7 ms·

Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near

Some reasoning tokens on this post: >Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp And also: >cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. Which is a meter-worthy resource. So intelligence effect on people's lives is in the order of magnitude of one second of a toaster use each day, in present value. This begs the question: what could you do with a toaster-second say 5 years from today?

GarnetFloride 1y ago
That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?
- AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on par with a coal plant, since the operating mechanism (heat -> steam -> electricity) is basically the same. Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. You can see a lot of the same attempts being made with AI, proposals to ban it or regulate it etc., or make sure only large organizations have it. But the difference is that power plants are inherently local. If the US makes it uneconomical to build new nuclear plants, US utility customers can't easily get electricity from power plants in China. That isn't really how it works with AI.
  - Joeri 1y ago
    I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end. Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behind high nuclear construction cost. They found that regulatory burdens were only responsible for 30% of cost increases. Most of the cost overruns were because of needing to adapt the design of the nuclear plant to the site. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 Now, you can criticize the methodology of that study, but then you have to bring your own study that shows precisely which regulatory burdens are causing these cost overruns, and which of those are in excess. Is it in excess that we have strict workplace safety regulation now? Is it in excess that we demand reactor containment vessels to prevent meltdowns from contaminating ground water supplies? In order to make a good red tape argument I expect detail in what is excess regulation, and I've never seen that. Besides, if "red tape" and fossil industry marketing was really the cause of unpopularity, and the business case for nuclear was real when installing plants at scale, you would see Russia and China have the majority of their electricity production from nuclear power. - Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world, and even they didn't get past 20% of electricity share. They claim levelized cost for nuclear on the order of that of solar and wind, but I am very skeptical of that number, and anyone who knows anything about the Russian government's relation to the truth will understand why. When they build nuclear plants in other countries (e.g. the bangladesh project) they are not that cheap. - China sits at low single digit percentages of nuclear share, with a levelized cost that is significantly higher than Russia's and well above that of solar and wind. While they're planning to grow the nuclear share they assume it will be based on new nuclear technology that changes the business case. Both Russia and China can rely on cheap skilled labor to bring down costs, a luxury western countries do not have. And this is ultimately the issue: the nuclear industry has been promising designs that bring down costs for over half a century, and they have never delivered on that promise. It's all smoke and mirrors distracting from the fact that building nuclear plants is inherently freaking expensive. Maybe AI can help us design better and cheaper nuclear power plants, but as of today there is no proven nuclear plant design that is economical to build, and that is ultimately why you see so little new nuclear plant construction in the west.
    - solarwindy 1y ago
      > Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world Not France? > France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. — https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
      - tim333 1y ago
        Russia likes nukes so they can threaten to nuke everyone.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    Your point is not wrong, but I'd clarify a couple things; The primary cost of a traditional plant is fuel. However a nuclear plant needs a tad more (qualified) oversight than a coal plant. In the same way that the navy has specialists for running nuclear propulsion systems versus crew needed for diesel engines. Not surprisingly nuclear engines cost "more than fuel". That cost may end up being insignificant in the long run, but cost is not zero. And shortages of staff would matter (like it does with ATC at the moment.) Construction cost should be much lower than it is, but I don't think it'll be as cheap as say coal or diesel. The nature of the fuel would always require some extras, if only because the penalty-for-failure is so high. There's a difference between a coal-plant catastrophe and Chernobyl. So there are costs gor running nuclear, I don't think it necessarily gets "too cheap to measure".
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      There are some costs that a coal plant wouldn't have, but those aren't really variable costs. If the plant's capacity is 1000MW and the grid is only demanding 500 MW right now, you don't get to send home any nuclear engineers, so what's the point in pricing kWh to discourage anyone from using more? If you build a 5GW plant instead of a 500MW plant, you don't need 10 times as many engineers just because this one's pipes have a larger diameter, so it's more economical to build larger plants, but the only times it makes sense to charge per kWh are when demand exceeds capacity and then those times become rare. Solar is on its way to do something incredibly disruptive because it's the same "too cheap to meter" but only when the sun is shining, and then you still need the independent capacity to supply power from something else when it isn't. So now instead of "you pay ~$0.12/kWh all the time" you have a situation where power during sunshine hours is basically free but power at other times costs dramatically more than it used to because the infrastructure to supply that power has to recover its costs over significantly less usage.
