By Jo Nova
All those sustainable dreams, gone pfft
Google, Oracle, Microsoft were all raving fans of renewable energy, but all of them have given up trying to do it with wind and solar power. In the rush to feed the baby AI gargoyle, instead of lining the streets with wind turbines and battery packs, they’re all suddenly buying, building and talking about nuclear power. For some reason, when running $100 billion dollar data centres, no one seems to want to use random electricity and turn them on and off when the wind stops. Probably because without electricity AI is a dumb rock.
In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race.
It’s all turned on a dime. It was only in May that Microsoft was making the “biggest ever renewable energy agreement” in order to power AI and be carbon neutral. Ten minutes later and it’s resurrecting the old Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Lucky Americans don’t blow up their old power plants.
Oracle is building the world’s largest datacentre and wants to power it with three small modular reactors. Amazon Web Services has bought a data centre next to a nuclear plant, and is running job ads for a nuclear engineer. Recently, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, spoke about small modular reactors. The chief of Open AI also happens to chair the boards of two nuclear start-ups.
The AI Boom Is Raising Hopes of a Nuclear Comeback
The AI boom has left technology companies scrambling for low-carbon sources of energy to power their data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that electricity demand from AI, data centers, and crypto could more than double by 2026. Even its lowball estimates say that the added demand will be equivalent to all the electricity used in Sweden or—in the high-usage case—Germany.
Australia uses ten times as much electricity as Microsoft, but is still fantasizing about reaching 82% renewable by 2030 with no nuclear power “because it will cost too much and take too long”. Microsoft uses 24 TWh of energy a year and employs 220,000 people, and knows it needs a nuclear plant to be competitive (and reach, albeit frivolous weather changing ideals). Australia uses 274 TWh of electricity, and employs 14 million people but is going to aim for frivolous climate witchery anyway, and do it the double-hard way.
Who needs to be competitive, right?
Pierre Gosselin discusses how Germany risks being left behind because it has switched off all its nuclear plants. At least it has some power lines to France. Australia has no nukes, not much hydro, no mountains to spare, is the driest continent on Earth, and it has no powerlines to anywhere. We are the crash test dummy. Soon most big companies will have more reliable power than we do.
It speaks volumes about how poorly run France is that they haven’t found a way to capitalize on being the only nation on earth with cheap, abundant, reliable zero CO2 emissions energy thanks to their 1970s nuclear buildout.
European tech startups and energy-intensive industries should be flocking to France to take advantage of French nuclear power. But instead, France has largely sat on it’s competitive advantage for the past 30 years rather than expanding it, and been content to sell off their excess power to their neighbors for a modest profit rather than using it all themselves (and building more) to revolutionize their industrial base. They’ve also allowed those 50 year old reactors to fall into a state of disrepair as they spent their energy dollars on ‘transitioning’ from the cleanest and most reliable grid in the world to less efficient solar and wind installations.
Hopefully, big tech will start a trend and we will see other American companies invest in nuclear, even if the government won’t. That’s why the free market is the greatest economic engine the world has ever know, and why governments picking winners and losers always ends up in taxpayer money being wasted.
And hopefully, sooner or later the country with the world’s largest reserves of nuclear fuel will figure out that they should probably be investing in nuclear as well, instead of building out unreliable wind and solar.
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France sells electricity to all of Europe … they make good money.
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I believe that UK also buys power from France.
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Last time I looked Victoria had 300 years of cheap brown coal fed electricity. The cheapest on Earth. We “decided” to go for wind and solar. Its unlikely we could fund a more stupid decision.
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As I have mentioned here before, the Amazon data centre consumes a staggering 960ME of nuclear power.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-5842/amazon-buys-nuclearpowered-data-center-from-talen/
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Thst should be 960MW or 960MWe not 960ME.
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I’ve only seen this MWe used for nuclear power plants in naval vessels, never for ground-based nuclear. Would appreciate an explanation of the differences.
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Two units applied to any thermal plant are MWe for electric output and MWt to describe the thermal input.
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Understood, but why aren’t most nuclear plants quoted in MWe, rather than just MW?
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Fundamental Question: Where is the market for all this AI? and who is going to pay for it? I just don’t see the numbers mounting up. AI is all well and good in niche areas but I certainly don’t see it as a replacement for a search engine \ Wikipedia in any paid sense to who is going to pay for it? and why? And, yes, it can draw pretty pictures and movies but people will get bored with them pretty quickly.
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AI as it exists today is 1st generation.
