Microsoft Looking to Use Nuclear Reactors to Power Its Data Centers::undefined

  • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That feeling when your society is so dysfunctional that only corporations can build much needed advanced infrastructure.

      • seaQueue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Which is great when the sun’s up and the weather is good. Similar deal for wind power, it’s great when the conditions are good. We still haven’t got very large scale storage where we need it to rely on renewables full time. Nuclear helps while we sort out storage but we need to be very, very careful about corruption - if corporations can screw over the public for money they’ve demonstrated that they will, and nuclear implementations cost a lot of money.

          • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Nuclear power is not exclusively used for AI. Additionally, if they have their own power, then that frees up whatever energy they use for AI from other plants to be used for other purposes.

            • tillimarleen@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              it still isn‘t a net gain for public infrastructure. which already lacks much needed investment.

                • Cyberwitch_7493@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 year ago

                  If they do feed the grid, they’ll probably get some credit back which ultimately lines their pockets instead of funding public infrastructure.

    • lightnegative@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Government doesn’t build infrastructure either, it mostly just funds private companies to build it for them.

      Theres a whole contract bidding process and everything

  • Nine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That’s … actually pretty neat.

    Makes a lot of sense given the amount of power needed to run a data centers like that. Definitely cleaner in the long run too.

    They’ll still need backup power/generators but they’ll need a lot less of them and they’ll mostly be needed for the nuclear parts.

    • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      They could just run renewables since they already need batteries as you said.

      Also i dont want incompetent people operating nuclear reactors. We saw what happened with that multiple times already and you still shouldnt eat boars in eastern Europe bc. auf radiation levels thanks to fucking Tschernobyl.

    • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There is another thread stating it is because training AI takes a lot of energy. Any reason to boost nuclear plants is good to me.

      • Richard@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Right, any reason to throw millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium is a good one to you, I wouldn’t have expected anything else.

    • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The whole plan has only one minor flaw: It’ll never work. Building a nuclear power plant never was, never is and never will be economical. The current boom in nuclear grandiose announcements is nothing but a smokescreen. The purpose is to delay the adoption of renewable energy with lofty promises that will never come to fruition. Then we’d be forced to keep using fossil fuels, which is the end goal.

      • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You comment has one minor flaw.

        Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.

        Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.

        • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          The NRC approved the design, so now they can start building it. That is still a looong way off from having a working reactor. And all those companies are way behind their originally planned schedules. Which is my whole point. I’m not saying they might not get this stuff to work some day. I’m saying that it will take way too long to make any contribution to fighting climate change. We need to decarbonise now and and we have the technology to do it now.

          • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That’s got nothing to do with Microsoft though. Their reactor wouldn’t be used to power other people, only their own data centers.

            They currently buy that from the grid, and they don’t really have any control over the source of that electricity generation. We should absolutely be pushing the power generators to go with renewables, but Microsoft isn’t a generator. They’re a customer like you or me.

            They’re looking at moving to small reactors eventually because of the cost of buying from the grid, not for the environment.

            • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              It would still be far cheaper to deploy the same kind of capacity in renewables. Whoever came up with this brilliant plan can’t do basic math.

              • Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Probably not because they would need to buy MUCH more land to do it.

                SMRs are so much more compact per MW. The one from NuScale that is approved already can do 924MW in 0.05 square miles. To do the same capacity with wind would take 94 square miles and 17 square miles for solar.

                Buying 17 square miles of land close enough to just one of their data centers would cost billions, on top of the cost of paying for the panels and installation.

                The whole point of them looking at these at all is because they do not want to purchase from the grid.

  • YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Clippy: it looks like you are trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown….

    Oh yes, what could go wrong. Windows can’t even run an advertising board without blue screening…

    “The core is about to melt down! Hit the shutdown button!!” “I can’t, it’s installing updates!!!”

      • Joe@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        It mostly runs. An Azure-optimized HyperV build is the primary hypervisor I think, but I’d wager that most customer VMs on Azure are running Linux. However, if you want to run Windows in the cloud, it’s a decent option.

        My experience with Azure has been less than stellar. They have good API documentation, but tooling & core compute is a bit janky. The web UI is also a throwback to a past era, but you can’t really avoid it when debugging issues which you have to do often during development. Then the developers want to forget all about it … which is a problem when something inevitably breaks.

        • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          If something like that actually were to happen, that would be a huge design flaw. Not that I’d be surprised, though.

    • Smokeydope@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Somewhere in some timeline relatively close to ours this actually happens, the idea of 3 mile island/Chernobyl 2.0 event happening to microsofts personal reactor because a forced windows update screws over emergency override software is peak absurdist dystopia that I get chuckles from

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think Bill Gates has any significant involvement with Microsoft these days, but wasn’t he pushing for greater nucleus power usage, including trialing reactors in India?

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      wasn’t he pushing for greater nucleus power

      You’re thinking of Gavin Belson. Nucleus was a Hooli product.

      • hark@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        LOL I didn’t even realize I made that typo. I’ve been typing nucleus a lot more than nuclear lately.

    • SeaJ@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      He is the primary investor of TerraPower. Not sure about anything with India. They do have something that is being planned in Wyoming.

      • hark@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ah, thanks. I looked it up and apparently he had planned something in China but the plans were scrapped and now it’s Wyoming. This is what I get for not looking it up to refresh my memory beforehand.

    • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      He was promoting something called traveling wave reactors. Which never panned out. Just like nothing will become of this.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Somehow, the idea that a company with a safety and security issues history like Microsoft would run a nuclear reactor sounds like a very, very bad idea.

    Do you remember the Aegis cruiser debacle? They didn’t even manage to run a f-ing diesel engine under Windows.

    • Madison420@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not the worry you should be worried about. Once they can cut the governmental power cord corporations would have exactly zero limits.

  • MiikCheque@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Microsoft and nuclear reactor are words that should never be in the same sentence - easy recipe for disaster

  • geissi@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    companies like Microsoft are always considering novel methods for powering (and cooling) their data centers

    If they are near population centers, they could use the excess heat from both for remote heating.
    But mostly adding a nuclear power plant to a data center will require additional cooling.

  • vividspecter@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This is talking about SMRs and not traditional reactors. SMRs still haven’t left the prototype stage, but maybe they’ll start to be useful in a decade’s time, who knows.

    • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      That would be a wildly optimistic timeline. And even if they managed to produce a working system by then, it would still take decades longer to scale up to the point where these things could make a meaningful contribution. That’s time we simply don’t have.

  • lettruthout@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What could go wrong?

    This for-profit company will finally come up with a solution to nuclear waste that has eluded the industry for decades. But if that turns out to be expensive, Microsoft will be around for thousands of years to ensure that nothing leaks that shouldn’t. Of course the US government will help them with the cost of establishing the reactors and when something goes wrong (because “nuclear”).

    /s

    • Fraylor@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Shrug. It’s better than nothing or throwing ones hands up and saying “oh well crank up the coal burners!”

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        Yeah in the meantime they could just build centifold that power in renewables and an electricity grid to make it available everywhere.

        Everyone who is strongly pro nuclear is also pro coal and other fossil fuels because they do fhe bidding of the cirrent fossil industries. Just using uranium instead of carbon.

    • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Almost all nuclear reactors in the US are privately owned.

      Im not arguing for or against, but this would be nothing out of the ordinary.

    • Zetta@mander.xyz
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      1 year ago

      There are many companies developing small nuclear reactors for deployment in a lot wider locations compared to current nuclear. This is something humanity needs a lot of focus on to help protect the environment and meet our ever growing energy needs. The more companies working on SMRs the better in my opinion.

      Nuclear waste is an overblown argument compared to the benefits nuclear power provides.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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      1 year ago
      • We have ways of storing waste safely, which are the same ways the planet has stored radioactive material for millennia.
      • There are experimental fission reactors that can consume this waste, as well as possible fusion reactors in the near future, so storage may become moot.
      • Coal ash disperses a crapton of radioactive material into the air, which is way worse than lodging it deep underground, encased on concrete.
      • gnygnygny@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago
        • underground storage is starting. And some of them already failed.
        • gen4 are experimental since several decades. None of them are commercial
        • last low radiation studies should worried anybody working in any nuclear plant.
      • SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo
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        1 year ago

        If it was google it would definitely end badly when they decided to kill it off since the reactor can’t show web ads.