Microsoft to Revive Nuclear Plant on Three Mile Island to Handle AI Processing
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Just a moment...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-to-revive-nuclear-plant-on-three-mile-island-to-handle-ai-processing
https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-to-revive-nuclear-plant-on-three-mile-island-to-handle-ai-processing
I know certain sentiments are coming, so I'll put this here: Three Mile Island wasn't the unmitigated disaster that fearmongers would have you believe. It was an ultimately harmless accident that was highly publicized because of poor communication and irresponsible sensationalist journalism.
More on the topic: https://youtu.be/cL9PsCLJpAA
Posted this earlier:
A poof of radioactive steam let loose. That's it, the whole incident. People freaked out on March 28, 1979.
In totally unrelated news, The China Syndrome, a popular movie about a reactor meltdown, came out March 16, 1979.
It was actually a success story. It failed safe, as designed.
Unfortunately "The China Syndrome" really pumped up anti-nuclesr sentiment.
TMI was the opposite of Chernobyl.
Yep. And underscoring that more than almost anything else is the fact that the TMI facility continued to operate without incident for forty years after that accident.
"Nuclear" sounds scary but it doesn't have to be and generally isn't. There are currently 94 active nuclear reactors in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_States
IMHO, the correct take on "<blank> uses enormous amounts of energy" is "yes, we do need to invest more in renewable and clean energy". Anyone who didn't have their head in the sand could have known that last century. This is only a problem now because our political leaders have failed us, year after year, decade after decade.
Small addendum, there's 94 commercial reactors that are generating power for the grid
But there's a few dozen more active nuclear reactors that exist for things like training and research.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_research_reactors#United_States
A nuclear plant is not a bad thing, that's one of the cleanest eneegy sources BUT being Microsoft I'm glad it's at least on an island
And it's the site that an American president came closest to dying in a nuclear explosion! (I mean that's not why it's notable, but it's a fun fact anyways.)
There is nothing clean or safe about the mile island. The place had a meltdown and created tons of nuclear waste. Next you’ll be trying to tell me Fukushima and Chernobyl were safe, clean, and cheap.
While that is true, it was also the site of the worst nuclear disaster on US soil.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not scaremongering, and I support nuclear power. It’s just a bit darkly ironic, imo.
Oh sorry, I thought we were saying things that were technically true but imply something much larger.
It was partial meltdown and the failsafe worked. No one was injured or had their health negatively affected by the incident. The worst nuclear disaster still had less negative effects than even a single modern coal plant does.
I live near enough to TMI that a catastrophic event would be severely detrimental to my health, but I see this as a good thing (if you can call AI good). Clean, safe energy, and jobs for people in an area that needs jobs, win-win.
ELI5 please why they don't just put their server farms in a desert, roofed with solar panels and a big-bum battery?
The Susquehanna River that Three Mile Island sits on offers virtually unlimited fresh cold water for cooling the server farm.
Fucking up the temperature downstream; global warming baby! But who needs that ecosystem? It's survive or die, and that includes the beavers! Down with trees, up with fleas(markets)!
Total ecological collapse is a small price to pay to boost shareholders' wealth by 0.1%!
line must go up
Transit latency is a tiny tiny fraction of the round trip time for AI processing tasks. Until AI tasks are in the order of milliseconds instead of seconds it's a rounding error.