It is going to improve exponentially over time. Today’s AI is the equivalent of the brick phones we used to lug around in the 1980s, or of Pong in the video gaming world, or of those giant console TVs we had back in the 70s built into 200 pound wooden cabinets with a 19″ screen. Compare all those to their modern equivalents and then let your imagination go to work on what AI will be like in 20 or 30 years.
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Steve4192,
Have you anything to back that up? (please don’t say Moore’s Law)
In the late ’80s I was good friends with a guy who had some experience working on neural nets at the time. He said they often generated wonderful answers, but their big failing was that they couldn’t explain any reasoning behind those answers. Potential buyers weren’t interested in magical answer machines that were often right, but sometimes direly wrong. It would be their head on the block.
As I understand it, the really big changes between then and now are *not* in the algorithms. Computers are way faster. There is vastly more training data. Perhaps the biggest change is that potential buyers are far more gullible than buyers in the ’80s.
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Hmm. I contend that AI is simply using today’s knowledge and not developing any new knowledge of its own. Used to have arguments with my company’s legal eagles about IP – they claimed that the IP were the products and what was recorded in the company’s documents. I said that this was old knowledge, and that the company’s IP, especially future IP, only existed in the heads of their employees.
Are there any examples of AI using existing knowledge to develop new knowledge?
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Ultimately, the purpose of AI as it’s being implemented is for Leftist propaganda purposes. It is now the basis of many or most search engine inquiries and it has already been proven how the big AI engines have been taught with an extremely Leftist bias. Search engine inquiries typically give a low ranking (or none at all) to conservstive responses on questions where there is a chance to provide either a Leftist or conservative point of view. Obviously, answers from both points of view should be treated equally.
E.g.
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‘who is going to pay for it?’
When you sign up for your digital passport, and use your digital currency, and want to leave your 15 minute city, or apply for an exemption to your carbon allocation, or pay your fine for truth-speak in order to get back your capacity to purchase food, or want to visit your young children in their ‘boarding schools’ or your older children in their barracks as they are prepared for the ongoing war with ‘the enemy’, I am sure you’ll be happy to pay the fee from the ‘money’ left over after your war tax is deducted.
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Try these:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-09-ai-efficiently-clinical-expert-accuracy.html
https://thespectator.com/topic/will-artificial-intelligence-lead-greater-appreciation-working-class-jobs/
https://nypost.com/2024/01/16/opinion/the-white-collar-class-derided-mass-layoffs-among-the-blue-collar-workers-its-about-to-feel-their-pain/
https://investorplace.com/market360/2024/10/what-the-longshoremens-strike-is-really-about-and-why-it-matters/
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America is where innovations start pretty much. It’s how we are. It’s how we are set up. The Left hates it but they never win in the long run. They just screw things up. Americans are the most restless people on earth. So, in regards to the future of AI I would start by reading:
Kurzweil – “The Singularity”
Then if you are an optimist read about ” Techno-Optimism” and “Effective Accelerationists” like Palmer Luckey and Marc Andreessen. Elon Musk had 200 countries to go to. He knew where to go. So did the Jews from The Third Reich. Smart people have a way of getting here and thriving.
The whole world translates our country’s name as “The United States.” One country does not: Israel. They call us the אַרצוֹת הַבְּרִית – artzot habeerit – The Lands of the Covenant. They get us, so to speak and it is why of all Western Nations, America still likes and admires Israel. Oh, Israel is also the other restless, innovation nation by far. It’s not even close. There is more venture capital in Israel than any nation in Europe. Ask Hezbollah about their nifty pagers and walkie talkies if they are still around. Now that was innovative and so admirable.
If the two smartest, most innovative nations on earth are attacking AI to get a leg up on their competition with every $ of capital spending, I would probably jump on board.
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Happy to make way for you.
Bear in mind that America’s popular attractions also include P.T.Barnum, the Great Depression and the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
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These woke Big Tech corporations promote wind and solar to the Proles and censor opinions critical of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fraud.
However, you can’t run the same data centres used to track, trace, control and mould our opinions on the expensive, useless, environmentally destructive wind and solar power they advocate.
No. No. No.
For them it has to be proper power sources that are inexpensive and reliable like nuclear power. The same ones they run campaigns against to prevent we Proles using them.
It really is a fight by the Elites who want to control us, represented by the Left, vs everyone else, represented by conservatives (not the fake conservative Liberal Party of Australia but more like the people Donald Trump represents).
It is the road to serfdom as Friedrich Hayek called it in his book of the same name in which he criticised government control of economic decision making through central planning (and/or these days, the corporate state).
