I wonder how public works funding would look if 90% of the nation wasn’t painfully far behind in maintenance.
But also, AI data centers have been around for like 3 years. It’s not surprising they haven’t reached a high level of efficiency yet.
IMO they are not an argument against excessive power use (I know this is not your argument, just a common one), but rather and argument FOR better (read: nuclear) power generation.
Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs? It doesn't make sense economically, it's just wishful thinking.
The only cheap nuclear energy is from plants that have already been built, because it won't help if we tear them down. But as soon as you factor in the costs of building, insurance and storage of materials, it's always more expensive than renewables.
And while the cost of renewables is still trending downwards, the cost of new reactors is rising, even in China.
In US at least much of the high cost is completely self inflicted, driven by Byzantine bureaucratic processes mostly unrelated to the actual engineering requirements necessary for building a safe reactor.
I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear. The actual position is that we need a mix of both nuclear and renewables while ramping down non-renewable sources as fast as possible, because you need both intermittent cheap generation and reliable baseload that doesn't care if the wind stops blowing or clouds roll over the panels.
The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could.
Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0] for quite literally no reason and especially benefit to anyone (other than arms industry I guess) whatsoever.
Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things.
And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world.
To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Putting aside the actual subsidies, there’s the uncomfortable truth that nuclear operators are not on the hook for long tail risks and costs. The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning if the company goes under, and it will foot the bill for accidents.
To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
> To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Care to elaborate on what you find funny?
France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.
French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.
> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning
What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.
Who should be paying for it, in your mind?
> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.
In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.
Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.
So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.
>Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs?
>I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.
I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.
How could you possibly know the cost and pollution levels of batteries not-yet invented? The pollution from a nuclear power plant is one 55-gallon barrel of waste per reactor per year, and ZERO batteries are that clean. Like, what are you even thinking here?
This ignores the pollution to make that fuel and the pollution to build the plan (both of which you are already counting on the battery side). Plus the pollution of all the backup generators that they require and must test regularly.
There is significant pollution created while digging up the rare earth materials which are needed to make solar panels, and batteries are some of the dirtiest things we make.
There is virtually zero pollution in a generator which does not typically run. The only waste is the need to occasionally change out the fuel. It’s a rounding error at worst.
This is also ignoring how much safer nuclear is than any other form of power generation, and pollution concerns are ostensibly, at least in part, about improving health and lives of humans.
Why do people create this false narrative that renewables and nuclear somehow aren’t the same thing? Why do people pretend that nuclear is not a solution to our energy needs? Why do they seem addicted to pretending the absolute worst alternatives, like solar and wind, are going to be the solution?
The only forms of power generation worth a shit are hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Geothermal and hydro are geographically bound to certain locations.
Solar sucks dick unless you magically invent a new battery (and if you think we haven’t been trying, you’re crazy). I mean, MAYBE we’ll have a major scientific breakthrough and it’ll be possible to utilize them, but relying largely on an energy source most scarce when you need it most is obviously dumb.
Wind is completely unpredictable and once again, if it’s not, it’s geographically bound.
At least have an argument that doesn’t look stupid as shit. “This thing we haven’t been investing in for 50 years is ESSPENSIV!! Also what’s fusion idk prolly dumb stuff guyz”
Because our battery tech sucks shit. The entire solar industry is predicated on the idea that we will invent a magical battery MANY MANY times better than what currently exists, without being dirtier than everything north of coal.
Come on, I’m begging you to come up with an actual argument rather than one answered millions of times already.
"AI data centers" are so non-central and located in places so data-sparse (yet rich in cheap electricity) I consider them more likely fronts for crypto mining.
From the headline:
>the problem is getting it where it's needed.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
There's definitely a gulf between living-situations, and people assuming their local experience is nationally representative.
I had a car-purchase decision a few years ago, and ultimately I had to choose based on the housing I had, not the housing I wish I had. It was frustrating to hear a lot of "you can just X" from folks who couldn't seem to imagine an apartment or chaotic street-parking.
if super chargers were always within 5 minutes, located around desirable locations to spend an hour, did not charge idle fees, and everyone had 30 minutes of free stuff to do at these locations... then it might just work!
Owning an EV doesn't necessitate spending a few grand to have a fast charger installed. They charge fine from a regular 110v US wall outlet -- they just do it slowly.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
Even people who have a round trip commute of 30 miles drive other places than work on average days and have days when they drive 2 and 3x as much as normal days every time enough greater than average days line up you have to contend with finding a charger which gets more contentious as more electric cars exist AND as they age in the hands of people who cannot afford to just replace car or battery.
Doesn’t matter, go to a charging station once every two weeks if/when charging gets behind. If you’re determined to fail instead of succeed there’s always more excuses to be made.
There’s a good tech connections series on this.
Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
It's doable for single family detached housing for users with a modest daily drive and relatively flat usage patterns so long as they can afford to pay a premium on the car and replace it in a timely fashion when the battery gets sufficiently old that its capacity continues to match peaks in usage with the understanding that failure to keep up means you don't get to work on time or can't get home.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
Suburbia has sprawling lots where nobody is near a receptacle and cities have concrete pads which aren't wired save for lighting. In the minority of cases in which there are any outlets at all nearby any assigned parking spot they are locked to prevent homeless camping their charging their stuff.
When any spots exist the electrical system would never tolerate more than a few people plugging in at once.
For instance if you picked 3 50 unit complexes you would would find that 3 cars were situated to charge out of the 200 to 300 owned.
At present like 2% of cars owned not sold are electric to get to a much higher penetration that is desirable we need better charging.
You don't live in a statistically valid sample of homes our current attachment only works now because 49 out of 50 cars run on gas.
Definitely not true in California, as I already mentioned. Approx 1/3 of cars here. Slow charging is not intensive and if the utility needs more capacity they’ll build it. Like for data centers.
Light poles are being tapped in the neighborhood for EV and surveillance already.
The great thing about the utility market is that they don’t need your permission to invest. They’ll do it when it becomes profitable, i.e. already.
Are you the same guy who poo-pooed digital photography in 2000? Sounds like it.
CA has also invested heavily in charging with 18000 fast charging stations and still only convinced a tiny minority to go electric even with the government partially buying rich kids cars.
With decreasing subsidies, sales already fell off a cliff its way less than 1 in 3 new cars and 1 in 20 existing even in the electric car capital of the US.
We need more mass transit, more telecommuting, cheaper housing in cities, more electric cars, and more charging stations especially in apartments along with more cheap electric vehicles even if they end up being made in china. We want the same thing I am just not delusional enough to believe we've already arrived.
As mentioned, electric cars are everywhere here. Enjoy your nostalgia. I only brought the estimate down to 1/3 because I realize we’re ahead of the curve.
It falls into the bin of "tragedies of the commons we could fix with current technology but fail to sufficiently fund and support in earnest"
Really, when is the last time we overhauled our built environment and actually followed through with a comprehensive plan in the west? We couldn't even finish the interstate highway system in a time when we had seemingly great alignment towards it along with far cheaper costs. Public housing failed too. Broadband access failed. Cell service is still pretty spotty and unreliable.
Public housing failed not because of insufficient funding or support but because a small fraction of residents were sociopaths and criminals. The authorities refused to take decisive action to quickly evict the troublemakers and so they wrecked the projects for everyone. Section 8 vouchers have been far more effective by enabling low-income people to rent housing from private landlords at market rates. There are some abuses but overall it's a better model than public housing.
Starlink satellite cellular service is available pretty much everywhere now.
That is probably an issue with low income housing overall. I don't think slumlord landlords are somehow immune to renting to gang members.
When I talk about spotty coverage I mean, verizon says I have an LTE connection, and yet I get served with dialup tier experience. Not always, but often. This has been the case for the probably 15 years I've had a mobile data plan. I experience this nowhere near anywhere remote, in the heart of large cities even.
Neither public nor private parties are immune to renting from problematic people. There are a few important factors in determining trajectory from normalcy to abnormal
- Friction to evict for cause.
People are less willing to engage in action against tenants when it is difficult or expensive to evict. This is often less about well meaning protections for tenants and surprisingly more about reasonable process in county. If it takes 6 months to get on the docket to get the process started this is going to be more important than what you have to do when you get there.
- Financial cost and immediacy of impact.
Most places lose tenants at end of term and can find at least some new suckers. Turning your place into a shithole may take years to fully show its impact and in a tight housing market it may still be muffled by the sheer number of poor bastards who need somewhere to sleep.
- Incentive structure and distance from decision makers.
If throwing out the bums requires work pain and risk only from the peons who manage the place for the owners and failure to do so only hurts residents and owners then one may find that these enforcement actions never happen. A bureaucracy further increases distance between actors and decision makers.
If you consider these factors you might rightly conclude that a government project is maximally situated to fail at removing bad actors. Friction to evict those in need is going to be higher than almost anywhere else, front line workers are there for long term career trajectory, have little real power nor incentive and nobody but the residents really feels the pain. If you are running a house of last resort your vacancy rate is going to be low even if its a bad place to live.
None of this makes it impossible to run projects correctly it represents increased risk not destiny.
Section 8 in my state is a lottery to get on the list for housing which may or may not happen in a multi year time frame. It's mostly unavailable for the people that need it while some folks who have the ability to work live off it after they went through the expected multi year wait.
> overall it's a better model than public housing.
I don't know about better, but it's what we've got. The problem is a shortage of housing, and the government building housing solves for that because the public market has been shown to be incompetent at that.
mostly because the state has made it illegal or costly to build housing.
The only reason the state would do better is if they can ignore either costs or their own regulation. e
Part of the problem is also the margins to support the top heavy capital class (and the restrictions and permits also favor the capital class). The same reason auto manufacturers put more effort into making expensive luxury cars instead of cheap commuter cars.
Why would someone build cheap houses that would net them the same profit in 10 years as building luxury houses that would in 5 years? Especially if the people on top investing the capital only deal with the accounting books and not actual customers and their desires.
If people could build houses, lots of people would build luxury units until there was no profit in it. Then cheap units would be the most profitable option TO build.
If you only get allowed to build 1 house, of course you will target the best demographic.
You cant lower prices without flooding the market with competing goods.
Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
This math is bad and shouldn't be used as a justification. It presumes that every charger is always available, that variable battery conditions and traffic conditions make reaching that charger every time, and that drivers have time to drive to the fast charger and spend 30 minutes there every time their car has low battery.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away, even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in the SF Bay Area and the local shopping centers closest to me have zero EV chargers. California is supposedly going to mandate that all new vehicles be electric in 2035 but that's obviously a ridiculous fantasy; the deadline will be pushed back or eliminated.
Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
I don’t have a garage, as is common in my country. Charging my car off a regular socket would thus require leaving a ground floor window open all night (undesirable from both a security and wildlife intrusion perspective) or installing a socket outdoors (at which point why not just get a charger?)
Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.
How many is enough is a complicated thing though. You don't need there to be as many pumps as cars because there is enough everywhere that you know with certainty that you can find one any given time within 15 minutes and be refueled in 5.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
Whenever I’m in a hurry the local gas stations are swamped. Twenty minutes is common, thirty minutes not uncommon. A month ago the pump we were on was broken and had to get my money back and abandon the attempt. Had no more than ten minutes to fuel and couldn’t do it.
See, we can apply the same brand of defeatism to anything.
Do you live in any extremely poor and rural area this isn't the experience for 99.9% of Americans where stations are plentiful and waits are 0-2 minutes
Well, when there were no cars using gasoline, there were no gas stations, what a surprise!
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
Ew apartment buildings have them where I live, though a limited number so I can imagine that their use fluctuates. Someone who can’t reserve an open charger can’t move in. Someone who can’t get the floor plan they want is less likely to sign a lease even if a charger is available.
I think this is usually done with idle fees and the like. I was recently apartment hunting and we tested out the EV chargers -- in this case it was a Tesla destination charger, but I didn't realize those now had smarts built into them to provide for billing and idle fees just like superchargers have.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
All three employers I've had over the last ten years now offer free charging at work. New houses everywhere have been putting in extra circuits for charging for years. Apartment buildings are commonly built with chargers now, and older ones are starting to see retrofits.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
The future is not evenly distributed and the outliers matter little.
>Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
Depends entirely on your assumptions about where you draw the line for emissions from second and third order effects.
Saudi oil is so easy to get out of the ground that compared to coal it's practically green.
Yeah seemingly this is not a problem with data centers. I am sure it was astroturfing all along. Also you never hear about climate change even though that's the cause of the heat wave in Europe and the US
I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.
At least in California it is felt really among people who have private power providers that need to both turn a profit and appease shareholders while also paying out various lawsuits and penalties from causing wildfires with poorly maintained equipment. Compare those rates to what you'd get under a municipal power company like LADWP and the difference is dramatic.
It doesn’t really matter if, at the end of the day, our current usage is too high and consumers see EVs as a pro-social purchase. I don’t really think they’re a problem, personally, but it IS the topic of this comment thread, so it’s an appropriate place to complain about this particular issue.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
The article discusses how the biggest problem is peak demand, but that midday electric prices have fallen as solar has grown. EVs are perfect for charging during solar peak and making use of energy that would have had to be curtailed, they can even feed back into the grid helping during peak demand.
The price of electricity in Seattle has effectively dropped - we went from a flat 13.4c/kWh to an opt-in time of use system with an overnight rate of 8c/kWh. My bill dropped by a third.
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
Are you really saying that in 2026, a year when only the nuts are still trying to claim climate change isn’t a thing, the most intelligent approach to the problem of powering data centres that are mostly being built for the purpose of juicing share prices is gas turbines at an industrial scale? The most intelligent approach is to not build the things. The next most intelligent approach is solar and batteries nearby. Way down the bottom of the list is burning gas to power them.
The natural gas is already being flared off to protect the environment (CH4 is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2).
The key with this project is that instead of wasting the thermal energy from this unused gas, we feed it into power plants that are constructed nearby, eliminating the need for new pipeline infrastructure and providing some actual value.
You could go on to argue the oil fields themselves should cease production. This is the only way to actually stop the methane coming out of the ground. Even then it wouldn't happen overnight.
Neat how? Tidal power never made economic sense. There are only a limited number of places with enough tidal flow to even potentially make it viable. Any moving parts in the marine environment require frequent expensive maintenance due to growths and corrosion. Environmentalists will file lawsuits against anything that causes any damage anywhere, even if it would be a net environmental benefit compared to alternatives.
Ocean waves aren't going to stop at night or on a cloudy day, and don't care if the wind is blowing. Yes, tidal power has its own set of problems, but it doesn't have those ones. The more amazing power source I heard about though is the enhanced geothermal power that Fervo is doing.
I don’t see how that generates anywhere near enough power, think about the potential energy of a bucket of water going up and down that amount over the course of a day.
Both are questionable. Tidal power is super neat in theory but we really struggle to make it viable in practice. GPUs in space are probably the lower risk option, but with even more questionable economics
My preferred outlandish idea would be to put the data centers next to solar farms in the Sahara. I just don't know yet how we are going to make the batteries to power that through the night
Yep, sounds like a fantastic idea. Let's litter Earth's orbit even more with the sole intention of messing about with one of the single most fundamental (and natural) processes of the planet: the day and night cycle.
Question for the experts: does the power crunch mean that AI hyperscalers will turn off previous generation GPU datacenters to free up power for their new Vera Rubin GPUs?
The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
In the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.
I'm not sure if the classic adoption curve applies. Has there ever been a product that vendors were shoving down customer's throats as relentlessly as AI?
I doubt it. We're less than six months in to really good coding agents, and they keep improving. Software will eat a lot more of the business world when it's this much cheaper and faster to produce.
We do not know whether subscription plans are unprofitable at all.
Some estimates suggest that this is the case only for the heaviest users.
Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
> We do not know whether subscription plans are unprofitable at all.
That's pretty much certain. It's sort of cute when people like to pretend otherwise.
> Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
I don't make that mistake. I actually suspect that the actual costs may be higher than the API prices. I think those may still be subsidized.
> Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
Yeah, I don't think they are being truthful at all.
> I don't make that mistake. I actually suspect that the actual costs may be higher than the API prices. I think those may still be subsidized.
how are you still under this delusion? so you think that all the hosting companies on openrouter are just burning money selling GLM 5.2 tokens at 1/6th the cost of opus 4.8 api pricing?
Mark Zuckerberg literally tweeted today that they are pricing Muse Spark 1.1 much lower because other companies have excessive margin.
I don't think Anthropic are doing that because they don't have enough compute capacity. If we had 100* more datacentres the message would still be the same - they're focusing on selling Fable access to enterprise users because that's what makes them more money.
Either the cost to serve this larger model is so high that they cannot offer any reasonable usage quota for it at subscription prices, or they really do not have the capacity.
I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset?
It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
A data center might not have murdered his family but the constant AI hype is super tiresome.
PR heads are raging over the amazing shit that AI does and how everything is going to change and just WOWZA BAZINGA.
Yet in my daily life I use it for years and it’s wrong _all_ the time, I end up having to yell at it because it keeps being lazy and gaslighting me, the data centers boil the oceans and rich assholes beg my government to throw billions of good money after bad to build more of this shit. What the fuck? I want to live in the future and all they gave me was some shitty Fisher’s price AI.
And that's precisely why this is all happening: people aiming for the future and forgetting about the present. You using AI every day for years is exactly what started boiling the oceans (even more) and giving the rich assholes even more power than they already had.
With these things, as with most things, you vote with your wallet. If people were to stop buying into the AI fantasy, the AI gooners would have no one to sell their wet dreams to.
You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...
And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...
So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
Who is opposing renewable energy? Texas is projected to top California as the state with the largest amount of solar before the end of the Trump administration.
If there was an oil refinery that looked exactly the same as a turbine from the outside, I would bet that he would love how those would look. The root cause is something else. Hmmm...
TFA isn’t about consumer usage, it is about training the next generation models. An interesting thought I heard recently is that a SOTA model has about the same parameters as the number of synapses in a Golden Retriever’s brain that are not dedicated to biological processes like breathing. Most of that should be wrapped in double quotes, don’t take it literally! But that number is about 100x lower than the same synapses in a human brain.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
just wait. the current gold rush has left any consideration of efficiency or price-performance at the side of the road. the entire enterprise is structured as a 'whoever can spend the most money wins the game for all time'. if we can get past that and invest more in theory and systems at a natural pace it'll just keep getting more affordable over time.
This is part of why the AI bubble will burst. The only way to make the profit numbers backing the loans to AI companies is to get increased capacity, and the capacity requires energy, and the energy won't arrive in time, only partly due to all the factors here, and partly because building transmission and generation is speculative and can fail for a number of reasons.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
> But if AI is a race with national security implications, they won’t be fast enough.
I really don't think this is the case. As far as I can tell there are two national security things where LLMs have some utility; mass surveilance (ick!!!) or software security. To me that does not justify a huge infrastructure buildout considering the implications of said infrastructure.
kind of reminded USSR history of 100 years ago - a mostly agrarian country destroyed by war and revolution doing jump into industrialization with electrification being the driving core of it (the other major factor was GULAG - electrification plus unlimited free labor - winning formula :)
"In 1920, British writer H. G. Wells visited Soviet Russia and met with Vladimir Lenin. Wells believed that it was impossible to realise the Russian revolutionary’s plan, as he wrote in his book Russia in the Shadows:
For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all "Utopians," has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power..."
Our civilization is converging on electricity right now. 200 year ago electricity looked like a set of disparate phenomena. I wonder if in 200 years we'll be basing our society on some new energy form instead of electricity - something like gravitational conductors or some StarTrek singularity generators and plasma coils.
Totally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.
My stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.
The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.
This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."
Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.
Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.
Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.
Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities.
The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity.
The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource.
The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.
The retardation has mostly been a case of AI companies fearmongering, lobbying the govt and the govt not reassuming people against job losses. Local governments passing moratoriums is just common sense populism.
This almost reads as satire from something like The Onion. What on earth does "Hollywood and their woke agenda" have to do with how AI data centers are powered?
We should have been building more nuclear. We’re not going to upgrade civilization with windmills and putting on sweaters. Think of how much power we’ll need for millions of robots?
Unit economics for renewables coupled with storage are excellent. I agree we should reform nuclear regulation to allow new nuclear plants to pencil out. I disagree that we should discount the value of renewables.
Solar and wind take up a bunch of space and generate a bunch of waste after the panels are decommissioned, plus the wind generators are ruining every single landscape we have. With 5 nuclear stations per country you could cleanup so much of Europe.
The environmental damage caused by "clean" power sources is done mostly in countries which are far from Europe, so it's not much discussed in Europe.
Like:
Copper. "As the world shifts to wind energy and electric cars, demand for the conductive metal has increased. But mining copper brings its own environmental hazards"
They probably are aware of nuclear waste and of the modalities of dealing with it, and still believe that not investing into nuclear is shooting yourself in the foot.
FYI, a typical 1GW nuclear plant produces 30 tons, or 10m3, of high-level waste. Germany uses ~500TWh of electricity per year. So Germany could replace all their electricity generation with 60 nuclear plants and would need to find space for 1800 tons or 5km3 of waste per year.
For comparison, German landfills can accommodate 70M metric tons per year.
France, a country famous for its investment into nuclear, is not covered in nuclear waste, and does not seem to have any issue disposing of it safely.
Nuclear has its disadvantages, but painting the many people who advocate for it on HN as delusional or ignorant is not very respectful.
Solar doesn’t produce that much waste either and that was the point. Just because you don’t see the nuclear waste doesn’t mean it isn’t sitting there somewhere. The person was acting as if clean energy is dirty via its waste. For the record I’m all for nuclear - it’s insane we’ve regressed so much and not invested into more. But it’s also insane we’re not taking more advantage of green energy where we can.
Most of the solar panels are pretty non-dangerous waste (cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar panels are dangerous waste, but are currently only small part of installed solar panels).
Silicon tetrachloride used for silicon production is toxic and has to handled carefully.
The main point is that, if Europe wants to invest more in solar power, it should also do the manufacturing in Europe and waste disposal in Europe.
Sure, I don't disagree with the ideal of onshoring more manufacturing for solar, but then the same standard should be applied to the entire supply chain of all forms of power generation. Frequently those negative externalities seem to be most often raised as a "gotcha" for solar specifically, in an attempt to rebut the clear environmental advantages.
For example, nuclear power is often sold as a plant that just sits there churning out zero-emissions power for 50 years from a few tons of super energy dense fuel (such as from the above commenter). Without acknowledging that fuel needs to be enriched from intensive and environmentally destructive mining of raw uranium ore. Which comes with risks to workers and possible contamination of groundwater to nearby communities, etc. Or the carbon impacts of the massive amounts of concrete/steel/etc that are required to build the plant, or the opportunity costs of spending tens of billions on a plant that will require continuing to burn natural gas and coal for another 10-20+ years until it comes online as a replacement, etc.
Otherwise it's just special pleading to apply a different standard that exaggerates the negative externalities of solar + batteries.
Because of super energy density of uranium you need to mine only small amounts of ore, per GWh. Uranium enriched is currently done by gas centrifuges, geopolitically sensitive technology. In future it could be done by laser isotope separation, much more efficient technology, but also geopolitically much more sensitive technology. (Exactly because laser isotope separation doesn't require large amounts of energy and space, it could be easier hidden). There have been demonstrated fast neutron reactors that can run on natural uranium without enrichment, can burn plutonium, but for geopolitical reason this programs have been stopped in US and US discouraged other governments from developing this technologies. With fast neutron reactors we already have enough uranium in stockpiles to power world for centuries.
Carter administration - Fast reactors and nuclear nonproliferation problem
The biggest CO2 impact of nuclear energy is from the steel/concrete used to build the containment building. Because of the aircraft impact rules, nuclear containment building has to survive the impact of a fully loaded large aircraft. These buildings are the strongest non-military facilities in existence, no other civilian industrial plants (even chemical plants with very nasty stuff) have this level of protection. Personally, I think much steel/concrete could be saved by moving nuclear reactor deep underground, but this would require changes in regulation. Again, deep underground nuclear facilities, geopolitical questions...
