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Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point. It seems the US is goi

Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth. But so is clean energy. And both right now are at an inflection point. It seems the US is going to thrive with the former but naively stick our heads in the sands with the latter. We’ll cede economic leadership, and wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy. Even worse, the administrations stance will encourage US energy companies to pursue bad strategies, letting them avoid transforming their business. In 10-20 years they'll be bankrupt and the US will probably have to bail them out for strategic reasons.

infamouscow 1y ago
People love using their pet issue as the sole explanation for why something did or didn't happen. It's never that simple. My boomer boss thinks writing tests is unnecessary and slows shipping down. It might be true, but it fails to appreciate the full scope of the problem.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
2600 1y ago
It's part of the current administration's energy agenda, President Trump signed executive orders a couple of months ago, to increase nuclear energy capacity by 400% in the next 25 years, revising regulations, and expediting review and approval of reactor projects, which seems like the most effective strategy for expanding clean energy production.
- atoav 1y ago
  A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the externalities". (And let's ignore the fact that humanity barely managed to organize anything that held even a mere 1000 years)
  - dingnuts 1y ago
    My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns, including renewables due to the materials used to build and operate and decommission solar panels and windmills. The argument you're making about waste has even led to the decommissioning of nuclear in Germany to be replaced with coal... burning coal also produces radioactive fly ash. Everything has tradeoffs! I guess we could just give up on electricity entirely! That might save the planet
    - hardolaf 1y ago
      Renewables outside of solar farms where solar is installed at ground level, also have a significantly higher death and serious injury rate than nuclear does per GWH produced even after including the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing in the numbers to make nuclear look worse.
    - Kon5ole 1y ago
      >My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns You are suffering from a misunderstanding then. Maybe several, since Germany has cut their coal use by more than half since Fukushima. (262 TWh from coal in 2011, 108 in 2024). Nuclear waste and the efforts it requires to manage is really orders of magnitude worse than other kinds of waste produced in energy production. Even if it can be argued that coal is second, it's a distant second, and nobody replaces nuclear with coal.
      - rini17 1y ago
        That is purely psychological perception. Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh. Neither safety, expense to manage nor other externalities.
        Kon5ole 1y ago
        >Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh Not sure what you mean here but I agree that nobody was able to predict what the cost of nuclear would actually end up being when they first started with it in the 50s. EDF was bailed out for 50 bn despite having neglected maintenance so badly that half their plants were offline in 2022, and the first thing France did when they took over was to double the purchase price. If that's enough remains to be seen. If you mean that you disagree that nuclear is an order of magnitude worse per TWh, then perhaps you don't know how much more energy we get from coal, or how much money, time and effort is spent on nuclear? Just as an illustration, during the 40 years it was active, Fukushima generated as much electricity in total as the world gets from coal in one week.
upquacker 1y ago
[dead]
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  I believe that we should separate the general case of AI from the particular case of LLMs. AI models have been accelerating science for decades, and new technology helps drive economic growth. I am convinced that LLMs are not worth the money we've invested in them but I do believe that more "traditional" AI is a net positive in research fields. Traditional AI has also had a net negative effect on the quality of content from internet publishers (i.e Facebook), but has made it more productive by allowing them to squeeze more blood from the stone. I think if you don't include LLMs, AI has obviously created economic growth. If you do include LLMs I think the conversation is more nuanced and obviously driven by the same kind of hype that led people to believe that Cryptocurrency is the future of the stock market
  - tempodox 1y ago
    The interesting thing is that the AI you're talking about (the one with the economic growth) isn't even called AI. Those are specialized tools that work and they have names that reflect that. When a fuzzy and inaccurate term like “AI” is being used, you know you've entered the realm of pure marketing and hype.
pizzafeelsright 1y ago
Whomever has more nuclear power generation will own energy. The cleanest energy is nuclear.
- jmyeet 1y ago
  I really don't understand HN's love affair with nuclear. Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue). And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1]. That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2]. And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident. And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US. And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently. And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar. and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large. I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph... [2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
Lonestar1440 1y ago
Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/. This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade. The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount. If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports. And then we're worse off in several different ways.
  - axpy906 1y ago
    This probably a stupid question but do solar and batteries depend on rare earth metals and their supply?
    - sroussey 1y ago
      The quick answer is yes, today. But there are battery technologies that require less and less in development. Also, rare earth elements are not that rare. But they are not concentrated, and finding concentrations of them is kinda rare. Event then, you have to mine a lot of area to get them, which is not great for the environment. And since Americans (and everyone ex-China) has not been doing it for decades, only China has advanced the technology to extract and refine it for decades. This lack of refining is similar to our lack of working on solar which will but us behind potentially forever, or until there is a big enough disruption to overcome the decade of experience. You can look at chipmaking and see that such things are not easy.
    - 1y ago
subhobroto 1y ago
> wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have? Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else? IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below. My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid. Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much! The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation. Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing. From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price. This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less. Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions. My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all. So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?
taurath 1y ago
The US is not naively sticking our heads in the sand, our leadership is making direct choices to make sure that they rule over the ashes rather than let a future happen where they have less power.
MangoToupe 1y ago
> Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth Is it? Sure it helps sell chips, but where is it actually driving measurable efficiency improvements?
kulahan 1y ago
Trump has signed a number of bills aimed at ramping up the nuclear center, which is the best-available renewable energy source based on current tech, aside from geothermal, assuming recent developments continue to pan out. The only country that the US needs to worry about beating them in the clean energy race is China. They’re building energy plants like crazy (though worth noting, not all of their plants are clean energy).

