Microsoft Looking to Use Nuclear Reactors to Power Its Data Centers
Microsoft Looking to Use Nuclear Reactors to Power Its Data Centers
The company just doesn't want to have to rely on the nearby energy grid to run its cloud services.
Microsoft Looking to Use Nuclear Reactors to Power Its Data Centers::undefined
That feeling when your society is so dysfunctional that only corporations can build much needed advanced infrastructure.
52Solar Panels are really cheap now.
7Which is great when the sun's up and the weather is good. Similar deal for wind power, it's great when the conditions are good. We still haven't got very large scale storage where we need it to rely on renewables full time. Nuclear helps while we sort out storage but we need to be very, very careful about corruption - if corporations can screw over the public for money they've demonstrated that they will, and nuclear implementations cost a lot of money.
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Government doesn't build infrastructure either, it mostly just funds private companies to build it for them.
Theres a whole contract bidding process and everything
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That’s … actually pretty neat.
Makes a lot of sense given the amount of power needed to run a data centers like that. Definitely cleaner in the long run too.
They’ll still need backup power/generators but they’ll need a lot less of them and they’ll mostly be needed for the nuclear parts.
42They could just run renewables since they already need batteries as you said.
Also i dont want incompetent people operating nuclear reactors. We saw what happened with that multiple times already and you still shouldnt eat boars in eastern Europe bc. auf radiation levels thanks to fucking Tschernobyl.
8I take it you haven’t read the relatively new study that showed that the radiation in the animals in Eastern Europe is actually more from unregulated atomic bomb testing rather than Chernobyl.
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There is another thread stating it is because training AI takes a lot of energy. Any reason to boost nuclear plants is good to me.
-1Right, any reason to throw millions or billions of dollars at wasting enormous quantities of concrete and water and at generating highly toxic waste that will irradiate its environment for millennia, and at ripping apart landscapes to extract uranium is a good one to you, I wouldn't have expected anything else.
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The whole plan has only one minor flaw: It'll never work. Building a nuclear power plant never was, never is and never will be economical. The current boom in nuclear grandiose announcements is nothing but a smokescreen. The purpose is to delay the adoption of renewable energy with lofty promises that will never come to fruition. Then we'd be forced to keep using fossil fuels, which is the end goal.
-3You comment has one minor flaw.
Small modular reactors are a thing now. NuScale has already had their VOYGR SMR plants approved for use in the US. Westinghouse has one that should be ready for sale in the next few years too.
Large nuclear plants aren’t economical for profit generation right now, but SMRs definitely have the ability to be economical for huge power users like Microsoft.
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Clippy: it looks like you are trying to prevent a nuclear meltdown….
Oh yes, what could go wrong. Windows can’t even run an advertising board without blue screening…
“The core is about to melt down! Hit the shutdown button!!” “I can’t, it’s installing updates!!!”
35Microsoft cloud runs mostly on Linux.
21It mostly runs. An Azure-optimized HyperV build is the primary hypervisor I think, but I'd wager that most customer VMs on Azure are running Linux. However, if you want to run Windows in the cloud, it's a decent option.
My experience with Azure has been less than stellar. They have good API documentation, but tooling & core compute is a bit janky. The web UI is also a throwback to a past era, but you can't really avoid it when debugging issues which you have to do often during development. Then the developers want to forget all about it ... which is a problem when something inevitably breaks.
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Somewhere in some timeline relatively close to ours this actually happens, the idea of 3 mile island/Chernobyl 2.0 event happening to microsofts personal reactor because a forced windows update screws over emergency override software is peak absurdist dystopia that I get chuckles from
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I don't think Bill Gates has any significant involvement with Microsoft these days, but wasn't he pushing for greater nucleus power usage, including trialing reactors in India?
22wasn't he pushing for greater nucleus power
You’re thinking of Gavin Belson. Nucleus was a Hooli product.
18LOL I didn't even realize I made that typo. I've been typing nucleus a lot more than nuclear lately.
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He is the primary investor of TerraPower. Not sure about anything with India. They do have something that is being planned in Wyoming.
5Ah, thanks. I looked it up and apparently he had planned something in China but the plans were scrapped and now it's Wyoming. This is what I get for not looking it up to refresh my memory beforehand.
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He was promoting something called traveling wave reactors. Which never panned out. Just like nothing will become of this.
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This would wrap up the whole story arc of Mr Robot to 1 season. Lol
10Somehow, the idea that a company with a safety and security issues history like Microsoft would run a nuclear reactor sounds like a very, very bad idea.
Do you remember the Aegis cruiser debacle? They didn't even manage to run a f-ing diesel engine under Windows.
9Not the worry you should be worried about. Once they can cut the governmental power cord corporations would have exactly zero limits.
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companies like Microsoft are always considering novel methods for powering (and cooling) their data centers
If they are near population centers, they could use the excess heat from both for remote heating.
But mostly adding a nuclear power plant to a data center will require additional cooling.8Microsoft and nuclear reactor are words that should never be in the same sentence - easy recipe for disaster
8This is talking about SMRs and not traditional reactors. SMRs still haven't left the prototype stage, but maybe they'll start to be useful in a decade's time, who knows.
5That would be a wildly optimistic timeline. And even if they managed to produce a working system by then, it would still take decades longer to scale up to the point where these things could make a meaningful contribution. That's time we simply don't have.
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1rare Microsoft W
1What could go wrong?
This for-profit company will finally come up with a solution to nuclear waste that has eluded the industry for decades. But if that turns out to be expensive, Microsoft will be around for thousands of years to ensure that nothing leaks that shouldn't. Of course the US government will help them with the cost of establishing the reactors and when something goes wrong (because "nuclear").
/s
-16Shrug. It's better than nothing or throwing ones hands up and saying "oh well crank up the coal burners!"
13Yeah in the meantime they could just build centifold that power in renewables and an electricity grid to make it available everywhere.
Everyone who is strongly pro nuclear is also pro coal and other fossil fuels because they do fhe bidding of the cirrent fossil industries. Just using uranium instead of carbon.
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There are many companies developing small nuclear reactors for deployment in a lot wider locations compared to current nuclear. This is something humanity needs a lot of focus on to help protect the environment and meet our ever growing energy needs. The more companies working on SMRs the better in my opinion.
Nuclear waste is an overblown argument compared to the benefits nuclear power provides.
9Almost all nuclear reactors in the US are privately owned.
Im not arguing for or against, but this would be nothing out of the ordinary.
9- We have ways of storing waste safely, which are the same ways the planet has stored radioactive material for millennia.
- There are experimental fission reactors that can consume this waste, as well as possible fusion reactors in the near future, so storage may become moot.
- Coal ash disperses a crapton of radioactive material into the air, which is way worse than lodging it deep underground, encased on concrete.
3- underground storage is starting. And some of them already failed.
- gen4 are experimental since several decades. None of them are commercial
- last low radiation studies should worried anybody working in any nuclear plant.
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Imagine if this was Google?
0If it was google it would definitely end badly when they decided to kill it off since the reactor can’t show web ads.
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