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The thought of a nuclear reactor running on Windows is terrifying.
They’re going to build it in 2026 but it’ll still somehow be running on XP.
“What operating system is that running?”
“Uh… vista.”
“We’re all going to die!”
If they make it Windows ME then we ARE ALL DEAD!
Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
XP is still a solid OS as long as you don’t connect to the internet.
A nuclear reactor connected to the internet sounds like a bad idea.
I mean it’s fine so long as someone remembers to pay the Mcafee bill right???
„Your reactor has been temporarily disabled due to license payment issues. Please consult [email protected]“
I’m not sure why you think it would be connected to the internet.
They’ll probably not use Windows, instead opting for an OS that is proven to work with already running reactors, like QNX
They should run Arch, btw
More stable than Windows I guess
Even Microsoft does not trust Windows on Azure 🤣
Modern nuclear reactors are designed to fail safely, so Windows couldn’t actually create a Chernobyl. Everything wrong with nuclear in our world is with old-gen plants. It’s a technology that got ahead of itself by 50 years.
Yeah, there’s very little information in the article on what type of reactor they plan to use, but I hope they’re able to go with something like a molten salt reactor with a thorium fuel cycle.
Getting half a dozen of those built and in use would be exactly the kind of thing that tech billionaires are actually good for.
Problem with new-gen plants is, that they are even more expensive to run.
Hm… risk of nuclear disaster? Or more expense? Hm… I’ll have to think about this one.
Your logic is fallacious: the solution is not to build a nuclear reactor but seek an alternative.
Yes I understand. It was a cheeky reply. But alternatives are actually limited if you consider all the benefits of nuclear: high energy output, limited land use, no dependence on weather or time of day, no massive subsidy to Chinese manufacturing, no carbon, all resources mineable in the US, waste all physically contained…
Got alternatives to that?
Hm… invest into your companies cybersecurity before or after you get hacked?
Companies don’t care enough about risks if they are not forced to comply.
Lol, even Microsoft wouldn’t use Windows to train AI.
Like Microsoft uses Windows for anything that matters since they got rid of Balmer.
A lot of them do IIRC, windows 98 is popping into my mind as an instance I’ve read of
Windows NT or 2000. Not 98.
Ah yes you’re correct, Windows 98 is (was?) the British nuclear submarines
Now THAT is wild as hell.
Reminds me of that time the technodork ran his minecraft reactor with opencomputers and lost his base because the computer blue screened. Almost as funny as that time the entire city lit up because they were using raw radio signals to control their reactor and a nearby thunderstrike instructed the reactor to drop all the fuel and go supercritical. This is why you add realism to video games, it leads to hilarious stuff like this.
EDIT: That was actually the same server where they sabotaged the entire electrical grid to blow up everyone’s base as a send-off and mine was the only one standing at the end because I was the only one who bothered to set up a surge protector under OHSA (Omega Haxors? Safety!? AHAHAHAH!) it just so happened that the system designed to save the grid from my many exploits just so happened to work in reverse.
Better than coal or oil, it might even result in more R&D into reactor designs.
Yeah, I don’t understand why building a relatively clean energy source is a bad thing. Reactors are now like 3+ generations past the versions that were super dangerous. Hell, they even have reactors that can use spent fuel from other reactors.
Oil lobby and other interests. Follow the money. Plus it’s easy to play on people’s fears about radioactive waste.
Oh well, countries that know what’s what just quietly build and use their reactors and go about their business. Finland for example is set for a while now.
Environmental groups are the biggest opposition to new nuclear builds.
Which is ironic because they like electric vehicles, and spent car batteries will soon become just as big of a problem as nuclear waste.
It’s a bit of “not seeing the forest for the trees” situation, we have an immediate climate problem we’re trying to stave off, if these are the things that will wean us off fossil energy than that’s what we have to do for now and we’ll cross that other bridge when we come to it.
You can recycle lithium batteries.
Someone on here made an interesting argument showing how conservative politicians are actually pushing nuclear hard. They do this to steer interest away from other renewables, but also because they know nuclear will go nowhere. It’s politically unviable with voters and regulatory bodies. The point is that the bottommost issue is public perception and bias against it. If we could overcome that, we’d at least have a fighting chance.
There’s no shortage of modern reactor designs. We have amazing stuff designed and even prototyped and proven - low waste, safely-failing reactors that basically can’t melt down. All we really lack is funding and regulatory clearance to build more.
Cortana, can you design a nuclear reactor to train you better?
Yes daddy
This is part of their plan to reduce carbon emissions.
This is what corporations mean when they say “reduce carbon emissions”
A corporation running a nuclear reactor to train AIs might just be the most cyberpunk news headline I’ve ever seen.