You know those big fields of panels in China? Where do you think they all will end up at the end of 25 years? To talk about nuclear waste is to be intentionally lying, nuclear waste amount generated is TINY.
How many tons does it take to make a dirty bomb that irradiates a city center or small downtown? To poison an aquifer when storage fails? How much does it cost to make sure neither of these events, or any other similar hypothetical, doesn't happen, not even once?
As far as I know, it hasn't happened, not even once.
Your objection appeals to emotions, not to reason. The very kind of objection that has enabled fossil fuels to be seen as less dangerous. FYI, nuclear energy has killed single digits of people. Fossil fuels kill around 10M annually through pollution alone.
Granted, your lament aims to make people privilege clean energy over nuclear, but in nature it is still the kind of thought-terminating fearmongering that gets us surveillance to protect children, so I object on principle.
Not to mention completely subjective, I personally love the look of windmills, and I live in the Netherlands in a location where I see windmills (and I don't mean the old-timey ones, the big power generating kind) everywhere around me for miles. It's certainly prettier to watch than smoke stacks.
It's been regulated "to death" because it's responsible for some of the worst man-made catastrophes of all time and has made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
It really hasn't though. Fossil fuels kill or disable more people every year than nuclear power has, ever.
Even in terms of radiation accidents, nuclear power generation pales in comparison to orphan sources from medical equipment. Yet you don't see people clamoring on about fewer x-ray or radiological machines.
> made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Are you talking about places besides the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
And why compare the small amount of area made dangerous by nuclear accidents to the entire planet being destroyed by fossil fuels?
Worst catastrophes? Pick any industrial accident with more than like 10 people killed and you've got nuclear beat. A single plane falls from the sky and you've outdone nuclear.
Large swaths of land? You mean a tiny part of Ukraine?
Keep breathing in the radioactive coal fumes in the air, those are good for you, actually.
This is completely BS. There were no deaths from Fukushima from radiation exposure itself (one worker's lung cancer death was later linked to it, but the dose in question makes even that contested), and the deaths that did happen in Fukushima came overwhelmingly from a botched evacuation, not radiation. Elderly patients dying from disrupted care and panic, not fallout. And Fukushima only happened because of multiple natural disasters aligning in the most unfortunate way possible, including a fucking tsunami hitting the plant directly.
Chernobyl was a disaster caused by Soviet incompetence combined with an RBMK reactor design that literally had no proper containment structure. That's the worst case that has ever occurred, nothing like it has happened since, and it can't really happen again with any reactor built with a real containment vessel, which is standard everywhere outside the old Soviet bloc. Three Mile Island is the perfect example, a partial meltdown caused by a mix of mechanical failure and operator error back in 1979, and the containment held. Zero deaths, zero meaningful radiation release. Even with human screwups and old tech, the actual design of the reactor kept it from becoming a Chernobyl.
And even taking Chernobyl as the worst case scenario we've ever seen, the exclusion zone covers about 2500 km^2 of land area, which isn't small, but it's not "large swathes of land" either. You get irradiated from flying in airplanes more than walking around most of the exclusion zone these days, obviously other than around Pripyat itself. Hell, you can take a walking tour through the zone, I'd very much recommend it (after the war concludes :p)
Meanwhile the reality right now is that fossil fuel sources are polluting the entire planet actively. Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment through fly ash than nuclear plants do under normal operation. Coal is far from clean in terms of radioactivity on top of everything else it's doing, and it's actively making the world uninhabitable at a much larger and faster scale than nuclear ever has, but yet we're holding nuclear to some higher standard due to years of propaganda.
It's not a perfect technology obviously, but it sure as hell is better than basically all fossil fuel sources.
Most of the US's problems on this have little to do with putting too much priority on safety. There are countries that show that you can have a sane regulatory process and still get well priced nuclear. France from the 70s through the 90s and South Korea are the classic examples. Neither compromised on what's actually needed, but both cleared the way on redundant walls that don't demonstrate or stop anything bad from happening. You can achieve both greater nuclear safety and reduced process burden through standardization, which is how most places that have done it got it done.
The sun provides unlimited energy for billions of years, significantly cheaper and without the hypothetical risk of turning huge areas uninhabitable or causing incidents with damage in the trillions.
Until you have bad weather, yeah. If you have literally any sources at all that modern(!!!) nuclear reactors are unsafe (so, those that would be built today), or less safe, than any other kind of power production, Id love to see it.
At the time of planning of Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors, were the people responsible aware that their design was in fact not safe? If no, why should it be different today?
And bad weather usually goes along with with significantly increased power generation from wind turbines. Together with battery storage getting cheaper and cheaper, a long term bet on nuclear seems bad both for economic and ecological reasons.
Cheap ubiquitous distributed power systems will change the world in many weird ways. Watch small modular nuclear offer home installation for ~$reasonable and getting cheaper every year.
Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can.
There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
I'd like to see a well reasoned plan to install small modular nuclear power at peoples houses that prevents the mentally ill, criminally reckless or terrorist minded people from cracking them open and obtaining access to the isotopes.
From a strictly red team threat analysis perspective, if you have an extremely safe working reactor that can't be made to melt down, no, the reactor can't be used to hurt much that is in the same location as the reactor. If you are able to get the isotopes out and start spreading them around or making a dirty bomb type thing (where the explosion just serves the purpose of throwing the isotopes around), that could be pretty catastrophic.
have you never visited a rural neighborhood? or an affluent neighborhood?
there are still many neighborhoods where people leave their doors unlocked because it is actually that safe. not every location is rife with criminal activity, and many are well protected.
Serious question, do you actually think that if you distribute millions of small nuclear reactors to homeowners geographically spread out around all of North America, 0.000% of them will be dangerously mentally ill, criminally reckless or inclined to terrorist like activity? Based on the frequency and number of mass shooter type incidents, (or like, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians) this would be a very naive view.
It doesn't require a criminally minded 3rd party coming onto someone's "safe" property to do something horrible with a sawzall and/or oxy-acetylene cutting torch.
That's a very optimistic view of humanity that I can't say I share. If you give a sufficiently motivated person enough isolation and time, they can cut into just about anything. And possibly deal with cleaning up the results of any internal tamperproof countermeasures. In a world that contains people like the Las Vegas mass shooter or those who conducted the 2015 attacks in Paris, handing out isotopes to the ordinary person seems like a recipe for disaster.
We live in a world where multiple people are killed every year by tipping vending machines over onto themselves and you propose to make nuclear reactors a mass market consumer good that goes in everyone's garage?
First: microwaves are only safe if you don't mess with them, a bunch of people get killed by tinkering with their high-voltage transformers (at least 35 US deaths from one specific usecase alone in the last decade, see https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Resources/Safety-Mater...).
A big potential concern with small reactors are highly toxic radionuclides; those can be much more dangerous (with LD50 far under 1mg/kg) than "ordinary toxins" like bleach or even nasty stuff like methyl isocyanate. That means expensive disposal and protection measures.
All of this is a non-concern though because there is no realistic path for nuclear reactors to compete with PV+batteries, ever. With cells already <$100/kWh and the panels being cheaper than glass windows, we will never be able to build, maintain and dispose of nuclear based reactors tech at a competitive price point, especially not with the insane current battery demand (automotive) driving technical optimisation and price competition.
> The worst thing an evildoer can do is blow up your own house and the few around it.
No, they can take the isotopes out and dump it into your local water supply. Or if they're suicidal and the isotopes have been encapsulated in some sort of tamperproof system, grid the whole thing down to granulated powder using less than $20,000 of power tools (disregarding their own health and the entire nearby area, of course) and then dump it into the local water supply.
If someone evil has access to the water supply, is radioactive material the worst they could do? that'll, what, give some people cancer which is really bad but it'll take a while to get them. If people wanted to be shitheads, they could already dump arsenic or LSD into the water supply, or any number of others things. that are already available to them right now! Have you personally tested your taps chlorine or flouride or lead levels recently?
Except most people don’t have industrial levels of arsenic, LSD, or other highly toxic substances stockpiled in their homes. Nor do they have a way to obtain it without triggering a visit from a swat team. Which is exactly what this comment chain is discussing. The potential for harm when you don’t have to go anywhere but your own basement/a few neighbors to obtain enough enriched uranium to create a superfund site.
I do, however, thanks to Taco Bell, have a lovely fauna of microbes in my toilet that, were they to be introduced to the water supply, would cause problems, and so do you. If someone was looking to fuck up the water supply, access to nuclear material isn't what's stopping them.
You're seriously proposing that a country with regular mass-shootings should give everyone a device that can cause a radioactive meltdown or a small explosion?
We already let people have cars and those things are crazy dangerous! No one should be allowed anything, ever, until we bubble wrap everything in the world to be perfectly safe!
Well, we already have strict background checks, licensing and regulations for a scenario such as if a person wants start a home based business manufacturing and storing C4, Semtex or similar at their rural property. If the idea is to start handing out nuclear reactors for peoples' houses, the possible damage that could be done is far greater. No matter how well packaged it is or designed to be consumer friendly.
I feel like the level of discourse on HN has fallen to that of reddit recently. I used to expect more of people on this website. When the rebuttal to home nuclear energy generation being an obviously horribly bad idea is “oh well we have cars too and those are dangerous. Guess we just live in baby world. Little baby world where little baby’s aren’t allowed to own their own nuclear reactors”, it’s just like man. What are you even doing here haha.
There were some crazy ideas for nuclear powered cars, but there are hard physical limits how small you can make a nuclear reactor.
1. Smaller the nuclear reactor is more neutron leakage you get. Each neutron which escapes a nuclear reactor is a neutron which can not be used to sustain the chain reactor. To compensate this you have to put more fissionable U-235 isotope into the reactor and as a result you need higher enriched nuclear fuel. A nuclear reactor in nuclear submarine can have the size of a dining table but it's running on nuclear fuel enriched to a weapon grade enrichment.
2. Even a small nuclear reactor with few kW thermal output needs a thick and heavy radiation shielding. This is not problem for power plant, or nuclear powered submarine, or nuclear powered ship. But the shielding requirement were problem for nuclear powered airplanes or trains.
In case of the mobile ML-1 experimental nuclear reactor, built as part of the US Army Nuclear Power Program, extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation.
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first artificial nuclear reactor, didn't have shielding. But, to keep the dose of ionizing radiation for the staff within reasonable limits, it operated only for very short time periods and the total output of CP-1 was only few Watts.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dIvV!,w_1456,c_limit...
Of the items on this chart, I would say AI data centers are providing the least amount of value per % of GDP spent.
And 1930s public works the highest.
I wonder how public works funding would look if 90% of the nation wasn’t painfully far behind in maintenance.
But also, AI data centers have been around for like 3 years. It’s not surprising they haven’t reached a high level of efficiency yet.
IMO they are not an argument against excessive power use (I know this is not your argument, just a common one), but rather and argument FOR better (read: nuclear) power generation.
Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs? It doesn't make sense economically, it's just wishful thinking.
The only cheap nuclear energy is from plants that have already been built, because it won't help if we tear them down. But as soon as you factor in the costs of building, insurance and storage of materials, it's always more expensive than renewables.
And while the cost of renewables is still trending downwards, the cost of new reactors is rising, even in China.
In US at least much of the high cost is completely self inflicted, driven by Byzantine bureaucratic processes mostly unrelated to the actual engineering requirements necessary for building a safe reactor.
I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear. The actual position is that we need a mix of both nuclear and renewables while ramping down non-renewable sources as fast as possible, because you need both intermittent cheap generation and reliable baseload that doesn't care if the wind stops blowing or clouds roll over the panels.
The pricing story remains unconvincing to me. LCOE comparisons measure the cost of producing a unit of electricity, but they don't account for what it costs to actually integrate that electricity into a working grid. Solar and wind are cheap on paper, but they still need storage or backup generation to cover the hours they're not producing, and that cost gets left out of the simple dollar per MWh number. Once you factor in grid balancing and storage, the gap closes a lot, and in some studies it disappears entirely depending on the region's wind and solar resources. Obviously things have to be considered in the context of where we're putting these power plants, Norwegians can probably afford to rely a lot more on offshore wind and hydro than a place like Serbia could.