infamouscow 1y ago

People love using their pet issue as the sole explanation for why something did or didn't happen. It's never that simple. My boomer boss thinks writing tests is unnecessary and slows shipping down. It might be true, but it fails to appreciate the full scope of the problem.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

2600 1y ago

It's part of the current administration's energy agenda, President Trump signed executive orders a couple of months ago, to increase nuclear energy capacity by 400% in the next 25 years, revising regulations, and expediting review and approval of reactor projects, which seems like the most effective strategy for expanding clean energy production.

atoav 1y ago
A certain group of people keep saying that. But that particular idea of "clean" nuclear does not price in the 10.000 years of safe storage of nuclear waste materials (for the most dangerous HLW materials this number can go up to 100.000 years). Do you and your 3500 generations of ancestors volunteer to do this? Then it is cheap and clean. Otherwise it is yet another instance of "privatize the gains and socialize the externalities". (And let's ignore the fact that humanity barely managed to organize anything that held even a mere 1000 years)
- dingnuts 1y ago
  My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns, including renewables due to the materials used to build and operate and decommission solar panels and windmills. The argument you're making about waste has even led to the decommissioning of nuclear in Germany to be replaced with coal... burning coal also produces radioactive fly ash. Everything has tradeoffs! I guess we could just give up on electricity entirely! That might save the planet
  - hardolaf 1y ago
    Renewables outside of solar farms where solar is installed at ground level, also have a significantly higher death and serious injury rate than nuclear does per GWH produced even after including the use of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons testing in the numbers to make nuclear look worse.
  - Kon5ole 1y ago
    >My understanding is that every other form of energy production has similar or worse concerns You are suffering from a misunderstanding then. Maybe several, since Germany has cut their coal use by more than half since Fukushima. (262 TWh from coal in 2011, 108 in 2024). Nuclear waste and the efforts it requires to manage is really orders of magnitude worse than other kinds of waste produced in energy production. Even if it can be argued that coal is second, it's a distant second, and nobody replaces nuclear with coal.
    - rini17 1y ago
      That is purely psychological perception. Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh. Neither safety, expense to manage nor other externalities.
      - Kon5ole 1y ago
        >Noone seriously calculated that nuclear waste would be orders of magnitude worse than coal per TWh Not sure what you mean here but I agree that nobody was able to predict what the cost of nuclear would actually end up being when they first started with it in the 50s. EDF was bailed out for 50 bn despite having neglected maintenance so badly that half their plants were offline in 2022, and the first thing France did when they took over was to double the purchase price. If that's enough remains to be seen. If you mean that you disagree that nuclear is an order of magnitude worse per TWh, then perhaps you don't know how much more energy we get from coal, or how much money, time and effort is spent on nuclear? Just as an illustration, during the 40 years it was active, Fukushima generated as much electricity in total as the world gets from coal in one week.

