Why can corporations own nuclear plants? Aren't they people? Can I own a nuclear plant? Or am I just stuck building additional pylons?
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
194 points (99.5% liked)
People Twitter
4975 readers
1442 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a tweet or similar
- No bullying.
- Be excellent to each other.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
AFAIK, There's nothing that says you can't make your own nuclear power plant. Just stuff forbidding you from obtaining nuclear material. Which would make it hard to operate a power plant. But you could still make one that doesn't do anything!
Most nuclear plants are owned by corporations. Before the accident, Three Mile Island was owned and operated by Constellation Energy (now Constellation Nuclear) and EnergySolutions.
You must construct additional pylons.
I can't wait for this AI bubble to pop.
I'm not saying that some parts of AI have utility - machine learning for medical scans will be a great thing for instance, but the "oooh new! shiny! venture capitalist, line-must-go-up" side of things can well and truly fuck off.
I don't think it will pop.
Everyone is trying to get in on the ground floor for actual AI. True AI will be as revolutionary as electricity and online porn.
We are a long way off from true AI. You know how VR was a thing with the virtual boy and then the whole thing died for awhile until the oculus and vive revived the idea like 20 years later? And how VR is basically dead again because it's still not quite there? AI is basically like that. We'll get there eventually, but this current trend isn't going to be enough to get us to true AI. It'll go quiet again for awhile until there's some new approach that revives the hype again. Maybe the next phase will do it, but the current AI approach is a dead end from a true AI perspective.
Can you explain what you mean? True AI? Like AGI or something else?
They want Jane from Speaker for the Dead, they're going to get Skynet.
aaeven just a machine learning model capable of searching for information and accurately returning an answer with a list of references supporting the claims would be huge for many industries and individuals.
it could help replace customer service with a competent replacement (if the company actually spent the effort to provide necessary features to the customer ui), search through software documentation to help programmers, and hopefully be a better version of what google was.
LLMs are kinda, sorta there already, aren't they?
Exactly. I'm bullish on AI, I'm not bullish on what the mass market media calls "AI."
What a waste of power. Somehow they went from "we're green tech!" to "fuck it, we need ALL the power" real quick. And for nothing.
For profit... somehow.
Don’t forget that Microsoft isn’t some dumb company trying to jump on the AI bandwagon. They’re a cloud provider and Azure provides lots of AI options.
Microsoft is one of the platforms raking in heaps of money from dumb companies trying to jump on the AI bandwagon. They’re the equivalent of the people selling MAGA shirts outside trump rallies.
Microsoft is one of the platforms raking in heaps of money from dumb companies trying to jump on the AI bandwagon.
True. But one of their biggest customers is OpenAI. A big part of Microsoft's investment in OpenAI comes in the form of free access to its data centers (which cost money to run, thus costing Microsoft in the short term). By taking advantage of OpenAI's non-profit status, Microsoft was able to write off a bunch of those losses early on as tax deductions.
But they're still losses.
Other firms using Microsoft to jump on the AI bandwagon might help make up the difference. But that's like saying "I'm only doing some of my own heroin, so I still come out ahead". Given the current rate of return on AI investments, the only truly correct investment value is $0.
They are making money off AI. Don't think they're not. I don't understand how, but these company's are getting profit.
If you look at the enterprise pricing and options for Copilot and Security Copilot, they're building a pretty obvious business model around automating everything from end user basic tasks to tier 1 incident response.
I'm not advocating that it will work, especially as a person in IR but, all the big players are pushing for security automation. All it's going to take is one high profile incident to shift the CSO's and the like to jump in with both hands full of "ai" purchase orders.
The shittiest part is, this is only going to eliminate more entry level secops jobs. Jobs that are generally a great place to start in the industry.
It's also going to create more headaches for the people left to fix things
Not necessarily. Companies chase what's popular because it boosts the stock. Executives get bonuses and move to the next hot idea.
Remember when everything was block chain?
No, I mean they are literally making money from it. Asianometry touched on it, but didn't explain how they were making the profit.
They're racking in a ton of investment case on AI. I'm sure there's also a slew of government contracts that keep this beast afloat.
But in terms of real value added to the economy? This seems like its just another Wall Street bubble waiting to pop.
Oh I agree. But the fact is these company's are seeing actual profits right now.
They're seeing a flood of new investment, but they're also absorbing huge losses from within their AI divisions.
The profits they're reaping are in other sectors.
The plant is actually going to be renamed "Crane Clean Energy Center" so it's fine!
Would be incredibly ironic if that thing melted down again and took MS's datacenters with it.
It was only a partial meltdown, some cooling systems failed and it was successfully contained! Safety precautions designed to stop a full meltdown and release of radiation succeeded.
I know that's not really the point of your comment but I feel like this particular incident has a lot of misinfo and I wanted to help elucidate what happened.
This isn't true -- radioactive gases were leaked into the surrounding area. The containment vessel remained intact, and NRC concluded that no measurable harm was done, but there was definitely a release and that's why it was such a big deal. They evacuated children and pregnant women from the area in response.
Exactly. A properly run nuclear plant can be extremely safe.
Nuclear meltdowns are incredibly uncommon though.
It's not as uncommon as you might expect -- here is a list for the curious. And I don't mean to denegrate nuclear energy as a power source; it is vastly better than fossil fuels and safe when done correctly -- I have participated in the safe generation of nuclear power. But the ramifications of it being done incorrectly are severe to say the least, and everyone should be aware that we do commonly have issues with it, especially in aging facilities. We commonly extend plants decades beyond what their initial construction planned for.
Edited to say I just realized you said meltdowns, not radioactive leaks, which I do agree with. Sorry for confusion
I also don't wish for that. We have enough fear mongering around nuclear power as it is.
Oh....
So Microsoft will also be repsonible for taking care of the nuclear waste until it's not toxic anymore, right? Right??
They've taken responsibility for all the arsenic and mercury released from the coal fired power plants they consumed energy from, so I have to assume that they will here too.