Worried the United States could fall behind in artificial intelligence, the White House wants to encourage data centers and dedicated power plants.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/55Ede
This is fucking stupid , AI data centers are horrible and people hate having them in residential areas, plus they use massive amounts of water. This is stupid and AI is not the future.
I wish I could just press “fast forward” and skip the years this society is wasting on AI, just the latest (cough… very profitable for the elite few) distraction from facing the rapidly looming polycrisis more directly.
AI is not a trend. It’s like calling computers a trend. Good luck
In thirty years we will have neither, and the surviving humans will be living at a mostly pre-industrial level of technology, unable to repair or rebuild most of what exists today.
Ok, go back to the equivalent of r/conspiracy lol 😆 😂
Gladly, but more like r/collapse 😐
It’s definitely a tend but not on the way you are thinking of. The majority of usage from what I understand is shoving AI in places they don’t belong. Google search is a great example of that, a massive fucking waste of resources for people who are too lazy to go to the source and read. Once the hype dies along with a bunch of those useless AI based companies, maybe then we can focus AI in fields where it actually helps.
AI is already being used in places where it helps. I use it at work multiple times a day. You don’t hear about that because there is nothing to rage about that. It’s a tool that helps when used right. You are talking about the dumb uses, but you can say that about anything. There is a lot of dumb talk about AI it feels like a blind hate echo chamber
Bruh obviously. Hence why I used the word “majority” and “focus”.
Point still stands bro. You just don’t hear about the other uses. It’s just what YOU hear about, which is mostly dumb AI shit. Just this weekend I used AI to upscale an old 720p video to 4K
I am well aware of them including ai upscaling, workflow usage, etc. My point is completely different, not on usage of AI.
They only good use I’ve seen is making dagoth ur say funny things.
AI is the future though. Open your eyes https://situational-awareness.ai/
And, let me guess, we’ll need to drill for oil on those federal lands so we can power those data centers.
All for AI that almost no one wants.
Don’t worry, they’ll probably build taxpayer-subsidised nuclear power plants for electricity which won’t be available for access for the general public.
But the general public will have to pay to store and secure all of the waste and clean it up when natural disasters hit the pools.
Nuclear waste isn’t stored in pools
Pee isn’t stored in the balls. (couldn’t resist)
What??? Spent Fuel Pools (SFPs) are the most common place it’s stored. They’re what ended up getting flooded and spilling into the ocean in the Fukushima disaster.
Casks are by far, like it’s not even close, the most common storage method. SFPs aren’t even long term storage options.
…and no, that’s not what caused the radiation leak into the ocean at Fukushima.
You people actually make me sick sometimes. I’m sure the oil industry pays you well but Christ, someone needs to DDD your bosses so we don’t have to deal with you anymore.
What are you talking about. The description in the parent site of the one I linked says specifically, “Currently, most spent nuclear fuel is safely stored in specially designed pools at individual reactor sites around the country.”
And no sh*t it’s not a long term storage method. But it’s where most of our waste is right now in the US.
And no, I’m starkly anti-fossil-fuel, but nuclear is 100% not cleaner unless you ignore the waste entirely. There are so many renewables and other options for cheaper, cleaner energy. But companies don’t count waste disposal as an operating cost (only short term storage), so nuclear looks cheap to investors because 1 million years kind of longterm isn’t part of their investment strategy. And that’s how long we need to be able to store a lot of this stuff unless it’s fully reprocessed down to safe levels of radiation, which has proven totally unprofitable in the short-term (decades-term), so it’s never been done.
Why can’t we just use nuclear power for this? I know some companies are planning it. Using any other energy source is inefficient and expensive for AI training.
Because there is no waste storage much less anywhere that could stand for the necessary thousands of years. And waste reprocessing is too costly for it ever to be developed by a for-profit or even non-profit but needs to break even company. It would cost trillions and several decades of no political interference in that money to research, develop, and build the reactors, best case.
So, it just sits in pools waiting for a tornado to spread the contaminated water over a whole state, or an earthquake or fracking tremor to cause a leak into the ground water. If AI is chewing through rods, in a decade there will be a hell of a lot of waste and nowhere to put it, much less anywhere to keep it safe for thousands of years.
…look up ANY information on nuclear waste before ever commenting again.
The Simpsons is not reality.
I think maybe you should take your own advice. All of the data is on the NRC and energy.gov websites. There’s about 90,000 metric tons of waste in temporary storage in the US alone and the half life of the waste is around 20,000 years, meaning it will be about 1 million years before it’s safe. There are no functional long term storage facilities and there’s no permanent solution that will last 1 million years. Most are designed for about 10,000 years, which again, don’t actually exist, just designed.
Edit: oh, and it was the US government who taught me all this information as I had training as part of my job in the Navy.
