The same people that build nuclear don’t build solar or wind. And yes, there is a huge shortage for these people with renewables, which is where the black and white flat cost of energy sources breaks down. Renewables are slightly less expensive than nuclear, but infinitely more expensive when their natural source is unavailable and battery / hydro storage is depleted. “far too expensive” is highly over exaggerated when nuclear costs about 1-3x as much as renewables, with newer reactors being on the low end of that scale.

On top of that there are very few moments where there is almost no wind or sunshine over a very large area all at once, making it economically unviable to an enormous degree.

To make this happen you need a massive amount of overcompensation for the times that the sun does shine and the wind does blow. The kind that isn’t economically viable. You’re building decentralized infrastructure that needs to be maintained while being essentially useless a lot of the time. You also can’t exactly build a new wind/solar park in response to short term fluctuating demand, while you can scale up reactor utility.

Obviously the best backup is battery storage, … And it allows far more decentralisation: small battery pack, which combined with some solar allows them to be basically off the grid.

The biggest users of electricity are not homes. You’re right, this is a fine setup for houses. But you’re not going to solve the biggest energy users this way. Not to mention, even for people at home, the amount of rare earth metals required with current technology is an ecological disaster in it’s own right. We need batteries, but lets not pretend they are currently a final solution. Decentralization is not a magic cure all, decentralization also causes places with outdated energy infrastructure requiring new investments to completely revamp the system. This is not economically viable.

But even something like gas is a more preferable alternative to nuclear. It’s very cheap and still viable when needing to spin up or down quickly.

This is not carbon neutral, which is what our goal is. So you’re essentially conceding the point here. You also highly overestimate how many days a year you would need them, considering the sun doesn’t shine for at least HALF the day on average.

Unfortunately it is, because money is finite. And investers choose whatever is most viable, which increasingly is not nuclear.

Which is why nuclear is necessary. As the engineers that can build and maintain renewables are busy, and the grid is oversaturated with renewables when the sun is shining and the wind blowing (causing their efficiency / utilization to fall if you build any more) they will eventually break the equation in favor of nuclear. And there are still nuclear reactors being built in places where public opinion isn’t irrationally afraid of nuclear.

The sad thing is we could have been building them 20 years ago, and have had massive steps ahead in being green now. Instead we are here hoping for some kind of miracle technology like cheap batteries, nuclear fusion, carbon capture, all which isn’t a certainty to become fruitful, yet nuclear is here right now.

Nuclear is there as a back up for when the sun doesn’t shine, the wind doesn’t blow, you don’t have enough space for renewables, or you’ve reached the capacity for building and repairing renewables (Either logistically, in lack of expertise, or lack of public support). If you can’t find a solution for that the result you end up with is just going back to fossil fuels when the times are tough. That’s not carbon neutrality.

Battery storage is also still a breakthrough away from being viable enough to store all the electricity renewables could potentially generate to be able to sustain a 100% load when they are less effective, not to mention the amount of infrastructure required for them to be able to do so. You need some kind of baseline to supplement it that works when nothing else does.

We need both renewables and nuclear, and nuclear should never be a reason not to invest in renewables. But the same goes the other way around. We’re in a crisis, we can’t be pedantic about this stuff when the world waited out the clock to the very end like a teenager the day before his exam. We can pick the perfect options when it is no longer the enemy of good options. Until then every option should be explored.

Sadly, it’s just not. Looking at just the price to generate is just too one sided. Renewables need a lot of expensive infrastructure due to being decentralized, land which you might not have, and experts that are already in huge shortage. Energy storage especially is hard and expensive with current technology due the massive amount of rare earth metals you need for it, and even the current largest storage facility can’t even provide enough energy for 2 million people let alone 8 billion of them.

