So, your battery is good for 9 hours of compute time. What happens if you have a couple of cloudy days in a row? And what's the insolation during the winter (in many places, it's 1/10th of the amount of summer sunlight)
Make the usage of fossil fuels a crime against humanity / all sentient life, and use nuclear reactors for base load with renewables for variable load.
Modernize the power grid by including excess energy storage mechanisms (batteries, water pumps, etc), harden it against solar flares, and create a profitable energy sink to keep reactors running (crypto mining) to further stabilize the grid.
Heavily subsidize electric vehicles to the point of gas trade-ins being a net profit for anyone with a car, and mandate conversion to electric vehicles.
Make all fossil fuels shipping barges illegal. Subsidize the usage of nuclear reactors on shipping barges. This can be done in several ways, such as expanding an agency like the NRC to manage reactors in consumer usages.
Those don't require a miracle. They require a sensible population to wake up and make the world better without compromises.
In order to replace the world's current energy mix with nuclear, we'd have to switch on a new nuclear plant every day for the next several decades. All of that new infrastructure would also require massive amounts of fossil fuels to build (which you've magically made illegal) and would only last a few decades before having to be replaced (presumably without requiring any fossil fuels by then).
There isn't even enough copper on earth to electrify everything.
U235 has an energy density around 80,000,000 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg).
Burning coal has an energy density around 24 MJ/kg for lignite (a lower grade of coal) to about 32 MJ/kg for anthracite (the highest grade of coal).
This makes utilizing U235 for energy around 2,500,000 more efficient than coal.
If we used thorium-232 instead, the theoretical energy density is around 79,000,000 megajoules per kilogram (MJ/kg) if considering the full lifecycle of the reaction.
The physics speaks for itself, regardless of people too dense to understand numbers.
Just because fossil fuels own our governments, industry, and most societal mechanisms, doesn't make the world they've fabricated real.
Usage of fossil fuels implies utilizing oil as a fuel. In other words, other usages of oil are still on the table -- plastics, chemistry, etc.
Infrastructure would not be so difficult to electrify. We already all know how to do it, and many countries are much further along than the US.
Water heating can be electrified. Heat pumps are already superior to other methods of heating / cooling. Trains can be electrified. Semis can be electrified.
I believe it would not be much of a challenge to make nuclear powered aircrafts with today's technology. It seems crazy because nuclear anything has been made to seem crazy, because it is literally free energy. The cost is overcoming our fears, and putting in some work to make it infallible on safety.
We have all the tools and all the capabilities. There are no longer excuses. The technology is here and has been here for a long time, to make a society that flourishes in every fashion.
What you are suggesting would require coordination on a scale that's almost unimaginable. The effort and coordination required would be similar to wartime mobilization.
The nuclear fuel cycle is exponentially less ecologically expensive than the fossil fuel cycle -- and it hasn't even been remotely optimized to the extent that it can be.
Nuclear fission is millions of times more efficient than any of the nearest energy sources when considering purely energy density. That efficiency compared to the cost and ecological danger is barely even tapped at this point, because it blows everything else out of the water by orders of magnitude.
The nuclear fuel cycle is economically expensive, not ecologically nor physically. And it is economically expensive because we are all slaves to the fossil fuel industry, who own nearly everything.
Why would slavers / masters living in luxury sacrifice everything so that their slaves would flourish instead? Answer: they wouldn't. Instead, everything would be rigged in their favor. Their most powerful opposition would be made to seem weaker than them.
>Make the usage of fossil fuels a crime against humanity
Delusional.
Fossil fuels have been unbelievably beneficial to humanity and are absolutely vital for modern society.
If a theoretical global ruler immediately outlawed fossil fuels they would be remembered as the greatest villain in world history, killing hundreds of millions and plunging us into chaos.
>They require a sensible population to wake up and make the world better without compromises.
No compromises? Sounds like utopian thinking. Tradeoffs exist everywhere.
I’m old enough to remember when companies were eager to claim that their data centers (or some aspect) were finally “carbon neutral”.
Now, with the enormous data center growth for AI purposes, companies don’t even bother pretending that any of this is sustainable.
At best, they might delude themselves into believing that a glorified text autocomplete program will magically solve the world’s problems, including the unsustainability of the machines running the program.
We're way past that. Global warming requires (or will, soon enough) heat pumps for survival in many regions of the world. Plenty of regions require large amount of electricity for life critical functions. Degrowth isn't the answer.
Yes, they will, which will drive conflict, xenophobia and economic destabilization in the countries those people move to, which will exacerbate global political tensions and probably wind up with us all getting wiped out in a nuclear configuration sometime before the century is over, so we might as well have really nice autocomplete before we get there.
It's just that investors are now completely over the whole "DEI and ESG" alphabet investing type of phase after seeing that it has not helped companies produce returns at all.
ESGs are still going strong, the whole point is potentially accepting lower returns in exchange for voting with your wallet on what companies you support. Investors, the people who collect money for a living, have never been the target for ESGs.
> Almost always people use that word to imply something clandestine, misleading, or both.
