this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
85 points (95.7% liked)

Technology

59589 readers
3148 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
L3s@fry.gs
L4s@fry.gs
L4s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
85
Hungry for Energy, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Turn to Nuclear Power | Large technology companies are investing billions of dollars in nuclear energy as an emissions-free source of electricity for AI (www.nytimes.com)
submitted 1 month ago by silence7@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

My impression is that this is a PR push, designed to avoid having to invest in renewables, and let them keep on burning gas and coal, rather than something likely to come to fruition.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Mostly:

  • New nuclear is really expensive
  • It also takes a long time to deliver
  • The new reactor examples in here consist of reactors from suppliers who haven't done that before

So it has the feel of a plan to promise to spend a lot of money several years from now, and get a lot of PR points today, and quietly cancel the project later.

[–] bizzle@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Well that is, indeed, wack. I appreciate your perspective, I can't believe I missed the "corporations lying for money" angle. I'm usually on top of it.

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It also takes a long time to deliver

Not that much. Do remember there's a lot of oil money pouring into FUDing about nuclear.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

They're talking about 5+ years on the new nuclear in these. And they haven't done it before, so a 30% deadline slip is realistic.

You can put up a lot of wind and solar in that time.

[–] 0x0@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You can put up a lot of wind and solar in that time.

Which needs a stable baseline to counteract lack of supply and/or a lot of lithium. And space.

[–] silence7@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 month ago

The existing large-scale batteries are largely lithium. There are a bunch of iron-chemistry ones and sodium-ion ones which have been deployed over the past year, with factories going up to scale them up. I'm not expecting to be limited by lithium availability for stationary batteries.