I calculate it and explain it in even more depth here: https://lemmy.world/comment/13508867

TL:DR; currently, renewables + nuclear + storage is the closest we can get to carbon neutral. With just renewables and storage you don’t get anywhere close and are still forced to fall back on either fossil, (stored) hydro, or nuclear. Of which the only really viable green option for most places is nuclear. When the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing, when the alternative is the exact pollution we are trying to nullify, that should be more important than paying a few cents more per kWh. In that moment the cost for renewables might as well be infinite if they’re not producing anything and we don’t have enough batteries to store it.

I’m sure such cases exist, but where I’m from people don’t really get paid to host turbines, maybe companies at times. They dislike them because it affects the view in the area, and especially if you live very close to them the blades can cause noticeable flickering shadows. That latter point has a lot more weight to it in my eyes, but people do really care about the former as well, and it’s kind of hard to push on people when they live there and not you.

There is competition in battery production. Pretty much all of society would be better off with better batteries, so price gauging in an industry like that is quite hard. And if it was, it would not go unnoticed.

The problem is simply the technology. There’s advancements like molten salt batteries, but it’s practically in it’s infancy. The moment a technology like that would become a big improvement over the norm, it would pretty much immediately cause a paradigm shift in energy production and every company would want a piece of the pie. So you’ll know it when you see it. But it might also just start off very underwhelmingly like nuclear fusion and very gradually improve with the hope it can scale beyond the current best technologies for batteries.

All we can do is wait and hope for breakthrough, I guess. Because cheap and abundant batteries could really help massively with reducing our carbon output.

2.160 GW is it’s rated capacity. I’m not sure how you got from there to 14.2 dollars per watt, but it completely ignores the lifetime of the power plant.

Vogtle 3&4 are really a bad example because unit 4 only entered commercial activity this year. But fine, we can look at what it produces just recently.. About 3335000 MWh per month, or about 107 GWh per day. We can then subtract the baseline from Reactor 1 & 2 from before Reactor 3 was opened, removing about 1700000 MWh per month. Which gives us about 53 GWh per day. The lifetime of them is expected to be around 60 to 80 year, but lets take 60. That’s about 1177200 GWh over it’s lifetime, divided by the 36 billion that it cost to built… Gives you about 0.03 dollars per kWh. Which is pretty much as good as renewables get as well. But of course, this ignores maintenance, but that’s hard to calculate for solar panels as well. As such it will be somewhat larger than 0.03, I will admit.

Solar panels on the other hand, often have a lifetime of 30 years, so even though it costs less per watt, MW, or GW, it also produces less over time. For solar, and wind, that’s about the same.. So this doesn’t really say much.

But that wasn’t even the point of my message. As I said, I agree that Nuclear is slightly more expensive than renewables. But there are other costs associated with renewables that aren’t expressed well in monetary value for their units alone. Infrastructure, space, approval, experts to maintain it.

Let’s ignore that no grid in the country actually needs 10hr storage yet.

Because they cannot. They can’t do it because there’s not enough capacity. If the sun is cloudy for a day, and the wind doesn’t run. Who’s going to power the grid for a day? That’s right. Mostly coal and gas. That’s the point. Nuclear is there to ensure we don’t go back to fossils when we want to be carbon neutral, which means no output. If you are carbon neutral only when the weather is perfect for renewables, then you’re not really carbon neutral and still would have to produce a ton of pollution at times.

I’m glad batteries and all are getting cheaper. They are definitely needed, also for nuclear. But you must also be aware of just how damn dirty they are to produce. The minerals required produce them are rare, and expensive. Wind power also kills people that need to maintain it. Things aren’t so black and white.

Also consider that PV and batteries have always gotten cheaper over time, while nuclear has always gotten more expensive.

This is not true, and it should be obvious when you think about it. Since this data fluctuates all the time. Nuclear has been more expensive in the past, before getting cheaper, and now getting more expensive again. Solar and wind have had peaks of being far more expensive than before. These numbers are just a representation of aggregate data, and they often leave out nuance like renewables being favored by regulations and subsidies. They are in part a manifestation of the resistance to nuclear. Unlike renewables, there are many more steps to be made for efficiency in nuclear. Most development has (justifiably) been focused on safety so far, as with solar and wind and batteries we can look away from the slave labor on the other side of the world to produce the rare earth metals needed for it. There is no free lunch in this world.

