Hot take: big tech companies finally fixing their longstanding power usage problem by generating their own clean energy is a good thing, actually.
The reactors e.g Google is getting are generation 4 molten salt reactors that use low enriched pebbles that cannot get hot enough to melt down even with all cooling lost. Kairos Power seems to have extensively tested their reactors for abuse resistance and has a lot of faith in them.
Are we in favor of clean nuclear energy or what? what's wrong? 🤷
I don't really know if I'm a fan of Microsoft rebooting the infamous Three Mile Island, that's not a gen 4 reactor even if hypothetically safe with modern control regimes, but the little modular MSRs that are being deployed by others seem fine with me honestly.
I'm happy that big companies are finally taking responsibility for their power usage, and without everyone's efforts to hold them responsible for it, we wouldn't have this. I would count this as a win, I'm unsure why people are salty tbh.
"but it's just because AI"
1) False, the internet grows immensely every day and the power usage always was enormous, AI is actually a mere fraction of the power usage even today
2) the fact that you're not the target audience for AI doesn't mean nobody is interested in generic ML
3) I don't think it's a problem even if they literally run while(true) loops on that cleanly generated power, it'd be inefficient, but it's their own problem, whereas non-clean external power usage is everyone's problem
@anthropy nuclear power, even the Chernobyl kind, is some of the safest sources of power we have. Arguably large scale solar and wind is safer, but considering the need for storage I don't know.
I am way more concerned about the source of the material to build the data centre, lifetime of a computer is about five years while a nuclear power plant can last a century. Disposal of the toxic chemicals used in the production of computers present their own disposal dilemma.