This gave me an idea for some level design I might want to use in a video game.
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I just like element-based levels in video games. Even water levels. Some even can present some time-based challenges, like saving a nuclear reactor from meltdown, or retrieving something from an area like that.
I wanna play your game lol
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requires an intensive carbon footprint
Maybe we should focus on the collapsing ecosystem then instead of training AI datasets.
Nuclear power means they can do both.
Hear me out:
What if we used that nuclear power only to fix the environment?
Ok, find someone willing to pay for one for that purpose.
Microsoft isn’t ‘we’
You’re free to invest in nuclear power for that purpose if you want.
Microsoft is investing in nuclear power to run their AI projects. They likely wouldn’t be investing in nuclear power if they didn’t have projects that needed it like this.
And the U.S. government wouldn’t have invested in all of the development that went into the Apollo program if they didn’t want to beat the Russians, but we still all benefitted from the science and the research and the development.
No. Nuclear power is not anti climate like the other fossil fuels, but still anti ecosytems.
How exactly is a nuke plant antiecosystems? Under that guise, pretty much anything humans do is as such.
Only if there’s a meltdown, and that’s near-impossible with current reactor designs. Just don’t build in very disaster-prone areas like Florida or Japan.
I think you have misread the comment you replied to.
Indeed. Using nuclear power avoids causing trouble to the ecosystem.
AI might be a fantastic tool to help fix the environment, though.
People aren’t listening to human scientists and you think they’ll be happy with an scary AI saving the planet?
If they’re not listening to humans or AI, then they’re not going to be happy with anything and should probably be ignored.
Unfortunately it’s hard to ignore the people running your country.
I doubt the people running the country are worried about a “scary AI saving the planet.” Their main concern is ignorant masses of voters who are scared of it.
It will be used to drive more consumption.
It will be used for both. The way out of global warming is going forward in technology, not backward.
We already use AI in climate change models. This is a large language model that honestly, we don’t need.
bold of you to assume microsoft is interested in that
Building and maintaining one isn’t really the concern I have with this one, nuclear reactors are incredibly safe these days. What are they going to do with the nuclear waste? That’s the real issue here. Governments can barely figure that out, how’s a megacorp going to do that in an ethical way? I already see them dumping it in a cave in some poor country in africa.
If they’re actually using a new type nuclear reactor, the small portable ones, then the waste is both incredibly small and recyclable. Nuclear technology has come a long way since the decades old reactors, we just haven’t built very many new ones to showcase that.
It’s a shame we aren’t seemingly taking them into consideration in the whole energy transition crisis we are in.
But rather let’s just keep sending people into hazardous coal mines while ignoring nuclear energy until the solution to all our problems magically comes to us.
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Solution already magically arrived. It’s called nuclear
How much nuclear waste are we talking about? Every time I’ve seen any actual quantity mentioned, it’s tiny.
And relative to coal’s radioactivity, it’s essentially nothing.
As noted elsewhere, these don’t create the same kind of spent fuel as a PWR. So that helps.
But also, the people who designed the PWRs didn’t just say “and then we’ll make shitloads of unmanageable waste lol!” Up until the Carter Administration, we ran a system called “reprocessing” that essentially shredded and dissolved the old fuel rods, isolated the metals chemically, and packed out separately.
France does this. Finland does this. Japan does this. Their waste concerns are negligible compared to ours.
Meanwhile Carter, bless his heart, determined that reprocessing was a proliferation risk, and shut down the US industry, saying “y’all will figure out a way to dispose of these things”.
So now we are using circular saws to hack these things apart, cramming them into barrels stuffed with kitty litter (you read that right), and hoping that nothing will happen to the barrels for 50 million years?
Long-term waste disposal became an impossible problem to solve in the US because our one and only allegedly nuclear-savvy president made the solution to the problem illegal. It became one immediately, and has never stopped being one.
Weird thing is, I’d trust them to not abandon the reactor during a budget shutdown…
I’m generally against nuclear–or more accurately, think the economics of it no longer make sense–but there’s one thing I think we should do: subsidize reactors that process waste. It’s better and more useful than tossing it in a cave and hoping for the best. Or the current plan of letting it sit around.
I mean you say that as if just burying it isn’t actually the proven safest option.
Startups are already beginning to explore using old oil drilling equipment to sink nuclear waste below where it’ll pose a threat, after it’s been suffused into a shitton of concrete of course.
Very rarely is nuclear waste of the corium toothpaste variety, more often it’s the old hazmat suits that are getting replaced and need to be disposed of with special care, or expired rods you can still have limited contact with without many issues.
So we finally get thorium power, but its only used to make celebrity porn for incels.
