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Tbh the statistics are pretty great for nuclear.
With a nuclear plant, there’s a teeny teeny tiny chance I’ll get Hulk powers.
With AI, I’ll probably just lose my job and destroy the planet.
Yeah, sure but will an AI you can boil off a lake to generate pictures of me as a hulk, me as a hulk wearing no shirt, me as a hulk wearing ripped pants and I have something in my pants, can you generate nudity, can you generate pictures of naked if it's non sexual, pictures of me as a hulk getting changed and I just took off my pants to put on other pants non sexual, generate a picture of an eggplant, make the eggplant green, make the tip of the eggplant a darker shade, take the eggplant from @image2 and place it over the crotch of @image1, animate this image, do it again, do it again, starrjummps, do it again, delete my account.
Generation IV power plants can be designed so that they are physically incapable of going into meltdown. And the technology is getting better and better at reusing the waste.
So, of course, one would prefer a nuclear power plant.
If anything, we really need to update old power plants and replace all other non-renewable plants with cleaner power, renewable or not.
Promises, promises. I haven't heard of one that's actually in commercial operation right now.
But, apples and oranges... it's a bullshit choice. Power plants generate power, DC's consume power.
If you going to generate power, why look beyond solar/wind and batteries? At a much lower price, and much faster build times, they too are 'physically incapable of going into meltdown', and are already in use worldwide, no wait time.
As far as DC's go, they depend on very new technology (enjoying a trendy fad) which -will- get far less power-hungry than they are. Or else. (The grid's not ready for them.)
The only people in a rush seem to be the people who invested in all the snake oil promises that LLM's are real A.I. ... which they aren't.
Bruh I think most of the people answering this are imagining 3-Mile Island...
I live in the other city in America which had a nuclear disaster, but no one talks about it really. It created a cancer cluster in part of my city. People died.
I'd rather have nuclear than data centers. Nuclear of today isn't the nuclear of the 50's / 60's. It's pretty easy to understand why it's safe these days.
Obviously nuclear fission is the real "fuck yeah" choice though
You mean the thing that was a bunch of panic but has never actually been shown to of caused any long term issues?
That's why they're saying modern plants aren't like that.
Why would anyone care to have a power plant near them? The last one in the US that failed was almost 50 years ago. I'm not saying there can't be accidents, but they're pretty safe. You're like 1,000,000x more likely to die on your commute to work.
And all our plants are old and unsafe as fuck compared to new modern designs. So building new ones would likely be even more safe
Well nuclear power plants create something more useful than ai data centers, nuclear waste.
Hell, some of the more modern designs barely produce that...
I still remember learning that and about breeder reactors (they produce fissile material from common isotopes) and feeling so betrayed by the common zeitgeist
Indeed, nuclear is among the safest and cleanest forms of energy currently available to us! All the waste in the world for life barely fills a few football fields' worth of space, if I recall correctly.
One football field 10 meters high to be precise.
One football field 10 meters high
You're mixing US and metric measurement systems there. You should either stick to meters or come up with a sports analogy for the height.
11.574 standard National Baseball League baseball bats high
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Nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused. France has been doing it for decades. Or you could reuse it in a thorium reactor, which needs less reprocessing.
Another thing people forget about is that nuclear power is the main source for tritium, which we have a shortage of and it's getting worse as more nuclear plants are decommissioned. Tritium has a lot of uses, but it's most noteworthy use is fuel for fusion power. If decommission all nuclear plants, fusion research is effectively dead in the water
Some groups have started to extract materials from nuclear waste that can provide Targeted Alpha Therapy for cancer patients, so very true.
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gotta be careful here because they'll take that as consent for both. "GEE IF THE POWER IS ALREADY THERE...."
I like things that don't vibrate in such a way that it makes me want to vomit and die, true.
Well no shit. One of those things is actually useful.
Why not both? \s
Actually what is going to happen lol
Since data centers will be run by nuclear power on-site in the future they will soon have both...
Why build a nuclear power plant with your data center if you could just get power from the grid and drive up everyone else's price too? It's cheaper for the data center operator.
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No they won't. Natural gas turbines baybee.
The joke of the Grok AI is how it's generating power in one of the least cost efficient manners possible.
Musk is just burning a ton of short term capital to avoid lobbying Mississippi (fucking Mississippi, the most easy state to bend over a rail with lobbyists in the country) for a hard-line to the existing grid and some upgrades to capacity funded on the public dime.
That's what you get to do as a trillionaire. Make stupid business decisions and then dump the turd onto your investors when they want to invest in your lucrative network of federal Pentagon contracts.
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Well yeah. Nuclear power plant somehow manage to consume less water
Nearly 50,000 residents of Lake Tahoe, a popular tourist destination in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, have been told their utility company will stop providing them with electricity in 2027. The utility, NV Energy, will instead use that power for data centers in northern Nevada, one of the fastest growing data center corridors in the nation and where Google, Microsoft and Apple have all either built or planned facilities, Fortune reported. Residents have until next May to find a new electric provider.
Wow, that's rather appalling. Ars has a longer write-up about it.
Utah just approved a data center that is supposed to be larger then Manhattan. And uses more power then the entire state currently. We are so fucked.
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"You will no longer be provided power in 7 months time, good luck." - Their local power company.
Are you nuts? And miss all the heat that data center will provide you yearly? Imagine in summer having heat from the data center!
You need to stop asking for nuclear power plants, data center is the feature, and you have to accept it! Period.
Yeah! If there's ONE thing lame-ass nuclear plants and their spicy rocks suck at, it's making heat!
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Of course, one of them actually does good for my community.
I would honestly rather have a loaded nuclear silo right underneath my house than a massive AI data center within 1000 miles of me
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I don't want either please.
Centralized energy sources should be considered a bad idea in Europe after what happened in Ukraine.
I think nuclear power safety has improved significantly over what they had in the USSR 40 years ago.
That's fine, but even if it was 100% safe, a centralized energy source can be taken over (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant#2022_Russian_occupation_of_the_plant) or destroyed (like a lot of other Ukrainian energy infrastructure) and then, people are without energy. Decentralized energy solves that problem.
Destroying or taking over 1 nuclear power plant is far easier than taking over or destroying the solar panels on every house in a country.
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this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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