upquacker 1y ago

[dead]

shortrounddev2 1y ago
I believe that we should separate the general case of AI from the particular case of LLMs. AI models have been accelerating science for decades, and new technology helps drive economic growth. I am convinced that LLMs are not worth the money we've invested in them but I do believe that more "traditional" AI is a net positive in research fields. Traditional AI has also had a net negative effect on the quality of content from internet publishers (i.e Facebook), but has made it more productive by allowing them to squeeze more blood from the stone. I think if you don't include LLMs, AI has obviously created economic growth. If you do include LLMs I think the conversation is more nuanced and obviously driven by the same kind of hype that led people to believe that Cryptocurrency is the future of the stock market
- tempodox 1y ago
  The interesting thing is that the AI you're talking about (the one with the economic growth) isn't even called AI. Those are specialized tools that work and they have names that reflect that. When a fuzzy and inaccurate term like “AI” is being used, you know you've entered the realm of pure marketing and hype.

pizzafeelsright 1y ago

Whomever has more nuclear power generation will own energy. The cleanest energy is nuclear.

jmyeet 1y ago
I really don't understand HN's love affair with nuclear. Uranium mining produces significant toxic waste (tailings and raffinates). Fuel processing produces toxic waste, typically UF6. There is some processing of UF6 to UF4 but that doesn't solve the problem and it's not economic anyway. Fuel usage produces even more waste that typically needs to be actively cooled for years or decades before it can be forgotten about in a cave (as nuclear advocates argue). And then who is going to operate the plant? This administration in particular is pushing for further nuclear deregulation, which is terrifying. You want to see what happens without regulation? Elon Musk's gas turbines in South Memphis with no Clean Air permits that are spewing pollution [1]. That's terrifying because the failure modes for a single nuclear incident are orders of magnitude worse than any other form of power plant. The cleanup from Fukushima requires technologies that don't exist yet, will take decades or centuries and will likely cost ~$1 trillion once its over, if it ever is [2]. And who's going to pay for that? It's not going to be the private operator. In fact, in the US there's laws that limit liability for nuclear accidents. The industry's self-insurance fund would be exhausted many times over by a single Fukushima incident. And then we get to the hand waving about Chernobyl, Fukushima and Three Mise Island. "Those are old designs", "the new designs are immune to catastrophic failure" or, my favorite, "Chernobyl was because of mismanagement in the USSR" like there wouldn't be corner-cutting by any private operator in the US. And let's just gloss over the fact that we've built fewer than 700 nuclear power plants, yet had 3 major incidents, 2 of them (Chernobyl and Fukushima) have had massive negative impacts. The Chernobyl absolute exclusion zone is still 1000 square miles. But anything negative is an outlier that should be ignored, apparently. And then we get to the impact of carbon emissions in climate change but now we're comparing the entire fossil fuel power industry vs one nuclear plant. It's also a false dichotomy. The future is hydro and solar. and then we get to the massive boondoggle of nuclear fusion, which I'm not convinced will ever be commercially viable. Energy loss and container destruction from fast neutrons is a fundamental problem that stars don't have because they have gravity and are incredibly large. I have no idea where this blind faith in nuclear comes from. [1]: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph... [2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-will-approach-one-trillion-dollars-just-for-nuclear-disaster/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...

