Plants that take ten years to build don’t seem like a very good response to a boom that measures dataceneter build time in months and will probably collapse in a year or two as hype is replaced by the reality of the technology. Battery backed solar and wind on the other hand are both cheaper, and can be built faster than the ‘AI’ datacenters they are ment to power.
Don’t get me wrong, I think nuclear power is important to the energy transition, and will find its use in certain use cases like large scale marine transport or places near the artic circle, but the window to build it was 1970 to 2010. At a point when the biggest thing slowing down green energy if finding financing for it, it makes sense to go with the lowest cost option available, which is battery backed solar.
Plants take 10 year to build because of a purposely complicated burocratic process. We churn out at least 1 nuclear submarines a year.
Edit: I still think you’re right, renewables and batteries are cheaper than nuclear in most first world countries, but the building process doesn’t have to be that long.
10 years is unrealistic, today it’s closer to 15 years. Both time frames would be too late. Doesn’t matter either way though since the US elections. The world is not going to be able to compensate for the US emissions under Trump’s fascism when we were already on our way to 3 degrees globally BEFORE that.
In domain-specific applications, yeah, agree. But building massive datacenters so randos on the internet can ask it to draw a picture of the Spice Girls if they were all anthropomorphic top-hats is a waste of resources, IMO lol.
AI was never going to save the climate. Its meant to give elites even more control over the population
Anyone who believes it’s going to take AI to find out fossil fuels are killing us all rapidly is a complete fucking moron.
5 years ago: “We really need to be careful with AI, it might turn everything into paperclips!!!”
Now:" AI needs paperclips to run so we need to destroy our planet and turn it into paperclips for AI"
Drexler must be rolling in his grave.
AI won’t fix the climate, but it also doesn’t need fossil fuels either.