  - derefr 1y ago
    > So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? That isn't negligible. ...I say that, but I do note that I live in a coastal city with a temperate climate near a mountain watershed, and I literally do have unmetered water. I suppose I pay for the OpEx of the infrastructure with my taxes.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
      It would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.
    - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? These are fixed costs. They don't go down if people use less power, so the sensible way to pay for them is with some kind of fixed monthly connection charge (e.g. proportional to the size of your service) or via taxes. You're still not measuring how much power people use at any given time.
      - derefr 1y ago
        Seems like the largest industrial customers would still need metered usage, though. There are quite a few businesses that can scale limited only by power consumption — but due to that, they today need connections massively overbuilt compared to their current usage (as they project their usage growth to be extremely fast, potentially as much as doubling each year) in order to not need to be constantly re-trenching connections or browning out. Which in turn means that, under a leased-line electrical system, they'd be massively overpaying for unused power capacity at all times — possibly to the point of being unprofitable. To achieve profitability, they'd need to negotiate billing based on only the fraction of the capacity of the available grid capacity that they're actually demanding on any given day... or, in other words, metered billing.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    I always thought with nuclear electricity it would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.
  - hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
    > Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. This is frankly nonsense, and my hope is that this nonsense is coming from a person too young to remember the real, valid fears from disasters like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Yes, I fully understand that over the long term coal plants cause many more deaths, and of course climate change is an order of magnitude worse, eventually. The issue is that human fears aren't based so much on "the long term" or "eventualities". When nuclear power plants failed, they had the unfortunate side effect of making hundreds or thousands of square miles uninhabitable for generations. The fact that societies demand heavy regulation for something that can fail so spectacularly isn't some underhanded conspiracy. Just look at France, the country with probably the most successful wide-scale deployment of nuclear. They are rightfully proud of their nuclear industry there, but they are not a huge country (significantly smaller than Texas), and thus understand the importance of regulation to prevent any disasters. Electricity there is relatively cheap compared to the rest of Western Europe but still considerably higher than the US average.
    - trashtester 1y ago
      The fears from 3 Mile Island and Fukushima were almost completely irrational. The death toll from those was too low to measure. And the fears from Chernobyl was MOSTLY irrational. The reason for the extreme fears that are generated from even very moderate spills from nuclear plants comes in part from the association with nuclear bombs and in part from fear of the unknown. A lot (if not most) people shut their rational thinking off when the word "nuclear" is used, even those who SHOULD understand that a lot more people die from coal and gas plants EVERY YEAR than have died from nuclear energy throughout history. Indeed, the safety level at Chernobyl may have been atrocious. But so was the coal industry in the USSR. Indeed, even if just considering the USSR, the death toll from coal alone caused a similar number of deaths (or a bit more) than the deaths caused by Chernobyl EVERY YEAR [1]. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.238.4823.11.d https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.238.4823.11....
  - roenxi 1y ago
    It is worth noting that the effect is jaw-droppingly stark. The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] so the more power plants get built the more expensive it gets! It is one of the most stunning failures of an industrial society in the modern era; the damage this did to us all is huge. It is disheartening that our leadership/society chose to turn their backs on the future and we're all lucky that the Chinese chose a different tack to the West's policy of energy failure. At least there are still people who believe in industry. [0] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 - Fig 3
    - myrmidon 1y ago
      > The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] This is conjecture. If you wanted to establish this, you would have to show that cost of (skilled) labor was unchanging or negligible. It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages are much more localized and traceable than excess deaths from air pollution, and thus much less acceptable to the voting population-- you could argue that this should not make any difference (I disagree), but I don't want to digress here too much. > we're all lucky that the Chinese chose a different tack to the West's policy of energy failure What do you believe that is? Because from my point of view, China generates a negligible amount of electricity from nuclear power (<5%), this is not going to change within the next decades, and the main "purpose" from what I can tell is to in-house reactor/turbine know-how (instead of relying on Alstom/Siemesn).
      - roenxi 1y ago
