Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there's very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they're able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Could be worse, could be running MacOS. Surely nothing bad can happen while the entire system freezes for no reason for 15 minutes or more without any possible input from the user. It will always fix it self... (hopefully before the reactor achieves a run away meltdown chain.)
Reminds me of that time the technodork ran his minecraft reactor with opencomputers and lost his base because the computer blue screened. Almost as funny as that time the entire city lit up because they were using raw radio signals to control their reactor and a nearby thunderstrike instructed the reactor to drop all the fuel and go supercritical. This is why you add realism to video games, it leads to hilarious stuff like this.
EDIT: That was actually the same server where they sabotaged the entire electrical grid to blow up everyone's base as a send-off and mine was the only one standing at the end because I was the only one who bothered to set up a surge protector under OHSA (Omega Haxors? Safety!? AHAHAHAH!) it just so happened that the system designed to save the grid from my many exploits just so happened to work in reverse.
Yeah, I don't understand why building a relatively clean energy source is a bad thing. Reactors are now like 3+ generations past the versions that were super dangerous. Hell, they even have reactors that can use spent fuel from other reactors.
Oil lobby and other interests. Follow the money. Plus it's easy to play on people's fears about radioactive waste.
Oh well, countries that know what's what just quietly build and use their reactors and go about their business. Finland for example is set for a while now.
There’s no shortage of modern reactor designs. We have amazing stuff designed and even prototyped and proven - low waste, safely-failing reactors that basically can’t melt down. All we really lack is funding and regulatory clearance to build more.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but just in case: that wouldn't work, mining is really just verifying transactions. So if you're not doing that, you may earn crypto by "mining", but you can't spend it because no-one is verifying your transactions.
Cryptocoins, blockchain, NFTs, AI craze. It's all the same people who think that the solution to the problems that capitalism has created is technology.
Nuclear power still requires huge front costs (goal of SMR is to reduce that, but first generations will not solve it), so it could be better to use them for every day life needs rather than a prospective commercial venture.
Only if there's a meltdown, and that's near-impossible with current reactor designs. Just don't build in very disaster-prone areas like Florida or Japan.
Building and maintaining one isn't really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That's the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how's a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
If they're actually using a new type nuclear reactor, the small portable ones, then the waste is both incredibly small and recyclable. Nuclear technology has come a long way since the decades old reactors, we just haven't built very many new ones to showcase that.
It's a shame we aren't seemingly taking them into consideration in the whole energy transition crisis we are in.
But rather let's just keep sending people into hazardous coal mines while ignoring nuclear energy until the solution to all our problems magically comes to us.
As noted elsewhere, these don't create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn't just say "and then we'll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!" Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called "reprocessing" that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying "y'all will figure out a way to dispose of these things".
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
I'm generally against nuclear--or more accurately, think the economics of it no longer make sense--but there's one thing I think we should do: subsidize reactors that process waste. It's better and more useful than tossing it in a cave and hoping for the best. Or the current plan of letting it sit around.
Nuclear waste is a technically solved issue with long term geological storage, long term dangerous waste which requires more tech is a very small mass. The problems are political, uneducated people are irrationally scared of those waste that they associate with Chernobyl so they oppose any kind of geological storage, and politicians don't have the balls to openly contradict them.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn't actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it'll pose a threat, after it's been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it's the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
Governments aren't exactly known for efficiency. A corporation is less likely to bogged down by just the mere fallacy that "other entities can't figure it out, why should they do it?"
You just need to find a geologically safe place to put it and you need to make sure everyone involved follows safety protocols to the letter. And you can't have anyone cutting corners to save money. You need to spare no expense when it comes to safety.
The only issue is that people don't stay strict with keeping everything safe sometimes. People are terrified of it because when something goes wrong, everyone can see the very gruesome results very quickly
But I don't think microsoft or any company should be making an AI at the rate they are if it's going to take as much resources as it seems.
Capital costs is incomplete, you need to look at lifetime costs versus lifetime production to get a more useful average - Levelized cost of energy (LCOE)
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of "work pod" and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
Edit: Glad to see a nice instance of the discussion going here.
In their specific use case that won't really work.
They want to use all of their available property for server racks. Covering the roof with solar won't give enough power/area for them. A small reactor would use a tiny fraction of the space, and generate several times the power. That's why it'd be worth the extra cost.
For those who haven't seen this discussion before, I feel like doing the next step in the dance. Cheers Plex.
It's important to note that nuclear is capable of satisfying baseload demand, which is particularly important for things like a commercial AI model training facility, which will be scheduled to run at full blast for multiple nines.
Solar+storage is considerably more unreliable than a local power plant (be it coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear). I have solar panels in an area that gets wildfire smoke (i.e. soon to be the entire planet), and visible smoke in the air effectively nullifies solar.