Nuclear plants will obviously be expensive to build, and will likely always be more expensive than renewables to initially build just due to the sheer complexity involved when compared to renewable sources, but I can't think of a better use of that money personally, especially compared to how much gets spent on far worse things like chucking a billion dollars worth of missiles at Iran[0] for quite literally no reason and especially benefit to anyone (other than arms industry I guess) whatsoever.
Also, already built and paid off nuclear plants are consistently some of the cheapest electricity around, often profitable without any subsidy at all. 70%(!!!!) of France's electricity comes from nuclear. They exported more electricity last year than countries like Belgium consumes in an entire year. They enjoy some of the cheapest power prices in the region because of their historical nuclear fleet, and had people had the same attitude back in the day (looking at you, German "green" party), that fleet would've never gotten built. Letting your offspring enjoy the shade of the tree you plant today and all that stuff, it'll always be too expensive until we actually hunker down and just build the bloody things.
And yeah, new builds like Flamanville have been a mess on cost and timeline, that's a fair criticism of new construction, but it doesn't erase what a mature nuclear fleet does for a grid once it's actually built, and can generally be applied to pretty much any infrastructure project anywhere in the world.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845514 - US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers
To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Putting aside the actual subsidies, there’s the uncomfortable truth that nuclear operators are not on the hook for long tail risks and costs. The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning if the company goes under, and it will foot the bill for accidents.
To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
> To say that paid off nuclear is profitable without subsidies and then mention France is deeply funny.
Care to elaborate on what you find funny?
France's energy regulator (CRE) puts the actual cost of running its nuclear fleet at about ~€61/MWh for 2026-2028. EDF's (Électricité de France) own revenue estimate for 2026 nuclear generation is around €66/MWh. They are currently earning a profit on their power generation, the fleet pulls in over €5 billion annually just from selling the surplus to its neighbors. If that's the punchline of your joke I'm not seeing it.
French industrial electricity runs about €69/MWh vs £168/MWh in the UK, as an example.
> The government (read us, the taxpayers) in most countries will foot the bill for decomisioning
What better use is there of taxes than the running and decommissioning of power plants, nuclear or not? I'd much rather my tax money go to covering all the costs involved with nuclear, from initial construction and everything else involved than pretty much anything else most gov'ts waste their money on.
Who should be paying for it, in your mind?
> To talk about them not getting subsidies once they are paid off is to ignore the fact that no reactor would ever get built without the government providing them a guaranteed backstop.
Again, I fail to see how or why this is actually a problem. Power generation is probably the poster child for what governments should be handling and backstopping with tax money. You're also talking as if the large majority of power plants, and I mean coal, natural gas and even renewables aren't also covered by the exact same kind of government backstop.
In the US, nuclear's liability for an accident is capped around $16.3 Billion under the Price-Anderson Act, split across private insurance and an industry-funded pool.
Offshore oil liability is capped by law at $75 million (Yes, only MILLION) per incident, funded by a tiny per-barrel tax, and cleanup costs blow through that number constantly, which is why e.g. Deepwater Horizon needed a special one-off arrangement to handle at all. TVA's 2008 coal ash spill cost over a billion dollars to clean up and got passed straight onto ratepayers because TVA hit its own debt ceiling. And right now, in 2026, the EPA is actively proposing to weaken coal ash cleanup rules, meaning the backstop on coal's mess is getting worse, not better, while it's still being burned at scale.
So no, nuclear doesn't get some unique golden treatment here. Every energy source with real catastrophic tail risk gets a government backstop, because no private insurer on earth prices genuinely catastrophic low-probability events without one. The only difference is nuclear's cap is a known, bounded number attached to an industry with an extremely good actual safety record in reality, while coal's backstop is open-ended and attached to something that poisons rivers and drinking water on a rolling basis without needing a single accident to do it.
>Why do so many otherwise seemingly rational people pretend that nuclear is the answer to our energy needs?
>I don't think anyone reasonable is saying we should only do nuclear.
I didn't interpret the other post to imply only nuclear. I interpreted to mean "why do so many people think nuclear is better than battery". My understanding is that LCOS+LCOE for batt+solar is quite close to nuclear cost and will only go down further, plus it has the advantage of being safer in the catastrophic case.
How could you possibly know the cost and pollution levels of batteries not-yet invented? The pollution from a nuclear power plant is one 55-gallon barrel of waste per reactor per year, and ZERO batteries are that clean. Like, what are you even thinking here?
This ignores the pollution to make that fuel and the pollution to build the plan (both of which you are already counting on the battery side). Plus the pollution of all the backup generators that they require and must test regularly.
There is significant pollution created while digging up the rare earth materials which are needed to make solar panels, and batteries are some of the dirtiest things we make.
There is virtually zero pollution in a generator which does not typically run. The only waste is the need to occasionally change out the fuel. It’s a rounding error at worst.
This is also ignoring how much safer nuclear is than any other form of power generation, and pollution concerns are ostensibly, at least in part, about improving health and lives of humans.
Bro come on lol.
Why do people create this false narrative that renewables and nuclear somehow aren’t the same thing? Why do people pretend that nuclear is not a solution to our energy needs? Why do they seem addicted to pretending the absolute worst alternatives, like solar and wind, are going to be the solution?
The only forms of power generation worth a shit are hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. Geothermal and hydro are geographically bound to certain locations.
Solar sucks dick unless you magically invent a new battery (and if you think we haven’t been trying, you’re crazy). I mean, MAYBE we’ll have a major scientific breakthrough and it’ll be possible to utilize them, but relying largely on an energy source most scarce when you need it most is obviously dumb.
Wind is completely unpredictable and once again, if it’s not, it’s geographically bound.
At least have an argument that doesn’t look stupid as shit. “This thing we haven’t been investing in for 50 years is ESSPENSIV!! Also what’s fusion idk prolly dumb stuff guyz”
Why are we convinced base load power is the only option? Plenty of countries are successfully running grid scale energy storage with batteries
Because our battery tech sucks shit. The entire solar industry is predicated on the idea that we will invent a magical battery MANY MANY times better than what currently exists, without being dirtier than everything north of coal.
Come on, I’m begging you to come up with an actual argument rather than one answered millions of times already.
"AI data centers" are so non-central and located in places so data-sparse (yet rich in cheap electricity) I consider them more likely fronts for crypto mining.
Remember when we didn't have enough electricity for electric cars?
From the headline: >the problem is getting it where it's needed.
Same issue with EV rollout. EVs are great if you have a single family home and a few grand to spend on outfitting a fast charger. Most apartment renters however are shit out of luck. I mean it has been how many years now of EV cars on the road and virtually no sweeping buildout of EV chargers in apartment complexes that I can see at least. There was a push for like maybe a half dozen token ev charging spots in new parking garage construction but that has been it for years in terms of that scale, a sort of nicety not something you can bank on having when you go to one of these garages. Street parking EV hookup has also not been rolling out at any serious scale. There is 1 single ev street parking spot in my neighborhood; they put it in years ago and nothing more has been built since.
I know someone with an EV in an apartment without a hookup for them, and charging it is a legitimate constant chore as they have to plan to go somewhere offsite to do it. Frequently they can't take the EV and have to resort to the gas car because the EV is at 20% charge or something.
I think what we are seeing with EVs is akin to general K shaped economy phenomenon. The rich and rich government leadership assume rollout must be going well, since they can charge conveniently at their house and they see many other Teslas in the parking lot of the country club or the luxury shopping center. Never mind actually considering how a renter's experience might be different, and renters are the bulk of our cities.
There's definitely a gulf between living-situations, and people assuming their local experience is nationally representative.
I had a car-purchase decision a few years ago, and ultimately I had to choose based on the housing I had, not the housing I wish I had. It was frustrating to hear a lot of "you can just X" from folks who couldn't seem to imagine an apartment or chaotic street-parking.
There is another sibling comment saying that it works just fine with charging at fast chargers.
I would find that irritating as it’s still time consuming - slow charging at home suits me, but as you say, requires a suitable home.
if super chargers were always within 5 minutes, located around desirable locations to spend an hour, did not charge idle fees, and everyone had 30 minutes of free stuff to do at these locations... then it might just work!
Owning an EV doesn't necessitate spending a few grand to have a fast charger installed. They charge fine from a regular 110v US wall outlet -- they just do it slowly.
And by "slowly," I mean: Somewhere in the realm of 2-5 miles per hour. It's not fast at all.
But that's compatible with many lifestyles, wherein: The car is probably just sitting there at home for 12 or more hours per day, anyway.
If the round-trip commute is 30 miles, and the car gains just 3 miles per hour while plugged in, and it gets plugged in for 12 hours per day, then: It gains 36 miles per day, and the daily-commute part of driving it is completely covered by a regular outlet.
(Which still doesn't address the conundrum that many apartment dwellers face, but it would've helped me at most of the apartments I've lived in: Ground floor, and parking right outside of my place. I'd have just used an extension cord and the landlord wouldn't have said a word, except maybe to have a chat about how I like the car.)
Even people who have a round trip commute of 30 miles drive other places than work on average days and have days when they drive 2 and 3x as much as normal days every time enough greater than average days line up you have to contend with finding a charger which gets more contentious as more electric cars exist AND as they age in the hands of people who cannot afford to just replace car or battery.
Doesn’t matter, go to a charging station once every two weeks if/when charging gets behind. If you’re determined to fail instead of succeed there’s always more excuses to be made.
There’s a good tech connections series on this. Slow home charging has been doable for quite a while.
It's doable for single family detached housing for users with a modest daily drive and relatively flat usage patterns so long as they can afford to pay a premium on the car and replace it in a timely fashion when the battery gets sufficiently old that its capacity continues to match peaks in usage with the understanding that failure to keep up means you don't get to work on time or can't get home.
Which is exactly why techbros think its obvious and most regular people aren't buying.
Nope, our 1970s apartment garage has 120V outlets and light fixtures, some have been tapped, and the rest could cheaply.
Most apartments especially in cities where most people live are unsuitable for charging of any kind
False, just mentioned our apartment.
For the ones that need upgrades, we’re talking extension-cord-level technology.
Suburbia has sprawling lots where nobody is near a receptacle and cities have concrete pads which aren't wired save for lighting. In the minority of cases in which there are any outlets at all nearby any assigned parking spot they are locked to prevent homeless camping their charging their stuff.
When any spots exist the electrical system would never tolerate more than a few people plugging in at once.
For instance if you picked 3 50 unit complexes you would would find that 3 cars were situated to charge out of the 200 to 300 owned.
At present like 2% of cars owned not sold are electric to get to a much higher penetration that is desirable we need better charging.
You don't live in a statistically valid sample of homes our current attachment only works now because 49 out of 50 cars run on gas.
Definitely not true in California, as I already mentioned. Approx 1/3 of cars here. Slow charging is not intensive and if the utility needs more capacity they’ll build it. Like for data centers.
Light poles are being tapped in the neighborhood for EV and surveillance already.
The great thing about the utility market is that they don’t need your permission to invest. They’ll do it when it becomes profitable, i.e. already.
Are you the same guy who poo-pooed digital photography in 2000? Sounds like it.
It's more like 2M out of 37M for plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid, or roughly 5%.
https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicle-registration
CA has also invested heavily in charging with 18000 fast charging stations and still only convinced a tiny minority to go electric even with the government partially buying rich kids cars.
With decreasing subsidies, sales already fell off a cliff its way less than 1 in 3 new cars and 1 in 20 existing even in the electric car capital of the US.
We need more mass transit, more telecommuting, cheaper housing in cities, more electric cars, and more charging stations especially in apartments along with more cheap electric vehicles even if they end up being made in china. We want the same thing I am just not delusional enough to believe we've already arrived.
As mentioned, electric cars are everywhere here. Enjoy your nostalgia. I only brought the estimate down to 1/3 because I realize we’re ahead of the curve.
