Lemmy.VG
  • Communities
  • Create Post
  • heart
    Support Lemmy
  • search
    Search
  • Login
  • Sign Up
jeffw@lemmy.world to Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.@slrpnk.net · 8 months ago

The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback

www.wired.com

external-link
message-square
3
fedilink
24
external-link

The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback

www.wired.com

jeffw@lemmy.world to Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.@slrpnk.net · 8 months ago
message-square
3
fedilink
Microsoft’s deal to bring back a Three Mile Island nuclear reactor is just one part of Big Tech’s quid pro quo with nuclear power.
  • Five@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    8 months ago

    Alex de Vries predicted that current AI technology could be on track to annually consume as much electricity as the entire country of Ireland (29.3 terawatt-hours per year). For comparison, the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index suggests Bitcoin uses 141-160 terawatt-hours (TWhs) of electricity annually. That’s ~0.7% of the world’s consumed electricity in 2022. The process of minting cryptocurrency is a very public activity, so the numbers are difficult to fudge. The cost of bringing extremely expensive nuclear reactors back online and driving demand for environmentally destructive Uranium mining and processing suggests de Vries’ guess was conservative.

    I’m reminded of Jevon’s Paradox as applied to energy generation. I hope the AI bubble pops before much more investment goes into nuclear energy.

    • MrMakabar@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 months ago

      Microsoft is already measuring its datacenters in GW. I would not be surprised, if next year all of big tech add data centers consuming as much as Ireland. Microsoft wirh 5GW is already pretty close.

Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.@slrpnk.net

climate@slrpnk.net

Subscribe from Remote Instance

Create a post
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]

Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.

Visibility: Public
globe

This community can be federated to other instances and be posted/commented in by their users.

  • 319 users / day
  • 1.86K users / week
  • 3.76K users / month
  • 9.49K users / 6 months
  • 7 local subscribers
  • 6.52K subscribers
  • 4.88K Posts
  • 18.3K Comments
  • Modlog
  • mods:
  • silence7@slrpnk.net
  • BE: 0.19.5
  • Modlog
  • Legal
  • Instances
  • Docs
  • Code
  • join-lemmy.org