For what it’s purpose should be, which is to provide a baseline production of electricity when renewables are not as effective. A higher price can be justified. It’s not meant to replace renewables altogether. Because if renewables can’t produce clean energy, their price might as well be infinitely high in that moment, which leaves our only options to be fossil fuels, hydro, batteries, or nuclear. Fossil fuels should be obvious, not everyone has hydro (let alone enough), batteries don’t have the capacity or numbers at the scale required (for the foreseeable future), and nuclear is here right now.

Ik dacht dat SGP over het algemeen een respectabele partij waren, maar ze zeggen hier letterlijk gewoon “Yep, accepteer maar wat Isreal hier op dit blaadje zet.” in hun motie. Dat is toch te gek voor woorden als het gaat om mensen en organizaties als terroristen markeren? Daar hebben we toch onze eigen veiligheidsdiensten voor om dat soort beslissingen te onderbouwen? Niet klakkeloos over nemen van een land dat een gigantisch conflict van interesse heeft om kritiek de mond te snoeren en mensenrechten veel minder serieus neemt.

Ja wat er in Amsterdam gebeurt is, is ver weg van acceptabel. Maar laten we niet doen alsof er niet gezonde mensen zijn die niet heel vrolijk worden van Isreal’s manier van dingen doen.

In mijn ogen niet anders dan Erdogan die hier of in Duitsland vraagt om hier iemand te veroordelen of uit te leveren omdat ze online wat gemene woorden over hem zeggen. Kom maar met bewijs dat het hier illegaal is, en dan kunnen we verder praten, tot dan, rot op met je ongefundeerde inmenging.

Solar and wind are cheaper yes. Batteries, no. If batteries were that cheap and easy to place we’d have solved energy a long time ago. Currently batteries don’t hold a candle to live production, the closest you can get is hydro storage, which not everyone has, and can’t realistically be built everywhere.

Look at the stats. The second largest battery storage in the US (and the world) is located near the Moss Landing Power Plant. It provides a capacity of 3000 MWh with 6000 MWh planned (Which would make it the largest). That sounds like a lot, but it’s located next to San Jose and San Fransisco, so lets pick just one of those counties to compare. The average energy usage in the county of San Clara, which contains San Jose (You might need to VPN from the US to see the source) is 17101 GWh per year, which is about 46.8 GWh per day, or 46800 MWh. So you’d need 8 more of those at 6000 MWh to even be able to store a day’s worth of electricity from that county alone, which has a population of about 2 million people. And that’s not even talking about all the realities that come with electricity like peak loads.

For reference, the largest hydro plant has a storage capacity of 40 GWh, 6.6x more (at 6000 MWh above).

Relative to how much space wind and solar use, nuclear is the clear winner. If a country doesn’t have massive amounts of empty area nuclear is unmissable. People also really hate seeing solar and wind farm. That’s not something I personally mind too much, but even in the best of countries people oppose renewables simply because it ruins their surroundings to them. Creating the infrastructure for such distributed energy networks to sustain large solar and wind farms is also quite hard and requires personnel that the entire world has shortages of, while a nuclear reactor is centralized and much easier to set up since it’s similar to current power plants. But a company that can build a nuclear plant isn’t going to be able to build a solar farm, or a wind farm, and in a similar way if every company that can make solar farms or wind farms is busy, their price will go up too. By balancing the load between nuclear, solar, and wind, we ensure the transition can happen as fast and affordable as possible.

There’s also the fact that it always works and can be scaled up or down on demand, and as such is the least polluting source (on the same level as renewables) that can reliably replace coal, natural gas, biomass, and any other always available source. You don’t want to fall back on those when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. If batteries were available to store that energy it’d be a different story. But unless you have large natural batteries like hydro plants with storage basins that you can pump water up to with excess electricity, it’s not sustainable. I’d wish it was, but it’s not. As it stands now, the world needs both renewables and nuclear to go fully neutral. Until something even better like nuclear fusion becomes viable.