So all of these problems are intractable? There is no way that any of them can be dealt with at all?
It falls into the bin of "tragedies of the commons we could fix with current technology but fail to sufficiently fund and support in earnest"
Really, when is the last time we overhauled our built environment and actually followed through with a comprehensive plan in the west? We couldn't even finish the interstate highway system in a time when we had seemingly great alignment towards it along with far cheaper costs. Public housing failed too. Broadband access failed. Cell service is still pretty spotty and unreliable.
Public housing failed not because of insufficient funding or support but because a small fraction of residents were sociopaths and criminals. The authorities refused to take decisive action to quickly evict the troublemakers and so they wrecked the projects for everyone. Section 8 vouchers have been far more effective by enabling low-income people to rent housing from private landlords at market rates. There are some abuses but overall it's a better model than public housing.
Starlink satellite cellular service is available pretty much everywhere now.
https://www.t-mobile.com/coverage/satellite-phone-service
That is probably an issue with low income housing overall. I don't think slumlord landlords are somehow immune to renting to gang members.
When I talk about spotty coverage I mean, verizon says I have an LTE connection, and yet I get served with dialup tier experience. Not always, but often. This has been the case for the probably 15 years I've had a mobile data plan. I experience this nowhere near anywhere remote, in the heart of large cities even.
Neither public nor private parties are immune to renting from problematic people. There are a few important factors in determining trajectory from normalcy to abnormal
- Friction to evict for cause.
People are less willing to engage in action against tenants when it is difficult or expensive to evict. This is often less about well meaning protections for tenants and surprisingly more about reasonable process in county. If it takes 6 months to get on the docket to get the process started this is going to be more important than what you have to do when you get there.
- Financial cost and immediacy of impact.
Most places lose tenants at end of term and can find at least some new suckers. Turning your place into a shithole may take years to fully show its impact and in a tight housing market it may still be muffled by the sheer number of poor bastards who need somewhere to sleep.
- Incentive structure and distance from decision makers.
If throwing out the bums requires work pain and risk only from the peons who manage the place for the owners and failure to do so only hurts residents and owners then one may find that these enforcement actions never happen. A bureaucracy further increases distance between actors and decision makers.
If you consider these factors you might rightly conclude that a government project is maximally situated to fail at removing bad actors. Friction to evict those in need is going to be higher than almost anywhere else, front line workers are there for long term career trajectory, have little real power nor incentive and nobody but the residents really feels the pain. If you are running a house of last resort your vacancy rate is going to be low even if its a bad place to live.
None of this makes it impossible to run projects correctly it represents increased risk not destiny.
Section 8 in my state is a lottery to get on the list for housing which may or may not happen in a multi year time frame. It's mostly unavailable for the people that need it while some folks who have the ability to work live off it after they went through the expected multi year wait.
> overall it's a better model than public housing.
I don't know about better, but it's what we've got. The problem is a shortage of housing, and the government building housing solves for that because the public market has been shown to be incompetent at that.
mostly because the state has made it illegal or costly to build housing. The only reason the state would do better is if they can ignore either costs or their own regulation. e
Part of the problem is also the margins to support the top heavy capital class (and the restrictions and permits also favor the capital class). The same reason auto manufacturers put more effort into making expensive luxury cars instead of cheap commuter cars.
Why would someone build cheap houses that would net them the same profit in 10 years as building luxury houses that would in 5 years? Especially if the people on top investing the capital only deal with the accounting books and not actual customers and their desires.
If people could build houses, lots of people would build luxury units until there was no profit in it. Then cheap units would be the most profitable option TO build.
If you only get allowed to build 1 house, of course you will target the best demographic.
You cant lower prices without flooding the market with competing goods.
Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
We need enough high speed chargers in the right places. The average American drives 37 miles per day. That pencils out to less than 30 minutes of charging per week using current high speed standards (which will continue to drop). Your friend could take their car at 20% if they knew that they could charge quickly at their destination.
We don't need a fast charger for every car anymore than we need a gas pump for every car. When I got my EV, I thought I would need to hire an electrician to put in a fast charger. After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine. Even using just that charger I am able to get 43 miles of range on my 10 hour overnight charge in an SUV. If you told me I was never allowed to charge at home, I would still use an EV. Parking at the charger while I shop once a week is fine. Most people with EVs that I talk to have the same feeling. Charger anxiety ends up being a non issue except for outliers that drive a lot, or in bursty patterns.
We need to have enough high speed chargers in spots where people spend at least 30 minutes per week, and that will cover the huge majority of driving.
Put high speed chargers at malls, grocery store and workplaces and it doesn't matter if you have a charger at home, you can just charge when your car is parked away from home.
I'm not even sure it's that big of a buildout that's needed. Where I am, there are far more public chargers (level 2 or better) than gas pumps. If I want to charge my car while I'm out and about, its pretty hard to find a commercial district where I would have to be more than 2 blocks from a charger (and I live in rural Canada).
This feels like a political problem (and maybe consumer perception) a lot more than an intractable one.
This math is bad and shouldn't be used as a justification. It presumes that every charger is always available, that variable battery conditions and traffic conditions make reaching that charger every time, and that drivers have time to drive to the fast charger and spend 30 minutes there every time their car has low battery.
I drive a new EV in the Boston metro, I do not need to drive most days. Charging without an in-home charger is a massive pain even with Superchargers within 20 minutes drive and a 300 mile range.
A trip to the super charger takes about 1.5 hours assuming its available when I arrive, I can only make the trip when the car needs charging or I am wasting time and energy. The exact time I will need to make this 1.5 hour trip work is variable. It depends on battery conditions, traffic conditions, and what I need to do. I cannot assume that the car will be charged when I need it to be - if I need to depart on Friday evening, or unexpectedly needed to get groceries during the week - I am obliged to spend the 1.5 hours at that moment.
To avoid these problems, I generally need to charge the car when it has ~30-40% and for battery protection I can only charge to 80%. Turning a car rated for 310 miles range into one with ~100-120 miles of usable range and a 1.5 hour weekly maintenance schedule. That range could be further reduced to 50-70 miles in winter conditions. The stalls at charging station charge by the minute, so you can't exactly wonder off.
With a reliable home charger, these problems mostly go away, even a slow 5kw charger should charge the car overnight - and a typical tesla installation delivers 11kw. A renter with no ability to plugin and charge overnight will have a tough time with an EV compared to a gas car.
Sounds like lack of a good network of fast chargers is a real issue for you. I can understand why you're so frustrated.
If you have to drive 20 minutes to find one in a tier 1 city, you are living in a country that is pretty backwards by modern standards.
In my small rural Canadian town I have to drive farther to get to a gas station than I do to get to a high speed charger. I've also never been skunked on getting a charger. My math works fine here. It works fine in China, and Nepal too. Is Boston still not electrified? Because lack of a grid would be constraint, but otherwise its a very easy problem to solve.
I feel bad that it is made to be so hard for you to do what many, many millions of people around the world are able to manage with ease.
I live in the SF Bay Area and the local shopping centers closest to me have zero EV chargers. California is supposedly going to mandate that all new vehicles be electric in 2035 but that's obviously a ridiculous fantasy; the deadline will be pushed back or eliminated.
Which is why I'm advocating for them to get built.
I live in a far less wealthy place than you and it isn't an issue here. Nepal has it figured out, so does China.
Sounds like California should work on catching up to Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or China, or any of the many other places that have this problem solved.
I don’t have a garage, as is common in my country. Charging my car off a regular socket would thus require leaving a ground floor window open all night (undesirable from both a security and wildlife intrusion perspective) or installing a socket outdoors (at which point why not just get a charger?)
Sounds like my suggestion to use a high speed public charger is perfect for you since that's a solution that scales and makes it so people that don't have a garage can use EVs and keep their windows closed at night.
How many is enough is a complicated thing though. You don't need there to be as many pumps as cars because there is enough everywhere that you know with certainty that you can find one any given time within 15 minutes and be refueled in 5.
If you have a charger or as many chargers at your apartment for the number of electric cars you know you are going to be able to charge with certainty.
If you have some small number of chargers at work do you know that you are going to be able to charge? Are you going to go into work park at the charging spot for 30 minutes then play musical chairs with your coworkers instead of working or are you going to park for 9 hours then leave at approx the same time as others ensuring that exactly 5 cars get charged per week despite being able to theoretically charge 336 per week in 3O minute blocks.
Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week? I haven't this month and even so you can't be sure that one of a small number of spots are actually available.
Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
We could just look at countries like Norway where the internal combustion car is extinct and see how they do it. If you are going to nitpick that Norway has a lot of houses and is rich enough to install chargers in every apartment parking spot, then we can look at Hong Kong, or China, or Nepal, or Portugal, or Ireland, or any of the countries that have mass EV adoption and a variety of conditions including incredible density.
These are solved problems. It is a case of social and political will (or lack thereof) at this point.
> Regarding trips to the grocery store. Did you spend 30 minutes in a parking lot of a grocery store or mall this week?
Yes. Have you not parked your car in a single place for longer than 30 minutes besides your house? It doesn't have to be a grocery store. It can be literally anywhere that you drive your car that has a power line (its actually pretty hard to find a place where this isn't true). The regional district parks near me offer free 7kw chargers for up to 2 hours. Because our province is a net overproducer of green energy, this is very cheap for the district. Never once had an issue getting a spot. My gym has them too, all new hotels in the province, the hospital, banks, gas stations, Costco, etc. Again, this is all in a small rural Canadian town. It really is a matter of will.
> Currently plug in vehicles are what 1.9% of cars on the road. A relatively small number of spots scattered here and there is enough for this to work better than expected but trying to scale this begins to get pretty stupid pretty fast.
Only in luddite and backward countries. Most modern, and even less developed countries have figured out how to do this without "getting stupid".
> What does this look like with 1 in 3 cars? At 2 in 3 cars? How does it look like when you try to put enough chargers in the place where people incidentally land for extended periods of time instead of just putting them in lots of homes and apartments?
It looks like a problem that a huge number of countries consider to be solved.
Whenever I’m in a hurry the local gas stations are swamped. Twenty minutes is common, thirty minutes not uncommon. A month ago the pump we were on was broken and had to get my money back and abandon the attempt. Had no more than ten minutes to fuel and couldn’t do it.
See, we can apply the same brand of defeatism to anything.
Do you live in any extremely poor and rural area this isn't the experience for 99.9% of Americans where stations are plentiful and waits are 0-2 minutes
Yes, southern california.
> Why are people so convinced that we need an EV charger per car at every home?
> After a week of just running the 1.5 kw slow charger I realized that was fine.
Wait, did you tell that you were using EV charger at home actually? I'm confused by the wording.
Yeah. My point is that I never bothered to install anything more than the super slow free charger that came with the car.
If you have a good fast charger network available you don’t really need to have a 240v charger or even a charger at all.
120v slow charging, only needs a dongle perhaps. Fine for most people who aren’t road warriors.
240v medium charging often needs a wall mount charger, though can plug into a dryer/oven outlet. More expensive but meets the needs of everyone.
Well, when there were no cars using gasoline, there were no gas stations, what a surprise!
Sure, there might sometime be a chicken-and-egg problem initially, but saying a new but proven technology is totally unusable because it does not have infrastructure everywhere seems kinda weird to me. The infrastructure will catch up as usage grows.
Ew apartment buildings have them where I live, though a limited number so I can imagine that their use fluctuates. Someone who can’t reserve an open charger can’t move in. Someone who can’t get the floor plan they want is less likely to sign a lease even if a charger is available.
This is in the Bay Area, fwiw.
I think this is usually done with idle fees and the like. I was recently apartment hunting and we tested out the EV chargers -- in this case it was a Tesla destination charger, but I didn't realize those now had smarts built into them to provide for billing and idle fees just like superchargers have.
We ended up in an apartment without any way to charge, so for now we're dealing with supercharging -- and just recently found a nearby condo complex (1/3mi walk) with 19 completely free chargepoints. But yeah, this is Menlo Park, so we have 5 superchargers within a few miles.
We still don't.
