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Nuclear shills out in force in the comments π¬
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I mean better nuclear than burning coal. I don't get why nuclear has such a bad wrap, it's a reliable zero emissions way to produce power, takes up way less space than a solar or wind farm and the only down side is the nuclear waste produced. Its not the best option sure, but far from the worst! Lots of fear mongering about melt downs, but if your gonna cry about that u better not advocate for electric cars because God forbid those batteries can light up too once in a blue moon! Hell just a few weeks ago an electric car and seperate incident an elec bus burnt down a set of toll booths not too far from me. Then then one lit up again while on the roll back. Can't remember the last nuclear melt down around here though ;)
Article pitches this as either/or when it's very obviously going to be more of one producing more of the other.
I do get tired of the "nuclear energy is better than climate change!" as though our voracious demand for cheap energy will neatly cap itself the moment we get X new nuclear facilities online.
But I also get tired of hearing people insist that nuclear energy is on the horizon, when nobody is building new plants. This is a vaporware technology. It isn't in the production pipeline and there's no reason to believe posting your Nuke-Love online will change that
Technically speaking, everything is nuclear power. The sun, our star, is a fusion generator.
Wind? winds are caused by weather patterns, which are caused by the sun, either through radiative heating or tidal forces.
Solar? Also the sun.
Hell, nearly every element in existence is the result of fusion in stars. Like coal and natural gas.
Even chemical reactions in batteries are an indirect result of nuclear power.
to make an apple pie from scratch...
Since data centers will be run by nuclear power on-site in the future they will soon have both...
No they won't. Natural gas turbines baybee.
The joke of the Grok AI is how it's generating power in one of the least cost efficient manners possible.
Musk is just burning a ton of short term capital to avoid lobbying Mississippi (fucking Mississippi, the most easy state to bend over a rail with lobbyists in the country) for a hard-line to the existing grid and some upgrades to capacity funded on the public dime.
That's what you get to do as a trillionaire. Make stupid business decisions and then dump the turd onto your investors when they want to invest in your lucrative network of federal Pentagon contracts.
Not if Trump keeps Hormuz fucked.
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else's price too? It's cheaper for the data center operator.
...because they will suck the grid dry.
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much. If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical. Then it is profitable to build a power plant. If they are generous, they could even sell some electricity to the community for a "reasonable" price.
Because eventually the grid electricity costs too much
Only a couple hundred mill a year per data center. Building a nuclear power plant costs several billion and isn't free to operate either, so it's not pure capex, there's still opex involved.
If you consume more than the community, then the prices will be astronomical
Prices rise for everyone so it becomes the community's problem as much as it becomes the data center's problem. The US in particular has three grids, so in reality, the community is either the western US, the eastern US, or Texas.
Then it is profitable to build a power plant.
Profitable over a decade or more maybe. The data center isn't guaranteed to be in operation for that long. You know those ~30-40k USD "graphics" cards they use? The ones that a single AI data center would likely have tens of thousands of, often even around 100k? They're used for about 3 years usually, often less. They become obsolete in that timeframe, just unable to compete with newer products in terms of both raw performance as well as efficiency. That's up to 3 billion dollars of GPUs every 3 years or less, per data center. Just a tiny economic downturn or people seriously realizing that this bubble is going to have to pop eventually and they'll have to stop running these data centers.
NPPs also usually take many years to complete. It took nearly two decades for the Finns to get Olkiluoto 3 running. Data centers need to be ready in a few years because in 5 years the AI craze could be over and they'll no longer be needed.
AI companies ain't gonna do shit for electricity generation if they're not forced to.
In my country, joining the grid or upgrading your circuit breaker has a one-time amperage-based fee (assuming you're close to the substation, otherwise it gets more expensive). I propose that for companies looking to consume huge amounts of electricity, there should also be a mandatory generation capacity increase fee that could be paid out to a nearby municipal power company that then uses it to build more power plants, or to some level of local government that could then sponsor building a power plant or 10.
Edit: Whoever downvoted me must think that data center operators are going to do anything out of the good of their hearts lol
People on lemmy downvote you just for disagreeing ALL the time, even if you make (as you just did) an informed and thoughtful reply. Itβs honestly just as bad as Reddit with the downvote shit
The lemms are peculiar like that
Well yeah. Nuclear power plant somehow manage to consume less water
I would honestly rather have a loaded nuclear silo right underneath my house than a massive AI data center within 1000 miles of me
Russia would like to talk to you.
Of course, one of them actually does good for my community.
Well no shit. One of those things is actually useful.
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