Solar is fantastic for covering the amount of load that is correlated with insolation: for example colocated with facilities that use air-conditioning (which do include data centers, but the processing is driving the power there).
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Right, let's welcome throwing 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, I mean that's such a nice thing, we need much more of it! It's not like we already have perfectly renewable solutions to providing power...
Those data centers are paying for their electrical usage. Economies of scale just make it more favorable for them over building their own power generation (solar/wind excluded).
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Or you get an overlord ai that isn't dependent on the larger power grid so it doesn't have any reason not to launch the nukes. You know they're going to harden these things.
Allocative efficiency in economics just means that you can't make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
An efficient allocation isn't necessarily equitable.
And the first welfare theorem of economics only claims that the market will produce an allocatively efficient result if its complete, in perfect competition, and everyone has complete information. Which has the obvious problems of those preconditions not matching reality.
I predict that within 10 years, computers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
Do you want to argue, that the construction of a nuclear power plant causes significantly less ecological stress and pollution than solar panels and windturbines?
Think about if you really want to claim that as a thing you actually believe in.
I'm just gonna throw some words in a pool.
concrete, steel, space, deforestation, river, 10+ Years construction time, heavy machinery, dust, natural habitats, fuel, mining, waste, noise, cost, france...
Thank you. i rest my case.
Imagine if it ends up requiring the achieving of ignition for Microsoft to launch a version of clippy that is able to reliably comprehend English grammar enough to make writing recommendations.
It's the biggest buzzword right now, it doesn't matter if it's profitable. I doubt most uses are directly profitable right now. It'd more of a FOMO situation - if we don't use AI, we're OBSOLETE! AHHH!
Here's a nice video of a guy training an AI to do a relatively simple task (driving a Trackmania trac) with a very limited amount of inputs with low variability, 2-3 outputs and very hardset restraints.
Compared to what he does, a rather narrow defined re-enforcement training scheme, Microsofts AI takes many more inputs and has many more outputs and all the inputs are highly variable (massive amounts of data like dictionaries, images, movies, entire texts, speech, etc compared to a handful of parameters with values from -1 to 1) and also is a mix between re-enforcement, supervised and unsupervised training. With different subnetworks trained for different things eventually working together to do the master task they have in mind.
What is shown in the video is what you'd do for a tiny subsystem of the AI Microsoft, Google, Apple and the like develop.
Kinda like if you watched a video about "this is what it takes to make the bolt that keeps your wheels on your car" you'd only have seen a fraction of what it takes to make the whole car.
Not sure if you're making fun or actually not understanding? To clarify, they need the power for training AI models. No trains are involved, neither passenger nor cargo – though atom powered trains sounds interesting as well!
I’m not opposed to new nuclear energy in principle. However Microsoft, an unrelentingly bad organization that consistently acts in bad faith to its customers, employees and businesses parters, and is seemingly dedicated to making awful products that never meaningfully improve, is not something I would trust to do nuclear safely.
Thankfully, any actual new type using modern tech have self-limiting reactions. Thorium ones, for example, can't meltdown because the high heat in that process kills the reaction itself.
I don't give a shit about training AI but the idea of Microsoft running nuclear reactors is hilarious to me. Either they do it well and we all benefit from the knowledge, or Windows goes out with a bang
Small Modular Reactor technology is the future, and it's really promising.
Self-contained (no onsite refueling), mass produced (cheap, higher quality), and modular (add more for more power, or small enough to power a data center).
Here's some quick videos from a professor of Nuclear Energy covering topic:
I'm not one to be all doom and gloom about ai, but giving one its own small nuclear reactor, presumably one that's in close proximity to it and separate from the local power grid... that's obviously going to have substantial security measures around it... and be that much more difficult to cut off if need be....
I mean, it's starting to sound a lot like an unbelievable plot hole in a bad sci fi movie isn't it?
That's a nice sci-fi thought, but also not really how it works irl.
Physical proximity is not really a factor here.
There's a lot more going on at all levels that makes this absurd at best. Movies are not a good representation of reality, they can't be if they are meant to be entertaining.
Why are you saying this as if the AI would have control over the reactor.
It's unlikely they'd even be in the same building, or even the same campus. We have these crazy things called "wires" that let us transmit a lot of power over distances, so your small nuclear reactor can be remote, safe and secure and your AI lab can just be on your main campus.
You do konw, that it is IMPOSSIBLE for a nuclear reactor to explode in a nuclear fission explosion, aka become a nuclear bomb. Reaching critical mass isn't possible. Nuclear reactors can catch on fire, if built using graphite, that isn't done anymore, or have a steam explosion. but that's it.
They can also get hot enough to melt the metallic components (including the fuel itself) if the reaction isn't properly regulated (hence, "meltdown"), but you're correct that that's still not a fission explosion.