Until free/at cost car charging is provided at work when the sun shines you're just moving the place where combustion happens.
This may be a worth while trade in downtowns where the main form of car pollution is engine exhaust at an average of 20mph.
All three employers I've had over the last ten years now offer free charging at work. New houses everywhere have been putting in extra circuits for charging for years. Apartment buildings are commonly built with chargers now, and older ones are starting to see retrofits.
Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
I think you may need to reset some of your assumptions. :)
And in Singapore I can get 10Gbps home internet.
The future is not evenly distributed and the outliers matter little.
>Electricity generation is almost always much, much cleaner than burning fuel in an internal combustion engine, and has been since long before EVs became available.
Depends entirely on your assumptions about where you draw the line for emissions from second and third order effects.
Saudi oil is so easy to get out of the ground that compared to coal it's practically green.
You've replied to me before - I really wish you would engage positively.
I don’t think there was anything negative about their comment
See their reply that came two minutes before yours. ;)
Mindless cheerleading is what got us in the state we're in. More of it will not fix anything.
The "long tailpipe" concept is outdated and incorrect.
Yeah seemingly this is not a problem with data centers. I am sure it was astroturfing all along. Also you never hear about climate change even though that's the cause of the heat wave in Europe and the US
I think Elon Musk would have happily built gas turbines on high-rises if we let him build them in the middle of the city to power those electric cars. I don't think that's a good idea, though.
Have you seen the price of electricity?
That's with only about 5% of cars being electric.
We've consumed nearly all of the slack in transmission capacity.
I'm expecting transmission costs to balloon.
Is that from the popularity of evs, or from data centers?
At least in California it is felt really among people who have private power providers that need to both turn a profit and appease shareholders while also paying out various lawsuits and penalties from causing wildfires with poorly maintained equipment. Compare those rates to what you'd get under a municipal power company like LADWP and the difference is dramatic.
It doesn’t really matter if, at the end of the day, our current usage is too high and consumers see EVs as a pro-social purchase. I don’t really think they’re a problem, personally, but it IS the topic of this comment thread, so it’s an appropriate place to complain about this particular issue.
Edit: also, the problem with charging vehicles isn’t really home owner cars, it’s tractor-trailers.
The thoughtfull hyped reality downvoter must know before doing the deed ..
The article discusses how the biggest problem is peak demand, but that midday electric prices have fallen as solar has grown. EVs are perfect for charging during solar peak and making use of energy that would have had to be curtailed, they can even feed back into the grid helping during peak demand.
The price of electricity in Seattle has effectively dropped - we went from a flat 13.4c/kWh to an opt-in time of use system with an overnight rate of 8c/kWh. My bill dropped by a third.
It's more like 2% of cars on the road you are thinking about portion of new cars sold.
Is capacity a static quantity?
Project Kilby is probably the most intelligent approach to this problem so far.
https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...
The idea is to bring the data centers, power generators and energy supply together in the ~same physical space so the only thing you have to transmit is data. Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information.
Are you really saying that in 2026, a year when only the nuts are still trying to claim climate change isn’t a thing, the most intelligent approach to the problem of powering data centres that are mostly being built for the purpose of juicing share prices is gas turbines at an industrial scale? The most intelligent approach is to not build the things. The next most intelligent approach is solar and batteries nearby. Way down the bottom of the list is burning gas to power them.
The natural gas is already being flared off to protect the environment (CH4 is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2).
The key with this project is that instead of wasting the thermal energy from this unused gas, we feed it into power plants that are constructed nearby, eliminating the need for new pipeline infrastructure and providing some actual value.
You could go on to argue the oil fields themselves should cease production. This is the only way to actually stop the methane coming out of the ground. Even then it wouldn't happen overnight.
Flared from oil production.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that "we're already flaring off the gas", but increasing dependency on the process is the wrong direction all the same.
You seem to be assuming the people proposing and making these decisions value the continuation of humanity over share prices.
What are you, some kind of a Luddite? (/s)
> Moving energy is way more expensive than moving information
But this project is still moving energy- it's just moving natural gas instead of electricity!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48630029#48631807
Its west Texas, the natural gas is already nearby.
The ocean tidal power data center idea was a neat one.
Neat how? Tidal power never made economic sense. There are only a limited number of places with enough tidal flow to even potentially make it viable. Any moving parts in the marine environment require frequent expensive maintenance due to growths and corrosion. Environmentalists will file lawsuits against anything that causes any damage anywhere, even if it would be a net environmental benefit compared to alternatives.
Ocean waves aren't going to stop at night or on a cloudy day, and don't care if the wind is blowing. Yes, tidal power has its own set of problems, but it doesn't have those ones. The more amazing power source I heard about though is the enhanced geothermal power that Fervo is doing.
https://youtube.com/shorts/9ltVH8RQYFk
I don’t see how that generates anywhere near enough power, think about the potential energy of a bucket of water going up and down that amount over the course of a day.
Sure, but then multiply that by several million buckets. Tidal flows can represent a lot of water volume, way more than you'd expect
Seems way more material/capex intensive than solar/wind? Also, the sea is generally a brutal maintenance nightmare.
I agree. It has to be more viable than sending GPUs to space.
Both are questionable. Tidal power is super neat in theory but we really struggle to make it viable in practice. GPUs in space are probably the lower risk option, but with even more questionable economics
My preferred outlandish idea would be to put the data centers next to solar farms in the Sahara. I just don't know yet how we are going to make the batteries to power that through the night
Perhaps: At night, the solar-powered datacenter simply sleeps. (This doesn't fit every workload, but it can fit more than zero of them.)
You put mirrors in space so the sun shines at night in certain places.
Yep, sounds like a fantastic idea. Let's litter Earth's orbit even more with the sole intention of messing about with one of the single most fundamental (and natural) processes of the planet: the day and night cycle.
Question for the experts: does the power crunch mean that AI hyperscalers will turn off previous generation GPU datacenters to free up power for their new Vera Rubin GPUs?
I think it’s more likely we’ll raise prices until demand lowers enough to match supply.
Open models enforce a floor on prices, unless overall compute is so constrained that those prices rise also.
I think at the very least, once the dust settles, a lot of these datacenters could become really really cool haunted houses, giant escape rooms, etc.
The real "AI" success story will be the person that makes an IRL backrooms theme park in the husk of a datacenter.
Or: laser tag park, the vests you wear are in part old tpu/gpu components.
Or: filming location for the next Bond movie
“Do you expect me to code?”
“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to prompt!”
Apparently they're fast tracking gas fired power plant approvals, so we can expect production to increase and the climate crisis to worsen. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/donald-trump-ep...
Supposedly the backlog for gas turbines is over 5 years at this point, so they can approve all they want.
Yes they will approve as many as possible to drive the price of turbines even higher.
These gas fired plants are just not that meaningful, it's too little to be a big deal - we're limited by gas supply and pricing. Renewables are already most new generation: https://environmentamerica.org/center/updates/renewable-ener...
The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity.
The bottleneck for building some AI datacentres and switching them on is electricity, sure, but that's not what drives growth. There also needs to be demand for the additional capacity; people need to be waiting for capacity to catch up so they can do the useful work that grows [society|GDP|something] that they aren't doing right now.
There's also very likely to be diminishing returns from additional capacity if we're near or over the limit of productive use. And there's the opportunity cost of what could have been done with that [money|land|electricity].
This is a much more complicated system than "people say they need more AI -> build datacenter -> power datacenter -> magical growth!"
In the Innovation Adoption Curve, we are absolutely beyond the Early Adopters phase and possibly the Early Majority. The growth rates necessarily have to start trending down because there’s no one left to sell to.
I'm not sure if the classic adoption curve applies. Has there ever been a product that vendors were shoving down customer's throats as relentlessly as AI?
"Internet" enabled devices, or "railroads" - for example.
Ads
I doubt it. We're less than six months in to really good coding agents, and they keep improving. Software will eat a lot more of the business world when it's this much cheaper and faster to produce.
I cannot currently access Fable class models, I am out of usage credits.
Anthropic is removing these larger models from personal plans at the end of the week to focus on selling it to enterprise users.
Putting these more intelligent new models into the hands of more people seems very worthwhile to me.
Do you pay API prices? Or are you on some of those plans that are deeply unprofitable?
I am not even sure if API prices are actually profitable, but they certainly aren't as unprofitable as the subscription plan users.
Either way, that's why you don't have access. It has nothing to do with capacity constraints.
We do not know whether subscription plans are unprofitable at all.
Some estimates suggest that this is the case only for the heaviest users.
Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
> We do not know whether subscription plans are unprofitable at all.
That's pretty much certain. It's sort of cute when people like to pretend otherwise.
> Many seem to confuse API prices with the actual cost to serve the models, and thus reach the conclusion that subscriptions must be deeply unprofitable.
I don't make that mistake. I actually suspect that the actual costs may be higher than the API prices. I think those may still be subsidized.
> Anthropic is officially citing capacity constraints with the intent to bring the Fable model back to subscriptions plans as soon as capacity allows.
Yeah, I don't think they are being truthful at all.
> I don't make that mistake. I actually suspect that the actual costs may be higher than the API prices. I think those may still be subsidized.
how are you still under this delusion? so you think that all the hosting companies on openrouter are just burning money selling GLM 5.2 tokens at 1/6th the cost of opus 4.8 api pricing?
Mark Zuckerberg literally tweeted today that they are pricing Muse Spark 1.1 much lower because other companies have excessive margin.
> delusion
It's not me the one that believes whatever comes out of the mouth of Zuckerberg.
I love how you think that is my primary argument. Want to address the openrouter point?
I don't think Anthropic are doing that because they don't have enough compute capacity. If we had 100* more datacentres the message would still be the same - they're focusing on selling Fable access to enterprise users because that's what makes them more money.
Either the cost to serve this larger model is so high that they cannot offer any reasonable usage quota for it at subscription prices, or they really do not have the capacity.
I think that it might well be true. The Opus models had capacity issues on many occasions too. Can the larger model even be served on all of the hardware they have, or only a subset?
It would not surprise me if growing enterprise demand threatens capacity, making it impossible for Anthropic to offer the model in subscriptions at this time, even though they could do so at a profit.
The most important sentences of the article are:
"Discussions about expanding electricity supply to power the future often become debates about which source is most suitable: gas, nuclear, solar, or something else. But these are a distraction. Far more fundamental is ensuring power can be efficiently delivered where needed."
This is the reason why data centers are not run only on cheap solar power.
1. People fighting back due to never ending effects caused by these massive data centers
2. Companies realising that they are burning half million to get nowhere
3. Circular investment scaring investors
4. And more recently, companies hiring people back coz the AI aimed to replace humans, created more problems than solved them
5. Memory cartel falling apart, again, they did the same thing during 2000s
6. China is making good ML free, supply and demand, destroying the US tech token business model
7. Even META has too much computer power and no enough use for them.
Those are the main reasons why AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart faster than expected.
> AI buildout is not just slowing down but falling apart
Premise perverted, FUD averted, false-victimhood denied.
A datacenter did not murder your family.
A data center might not have murdered his family but the constant AI hype is super tiresome.
PR heads are raging over the amazing shit that AI does and how everything is going to change and just WOWZA BAZINGA.
Yet in my daily life I use it for years and it’s wrong _all_ the time, I end up having to yell at it because it keeps being lazy and gaslighting me, the data centers boil the oceans and rich assholes beg my government to throw billions of good money after bad to build more of this shit. What the fuck? I want to live in the future and all they gave me was some shitty Fisher’s price AI.
> I want to live in the future
And that's precisely why this is all happening: people aiming for the future and forgetting about the present. You using AI every day for years is exactly what started boiling the oceans (even more) and giving the rich assholes even more power than they already had.
With these things, as with most things, you vote with your wallet. If people were to stop buying into the AI fantasy, the AI gooners would have no one to sell their wet dreams to.
‘the abundance of [AI] will be limited by the abundance of energy’.
And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
You don’t even need to mention the long-term sustainability benefits of renewable energy. It is simply the dominant option economically. Dollars in, watts produced, fossil energy can’t touch it.