Hey, whatever keeps them out of Walmart parking lots at 1am.
Like there’s somewhere better to buy celebrity porn at 1am. Psh. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Nice!
The reason is ultimately irrelevant, but I welcome more nuclear energy.
They could just invest in a solar farm or something, they are just a lot more economical.
Nuclear is okay, but the costs compared to renewables are very high, and you have to put a lot of effort and security into building a reactor, compared to a solar panel that you can basically just put up and replace if it snaps.
You probably know this discussion already through.
In their specific use case that won’t really work.
They want to use all of their available property for server racks. Covering the roof with solar won’t give enough power/area for them. A small reactor would use a tiny fraction of the space, and generate several times the power. That’s why it’d be worth the extra cost.
For those who haven’t seen this discussion before, I feel like doing the next step in the dance. Cheers Plex.
It’s important to note that nuclear is capable of satisfying baseload demand, which is particularly important for things like a commercial AI model training facility, which will be scheduled to run at full blast for multiple nines.
Solar+storage is considerably more unreliable than a local power plant (be it coal, gas, hydro, or nuclear). I have solar panels in an area that gets wildfire smoke (i.e. soon to be the entire planet), and visible smoke in the air effectively nullifies solar.
Solar is fantastic for covering the amount of load that is correlated with insolation: for example colocated with facilities that use air-conditioning (which do include data centers, but the processing is driving the power there).
While you are right about baseload being more satisfiable through nuclear, you are wrong that it’s in any way important for AI model training. This is one of the best uses for solar energy: you train while you have lots of energy, and you pause training while you don’t. Baseload is important for things that absolutely need to get done (e.g. powering machines in hospitals), or for things that have a high startup cost (e.g. furnaces). AI model training is the opposite of both, so baseload isn’t relevant at all.
The more people who invest the better the tech becomes the more the price comes down. Nuclear is excellent base energy
This is false. Nuclear has a very competitive levelized cost of energy (LCOE). Nuclear has high upfront costs but fuel is cheap and the reactor can last much longer than solar panels. The big picture matters not just upfront costs.
Source: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/08/f25/LCOE.pdf
Yo better check your fuel prices: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/09/21/why-uranium-prices-are-soaring
Plus imagine how expensive uranium will get once we start relying on nuclear. It’ll be the new oil.
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Sucks to wait for the sun to come out to make Bing answer though. “Disclaimer: Answer dependent on cloud cover or night time”.
Do you seriously think that Bing trains an AI model when you send a request? Why would they do that?
Oh, they’re working on it. It’s dumb, but it’s happening.
You’d get used to it awfully fast though.
are you arguing solar is more economical than nucleae cause if so youre wrong by a longshot
That was true 20 years ago. You are working off extremely outdated information.
No, you are. Solar is much cheaper than nuclear is.
Yeah, I don’t know where nuclear advocates got the idea that their preferred method is the cheapest. It’s ludicrously untrue. Just a bunch of talking points that were designed to take on Greenpeace in the 90s, but were never updated with changing economics of energy.
I can see why Microsoft would go for it in this use case. It’s a steady load of power all the time. Their use case is also of questionable benefit to the rest of humanity, but I see why they’d go for it.
The people who actually put money into energy projects are signalling their preferences quite clearly. They took a look at nuclear’s long history of cost and schedule overruns, and then invested in the one that can be up and running in six months. The US government has been willing to issue licenses for new nuclear if companies have their shit in order. Nobody is buying.
Tell me more about how capitalists efficiently allocate resources.
This may actually be one of those things where it turns out to be worth it (for them anyway), if they can get some major technological advancements out of it.
There are so many other things in the world that are way more wasteful and way more pointless.
Or you get an overlord ai that isn’t dependent on the larger power grid so it doesn’t have any reason not to launch the nukes. You know they’re going to harden these things.
God pls send the singularity I tire of this meat 🙏
Yeah, being ruled over by something without any accountability or oversight is a terrible thing. I’m so glad we don’t live in a world like that. /s
Honestly, I’m not sure an AI could fuck it up any worse than humans are.
Hi bing. How do I stop a nuclear reactor from going critical?
For those correcting my error It was just a joke. The only things I know about nuclear power I learned from the simpsons and Kyle hill
you turn it off.
“critical” is the normal operating state of reactor when it’s working. what you want to avoid is supercriticality, which means that power is rising. if it’s delayed supercritical but prompt subcritical, power rises and may or may not stop on its own at some point. when it’s prompt supercritical, you don’t even have time to ask https://www.nuclear-power.com/nuclear-power/reactor-physics/nuclear-fission-chain-reaction/reactor-criticality/
Modern reactor design also pretty much makes runaway reactions nearly impossible, as in, you have to actually try to fuck it up.