I know this is ironic given my username but you do realize nuclear waste doesnt work like sci-fi? There was a dump site planned in Nevada that was abandoned as a concept because there wasnt enough waste across the USA, this was at the height of nuclear power too. We have only gotten more efficient since then, hell inefficiency is actually introduced since some byproducts are useful for some alloys and composites.
Also if ya can find a suitable location nuclear waste can quite literally be ignored till it’s not a problem due to how half life works.
It wasn’t abandoned because there wasn’t enough waste. That doesn’t make any sense. You don’t wait to finish building a dump until there’s enough garbage to fill it. And we already have over 90,000 metric tons and produce about 2,000 per year.
And the half life is way longer than the life of any materials that would be used in construction or the movement of tectonic plates that would disrupt the storage. It literally would need to be dug up and rebuilt every ten thousand years or so to keep it from leaking. We don’t have the technology to dig so deep that we can ignore it, and much of the waste will be unsafe for about a million years “due to how half life works”.
It was abandoned as a project because there wasnt enough waste to justify the utilities, security, or transportation costes associated. So yes a project can be killed cause there isnt enough waste, especially when said waste can be used for weapons with minimal modifications. There is a explosive disposal facility near me that had to shutdown half of its building because they arent getting enough shit to destroy and burry.
If you are having to factor in radioactive material on the scale of tens millennia then you are dealing moreso with issues of pollution and chemical toxicity, since by that point its barely outputting more than a background amount of radiation. Unless you think Colorado is a radiation blasted hellscape since half the damned state is a uranium deposit. Just using Chernobyl as an example most of the threat isnt the radiation unless you want to go fuck the elephant foot, its the utterly absurd amount of toxic dust that was scattered everywhere which while harmless outside of your body will fuck you up internally.
You do have to factor in waste for that long because it’s only background radiation if it’s properly stored. When the coffin cracks on the Chernobyl core, it will be dangerous AF. Also, as all the Russian soldiers who were stationed there and exposed because they don’t know about the history of the meltdown at all, much less that it was there. It’s not hard to google the half life of the materials. And if you think concentrated, enriched uranium or plutonium is the same danger level as natural uranium, maybe you should build a reactor yourself and get rich. Sorry to say, the energy output by enriched uranium, even the spent stuff, is exponentially higher than the stuff in the ground.
Finally, you may want to research the difference between alpha, beta, and gamma radiation. Just because the news only talks about gamma because it’s the only one that would hurt you from outside your body, doesn’t mean that the alpha and beta aren’t way more deadly if they get into your body through your water supply, or into the ground and thus into the plants and animals you eat. And it’s cumulative, you can’t get rid of it easily and the longer it’s in you, the more damage it does.
And this is just the very basics. I was trained by the Navy in all this stuff. It’s not like I’m talking out my ass. Not to mention you can get it all from the NRC, NIH, and energy.gov websites if you want among many, many other resources as much of it is public knowledge outside of the specifics.
We can literally toss such waste into deep mines and forget about them. You are talking about matters on a timescale so massive that it becomes utterly meaningless to those who exist now and will exist then, the best solution is to leave as much of a footprint that the sand of time doesnt erase it in the vague hope that our distant descendants may be able to source a theoretical problem.
Do you know what our ancestors were doing 10,000 years ago, because I only know the broadest of strokes. I severely doubt they could even conceptualize 10,000 years a functional timescale. Within the last 10,000 years every empire and civilization that has existed has risen and fallen with room to spare. I can get worrying about the timescale of a thousand years but ten thousand is another beast all together.
I am not proposing being loose with regulations or structure, but moreso pointing out that almost any other problem short of the sun burning out is far more pressing. Hell we could problem accelerate and reverse global warming over a thousand times within ten thousand years. How about we focus on the here and now and not literally the far and istant future when all our cities will have been ground to fucking dust.
Great solution. Poison the ground in ten thousand years so you don’t have to care. You realize there’s enough to make the entire world unlivable for nearly a million years, right? And we’re still producing. A little tiny amount escaped into an ocean in Japan that covers nearly half the globe and it is still detectable in the US, that watered down. Now imagine hundreds of thousands of metric tons seaping into the soil and water table for hundreds of thousands of years from mines all over the world. You realize the deepest mine we’ve ever created barely scratches the surface of the Earth, literally, right. We don’t have the technology to dig deep enough for it to be safe once the encasing cracks.
And in 10,000 years, when the tectonic plates have moved enough to disrupt the deteriorating construction materials, who is going to dig it up and rebuild it. And then the next 10,000 years, and the next.
Great idea…
Let’s make sure Elmo and trump can build data centers on federal lands wherever they want, surely nothing could go wrong.