Politics is merely a downstream effect of the root of the problem: corruption and regulatory capture. Regression into the authoritarian petrostate pattern.
That's true, but it's bipartisan policy. The Trump admin obviously is fighting wind, though solar is just too useful to be able to be stopped even by them. But it's also popular among environmentalists to fight solar projects https://v2.courthousenews.com/greens-fight-mojave-desert-sol...
And Indian Point in NY is the classic example of how nuclear was supposed to be replaced by renewables but was replaced by gas (and many solar installations in NY were blocked so we're not coincidentally here): https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/nuclear-...
So, it's political in that our policy is in line with what most people want: fewer renewable generation stations. But there's no outside enemy to conquer here. We've just collectively decided on this equilibrium.
Who is opposing renewable energy? Texas is projected to top California as the state with the largest amount of solar before the end of the Trump administration.
> Who is opposing renewable energy?
The current US admin:
Trump’s Multi-Pronged Attack on Renewable Energy https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?par...
but they are slowly being beaten back:
Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges - https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admin-abandons...
The Trumpian adventures in Iran have wrong footed his fossil fuel buddies and slowed his Don Quixote roll against giant scary windmills for now.
He hates wind turbines because he simply doesn't like how they look, and couldn't stop them next to one of his golf courses.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15l3knp4xyo
And he hates solar because???
If you look at the overall picture, it's clear that he opposes anything not carbon based. And cost isn't a rational reason for it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/trump-says-us-will-not-appro...
If there was an oil refinery that looked exactly the same as a turbine from the outside, I would bet that he would love how those would look. The root cause is something else. Hmmm...
https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2025/07/31/trump-admin-bloc...
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/06/05/views-on-trum...
> And the reason current US policy opposes clean, renewable energy is --- purely political.
What isn't "purely political?"
Everything is political in the world, unfortunately.
TFA isn’t about consumer usage, it is about training the next generation models. An interesting thought I heard recently is that a SOTA model has about the same parameters as the number of synapses in a Golden Retriever’s brain that are not dedicated to biological processes like breathing. Most of that should be wrapped in double quotes, don’t take it literally! But that number is about 100x lower than the same synapses in a human brain.
If the next order of magnitude costs 40B, I wonder if it’s even possible to get to the one after.
just wait. the current gold rush has left any consideration of efficiency or price-performance at the side of the road. the entire enterprise is structured as a 'whoever can spend the most money wins the game for all time'. if we can get past that and invest more in theory and systems at a natural pace it'll just keep getting more affordable over time.
This is part of why the AI bubble will burst. The only way to make the profit numbers backing the loans to AI companies is to get increased capacity, and the capacity requires energy, and the energy won't arrive in time, only partly due to all the factors here, and partly because building transmission and generation is speculative and can fail for a number of reasons.
US administration can try to pull a China and basically remove all regulatory barriers (following existing playbook of "do whatever we want and wait a year or two for the courts to catch up and stop us"). It'll create havoc that will make people very upset (more so than the people that already protest DCs in their backyards). But even then, it's construction on varied terrain and property over long distances; you can't predict exactly how that will go. Triple the estimated timeline and that is probably doable, but current AI investment likely can't wait that long, unless somebody can pull additional hundreds of billions out of a hat to extend lines of credit or a ponzi-scheme-esque paying-creditors-with-newly-lent-money. In that time the market will realize the hype was hype, the gains were modest, they'll start divesting, and then the house comes down.
One way around that might be to deploy thousands more gas turbines and make rural air quality look like 2010 Beijing. It will probably happen if things get really tight, and we'll see how the current administrations's base responds; if they stick it out, the market gets a reprieve.
Deploying thousands more gas turbines in a short time is impossible. Lead times for gas turbines are already multiple years.
Maybe it's the same thing I heard it was six months ago when it was determined that more hardware was sold than twice the nation's supply of electric.
> But if AI is a race with national security implications, they won’t be fast enough.
I really don't think this is the case. As far as I can tell there are two national security things where LLMs have some utility; mass surveilance (ick!!!) or software security. To me that does not justify a huge infrastructure buildout considering the implications of said infrastructure.
Crusoe bypasses the grid completely by leveraging old batteries and wasted resources to power compute.
I don't get why its hard to find electricity for data centers. Just build them where its cheap, like the deserts in China and stuff. Duh.
Yeah like, doesn't Texas have plenty of land available for solar? Why isn't the Nevada desert filled with solar panels?
kind of reminded USSR history of 100 years ago - a mostly agrarian country destroyed by war and revolution doing jump into industrialization with electrification being the driving core of it (the other major factor was GULAG - electrification plus unlimited free labor - winning formula :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOELRO
"In 1920, British writer H. G. Wells visited Soviet Russia and met with Vladimir Lenin. Wells believed that it was impossible to realise the Russian revolutionary’s plan, as he wrote in his book Russia in the Shadows:
For Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist denounces all "Utopians," has succumbed at last to a Utopia, the Utopia of the electricians. He is throwing all his weight into a scheme for the development of great power stations in Russia to serve whole provinces with light, with transport, and industrial power..."
Our civilization is converging on electricity right now. 200 year ago electricity looked like a set of disparate phenomena. I wonder if in 200 years we'll be basing our society on some new energy form instead of electricity - something like gravitational conductors or some StarTrek singularity generators and plasma coils.
Always double down on bad decisions.
"The primary bottleneck to this growth is the availability of electricity."
We put the cart before the horse, lets stop talking about growth and focus on making it useful first lmao
Totally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.
Or maybe you just lack the intellectual curiosity to get anything from these models.
You have to a fucking moron to think Claude is not "useful".
My stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.
So we're now at a stage where you're considered intellectually stunted if you don't find AI as useful as the AI bros on the internet do.
Wow. Just fucking wow.
The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.
> The politicization of AI
This should include the AI companies trying to sell their product to the government, suggesting it is a strategic asset in need of protectionism, and playing the PR game of "our product will let us own the world, we're so awesome you should be scared and invest."
Even rural localities in blood-red states are opposing datacenters. Noise, water electricity usage coupled with few permanent jobs and little tax-income due to subsidies have made them unpalatable to many.
Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.
Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.
Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
The problem is that they are building these wherever they can without any consideration for how they are affecting the communities. The noise concerns are common because they build them in areas without enough electric capacity. The water concerns are real, not because of some paper or because the water usage is incredibly high but again because they built them in locations that don't have enough of that resource. The tax subsidies were negotiated in bad-faith, essentially lying about the number of permanent high-paying jobs they bring.
The retardation has mostly been a case of AI companies fearmongering, lobbying the govt and the govt not reassuming people against job losses. Local governments passing moratoriums is just common sense populism.
Peak demand
Not enough!
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This almost reads as satire from something like The Onion. What on earth does "Hollywood and their woke agenda" have to do with how AI data centers are powered?
We should have been building more nuclear. We’re not going to upgrade civilization with windmills and putting on sweaters. Think of how much power we’ll need for millions of robots?
Unit economics for renewables coupled with storage are excellent. I agree we should reform nuclear regulation to allow new nuclear plants to pencil out. I disagree that we should discount the value of renewables.
Solar and wind take up a bunch of space and generate a bunch of waste after the panels are decommissioned, plus the wind generators are ruining every single landscape we have. With 5 nuclear stations per country you could cleanup so much of Europe.
The environmental damage caused by "clean" power sources is done mostly in countries which are far from Europe, so it's not much discussed in Europe.
Like:
Copper. "As the world shifts to wind energy and electric cars, demand for the conductive metal has increased. But mining copper brings its own environmental hazards"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/09/copper-minin...
Impacts of lithium mining on water stressed regions in Chile
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/01/c...
Impacts of rare earth refining in China.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/business/china-rare-earth...
silicon tetrachloride from solar production
https://www.azocleantech.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=831
Europe should not outsource it's ecological impact to developing countries.
And the person you replied to probably doesn’t realize spent nuclear fuel has really no where to go other than long term storage.
They probably are aware of nuclear waste and of the modalities of dealing with it, and still believe that not investing into nuclear is shooting yourself in the foot.
FYI, a typical 1GW nuclear plant produces 30 tons, or 10m3, of high-level waste. Germany uses ~500TWh of electricity per year. So Germany could replace all their electricity generation with 60 nuclear plants and would need to find space for 1800 tons or 5km3 of waste per year.
For comparison, German landfills can accommodate 70M metric tons per year.
France, a country famous for its investment into nuclear, is not covered in nuclear waste, and does not seem to have any issue disposing of it safely.
Nuclear has its disadvantages, but painting the many people who advocate for it on HN as delusional or ignorant is not very respectful.
Solar doesn’t produce that much waste either and that was the point. Just because you don’t see the nuclear waste doesn’t mean it isn’t sitting there somewhere. The person was acting as if clean energy is dirty via its waste. For the record I’m all for nuclear - it’s insane we’ve regressed so much and not invested into more. But it’s also insane we’re not taking more advantage of green energy where we can.
Most of the solar panels are pretty non-dangerous waste (cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar panels are dangerous waste, but are currently only small part of installed solar panels).
Silicon tetrachloride used for silicon production is toxic and has to handled carefully.
The main point is that, if Europe wants to invest more in solar power, it should also do the manufacturing in Europe and waste disposal in Europe.
Sure, I don't disagree with the ideal of onshoring more manufacturing for solar, but then the same standard should be applied to the entire supply chain of all forms of power generation. Frequently those negative externalities seem to be most often raised as a "gotcha" for solar specifically, in an attempt to rebut the clear environmental advantages.
For example, nuclear power is often sold as a plant that just sits there churning out zero-emissions power for 50 years from a few tons of super energy dense fuel (such as from the above commenter). Without acknowledging that fuel needs to be enriched from intensive and environmentally destructive mining of raw uranium ore. Which comes with risks to workers and possible contamination of groundwater to nearby communities, etc. Or the carbon impacts of the massive amounts of concrete/steel/etc that are required to build the plant, or the opportunity costs of spending tens of billions on a plant that will require continuing to burn natural gas and coal for another 10-20+ years until it comes online as a replacement, etc.
Otherwise it's just special pleading to apply a different standard that exaggerates the negative externalities of solar + batteries.
Because of super energy density of uranium you need to mine only small amounts of ore, per GWh. Uranium enriched is currently done by gas centrifuges, geopolitically sensitive technology. In future it could be done by laser isotope separation, much more efficient technology, but also geopolitically much more sensitive technology. (Exactly because laser isotope separation doesn't require large amounts of energy and space, it could be easier hidden). There have been demonstrated fast neutron reactors that can run on natural uranium without enrichment, can burn plutonium, but for geopolitical reason this programs have been stopped in US and US discouraged other governments from developing this technologies. With fast neutron reactors we already have enough uranium in stockpiles to power world for centuries.
Carter administration - Fast reactors and nuclear nonproliferation problem
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245230381...
The biggest CO2 impact of nuclear energy is from the steel/concrete used to build the containment building. Because of the aircraft impact rules, nuclear containment building has to survive the impact of a fully loaded large aircraft. These buildings are the strongest non-military facilities in existence, no other civilian industrial plants (even chemical plants with very nasty stuff) have this level of protection. Personally, I think much steel/concrete could be saved by moving nuclear reactor deep underground, but this would require changes in regulation. Again, deep underground nuclear facilities, geopolitical questions...
Of course, that's money that is not going to go to slowing global warming.
Fair. I've seen the use of nuclear waste to derail conversations about nuclear so often that I reacted without looking at the context, sorry.
You know those big fields of panels in China? Where do you think they all will end up at the end of 25 years? To talk about nuclear waste is to be intentionally lying, nuclear waste amount generated is TINY.
How many tons does it take to make a dirty bomb that irradiates a city center or small downtown? To poison an aquifer when storage fails? How much does it cost to make sure neither of these events, or any other similar hypothetical, doesn't happen, not even once?
As far as I know, it hasn't happened, not even once.
Your objection appeals to emotions, not to reason. The very kind of objection that has enabled fossil fuels to be seen as less dangerous. FYI, nuclear energy has killed single digits of people. Fossil fuels kill around 10M annually through pollution alone.