Even Fukushima didn’t have a runaway reaction, it just lost coolant.
Don’t turn it on? Critical means a reaction that is exactly self sustaining, i.e. a constant power level.
Buy MS office subscription.
Burning 3 continents worth of coal to steal artwork at maximum efficiency.
Do nuclear reactors use coal?
No and ai doesn’t steal artwork either but this guy’s life sucks enough to lie about it I guess.
sorta does tho
Tell me u know nothing about AI without telling me you know nothing about AI…lol
Everyone’s life sucks. Don’t pretend that you aren’t feeling like shit because happy people don’t make comments like this.
Maybe for you, buddy.
Alright, enjoy then. No amount of denial is going to stop you from crying yourself to sleep.
Seek help.
🙄😚
Does it matter what they claim they’re going to do differently in the future when they’re burning indefensible amounts of coal right now?
The human body produces a lot of electrical impulses. What if they just took all their workers and put them in some type of “work pod” and harnessed the energy to run the large scale AI?
They might get bored though. Maybe hook them up to some kind of virtual reality world.
Yes, and they could just live in the virtual reality so they never have to stop providing power. It’d be perfect
Imagine spending chunks of time in there hooked up to a device set to lose weight. Essentially just setting your intake to -300 calories a day and spending a month in there.
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this is the matrix
woosh
This is lemmy but it’s cool you can access it from matrix.
It would cost more energy to feed them then they would produce. /s
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with the hopes of buying electricity from it as soon as 2028.
Fusion won’t be ready by then
Energy should be public
energy, water, food and housing should not be used for profit. Everything else is fair game.
And healthcare. You know, all the stuff to keep us alive.
Nah, not everything else. You can add healthcare to the list.
But there’s so much profit to be made in things required to survive.
There isn’t a price point at which I’ll choose to quit using food and water.
Max Planck seems to have learned from the Fraunhofer mp3 thing and is getting their hands dirty with commercialising Stellerators. “In the 2030s”, right now they’re drafting, maybe simulating. Awfully short on details right now if you understand anything about fusion.
I can’t handle this . i’m going to sleep.
that’s what the operating system running the reactor would say
At least we hope that it will do that when it can’t handle the reactor - it puts reactor to sleep.
AI needs that’s much power?
Fuck you, ditch it like a Zune and make some more video games.
Or make some more Zunes.
I miss my Zune. Oddly enough, every person I’ve met who had a Zune had it stolen, including me.
And they only ever made one.
Mine was never stolen, to break your streak. I had one of the little 4GB ones.
Technically he didn’t meet you so the streak is still on.
So you’re saying I need to stalk them down and introduce myself? Seems like a lot of work to avoid being incorrect, but since this is the internet I am obliged to do what I must to be correct.
More Zunes, please. My Zune 30 has dead pixels and the battery is on its way out.
Damn thing lasted longer than my marriage and an 8 year relationship after that.
The power consumption is factored into the cost of AI. It’s still profitable after that, or they wouldn’t be doing it.
It’s the biggest buzzword right now, it doesn’t matter if it’s profitable. I doubt most uses are directly profitable right now. It’d more of a FOMO situation - if we don’t use AI, we’re OBSOLETE! AHHH!
If it turns out not to be profitable in the long run then people will stop.
Should we never even experiment?
That’s basically exactly my point. Seems we agree lol. I was just poking fun at the fact that it feels like just about every large tech company is doing it, just like when the metaverse was all the rage… Or crypto, or…
Or Windows Phones 📱
Windows phones were nice, except Microsoft made them even more locked-down than iPhones…
Here’s a nice video of a guy training an AI to do a relatively simple task (driving a Trackmania trac) with a very limited amount of inputs with low variability, 2-3 outputs and very hardset restraints.
Compared to what he does, a rather narrow defined re-enforcement training scheme, Microsofts AI takes many more inputs and has many more outputs and all the inputs are highly variable (massive amounts of data like dictionaries, images, movies, entire texts, speech, etc compared to a handful of parameters with values from -1 to 1) and also is a mix between re-enforcement, supervised and unsupervised training. With different subnetworks trained for different things eventually working together to do the master task they have in mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3BZ6O_8LY
What is shown in the video is what you’d do for a tiny subsystem of the AI Microsoft, Google, Apple and the like develop.
Kinda like if you watched a video about “this is what it takes to make the bolt that keeps your wheels on your car” you’d only have seen a fraction of what it takes to make the whole car.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3BZ6O_8LY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
AI’s going to kill us off by doing what we do better than us. Consuming resources and producing waste. And we’re already pretty good at it.
