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AI is bringing old nuclear plants out of retirement
- danmaz74 11mo agoAt least, they're not reactivating a coal power plant.
- rmoriz 11mo agoCoal would harm the nature for months until the bubble bursts, nuclear waste will last forever. And hopefully the old nuclear plants won’t fail uncontrolledly.
- sigwinch 11mo agoThe mercury and other pollution dusted by coal doesn’t degrade. It has the same two solutions as nuclear waste: ignore or concentrate.
- rmoriz 11mo agoif you operate a coal plant for 3 years until the bubble bursts, you will emit 3 years of toxins and carbon dioxide. If you operate a nuclear plant for just one minute, your highly radioactive waste will be a burden for thousands of generations.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoNuclear waste is not a burden. It's very manageable. The problem would be in any uncontained accident. The probability of that is low but not zero, especially in old reactor designs such as the ones they are talking about reactivating.
- ponector 11mo agoCompare in tons please, not in minutes. Coal has heavy metals and traces of radioactive materials in it. Multiply to the thousands tons and maybe they are more harmful than nuclear.
- kouiskas 11mo ago[flagged]
- solarengineer 11mo agoThe old nuclear plants should definitely be inspected and safety issues should be remediated. I have found this page on nuclear waste to be informative https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear-waste-and-what-do-we-do-with-it https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-is-nuclear... Some points: - The generation of electricity from a typical 1,000-megawatt nuclear power station, which would supply the needs of more than a million people, produces only three cubic metres of vitrified high-level waste per year, if the used fuel is recycled. In comparison, a 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power station produces approximately 300,000 tonnes of ash and more than 6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, every year. Important condition being "if the used fuel is recycled". To quote from the article on recycling: "Although some countries, most notably the USA, treat used nuclear fuel as waste, most of the material in used fuel can be recycled. Approximately 97% – the vast majority (~94%) being uranium – of it could be used as fuel in certain types of reactor. Recycling has, to date, mostly been focused on the extraction of plutonium and uranium, as these elements can be reused in conventional reactors. This separated plutonium and uranium can subsequently be mixed with fresh uranium and made into new fuel rods. Countries such as France, Japan, Germany, Belgium and Russia have all used plutonium recycling to generate electricity, whilst also reducing the radiological footprint of their waste. Some of the by-products (approximately 4%), mainly the fission products, will still require disposal in a repository and are immobilized by mixing them with glass, through a process called vitrification." There are various informative videos on Youtube that cover vitrification, where the remaining waste is melted with glass-forming materials at a high temperature, and the resulting matter can be safely stored in steel vats. In comparison to carbon from coal, the volume is miniscule.
- Filligree 11mo agoRadiation from coal goes into the air and tailings, which aren’t well controlled, and stays dangerous for centuries. Radiation from nuclear waste is constrained to steel casks in cooling ponds, and the waste can be reprocessed for use in breeder reactors instead of letting it sit.
- rmoriz 11mo agoThe costs of protecting nuclear waste for 100.000 years from terrorists and during wars will be impossible. It's a super easy target. Just attack the power plants and nuclear waste facilities of the opponent and you have won the war.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoWell we've had them since the 1950s, where are all these terrorist attacks? The only nuclear disasters have been accidental, and those were made worse by early reactor designs that didn't account for safety to the degree necessary.
- rmoriz 11mo agoThe Twin Towers were attacked almost 30 years after.
- hagbard_c 11mo ago> nuclear waste will last forever Nuclear 'waste' is just waiting to become new nuclear 'fuel' in a fast neutron or 'breeder' reactor. Treated this way the volume of nuclear waste can be reduced by 90% while the remaining highly radioactive waste only needs to be stored for some hundreds of years instead of thousands due to its much shorter half life. It also extends the viability of nuclear fission (as opposed to fusion) by a factor of 10 by producing new fissionable material.
- pfdietz 11mo agoRecycled plutonium has negative value. It costs more to fabricate fuel elements out of it than it saves in uranium mining and enrichment costs. There is no great financial windfall waiting here.
