I can only imagine how catastrophic this could be. I don’t think you’d want the people working at a nuclear power plant to be so overwhelmed with work they need to piss in bottles.
That’s basically how medicine is run these days, and that’s a result of the artificial supply restriction government places on medical facilities and staff.
All doctors are forced through a narrow gauntlet which is basically designed by government regulations. The result of that process is doctors that have reduced empathy (it’s been documented, look it up), sleep deprivation, enormous debt, and a huge workload.
As a result, the third leading cause of death is medical malpractice, and people go into financial ruin to get medical care.
Medicine is one of those things we deemed “too important for a free market”, and so we’ve created a horrible hybrid of profit and government regulation that consistently produces horrible outcomes.
We need to be careful with this notion that something vitally important will be made safer, or more reliable, or less damaging by getting government involved.
If we aren’t careful (and let’s face it: government cannot be careful because it operates on a feedback loop of years, not days like private enterprise does), regulating the fuck out of a growing nuclear sector could lead to error and burnout rates similar to our medical sector, with similarly disastrous results.
Was the byline written by AI?
This comment was also brought to you by the artificial intelligence boom, and has as much to do with it.
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So long as they keep international regulations in place - or, rather, bolster them - it might work.
No
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