        Those are constant dollars. Are you claiming that the real cost of labour went up 4- to 8-fold in the nuclear industry? Why did that happen? The median nuclear plant construction worker would be making $240k/annum type wages. And as I recall I've not heard of that sort of wage rise outside a regulatory failure or somewhere like China undergoing a massive economic boom. > It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages... Maybe you can answer this for me - what deaths and damages? So far I've never been able to pin down any actual death or damage to a nuclear meltdown. I'm sure there are some, but most of the actual attempts to quantify it require appealing to hypothetical deaths and damages that no-one can specifically point to, or tiny numbers that are irrelevant to industrial policy. I know people who lived in a town next to a lead-zinc mine. That appears to be about as bad as a nuclear crisis from what I can gather and it doesn't seem to be causing anyone undue stress. We're still using lead and zinc. People still live in the town. > What do you believe that is? They're building reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... is a happy tale of new and planned plants. Some of them are really cool too, there is one by the Gobi desert, apparently to prove that they don't need to use water as a coolant.
  - squidbeak 1y ago
    Nuclear plants have other long tails costs, decommissioning and waste containment.
    - MagnumOpus 1y ago
      So do coal plants. Interestingly approximately nobody seems to be worried about the thousands of coal ash ponds leaching radioactive material, toxic heavy metals and teratogenic compounds into ground water on a regular basis - while storing spent fuel element in a salt mine thousands of miles away engenders outrage…
      - yencabulator 1y ago
        I have never worried about a coal plant in Ukraine. I lived at a place that was potentially downwind of Chernobyl and inside the projected bad-things-happening plume. The scale of a nuclear disaster well exceeds the scale of a coal plant disaster. Many things are cheap when you ignore externalities.
- danw1979 1y ago
  The thing is, nuclear was never on such a steep learning curve as solar and batteries are today. It’ll never be too cheap to meter, but electricity will get much cheaper over the coming decades, and so will synthetic hydrocarbons on the back of it.
- TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Your electricity bill is set by the grift of archaic fossil energy industries. And nuclear qualifies as a fossil industry because it's still essentially digging ancient stuff out of the ground, moving it around the world, and burning it in huge dirty machines constructed at vast expense. There are better options, and at scale they're literally capable of producing electricity that literally is too cheap to meter. The reasons they haven't been built at scale are purely political. Today's AI is computing's equivalent of nuclear energy - clumsy, centralised, crude, industrial, extractive, and massively overhyped and overpriced. Real AI would be the step after that - distributed, decentralised, reliable, collaborative, free in all senses of the word.
- tim333 1y ago
  My and or my family's electricity bills have never been near zero. On the other hand my AI bill is zero. I think different economics apply. (that excludes a brief period when I camped with a solar panel)
greenie_beans 1y ago
watch the cost of electricity go up because the demand created by data centers. i'm building an off grid solar system right now and it ain't cheap! thinking about a future where consumers are competing with data centers for electricity makes me think it might feel cheap in the future, though.
- unstablediffusi 1y ago
  bro, how much did your electricity cost go up because of millions of people playing games on their 500w+ gpus? by a billion of people watching youtube? by hundreds of millions of women and children scrolling instagram and tiktok 8 hours a day?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - greenie_beans 1y ago
    this is not the same thing and all the AI CEOs would agree with me. very absurd statement to try to use for your argument. but here is some data bro! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
- nhdjd 1y ago
  Fusion will show up soon dont worry. AI will accelerate its arrival.
  - greenie_beans 1y ago
    good luck w that
  - NoGravitas 1y ago
    Instead of always being 30 years in the future, it's now always 15 years in the future!
- antihero 1y ago
  Datacentre operators want to keep energy costs down and also have capital to make it happen.
jes5199 1y ago
I’m not sure we’ll be metering electricity if Wright’s Law continues
joshjob42 1y ago
Well, Altman is also investing in Helion, which projects to get the price of electricity to ~$10/MWh, but for whom, much like solar, wind, and actual nuclear the cost structure is overwhelmingly dominated by capital costs and non-varying capital costs (the cost of uranium or Helion's fuel will be negligible vs capital and manpower). So there's actually a pretty good reason to think long term electricity will be marginally so cheap that it isn't metered but instead basically bought in chunks of capacity or availability. Another way for intelligence to get too cheap to meter is for the cost to fall so low it becomes hyperabundant. If you were to, for instance, take AI2027 as a benchmark and think ultimately we'll achieve something like the equivalent of John von Neumann in a box with a 2T dense equivalent parameter model and it will match such a Nobel prize winner's productivity when running inference at say 15 tokens a second (as fast as people can read) then you only need in principle 60 teraflops of AI infernce compute, which is roughly 2x the current Apple Neural Engine. So plausibly by the time you get to the 2030s, every laptop, smartphone, etc will be easily able to run models as powerful as the smartest people. Somewhat longer term, I'm sure Altman expects the entire process to be automated and for the computational efficiency to rise significantly. If you take recent estimates from various players in the reversible computing space, you'd guesstimate that you ought to be able to do 60tflops by the late 2030s using under 0.1W or ~1kWh/yr which Helion could produce for ~1¢. I do feel like 1 year of cognitive labor from the smartest person a penny or two renders intelligence too cheap to meter out on a per-hour basis.