- hagbard_c 11mo agoThere is, however, a marked reduction in the amount of nuclear waste in need of storage as well as a marked increase in the amount of available fissionable material. Given that one of the arguments against nuclear fission is the amount of waste which needs to be stored for a very long period this in itself is worth the effort of reprocessing spent fuel pellets. Do this at a large enough scale and the price of reprocessing will come down as well. As long as nuclear fusion is still 10 to 30 years away nuclear fission is one of the few reliable day-and-night hell-or-high-water power sources which doesn't (or, let's rephrase it, shouldn't) scare those who believe in the CO₂ scare nor does it (or, also rephrased, should it) rely on resources from politically volatile regions.
- pfdietz 11mo agoWaste handling is also a bad argument for reprocessing. It turns out it's cheaper to just procrastinate. If you want to reprocess to reduce waste, you spend less money (incorporating the time value of money) if you wait 10 years. And then you spend less if you wait another 10 years. And so on, indefinitely.
- m4ck_ 11mo agoTell that to the people in North Carolina whose neighborhoods were built on coal ash dumps. A little undocumented whooopsie from the power company and all the sudden your kids all have eye cancer.
- rmoriz 11mo agoAI is a bubble and in a few months, expensive nuclear energy will either be not needed anymore or replaced by cheaper solar and wind energy. The plant was decommissioned years ago because it was just not running profitable. And it will never be except within a bubble phase, like AI is currently in. Nuclear energy is the most stupid energy to ramp up during high demand phases.
- rmoriz 11mo agoOld nuclear plants are huge targets for sabotage by foreign spies and terrorists. If they can make one blow up, it will decide every conflict in their favour. It's like having a huge bomb in your garden on display for everyone to target.
- cr125rider 11mo agoI think it’s more of a “power any way we can get it” sort of strategy. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/27/ai-gives-coal-plants-a-lifeline-as-trump-makes-them-dirtier-00661839 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/27/ai-gives-coal-plant...
- t0mas88 11mo agoIs AI energy consumption a stable 24x7 kind of thing? Inference load obviously changes with consumer traffic, so it will have a daily rhythm. But do the large providers use the rest of the capacity for training? Or are those separate clusters? If it's a stable 24x7 load it would be ideal for nuclear energy, low carbon, but slow to adapt to changes in demand.
- reactordev 11mo agoIt’s way more nuanced than this. It’s not like when you ask GPT a question, the energy grid takes a dip. No, data centers have massive power draw. They also have battery backup systems that are the primary drivers of stable power along with power inverters and all sorts of power equipment on site. The fact that we are building out more data centers means we need more power. The energy marketplace has only so much extra capacity (various forms) before it too is depleted. So, you bring on more power plants, more reactors, more solar farms, moar powah! No, what is sad is that we have the ability to turn every roof, every window, every side wall into a power source and yet we choose not to. (I wrote a demand response energy grid “manipulation” platform)
- tylervigen 11mo agoFrontier LLM training can take months for a single run, which is about as stable as a load gets.
- svara 11mo agoMight make sense to scale the load by following electricity supply/prices though? Staying that as a genuine question since I'm not sure how the math works out at that scale, you have to weigh that against hardware depreciation of course.
- manquer 11mo agoIt does not. Power purchase agreements are priced differently and usually written to guarantee power at a predictable price, think of it like reserved instances and spot on the cloud. Bulk of workloads don’t care or benefit from spot pricing. Also Modern neoclouds have captive non grid sources like gas or diesel plants for which grid demand has no impact to cost. These sources are not cheap but DC operators have not much choice as getting grid capacity takes years . Even gas turbines are difficult to procure these days so we hear of funky sources like jet engines.
- antonvs 11mo agoAt first I thought this meant they were vibe-coding the restart of an old nuclear plant. What could possibly go wrong?
- bicx 11mo agoOn the bright side, maybe big tech will be the ones to accelerate fusion energy generation to a point of practical usage.
