this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2024
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Fuck AI
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If all fossil fuel power plants were converted to nuclear then tech power consumption wouldn't even matter. Again, it was the oil industry that railroaded nuclear power as being unsafe.
Do you have a proposed solution for nuclear waste?
We can (but largely don’t) recycle nuclear waste, completely negating the need for ultra-long term (i.e., measured in the thousands of years) storage and getting more overall energy relative to the waste that will end up in long term (measured in hundreds of years) storage.
That said, my understanding is that we have a plan for dealing with the waste, but it’s been awaiting formal review for a decade. This plan was already approved in 2002 but was shut down in 2010 for political reasons, not because of technical or safety concerns.
The one we already use and works fine: cement it and bury it
I do. The same thing we have been doing with it this entire time storing it in underground bunkers. Unlike the propaganda, the waste from nuclear is rather small and unlike pollution from fossil fuel plants, it is easily contained however much longer living. The benefit still out weigh the cost of managing disposal. The reality is that there is plenty of uninhabited land on the planet where nuclear waste can be stored and isolated for thousands of years. One day, hopefully, we will have fusion power which won't generate waste. And perhaps, someday we will also figure out how to permanently disposal of the nuclear waste. In the mean time, storage is a fine solution that far out weighs polluting the atmosphere with burning things.
If we had infinite money plus infinite people with the required skills to design and build nuclear power plants plus a magical method to build nuclear reactors in 2 months (or even instantly !) plus managed to convince the public opinion that nuclear energy is actually fine, then the climate crisis would be only partially solved ! Hurray ! (This doesn't in and of itself solve food production & consumption, transportation and other sources of land use change emissions, we'd need a whole lot more work or on many other subjects)
In more serious terms (Net Zero research), nuclear isn't perfect nor is it the be all and end all solution, but it IS globally a part of the solution to generate cleaner electricity and cutting emissions. However, since we don't have all the magical things I was listing earlier, its development encounters many roadblocks and it turns out that wind and solar are extremely well scalable, integrates pretty well into grids as long as we're willing to develop the (mostly known) solutions to counter their variability (several exemples of high integration rates in different settings). The issue is that all of this (both nuclear and renewables) demands a lot of investment in terms of money, of people with the required skill sets and educating the public opinion that this is needed and desirable. And that's a MASSIVE challenge.
Which is why, to get to the point, the enormous electricity use of AI is actually a problem because its additional power consumption is keeping fossil power plants running or making them run more when emissions should be declining due to advancements in low carbon electricity production (mostly renewables). In general, it makes reaching Net Zero goals harder.