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This is actually fantastic news. The big tech companies dumping renewables for nuclear will provide the unassailable evidence that wind and solar cannot cut it. The virtue signaling politicians and leaders will be forced to change direction in a most positive way.
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significant damage has already been done.
they need to be held to account.
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Energy for big brother good, Energy for proles bad.
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Exactly. Only the deluded really think that co2 needs mitigation. It has always been about creating/maintaining scarcity for the non-elites.
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For me it just underscores the size of the NWO con trick! First they made electricity too expensive using C02 as the bogyman then switch sides and make like the good guys. We are being manipulated to death!
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I’m not dead. Whack!
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I need some new conspiracy theories! All the old ones have come true!
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Yep, and I’m still waiting for “their ABC” and some in the MSM to catch up on that fact.
I won’t hold my breath though.
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The elephant in the room is surplus solar.
Until it is mandated that solar power can only be connected to the grid if it is dispatchable i.e. with batteries, there will be a midday glut, forcing all other generators to curtail production.
AS an example, according to OpenNEM, yesterday at 12.30pm, solar was supplying 65% of demand, forcing coal generators to curtail production to supply just 26% of demand, yet at 7pm ramp up to supply 60% of demand.
Maybe the answer for big users of electricity is to go off grid with a modular nuclear reactor.
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You need to read Jo’s article on this from last week.
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“All those sustainable dreams, gone pfft.”
Along with trillions of dollars ‘investment’ now converted into floating, marble-encrusted floating palaces, private jets and oceanside mansions. Of course, the money was the real objective, not environmental concerns, and should the solar/wind scam truly start to wither, it will be replaced with a similar con in order to keep the money flowing.
Hydrogen power anybody?
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Again Labor, Greens and Teals want to destroy thousands of klms of our wilderness areas and farms to force us to use toxic W & S and then replace the entire toxic mess every 15 to 20 years.
Even Bloomberg and their ABC etc admit it will cost Aussies trillions of $ and yet Labor tells us that Nuclear will cost too much?
But Nuclear is cheaper than unreliable, toxic W & S and the reliable 24/7 Nuclear stns built today will easily extend past 2100.
Of course Labor’s B O Bowen loony is also pushing for more W & S to destroy our coastal ocean environments as well and whales are beaching in greater numbers in the US according to their concerned citizens.
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But this can’t be true… Albo said prices were going down.
I was wondering why this hadn’t happened earlier – old contract now up for renewal.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-02/electricity-prices-food-manufacturing-rising-costs/104413466
Cheers
Dave B
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Not to worry Neville – “the country’s in the very best of hands”. Here is an example of gross hypocrisy evidenced by Tanya Plibersek’s mob (DCCEEW) giving the Fitzroy Basin Association $4.5 million from the Australian Government’s Saving Koalas Fund “to restore and protect koala habitat in areas of significant koala populations in the Clarke-Connors Range” in Central Queensland (Link: https://fba.org.au/fba-koala-projects-in-the-clarke-connors-range ) – while at the same time the State Government approved Twiggy Forrest’s (Squadron Energy) massive bird chopper project to effectively devastate prime koala habitat in the same Clarke-Connors range system! A largely pristine wilderness area in this coastal range continuum.
But of course, all this is completely opaque to your urban yuppie voter. As is the fact that the State has exempted the clearing of forest/woodland for ‘renewables’ on land that would have led to 5-6 figure fines if carried out by rural landholders.
Steven Nowakowski and his mates are brilliant at producing short videos monitoring this unending disaster. See: https://www.youtube.com/@rainforestreservesaustrali5016 . I recommend looking at the ‘Clarke Creek Vandalism’ YouTube presentation for a quick appreciation (3 mins) of Twiggys activities.
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Thanks Bill and Steven Nowakowski is a real conservationist and he has appeared on Andrew Bolt’s show and the Ousiders etc on Sky News.
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onto the next boondoggle.
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Here’s a very informed recent video from Mark Mills and you can select or watch by chapters if you like under the video.
Mark has been telling us for years that toxic W & S is an expensive disaster and the so called energy transition is a delusional sick joke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30e58egoHC0&t=15s
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BTW Mark Mills claims in the video at 35.5 minutes that the PV Chinese solar panels on a typical roof in California has already used about 100 tons of coal to manufacture the panels.
Think about it and the how we’ve been misled for decades by the con merchants and liars.