The time will come, you can slowly see the tide turning :) Most people aren’t inherently against it, just (understandably) cautious, and at worst misinformed or radicalized about hating it.

What really helps is to start with showing something you really put your heart into, where you can explain your choices and techniques, before you tell them it was done with (help from) AI. There was a recent study where people actually seemed to prefer works made with AI, until they were told it was made by AI and not a person. This just shows there is an AI-bias under people, and being able to show that whatever you’re making was in fact largely a product of your creativity, not the AI’s, really helps.

I tend to make recordings and snapshots of work in progress and then turn that into one of those animations that blends frame to frame to show the entire process. Just being able to show that it wasn’t just doing nothing yourself and that it’s still your creation really helps make people understand.

People differentiate AI (the technology) from AI (the product being peddled by big corporations) without making clear that nuance (Or they mean just LLMs, or they aren’t even aware the technology has a grassroots adoption outside of those big corporations). It will take time, and the bubble bursting might very well be a good thing for the technology into the future. If something is only know for it’s capitalistic exploits it’ll continue to be seen unfavorably even when it’s proven it’s value to those who care to look at it with an open mind. I read it mostly as those people rejoicing over those big corporations getting shafted for their greedy practices.

Not sure why you think I have blind faith? I’ve got blind faith in no one. Least of all the american voter lol.

Stop trying to force your interpretation on my words, it’s not what I said, period. I’m not limiting my scope to two choices. The US constitution does that for the matter of what party is in office. There are very obvious other choices, and most of them call for massive human suffering like civil war or political violence, which I’m not going to iterate on for obvious reasons. Nowhere do I deny the existence of those choices, I’m just presenting the obvious conclusion of trying to change the system in a peaceful manner.

Not that optimistically (And realistically, not common sense either apparently), but yes, it’s a potential path. And a peaceful one, among a multitude of bloody ones.

I’m not expecting anything, And I never said they had to do anything. Who would be expecting any kind of logical reasoning from US voters after this result. I said “If you want to” = “In order to get a desirable outcome, this is potentially the only way to do so.”, not “Everyone must do this because I say so”

You can blame both, honestly. The US has always had the same political game as ever, people should be wise enough to understand how to play it. If you ever want to get to a more stable democracy that no longer has the stupid two party system that prevents any form of real representative democracy where you can actually have a selection of parties that represent you perfectly, the choice should be obvious.

At least with Harris they could try to work with her and convince them to change their views for the future as they ruled. Trump will call you a left wing lunatic and slam the door in your face. Zero influence and no chance for progress (and even regression) vs some influence and some chance to progress.

Definitely not just you, I instantly said “holy shit this is one ancient meme”. I remember it too from the early 2000’s.

First of all, I understand your point of view. And I’ve been looking at artists being undervalued like your potential client for decades, before AI was even a thing. So I definitely feel you on that point, and I wish it would be different. That said, here’s my response. (It’s a bit long, so I put it in spoiler tags)

I told him he wasn’t looking for a composer, but rather a programmer or something

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I could also tell you about the written assignments that students hand in, and for which I can identify in less than 30 seconds which ones have been produced by AI (students overreact to their writing skills, it’s often laughable).

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As I tell them, those who have used chatgpt have “learned” to use AI, those who have done the work have learned to carry out research, to synthesize their ideas and to structure, articulate and present them.

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One last thing. As far as innovation is concerned, AI can endlessly produce pieces that sound like Bach, but it took Bach to exist in the first place, and Glenn Gould to revolutionize the interpretation of his scores for this to be possible.

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EDIT: Just want to add to this:

I have no interest in replacing this practice by entering prompts into an algorithm, even if I could make easy money from it.