- acessoproibido 11mo agoTo me one of the great tragedies of our time is that we could probably solve fusion if we just invested like 50 billion or something in it. Instead wasting so much effort on things like quantum computers seems insane. Solving fusion could usher in the golden age that atomic power failed to produce
- rcxdude 11mo agoThe thing that worries me is that it's still not obvious that fusion wouldn't also be the extremely expensive, slow to build boondoggle that fission is.
- __MatrixMan__ 11mo agoBecause it has the word nuclear nearby and we'll be surprised at how ignorant our regulators can be, or because it'll turn out to be less safe than we think and it'll get red taped to death like fission did, or some non regulatory reason?
- actionfromafar 11mo agoOr just orders of magnitudes more than expensive than paving solar and batteries everywhere. Also a juicy missile target.
- ZeroGravitas 11mo agoBecause most plans for it still involve attaching a giant steam boiler to turn the heat it produces into electricity and that bit alone will cost more than renewable alternatives.
- 11mo ago
- bjourne 11mo ago"AI" or "massive government subsidies"? Power generation that after 60 years still need to be subsidized may not be all that.
- halapro 11mo agoOops. I really messed up. I should not have done that. I apologize. The temperature will not stop rising and I can't save you.
- Aperocky 11mo agothey are not using AI to bring it up (only the demand from AI), but this is still funny.
- jack_tripper 11mo agoYou're right! Your eagle eyed diligence caught my mistake. Let's try this again without the mushroom cloud this time.
- quantum_state 11mo ago:-) ...
- qoez 11mo ago"You're totally right in catching that mistake! The temperature is indeed one order of magnitude off. Let's walk through step by step what it should be:"
- AshamedCaptain 11mo agoWhenever you ask yourself "why did the other Chernobyl generators keep running decades after the infamous accident" -- read the answer here.
- m4ck_ 11mo agoinb4 that South Carolina plant ends up turning into a scam that costs the tax payers billions (again)
- ProllyInfamous 11mo agoHowdy neighbor, from a customer of Tennessee Valley Authority (primary generators are hydro and nuclear, with natgas peakers). For some reason TVA keeps building new nuclear sites, never commissioning them, and then selling them at huge losses to private investors (or destroying them). Recently TVA got approval for µfission reactors to be installed... here we go again. [•] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefonte_Nuclear_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellefonte_Nuclear_Plant> $4B, estimated loss Suggested (hopefully not Enron-esque) reading: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/0593084160/ https://www.amazon.com/Power-Failure-Rise-Fall-American/dp/0...
- alecco 11mo agoUS/UK/EU can barely supply energy as it is today. A little will be added for AI, slowly. But good luck re-industrializing without any energy left while competing with China at 1/16th of energy cost. This has been brewing for decades and the people responsible are not going anywhere.
- londons_explore 11mo agoMarket forces will fix this. AI compute will go to places where energy is cheap
- mistrial9 11mo agosixty five datacenters under construction in Chile, right now source: Chile National Data Centers Plan | 2024-2030 MinCiencia Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation note - this is "promoting the sustainable growth of the data center industry" .. you know it has to be sustainable
- alecco 11mo agoAll those are bold announcements by politicians. There are a lot of things to do and it takes many years in Latin America. Also there is no spare grid and electricity generation is kind of in the middle of nowhere. Good luck with constructing a datacenter in there, and then having technical employees to maintain it. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for those plans. But it will take 5 to 10 years while China has a 15 year headstart.
- ikekkdcjkfke 11mo agoIs the universe sustainable though
- rationalist 11mo agohttp://www.thelastquestion.net http://www.thelastquestion.net
- 11mo ago
- pragmatic 11mo agoWhat are the likely outcomes? 1) current admins working hand in glove with current AI hypemen safely bring old nuke plants online. 2) they bring it online but cause a meltdown or two in the process. Investor pressure lead to cut corners lead to meltdowns lead to public opinion turning against nuke power...again. Second nuke power winter begins. 3) something else?