GarnetFloride 1y ago

That's what they said about electricity when nuclear power plants were proposed. What's your electricity bill like today?

AnthonyMouse 1y ago
The primary operating cost of traditional power plants is fuel, i.e. coal and natural gas. The fuel cost for nuclear power plants is negligible because the energy content is higher by more than a factor of a million. So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Meanwhile the construction cost should be on par with a coal plant, since the operating mechanism (heat -> steam -> electricity) is basically the same. Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. You can see a lot of the same attempts being made with AI, proposals to ban it or regulate it etc., or make sure only large organizations have it. But the difference is that power plants are inherently local. If the US makes it uneconomical to build new nuclear plants, US utility customers can't easily get electricity from power plants in China. That isn't really how it works with AI.
- Joeri 1y ago
  I don't buy into the "red tape" argument. For me it's all due to a lack of a business case. I think building (LWR) nuclear plants is just freaking expensive, has always been freaking expensive, was bankrolled for a while by governments because they thought it would get cheaper, and then largely abandoned in most countries when it proved to be an engineering dead end. Here's an MIT study that dug into the reasons behind high nuclear construction cost. They found that regulatory burdens were only responsible for 30% of cost increases. Most of the cost overruns were because of needing to adapt the design of the nuclear plant to the site. https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 https://news.mit.edu/2020/reasons-nuclear-overruns-1118 Now, you can criticize the methodology of that study, but then you have to bring your own study that shows precisely which regulatory burdens are causing these cost overruns, and which of those are in excess. Is it in excess that we have strict workplace safety regulation now? Is it in excess that we demand reactor containment vessels to prevent meltdowns from contaminating ground water supplies? In order to make a good red tape argument I expect detail in what is excess regulation, and I've never seen that. Besides, if "red tape" and fossil industry marketing was really the cause of unpopularity, and the business case for nuclear was real when installing plants at scale, you would see Russia and China have the majority of their electricity production from nuclear power. - Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world, and even they didn't get past 20% of electricity share. They claim levelized cost for nuclear on the order of that of solar and wind, but I am very skeptical of that number, and anyone who knows anything about the Russian government's relation to the truth will understand why. When they build nuclear plants in other countries (e.g. the bangladesh project) they are not that cheap. - China sits at low single digit percentages of nuclear share, with a levelized cost that is significantly higher than Russia's and well above that of solar and wind. While they're planning to grow the nuclear share they assume it will be based on new nuclear technology that changes the business case. Both Russia and China can rely on cheap skilled labor to bring down costs, a luxury western countries do not have. And this is ultimately the issue: the nuclear industry has been promising designs that bring down costs for over half a century, and they have never delivered on that promise. It's all smoke and mirrors distracting from the fact that building nuclear plants is inherently freaking expensive. Maybe AI can help us design better and cheaper nuclear power plants, but as of today there is no proven nuclear plant design that is economical to build, and that is ultimately why you see so little new nuclear plant construction in the west.
  - solarwindy 1y ago
    > Russia is the most pro-nuclear country in the world Not France? > France derives about 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy, due to a long-standing policy based on energy security. — https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
    - tim333 1y ago
      Russia likes nukes so they can threaten to nuke everyone.
- bruce511 1y ago
  Your point is not wrong, but I'd clarify a couple things; The primary cost of a traditional plant is fuel. However a nuclear plant needs a tad more (qualified) oversight than a coal plant. In the same way that the navy has specialists for running nuclear propulsion systems versus crew needed for diesel engines. Not surprisingly nuclear engines cost "more than fuel". That cost may end up being insignificant in the long run, but cost is not zero. And shortages of staff would matter (like it does with ATC at the moment.) Construction cost should be much lower than it is, but I don't think it'll be as cheap as say coal or diesel. The nature of the fuel would always require some extras, if only because the penalty-for-failure is so high. There's a difference between a coal-plant catastrophe and Chernobyl. So there are costs gor running nuclear, I don't think it necessarily gets "too cheap to measure".