That’s not something anyone should do. Because that’s not using it as a tool. That’s making it the entire process. That’s not the kind of AI usage I’m advocating for either. And you’re free to forego AI completely. Just like there are probably some instruments you never use, or some genre you never visit. I don’t like taking the easy way either, that’s why I make creative stuff as a living too. If I just wanted money I would go elsewhere too.

Again - if this is your argument - then the vast majority of things humans do would be “pushing down harder on the gas pedal”. Excluding AI, more people get born every year, water usage also increases every year, electricity usage too. Even if you got rid of all AI right now you would have to overcome those much more significant increases to make a difference. It just doesn’t even make a dent. And it has to, if you want it to actually reduce the impact of climate change and resource depletion.

The world does not stand still, even if we did everything we should to stop climate change. Technology that can change the world and facilitates happier, healthier humans is not a bad thing for a reasonable price. And as I just explained in detail, that price is not that significant in the grand scheme of things. Hence why there is no significant public outrage from this.

If you’re going to hold this position, you should really stick to the biggest polluters, which as you agree, are not getting enough pushback. I agree with that as well, and I would happily stand by your side here. But if someone is handing out pie, and you think everyone should be angry at someone taking 0.00532% of the pie, that is horribly ineffective at actually getting the change we need. Since basically nobody reasonable is going to agree with you. While for the larger polluters it is easily self evident they need it, and we still have a lot of trouble with that.

And Sam Altman went to the emirates asking for Trillions to scale LLMs. All of this for a little more convenience when tackling mostly mundane tasks.

I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but I don’t like the big tech companies use of AI. That does not say anything about the technology at large though. Screw OpenAI and Sam Altman. If your criticism is purely aimed at wasteful conduct by big companies, I’m all there with you. But there are so many smaller companies that also use AI and LLMs.

If you think that’s depressing, wait until you find out that it’s basically nothing in the grand scheme of things.

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And as others have pointed out the water isn’t gone, there’s some cyclicality in how the water is used.

I already know of the stats you speak of, and it’s not nothing. But as I explain below, on the scale of other pollutants and for how widespread it’s usage is, it is a footnote. There are far bigger fish to fry first when it comes to reducing water usage and energy usage.

Lets look up some stats together. Most sources agree that we use about 4 trillion cubic meters of water every year worldwide (Although, this stat is from 2015 most likely, and so it will be bigger now). In 2022, using the stats here Microsoft used 1.7 billion gallons per year, and Google 5.56 billion gallons per year. In cubic meters that’s only 23.69 million cubic meters. That’s only 0.00059% of the worldwide water usage. Meanwhile agriculture uses 70%. Granted not every country uses 70%, but a 1% gain there overshadows any current and even future usage.

And even if we just look at the US, since that’s where Google and Microsoft are based, which uses 322 billion gallons of water every day, resulting in about 445 billion cubic meters per year, that’s still 0.00532%. So it’s not hugely significant inside the US either, we can have 187 more Googles and Microsofts before we even top a single percentage.

There are plenty of other hobbies that are also terrible for the environment but we don’t tackle them because like AI it would be a drop in the bucket. Honestly ask yourself, if AI was such a big issue and would threaten lives, why is nobody actually taking serious measures for it? Why are there no public campaigns to get people to stop using AI to save the water? It’s because the stats are concerning, but not significantly so, and if the stats don’t actually back up the position that AI usage is slowly sucking us dry, people don’t stand behind it. If the advancement of AI allows us to save more lives through medical research, or allows us to farm more efficiently, it can easily pay back it’s investment. And those things outweigh the negatives.

However, as I’ve stated multiple times below, I despise the wasteful usage of AI, and therefore you won’t see me praising Bing or Google for their usage of AI in a way that makes no sense and just wastes resources. But the technology exists for everyone, not just those companies. There are more sustainable LLM models than GPT-4, and OpenAI can rightfully be criticized for not prioritizing efficiency rather that bigger and more power hungry models.

EDIT: Added US comparison EDIT2: Double checked some of the math