Tech companies are turning to nuclear to fulfill the skyrocketing energy needs of artificial intelligence, with major corporations like Amazon, Google and Microsoft announcing plans to invest in nuclear power. But the speed at which energy needs are growing may not align with the construction or revitalization of nuclear infrastructure, says Alex de Vries, who researches the unintended consequences of AI and cryptocurrencies. There may be a “mismatch between the needs of tech companies today” and the future, while nuclear power continues to carry the same safety risks that led to its phasing out in the first place.
Wouldn’t it be an obvious part of the price they will pay for the electricity? The electricity producer or whatever intermediate in charge of the waste, will bill its work for waste storage, and it will end up on the bill of the energy consumer. What am I missing?
You’re missing that no one ever invested in nuclear if they didn’t expect to socialize storage cost. The premise is completely absurd too — you can’t keep anything safe for over 100k years. There’s no way to ensure that people won’t dig up rocks, even on a 500-year horizon.
The entire history of humanity is only 300k years long, and our languages as well as our societal systems of organization are much younger.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time, the worry is rather preventing people to dig them up unknowingly in the future. Actually dangerous wastes have way smaller half lives that that.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time
Ideally. Though you can do a 80s Germany: Find a suboptimal storage site right next to the inner-German border, so as to piss off the other side of the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, only a few years after you reunite (and it feels so good), except now you have a bunch of contaminated water in your storage site after mere decades.
But quite honestly — how can you predict the fate of even the “safest” storage site? Will there be a fracking boom near it in the next 200 years? Something other new technology? And in that sense, it really doesn’t matter whether half life is 10k years or 100k years.
Wouldn’t it be an obvious part of the price they will pay for the electricity? The electricity producer or whatever intermediate in charge of the waste, will bill its work for waste storage, and it will end up on the bill of the energy consumer. What am I missing?
You’re missing that no one ever invested in nuclear if they didn’t expect to socialize storage cost. The premise is completely absurd too — you can’t keep anything safe for over 100k years. There’s no way to ensure that people won’t dig up rocks, even on a 500-year horizon.
The entire history of humanity is only 300k years long, and our languages as well as our societal systems of organization are much younger.
Long term storage is not supposed to require maintenance over that time, the worry is rather preventing people to dig them up unknowingly in the future. Actually dangerous wastes have way smaller half lives that that.
Ideally. Though you can do a 80s Germany: Find a suboptimal storage site right next to the inner-German border, so as to piss off the other side of the Iron Curtain. Surprisingly, only a few years after you reunite (and it feels so good), except now you have a bunch of contaminated water in your storage site after mere decades.
But quite honestly — how can you predict the fate of even the “safest” storage site? Will there be a fracking boom near it in the next 200 years? Something other new technology? And in that sense, it really doesn’t matter whether half life is 10k years or 100k years.
over half a century of fear mongering from the nuclear industry itself to upsell safety systems