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    There are some costs that a coal plant wouldn't have, but those aren't really variable costs. If the plant's capacity is 1000MW and the grid is only demanding 500 MW right now, you don't get to send home any nuclear engineers, so what's the point in pricing kWh to discourage anyone from using more? If you build a 5GW plant instead of a 500MW plant, you don't need 10 times as many engineers just because this one's pipes have a larger diameter, so it's more economical to build larger plants, but the only times it makes sense to charge per kWh are when demand exceeds capacity and then those times become rare. Solar is on its way to do something incredibly disruptive because it's the same "too cheap to meter" but only when the sun is shining, and then you still need the independent capacity to supply power from something else when it isn't. So now instead of "you pay ~$0.12/kWh all the time" you have a situation where power during sunshine hours is basically free but power at other times costs dramatically more than it used to because the infrastructure to supply that power has to recover its costs over significantly less usage.
- derefr 1y ago
  > So if you build enough nuclear plants to power the grid, charging per kWh for the electricity is pointless because the marginal cost of the fuel is so low. Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? That isn't negligible. ...I say that, but I do note that I live in a coastal city with a temperate climate near a mountain watershed, and I literally do have unmetered water. I suppose I pay for the OpEx of the infrastructure with my taxes.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    It would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.
  - AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > Wouldn't there still be the OpEx of maintaining the power plants + power infrastructure (long-distance HVDC lines, transformer substations, etc)? These are fixed costs. They don't go down if people use less power, so the sensible way to pay for them is with some kind of fixed monthly connection charge (e.g. proportional to the size of your service) or via taxes. You're still not measuring how much power people use at any given time.
    - derefr 1y ago
      Seems like the largest industrial customers would still need metered usage, though. There are quite a few businesses that can scale limited only by power consumption — but due to that, they today need connections massively overbuilt compared to their current usage (as they project their usage growth to be extremely fast, potentially as much as doubling each year) in order to not need to be constantly re-trenching connections or browning out. Which in turn means that, under a leased-line electrical system, they'd be massively overpaying for unused power capacity at all times — possibly to the point of being unprofitable. To achieve profitability, they'd need to negotiate billing based on only the fraction of the capacity of the available grid capacity that they're actually demanding on any given day... or, in other words, metered billing.
- UltraSane 1y ago
  I always thought with nuclear electricity it would actually make more sense to charge by the max watts a customer can draw.
- hn_throwaway_99 1y ago
  > Unsurprisingly, this scared the crap out of the fossil fuel industry in the US and countries like Russia that are net exporters of fossil fuels, so they've spent decades lobbying to bind nuclear plant construction up in red tape to prevent them being built and funding anti-nuclear propaganda. This is frankly nonsense, and my hope is that this nonsense is coming from a person too young to remember the real, valid fears from disasters like 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Yes, I fully understand that over the long term coal plants cause many more deaths, and of course climate change is an order of magnitude worse, eventually. The issue is that human fears aren't based so much on "the long term" or "eventualities". When nuclear power plants failed, they had the unfortunate side effect of making hundreds or thousands of square miles uninhabitable for generations. The fact that societies demand heavy regulation for something that can fail so spectacularly isn't some underhanded conspiracy. Just look at France, the country with probably the most successful wide-scale deployment of nuclear. They are rightfully proud of their nuclear industry there, but they are not a huge country (significantly smaller than Texas), and thus understand the importance of regulation to prevent any disasters. Electricity there is relatively cheap compared to the rest of Western Europe but still considerably higher than the US average.
  - trashtester 1y ago
    The fears from 3 Mile Island and Fukushima were almost completely irrational. The death toll from those was too low to measure. And the fears from Chernobyl was MOSTLY irrational. The reason for the extreme fears that are generated from even very moderate spills from nuclear plants comes in part from the association with nuclear bombs and in part from fear of the unknown. A lot (if not most) people shut their rational thinking off when the word "nuclear" is used, even those who SHOULD understand that a lot more people die from coal and gas plants EVERY YEAR than have died from nuclear energy throughout history. Indeed, the safety level at Chernobyl may have been atrocious. But so was the coal industry in the USSR. Indeed, even if just considering the USSR, the death toll from coal alone caused a similar number of deaths (or a bit more) than the deaths caused by Chernobyl EVERY YEAR [1]. [1] https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.238.4823.11.d https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.238.4823.11....