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Thanks again to Jo Nova for trying to wake us up to our vulnerability if we’re stupid enough to try to change to toxic, unreliable W & S.
Here’s a short quote from Jo’s article….
“In a sense, AI is a form of energy. The guy with the biggest gigawatts has a head start, and the guy with unreliable generators isn’t in the race”.
IOW if we use toxic W & S we are very vulnerable and definitely will not be able to defend ourselves against an enemy equipped with Nuclear and other reliable 24/7 base-load energy systems.
Certainly this is also the most important reason thet we shouldn’t waste trillions of S on unreliable toxic W & S. And then repeat this lunacy every 15 to 20 years.
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Starting with the first apparently serious propaganda about new nuclear technology I’ve been entering the occasional comment that the long term plan is for big data and AI, which are important to government for its surveillance and people control programs, along with the government centers those technologies serve, will get the best synchronous, reliable electricity supplies while the little people will have to make due with the unreliable, asynchronous supplies — whenever those happen to be running. Watch it unfold.
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Our Australian energy minister constantly derides nuclear technology.
and yet his electoral seat is only 12km distance from a functioning nuclear reactor.
Australia’s Open Pool Australian Lightwater (OPAL) reactor is a state-of-the-art 20-megawatt multi-purpose reactor.
“As Australia’s only nuclear reactor, OPAL produces neutrons that form the radioisotopes required for nuclear medicines to diagnose and treat a range of medical conditions and cancers. OPAL also enables the supply of more than half of the global demand for irradiated silicon for use in electronics and green technologies.”
Quote above, sourced from media release, 29th September 2024… https://www.ansto.gov.au/news/opal-reactor-back-online-after-planned-long-shutdown
I have had the opportunity to inspect the nuclear facility in full. (3 times now).
It is an amazing site.
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Thanks for reminding me about the Opal reactor William x and the wonderful part that Nuclear energy plays in Nuclear medicine and saving thousands of lives.
What an asset we now have for Australia’s future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiAkelzSIGg
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From Nuclear for Australia in an email to everyone on their Mailing List –
Dear Johnny Rotten,
https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-ways-us-nuclear-energy-industry-evolving-2024
This report is a game changer.
This US Department of Energy report has debunked Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese’s anti-nuclear claims.
Analysis from the US shows that electricity costs are ~30% cheaper with nuclear and renewables in the energy mix!
Which is why the US Government is planning to TRIPLE their nuclear energy capacity by 2025.
It also heavily undermines the CSIRO’s anti-nuclear analysis, getting it wrong by orders of magnitude. This US analysis shows nuclear plants last 80 years, not only 30 years as claimed in their GenCost report.
There’s also good news for nuclear jobs: the report shows nuclear jobs are ~50% higher paying than jobs in solar or wind.
These are the facts we’ve claimed from the start.
For anti-nuclear campaigners to now ignore this report would be willful ignorance.
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Actually, the email has an error. The US aim is to TRIPLE their nuclear energy capacity by 2050 and not 2025. That would be impossible to do in only one year.
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Given the success of UK’s naval reactor driven ships I’m surprised they have not come up with a Small Modular Reactor that is already in a power station ship. They could rent it out to (say) Sydney and be responsible for it’s total operation. It could become a fleet auxiliary of the Royal Navy and help pay for that nation’s navy. There is nothing new about this. The Soviet Antarctika Class ice-breakers are hired out for similar purpose sometimes.
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One of the lessons from nuclear powered ships is that they can be built and commissioned much faster than land based power stations. At a guess it would be something to do with the red and green tape which buries nearly all worthwhile projects.
After getting rid of the red and green tape the only real question is one of scale. Ships require fairly small amounts of power compared to cities.
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Have to overturn Australia’s government policy on nuclear energy first. The LNP are talking about nuclear at the moment, but I still don’t trust them. They had ample time to “fix” so many things during their time in government but were often blocked by their own members, senate and intransigent public service. Within the Ministry of Energy I think there is a nucleus of bureaucrats both anti-nuclear and anti-coal. If we stick with the same Lib/Lab government, nothing will get done.
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The only two times nuclear energy was banned in Australia was by the LNP. First when the Jervis Bay power plant, already under construction, was cancelled by McMahon in 1971 and then nuclear powrr was banned by law by Howard in 1998.
Plus, the worst disasters to Australia’s energy supply have happened under the LNP, Howard in particular.
-Howard allowed non-dispatchable generators to connect to the grid.
-Howard gave away much of our natural gas supply to the Chicomms at world’s cheapest prices on a bizarre 30 year contract with no provision for inflation or market price, still running.