No, propaganda is often quite blatant. Look at the posters from both of the World Wars, depicting US enemies as vicious, inhuman monsters.
Even the “Rosie the Riveter” and Uncle Sam imagery is propaganda.
Propaganda can be any sort of one-sided media used to manipulate public opinion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be banned, but people need to learn more media literacy to recognize it.
> The presented data, especially for 2022, are thus preliminary and subject to backward revisions. The more recent data are usually more incomplete and therefore can undergo upward revisions over time. This implies that several of the reported excess mortality estimates can be underestimations.
> During the public meeting, residents questioned what will happen to the data centers when the nuclear power plant is eventually decommissioned. One reactor is set to be decommissioned in 2042, while the other is slated to be shut down in 2044. However, their licenses could be extended.
Of course, nobody is thinking that far ahead. If we cared about the future, we wouldn't be building energy-draining data centers anywhere.
The grid in Pennsylvania is mostly gas and coal. If we actually wanted to eliminate emissions and electrify everything, then we would take a triage approach to building any new infrastructure.
Nameplate of the Susquehanna generator is ~2.6GW. As long as that much new firm renewables capacity comes online in the next 20 years close enough to get power to the facility with transmission, this is not a terrible problem to solve.
> According to data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory compiled by the Environment America Research & Policy Center, Pennsylvania has enough solar potential today to meet the state's electric demand in 2020 by almost fivefold.
In short, this is a reasonable solution today (colo'ing datacenter load near this low carbon generator) and can be solved for in the future. It's actually very good imho that folks today are taking into account carbon emissions when citing this type of load/demand, versus just dropping datacenters anywhere (looking at you Missouri!).
> The largest solar power project in Wyoming, which plans to supply electricity to a burgeoning infrastructure of power-hungry data centers in south Cheyenne, was given the green light for construction Tuesday by a key state permitting agency.
> As long as that much new firm renewables capacity comes online in the next 20 years close enough to get power to the facility with transmission, this is not a terrible problem to solve.
Nuclear and renewables are not 1:1 interchangeable. Nuclear adds to the base electric capacity —- it’s a constant 2GW. To replace it with intermittent renewables requires several times that amount of capacity.
And electricity is only about 20% of our energy use. As we’re electrifying heating and transportation, all of that adds an enormous demand to the electric grid. The electricity powering Amazon’s 900MW data center could be used to power people’s basic needs.
The “energy transition” is not a simple problem to solve —- if it were, we’d be doing it. In reality, additional renewable generation is only adding to the total energy consumption, not replacing fossil fuels.
Like I said, if we cared about the future, we’d take a triage approach to any new electric loads.
That’s always been an issue. Years ago, researchers demonstrated in an experiment that they could swing public opinion about electoral candidates by manipulating search results. Who knows if Google took that experiment and ran with it?
I mean, that's always been the TikTok argument, to me.
Widely-used platforms that can +/- 1% their algorithms to affect democracy have pretty high burdens of trust/transparency, and we're not close to that with any platform (Chinese or not) that I'm aware of.
Meta's probably the closest, because of scrutiny, but afaik even their transparency isn't sufficient for realtime attestation.
DC arcs don’t self extinguish like AC ones do, because there is no zero-voltage crossing phase point. For a given voltage, it makes DC much harder on relays, and DC relays are more expensive and harder to produce.
This is true even though AC peak voltage is quite a bit higher than the RMS AC voltage. 170V for ‘120V AC’ for instance.
It matters for switches and things releasing in a physical sense, so muscles may not come into it. Also, there are issues with high voltage DC contactors welding themselves closed in high demand EV situations because they were sized incorrectly or had poor control.
Thanks, dangerous in the sense of damaging equipment/starting a fire? (As opposed to say shocking someone)
> Also, there are issues with high voltage DC contactors welding themselves closed in high demand EV situations because they were sized incorrectly or had poor control.
Would this have have made a difference if it were AC? I think AC welding is also a thing.
AC definitionally has zero voltage 60 times a second, so when you try to "disconnect" by breaking the switch, the flowing electricity doesn't hold the switch closed. It's why when you look at relays they're rated for 12VDC or 120VAC (that and the commonality of house voltage and automotive voltage). I think the true values are probably a little higher in each, but you'd find that relays cannot break contact at 120VDC where they can at 120VAC.
Thank you! So it's the "stickiness" of DC causing these problems, eh? I wonder if there are applications where the DC could temporarily be converted to AC or turned into some kind of oscillating DC temporarily to use more hardware.
>So it's the "stickiness" of DC causing these problems, eh?
Yes, but it's more than just sticky in the sense of welded-contacts. A DC Arc is a continuous plasma that is conductive. That means the arc continues even with a significant air gap. The arc stretches as contacts are separated and yet the arc continues. That means that fuses can burn out completely but still conduct. Breaker-switches can trip and then catch fire while they continue to conduct rather than safely interrupting the arc. So fuses, breakers and relays all need to be designed specifically for DC or significantly de-rated compared to their AC voltage and amperage ratings.
> applications where the DC could temporarily be converted to AC