- roenxi 1y ago
  It is worth noting that the effect is jaw-droppingly stark. The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] so the more power plants get built the more expensive it gets! It is one of the most stunning failures of an industrial society in the modern era; the damage this did to us all is huge. It is disheartening that our leadership/society chose to turn their backs on the future and we're all lucky that the Chinese chose a different tack to the West's policy of energy failure. At least there are still people who believe in industry. [0] https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169 - Fig 3
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    > The regulators managed to invert the learning curve [0] This is conjecture. If you wanted to establish this, you would have to show that cost of (skilled) labor was unchanging or negligible. It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages are much more localized and traceable than excess deaths from air pollution, and thus much less acceptable to the voting population-- you could argue that this should not make any difference (I disagree), but I don't want to digress here too much. > we're all lucky that the Chinese chose a different tack to the West's policy of energy failure What do you believe that is? Because from my point of view, China generates a negligible amount of electricity from nuclear power (<5%), this is not going to change within the next decades, and the main "purpose" from what I can tell is to in-house reactor/turbine know-how (instead of relying on Alstom/Siemesn).
    - roenxi 1y ago
      Those are constant dollars. Are you claiming that the real cost of labour went up 4- to 8-fold in the nuclear industry? Why did that happen? The median nuclear plant construction worker would be making $240k/annum type wages. And as I recall I've not heard of that sort of wage rise outside a regulatory failure or somewhere like China undergoing a massive economic boom. > It is also important to consider that nuclear power deaths/damages... Maybe you can answer this for me - what deaths and damages? So far I've never been able to pin down any actual death or damage to a nuclear meltdown. I'm sure there are some, but most of the actual attempts to quantify it require appealing to hypothetical deaths and damages that no-one can specifically point to, or tiny numbers that are irrelevant to industrial policy. I know people who lived in a town next to a lead-zinc mine. That appears to be about as bad as a nuclear crisis from what I can gather and it doesn't seem to be causing anyone undue stress. We're still using lead and zinc. People still live in the town. > What do you believe that is? They're building reactors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea... is a happy tale of new and planned plants. Some of them are really cool too, there is one by the Gobi desert, apparently to prove that they don't need to use water as a coolant.
- squidbeak 1y ago
  Nuclear plants have other long tails costs, decommissioning and waste containment.
  - MagnumOpus 1y ago
    So do coal plants. Interestingly approximately nobody seems to be worried about the thousands of coal ash ponds leaching radioactive material, toxic heavy metals and teratogenic compounds into ground water on a regular basis - while storing spent fuel element in a salt mine thousands of miles away engenders outrage…
    - yencabulator 1y ago
      I have never worried about a coal plant in Ukraine. I lived at a place that was potentially downwind of Chernobyl and inside the projected bad-things-happening plume. The scale of a nuclear disaster well exceeds the scale of a coal plant disaster. Many things are cheap when you ignore externalities.
danw1979 1y ago
The thing is, nuclear was never on such a steep learning curve as solar and batteries are today. It’ll never be too cheap to meter, but electricity will get much cheaper over the coming decades, and so will synthetic hydrocarbons on the back of it.
TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
Your electricity bill is set by the grift of archaic fossil energy industries. And nuclear qualifies as a fossil industry because it's still essentially digging ancient stuff out of the ground, moving it around the world, and burning it in huge dirty machines constructed at vast expense. There are better options, and at scale they're literally capable of producing electricity that literally is too cheap to meter. The reasons they haven't been built at scale are purely political. Today's AI is computing's equivalent of nuclear energy - clumsy, centralised, crude, industrial, extractive, and massively overhyped and overpriced. Real AI would be the step after that - distributed, decentralised, reliable, collaborative, free in all senses of the word.
tim333 1y ago
My and or my family's electricity bills have never been near zero. On the other hand my AI bill is zero. I think different economics apply. (that excludes a brief period when I camped with a solar panel)