Lonestar1440 1y ago

Overall US Energy production has been expanding, faster, each recent year. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/. This is all before you factor in the recent attention to Nuclear, which could come online within the next decade. The ice caps may be worse off for it, but there's little reason to think the USA will cease to "lead in energy" anytime soon.

margalabargala 1y ago
The US has long since exhausted it's "easy" oil/gas reserves. Yes, there's tons more down there, but it's increasingly hard to get to. Lots of extraction methods only make sense when the price for oil is above some amount. If the rest of the world standardizes on solar+battery, demand for oil goes down, and so will the price. Which in turn makes US-produced oil not cost effective to extract, and domestic energy production collapses in favor of cheap foreign imports. And then we're worse off in several different ways.
- axpy906 1y ago
  This probably a stupid question but do solar and batteries depend on rare earth metals and their supply?
  - sroussey 1y ago
    The quick answer is yes, today. But there are battery technologies that require less and less in development. Also, rare earth elements are not that rare. But they are not concentrated, and finding concentrations of them is kinda rare. Event then, you have to mine a lot of area to get them, which is not great for the environment. And since Americans (and everyone ex-China) has not been doing it for decades, only China has advanced the technology to extract and refine it for decades. This lack of refining is similar to our lack of working on solar which will but us behind potentially forever, or until there is a big enough disruption to overcome the decade of experience. You can look at chipmaking and see that such things are not easy.
  - 1y ago

subhobroto 1y ago

> wonder in 20 years what happened as other countries lead in energy Can you clarify what leading in energy means? And what concerns do you have? Do you mean we, in the U.S. are in a tarpit of regulations and red tape that makes setting up a nuclear power plant up impossible? Or something else? IMHO, leading in energy also needs to take into account where that energy takes us and what it unlocks. I immigrated to the U.S. so I am extremely bullish so do consider that below. My California perspective is that energy is going to be even more decentralized. I have not paid an electric bill in years and get a check from my utility once a year where they pay me wholesale rates for my net export. I net export because I rarely use any meaningful energy at night that my 5kwH battery pack cannot provide. Once battery prices fall even further, I will dump everything into my local storage and draw no gross power from my utility at all. For all practical purposes, I will be off grid. Anyone in California has the technological ability to get there as well. The utilities dump GWh of solar energy because we produce so much! The issue we have in the U.S. is one of horrible policies and regulation. Your typical townhouse in the city block isn't going to be able to put 20 panels on their roof because their HOA is going to throw a fit. The owner won't be allowed to install it themselves and would have to pay an electrician tens of thousands of dollars because the city isn't going to permit it otherwise. The obstacle of installing $5k worth of parts is incredibly disappointing. From my perspective, technologically, solar energy is going to become cheaper as storage continues to fall in price. This will empower increasing productivity. In my case, once the GPU market becomes consumer friendly and less constrained, or fundamentally different LLMs are released that are CPU friendly but I can't imagine that possibility yet, I will buy more GPUs and increase my self host LLM capacity. Today, as of right now I an getting "Insufficient capacity" errors from AWS attempting to launch a g6.2xlarge cluster and puny 24GB GPUs cost a lot making renting from AWS a better choice. The responses from the coding models blow my mind. They often meet or beat the kind of code I would expect from a junior engineer I would have to pay $120k/yr for and that would be a cheap engineer in SoCal. A GPU cluster including running costs would be fraction of that so I would be able to expand quicker with less. Whole offices are going to become more compact and continue to become decentralized or even remote. Their carbon footprint is then going to go practically zero (no office security patrol, no HVAC, no heating, etc). More people will be able to start businesses (higher GDP) with less, increasing the GDP per Co2 emissions. My childhood friends in the E.U who are in the same space that I am in are less enthusiastic. My friends in Germany who bought a hundred PV panels is not happy at all. So which country will lead in energy and what would they be doing?

taurath 1y ago

The US is not naively sticking our heads in the sand, our leadership is making direct choices to make sure that they rule over the ashes rather than let a future happen where they have less power.

MangoToupe 1y ago

> Obviously AI is a massive and important area for economic growth Is it? Sure it helps sell chips, but where is it actually driving measurable efficiency improvements?

kulahan 1y ago

Trump has signed a number of bills aimed at ramping up the nuclear center, which is the best-available renewable energy source based on current tech, aside from geothermal, assuming recent developments continue to pan out. The only country that the US needs to worry about beating them in the clean energy race is China. They’re building energy plants like crazy (though worth noting, not all of their plants are clean energy).