-Howard’s ethanol subsidy, still running.
-Howard’s world parity pricing for petrol.
Etc..
Howard was energyphobic.
Absolutely don’t trust the fake conservative Liberal faction of the Uniparty. They are only slightly less bad than the Green Labor faction.
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Russia has mounted a couple of ex-sub nuclear reactors on a barge and anchored it at a small town in Siberia to supply power. Think another one was planned, but not sure if it went into service.
Small reactors have been planned to fit into shipping containers so that they can be moved around the country.
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Toshiba has developed small nuclear reactors to generate electricity for a while now – They also have other applications –
Advanced Reactor
Very Small Reactor MoveluX™
As for safety aspect, reactor automatically shut down and remove decay heat without operator’s action during accident and has reactor autonomously shut down system by moderator material characteristics.
Heat pipe, pump-less simple cooling system, contributes to enhance economic efficiency. Solid moderator makes lower pressure system available.
MoveluX™ can supply heat of about 700°C, which makes it suitable for a broad range of applications, including heat supply and hydrogen production.
※ MoveluX™：Mobile-Very-small reactor for Local Utility in X-mark
https://www.global.toshiba/ww/products-solutions/nuclearenergy/research/safety-reactor.html
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Oh goody, haute couture energy for the elites.
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Cognitive dissonance is a truly powerful force.
The powers that be had a collective mind set that there was money to be made running everything on unicorn flatulence.
Then the powers that be discovered that their pet projects were impossible with that power source.
So cognitive dissonance kicks in and all of a sudden the mindset changes.
At a guess the new collective mindset will be that everything other than pet projects will run on unicorn flatulence.
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BTW Sky’s Chris Kenny has also interviewed Steven Nowakowski about the toxic, unreliable windfarms and the thousands of kilometres to be destroyed in Qld and eastern Australia.
Probably the worst vandalism we’ve seen in the last 200 + years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65dxBmK3K8E
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Watching a documentary last night on the downfall of Angkor Wat gave me reason to compare Australia’s electricity grid to the plight of the Khmer peoples.
The Khmer were a high class civilisation from about 800 AD to 1400 AD with incredible wealth and power, and to do this they built a large irrigation system for growing enormous amounts of rice, and the empire was highly dependent on this commodity and irrigation systems. They terraformed the landscape to meet their needs, and as time went by they needed more and more irrigation to maintain and grow the rice economy (so highly valued that rice doubled as a currency) which eventually led to a complicated network of irrigation systems which also required a lot of maintenance and organisation. Researchers believed the system became so complicated to manage with a large bureaucracy that eventually failures occurred. Then along came a long period of drought followed by a long flooding period, this disaster was the final nail in the coffin of a once powerful empire. They then become susceptible to invasion and destruction and the magnificent constructions of Angkor Wat were eventually lost to the jungle.
Australia’s path of electricity generation and distribution compared to the Khmer irrigation systems and subsequent failure is obvious. The warning signs are all there. Reliance on single type of weather dependent energy (climate anyone?), complicated grid to manage etc, etc………….this is disaster waiting to happen. When will we ever learn? Devotion to single forms always ends in collapse.
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In 2018, uranium was USD16/lb. Today it is USD80/lb. A 5-fold increase in a few years:
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/uranium
Even at USD100/lb, the fuel cost is in cents per MWh. However if big tech requirements for uranium push the price to the stratosphere; say USD10,000/lb, then the fuel is of the order of $20/MWh. Price zoomed to USD135/lb in 2007 (at least $200/lb inflation adjusted). So with Ranger Mine now out of the picture and Kazatomprom having serious production difficulties, get set for Uranium price to go stratospheric.
Russia dominates uranium fuel production. France gets a free pass on sanctions for buying Russian sourced uranium fuel pellets. Imagine if the EU/Russian hostilities intensify.
Possibly the smartest place for big tech to build AI is the Latrobe Valley. Something like 1000 years of coal at Australia’s current rate of electricity production still in the ground. And that is before the gas is tapped.
My bet is that AI will magically work out that atmospheric CO2 is solely beneficial for the planet with no down side. The globalist have taken the CO2 scam about as far as it can go. Any individual with a brain and 5 minutes looking at the data realises CO2 does nothing to alter Earth’s energy balance. Ice in the atmosphere dominates the energy balance. We observe the ice as cloud. Ice formation occurs at a precise temperature and becomes quite obvious that it is going to result in temperature regulation.
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