If you're so smart why don't you come up with a way to do it under 100 watts???
Also this is training them not using them. Using an ai consumes significantly less power than the process to train it sort of like how humans take more to learn than to put something in practice.
Organic technology is hard. If you can figure out how to grow a compute system you will take human technology hundreds of years into the future. Silicon tech is the stone age of compute.
The brain has a slow clock rate to keep within its power limitations, but it is a parallel computational beast compared to current models.
It takes around ten years for new hardware to really take shape in our current age. AI hasn't really established what direction it is going in yet. The open source offline model is the likely winner, meaning the hardware design and scaling factors are still unknown. We probably won't see a good solution for years. We are patching video hardware as a solution until AI specific hardware is readily available.
I am so excited for the advances that neuromorphic processors will bring, which is not exactly my field, but adjacent to it. The concept of modelling chips after the human brain instead of traditional computing doctrines sounds extremely promising, and I would love to get to work on systems like Intel's Loihi or IBM's TrueNorth! If you think about it, it's a bit ridiculous how corporations like Nvidia are currently approaching AI with graphics processors. I mean, it makes more sense than general-purpose CPUs, but it is at the very least a subideal solution.
I bet it'd be a whole lot easier to grow and organic computer if you didn't have to worry about pesky things like people thinking you grew genetically engineered slaves.
The whole language model scene system started with "we accidently found something that kinda works" and is now in full "somebody please accidently find a way so it uses less power" mode.
Because safety and profits aren't going in the same direction. They would cut corner for reduce the costs. Which is how you end with a nuclear accident. And then it would be to the tax payer to kick the bill.
Well, there's only so much training you can do before it has ingested all of Garfield lore and fan creations, so you start over fitting and can't generate new Garfield material anymore, and at that point, what's even the point of going on?
Training large language models is an incredibly power-intensive process that has an immense carbon footprint.
Now, The Verge reports, Microsoft is betting so big on AI that its pushing forward with a plan to power them using nuclear reactors.
Yes, you read that right; a recent job listing suggests the company is planning to grow its energy infrastructure with the use of small modular reactors (SMR.)
But before Microsoft can start relying on nuclear power to train its AIs, it'll have plenty of other hurdles to overcome.
Then, it'll have to figure out how to get its hands on a highly enriched uranium fuel that these small reactors typically require, as The Verge points out.
Nevertheless, the company signed a power purchase agreement with Helion, a fusion startup founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this year, with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
The original article contains 346 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
While I appreciate them going a greener route, if these chat AIs are still this inefficient to simply train, maybe it is best left to return them back to the research phrase.
You say "simply train," but really, the training of these models is The most intensive part. Once they are trained, they require less power (relatively) to actually run for inference.
So it sounds like they need a shitload of GPU power. You know what also costs a shitload of GPU power crypto mining? Could they not outsource the work to all those GPUs that stopped mining crypto once it plummeted?
I am surprised this hasn't become a community project already. I assume there is some limitation that I am unaware of.
There's tradeoffs. If training LLMs (and similar systems that feed on pure physics data) can improve nuclear processes, then overall it could be a net benefit. Fusion energy research takes a huge amount of power to trigger every test ignition and we do them all the time, learning little by little.
The real question is if the LLMs are even capable of revealing those kinds of insights to us. If they are, nuclear is hardly the worst path to go down.
Yeah, every time AI or nuclear energy is mentioned the quality of the comments plummets. Since we have the two combined in this story, the results are tragically predictable.
Yeah, there's definitely some parallels between how people negatively reacted to crypto and the current wave of reactions towards AI. My personal theory is that a lot of people are becoming hostile towards big tech, and anything that's seen as the next big thing in tech will quickly get negative reactions.
Just go to Chernobyl and build there. Deal with the aftermarch now instead of later. The order matter because then they will understand there is a big problem with nuclear power.
Yes, it have even happened in modern time. Look at what happened at Japan 2011 fukushima. It will happen again. Political/economic/misstakes will happen again.
Just look at Russia firing at nuclear plants... we are doomed.
How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it's just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.
It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we've shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.
Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there's no reason we shouldn't be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.
You know that if we look at for example Chernobyl how many did varies a lot between who you ask. That is even today. You also need to think of those who did not die but survived with some damages. Chernobyl is not over so you can't even stop counting who died from it. It will take very long time before it is over.
Yes, I agree with you that pollution is a even bigger problem that I can't understand that no one cares about it. Seeing on TV that people going to work in a smog of smoke and they don't react. It is deadly!
Personally, I agree that fossil fuel should banned for example for cars. There are alternatives, maybe not as good but you will survive. Teleports does not exist yet but we survive somehow anyway.