@Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd

I live 2km from the Columbia, downstream of Hanford...

@pieist @Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd All those gamma rays and no superpowers. Totes unfair.

@BashStKid Hang on, the ability to create virtual realities entirely in my head in which I have superpowers isn't itself a superpower? Ffffff....

@pieist Recursive solipsism, the ultimate superpower?

@Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd Nuclear waste isn’t as difficult a problem as people think. It can be buried deep enough that only a modern nation state could get near it, and if they do, by nearly astronomical odds, stumble on it, the tomb would be so conspicuous only fools wouldn’t check for all forms of safety.

The waste problem is entirely political.

@Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd That doesn’t solve the other issues. Our current nuclear energy strategy is an aging disaster. Solar, wind, and tidal are where we need to go right now. I don’t see the political will to rebuild our nuclear energy infrastructure coming any time soon.

@Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd

Solar power satellites are where it's at, baby. Can also be repurposed as a Starlink-zappers, for planetary demusking.

@pieist @Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd How do we get the power from there to here? We can’t beam 1.21 gigawatts from space to earth without some serious atmospheric side effects.

@Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd

Great Scott! (Whoa, this is heavy.)

There's a lot of debate on the topic, but purportedly at geostationary distances the maser beam spread would be sufficient enough that harms would be pretty small and mitigable ... perhaps even negligible compared to those of legacy energy sources. I'm not going to try to link a lot of resources, I'd just be googling for them same as you.

@Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @Npars01 @pieist @dragonsidedd I don’t think they are that short lived. I think I heard 20 years.

@Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell @dragonsidedd I’m neither pro nir anti nuclear. I think it could be done safely. It isn’t being done safely. It won’t be done safely any time soon, so we should move on until we get our act together.

@Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell
FWIW I am super bullish on high temperature superconductors for spherical tokamaks.

And a viable machine is coming online in <2 years

https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

@dragonsidedd @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell Can we wait until a technology exists before we count on it?

Also, non-real-time computing does not require a fixed-power energy source. Things like nuclear is totally unnecessary for training tasks. Train when you have power. Pause the training when you don’t.

And nuclear is not a stable source of energy. France had to turn off nuclear because of too-hot rivers, and emergency shutdowns are common.

@ahltorp @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

> Can we wait until a technology exists before we count on it?

You should learn about HTS. It is decades-old technology that has been gaining incrementally.

> nuclear is totally unnecessary for training tasks. Train when you have power. Pause the training when you don’t.

This would take orders of magnitude *more* power due to the save and read data required for suspend-and-restore.

@dragonsidedd @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell I was not referring to HTS, I was referring to fusion reactors. Once they a) work, and b) have been tested a while, then they are relevant. Before then it’s just wishful thinking, which is no basis for a system of government.

As for pausing, I recommend basic power management literature. This is not the forum for a detailed discussion. I would write a longer text, but: sealioning.

@ahltorp @dragonsidedd @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

Speaking of which, if crocodiles are flourishing in French rivers thanks to nuclear power, just imagine how the sea lions must feel.

@pieist @ahltorp @dragonsidedd @Extra_Special_Carbon @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

The sea lions die of cancer from radioactive fish.

@ahltorp @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

Honest question:

What is your explanation for why the professionals who specialize in data canter design are putting their careers and companies' investments on the line with this specific solution?

And why does "baseline power load" always factor so highly in the relevant proposals?

@dragonsidedd @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell Easy. Because they want the hardware to work constantly to increase ROI, and then they externalise the power network costs.

That should, however, not be society’s problem to solve for them.

@ahltorp @Extra_Special_Carbon @Npars01 @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell
you must deal with some strange IT providers.

at the company I work for, increasing ROI at a datacenter involves *minimizing* its energy usage, while still being able to serve the customers' data

@dragonsidedd @ahltorp @Extra_Special_Carbon @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

Simple answer?
Saudi Arabia wants to become a nuclear power and an AI superpower. To end democracy. To keep frying a planet.

The folks implementing AI are funded by the richest people on the planet.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-administration-approved-nuclear-deals-saudi-arabia-khashoggi/story?id=63492793

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/us-approved-secret-nuclear-power-work-for-saudi-arabia-idUSKCN1R82LY/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/technology/saudi-arabia-ai.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/us/politics/kushner-private-equity-saudi-arabia.html

And Republican billionaires are helping them do that. Ellison. Musk. Thiel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/28/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-to-maintain-twitter-stake

@Npars01 @ahltorp @Extra_Special_Carbon @pieist @Nimbius666 @gimulnautti @noellemitchell

I've been involved with data center planning in a large cloud company. Would you believe, Saudi Arabia's requirements have never come up, but base load considerations have.

Also if you want to "fry the planet", non-CO2-generating fission is counter to the end goal.

Fun fact: if your wastewater stream is hot, you are losing money and the executives probably want that to stop