greenie_beans 1y ago

watch the cost of electricity go up because the demand created by data centers. i'm building an off grid solar system right now and it ain't cheap! thinking about a future where consumers are competing with data centers for electricity makes me think it might feel cheap in the future, though.

unstablediffusi 1y ago
bro, how much did your electricity cost go up because of millions of people playing games on their 500w+ gpus? by a billion of people watching youtube? by hundreds of millions of women and children scrolling instagram and tiktok 8 hours a day?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- greenie_beans 1y ago
  this is not the same thing and all the AI CEOs would agree with me. very absurd statement to try to use for your argument. but here is some data bro! https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
nhdjd 1y ago
Fusion will show up soon dont worry. AI will accelerate its arrival.
- greenie_beans 1y ago
  good luck w that
- NoGravitas 1y ago
  Instead of always being 30 years in the future, it's now always 15 years in the future!
antihero 1y ago
Datacentre operators want to keep energy costs down and also have capital to make it happen.

jes5199 1y ago

I’m not sure we’ll be metering electricity if Wright’s Law continues

joshjob42 1y ago

Well, Altman is also investing in Helion, which projects to get the price of electricity to ~$10/MWh, but for whom, much like solar, wind, and actual nuclear the cost structure is overwhelmingly dominated by capital costs and non-varying capital costs (the cost of uranium or Helion's fuel will be negligible vs capital and manpower). So there's actually a pretty good reason to think long term electricity will be marginally so cheap that it isn't metered but instead basically bought in chunks of capacity or availability. Another way for intelligence to get too cheap to meter is for the cost to fall so low it becomes hyperabundant. If you were to, for instance, take AI2027 as a benchmark and think ultimately we'll achieve something like the equivalent of John von Neumann in a box with a 2T dense equivalent parameter model and it will match such a Nobel prize winner's productivity when running inference at say 15 tokens a second (as fast as people can read) then you only need in principle 60 teraflops of AI infernce compute, which is roughly 2x the current Apple Neural Engine. So plausibly by the time you get to the 2030s, every laptop, smartphone, etc will be easily able to run models as powerful as the smartest people. Somewhat longer term, I'm sure Altman expects the entire process to be automated and for the computational efficiency to rise significantly. If you take recent estimates from various players in the reversible computing space, you'd guesstimate that you ought to be able to do 60tflops by the late 2030s using under 0.1W or ~1kWh/yr which Helion could produce for ~1¢. I do feel like 1 year of cognitive labor from the smartest person a penny or two renders intelligence too cheap to meter out on a per-hour basis.