Granted, your lament aims to make people privilege clean energy over nuclear, but in nature it is still the kind of thought-terminating fearmongering that gets us surveillance to protect children, so I object on principle.
Distracts from the much larger environmental impacts of coal, oil, and nat gas production, which is much higher on a per-capita basis.
Comparisons should be made for replacements.
Is mining and refining uranium or oil free of environmental impacts? Does Europe currently have or do either?
Not to mention completely subjective, I personally love the look of windmills, and I live in the Netherlands in a location where I see windmills (and I don't mean the old-timey ones, the big power generating kind) everywhere around me for miles. It's certainly prettier to watch than smoke stacks.
For people that stay inside all day on the computer I can see why
Loses argument, insults commenter
Losing is a state of mind
I don't see how expensive energy helps us "upgrade civilization".
Its only expensive because its been regulated to death. In terms of potential energy output in a given area its tops.
It's been regulated "to death" because it's responsible for some of the worst man-made catastrophes of all time and has made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Move fast and break things this is not.
It really hasn't though. Fossil fuels kill or disable more people every year than nuclear power has, ever.
Even in terms of radiation accidents, nuclear power generation pales in comparison to orphan sources from medical equipment. Yet you don't see people clamoring on about fewer x-ray or radiological machines.
> made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Are you talking about places besides the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
And why compare the small amount of area made dangerous by nuclear accidents to the entire planet being destroyed by fossil fuels?
Hilarious hysterical nonsense.
Worst catastrophes? Pick any industrial accident with more than like 10 people killed and you've got nuclear beat. A single plane falls from the sky and you've outdone nuclear.
Large swaths of land? You mean a tiny part of Ukraine?
Keep breathing in the radioactive coal fumes in the air, those are good for you, actually.
This is completely BS. There were no deaths from Fukushima from radiation exposure itself (one worker's lung cancer death was later linked to it, but the dose in question makes even that contested), and the deaths that did happen in Fukushima came overwhelmingly from a botched evacuation, not radiation. Elderly patients dying from disrupted care and panic, not fallout. And Fukushima only happened because of multiple natural disasters aligning in the most unfortunate way possible, including a fucking tsunami hitting the plant directly.
Chernobyl was a disaster caused by Soviet incompetence combined with an RBMK reactor design that literally had no proper containment structure. That's the worst case that has ever occurred, nothing like it has happened since, and it can't really happen again with any reactor built with a real containment vessel, which is standard everywhere outside the old Soviet bloc. Three Mile Island is the perfect example, a partial meltdown caused by a mix of mechanical failure and operator error back in 1979, and the containment held. Zero deaths, zero meaningful radiation release. Even with human screwups and old tech, the actual design of the reactor kept it from becoming a Chernobyl.
And even taking Chernobyl as the worst case scenario we've ever seen, the exclusion zone covers about 2500 km^2 of land area, which isn't small, but it's not "large swathes of land" either. You get irradiated from flying in airplanes more than walking around most of the exclusion zone these days, obviously other than around Pripyat itself. Hell, you can take a walking tour through the zone, I'd very much recommend it (after the war concludes :p)
Meanwhile the reality right now is that fossil fuel sources are polluting the entire planet actively. Coal plants release more radioactive material into the environment through fly ash than nuclear plants do under normal operation. Coal is far from clean in terms of radioactivity on top of everything else it's doing, and it's actively making the world uninhabitable at a much larger and faster scale than nuclear ever has, but yet we're holding nuclear to some higher standard due to years of propaganda.
It's not a perfect technology obviously, but it sure as hell is better than basically all fossil fuel sources.
Unregulated nuclear energy is only going to show us how unsafe it is.
Most of the US's problems on this have little to do with putting too much priority on safety. There are countries that show that you can have a sane regulatory process and still get well priced nuclear. France from the 70s through the 90s and South Korea are the classic examples. Neither compromised on what's actually needed, but both cleared the way on redundant walls that don't demonstrate or stop anything bad from happening. You can achieve both greater nuclear safety and reduced process burden through standardization, which is how most places that have done it got it done.
Unlimited energy for 200 years is a good step, no?
It's hardly unlimited.
And not if plants can't get cooling water because of drought.
https://www.euronews.com/2026/06/25/france-takes-nuclear-rea...
The sun provides unlimited energy for billions of years, significantly cheaper and without the hypothetical risk of turning huge areas uninhabitable or causing incidents with damage in the trillions.
Until you have bad weather, yeah. If you have literally any sources at all that modern(!!!) nuclear reactors are unsafe (so, those that would be built today), or less safe, than any other kind of power production, Id love to see it.
At the time of planning of Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors, were the people responsible aware that their design was in fact not safe? If no, why should it be different today?
And bad weather usually goes along with with significantly increased power generation from wind turbines. Together with battery storage getting cheaper and cheaper, a long term bet on nuclear seems bad both for economic and ecological reasons.
Nuclear power only makes sense long term. There needs to be 50/50 investment in nlong term nuclear and short term renewables
Cheap ubiquitous distributed power systems will change the world in many weird ways. Watch small modular nuclear offer home installation for ~$reasonable and getting cheaper every year.
Fast forward 20 years from the advent of essentially infinite energy results in WWIII and a new “Great Detente” but only after all the assholes have wreaked all the havoc they can.
There are dark days ahead but ultimately a brighter future. Sucks to live through that transition phase though.
I'd like to see a well reasoned plan to install small modular nuclear power at peoples houses that prevents the mentally ill, criminally reckless or terrorist minded people from cracking them open and obtaining access to the isotopes.
There isn’t much need to extract isotopes if you have an actual working reactor, is there? Just use that as-is to cause whatever damage.
From a strictly red team threat analysis perspective, if you have an extremely safe working reactor that can't be made to melt down, no, the reactor can't be used to hurt much that is in the same location as the reactor. If you are able to get the isotopes out and start spreading them around or making a dirty bomb type thing (where the explosion just serves the purpose of throwing the isotopes around), that could be pretty catastrophic.
have you never visited a rural neighborhood? or an affluent neighborhood?
there are still many neighborhoods where people leave their doors unlocked because it is actually that safe. not every location is rife with criminal activity, and many are well protected.
Serious question, do you actually think that if you distribute millions of small nuclear reactors to homeowners geographically spread out around all of North America, 0.000% of them will be dangerously mentally ill, criminally reckless or inclined to terrorist like activity? Based on the frequency and number of mass shooter type incidents, (or like, David Koresh and the Branch Davidians) this would be a very naive view.
It doesn't require a criminally minded 3rd party coming onto someone's "safe" property to do something horrible with a sawzall and/or oxy-acetylene cutting torch.
have you never heard of tamper-proof containers? mess with it, it’s useless and you go to jail for a long time?
Plus, they’re ubiquitous, you don’t know who has one, max damage is minimal even worst case — go fish!
That's a very optimistic view of humanity that I can't say I share. If you give a sufficiently motivated person enough isolation and time, they can cut into just about anything. And possibly deal with cleaning up the results of any internal tamperproof countermeasures. In a world that contains people like the Las Vegas mass shooter or those who conducted the 2015 attacks in Paris, handing out isotopes to the ordinary person seems like a recipe for disaster.
We live in a world where multiple people are killed every year by tipping vending machines over onto themselves and you propose to make nuclear reactors a mass market consumer good that goes in everyone's garage?
We have microwave ovens. They’re pretty safe. Imagine something as safe as that. We can do it.
But I can’t disagree that it’s more exciting to imagine terror dreams.
First: microwaves are only safe if you don't mess with them, a bunch of people get killed by tinkering with their high-voltage transformers (at least 35 US deaths from one specific usecase alone in the last decade, see https://www.woodturner.org/Woodturner/Resources/Safety-Mater...).
A big potential concern with small reactors are highly toxic radionuclides; those can be much more dangerous (with LD50 far under 1mg/kg) than "ordinary toxins" like bleach or even nasty stuff like methyl isocyanate. That means expensive disposal and protection measures.
All of this is a non-concern though because there is no realistic path for nuclear reactors to compete with PV+batteries, ever. With cells already <$100/kWh and the panels being cheaper than glass windows, we will never be able to build, maintain and dispose of nuclear based reactors tech at a competitive price point, especially not with the insane current battery demand (automotive) driving technical optimisation and price competition.
While that is true, if there is something worthwhile enough in a far and safe location - it won't stay that way
It’s everywhere. It’s in the shed in your backyard. Nobody knows it’s there. Lots of people have them. It’s an appliance.
The worst thing an evildoer can do is blow up your own house and the few around it. and no one does that because you go to jail forever.
The worst thing you can do is let it melt down, which means it quietly shuts itself down.
> The worst thing an evildoer can do is blow up your own house and the few around it.
No, they can take the isotopes out and dump it into your local water supply. Or if they're suicidal and the isotopes have been encapsulated in some sort of tamperproof system, grid the whole thing down to granulated powder using less than $20,000 of power tools (disregarding their own health and the entire nearby area, of course) and then dump it into the local water supply.
If someone evil has access to the water supply, is radioactive material the worst they could do? that'll, what, give some people cancer which is really bad but it'll take a while to get them. If people wanted to be shitheads, they could already dump arsenic or LSD into the water supply, or any number of others things. that are already available to them right now! Have you personally tested your taps chlorine or flouride or lead levels recently?
Except most people don’t have industrial levels of arsenic, LSD, or other highly toxic substances stockpiled in their homes. Nor do they have a way to obtain it without triggering a visit from a swat team. Which is exactly what this comment chain is discussing. The potential for harm when you don’t have to go anywhere but your own basement/a few neighbors to obtain enough enriched uranium to create a superfund site.
I do, however, thanks to Taco Bell, have a lovely fauna of microbes in my toilet that, were they to be introduced to the water supply, would cause problems, and so do you. If someone was looking to fuck up the water supply, access to nuclear material isn't what's stopping them.
You're seriously proposing that a country with regular mass-shootings should give everyone a device that can cause a radioactive meltdown or a small explosion?
We already let people have cars and those things are crazy dangerous! No one should be allowed anything, ever, until we bubble wrap everything in the world to be perfectly safe!
Well, we already have strict background checks, licensing and regulations for a scenario such as if a person wants start a home based business manufacturing and storing C4, Semtex or similar at their rural property. If the idea is to start handing out nuclear reactors for peoples' houses, the possible damage that could be done is far greater. No matter how well packaged it is or designed to be consumer friendly.
I feel like the level of discourse on HN has fallen to that of reddit recently. I used to expect more of people on this website. When the rebuttal to home nuclear energy generation being an obviously horribly bad idea is “oh well we have cars too and those are dangerous. Guess we just live in baby world. Little baby world where little baby’s aren’t allowed to own their own nuclear reactors”, it’s just like man. What are you even doing here haha.
There were some crazy ideas for nuclear powered cars, but there are hard physical limits how small you can make a nuclear reactor.
1. Smaller the nuclear reactor is more neutron leakage you get. Each neutron which escapes a nuclear reactor is a neutron which can not be used to sustain the chain reactor. To compensate this you have to put more fissionable U-235 isotope into the reactor and as a result you need higher enriched nuclear fuel. A nuclear reactor in nuclear submarine can have the size of a dining table but it's running on nuclear fuel enriched to a weapon grade enrichment.
2. Even a small nuclear reactor with few kW thermal output needs a thick and heavy radiation shielding. This is not problem for power plant, or nuclear powered submarine, or nuclear powered ship. But the shielding requirement were problem for nuclear powered airplanes or trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_aircraft
In case of the mobile ML-1 experimental nuclear reactor, built as part of the US Army Nuclear Power Program, extensive shielding was omitted in favor of a personnel exclusion zone of 500 feet (150 m) while in operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML-1
Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first artificial nuclear reactor, didn't have shielding. But, to keep the dose of ionizing radiation for the staff within reasonable limits, it operated only for very short time periods and the total output of CP-1 was only few Watts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
Why would I need “home nuclear” when I’m already self sufficient in power in the winter with 15k of solar and battery, let alone the summer.