• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    4 months ago

    In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently.

    The first new nuclear plants since Three Mile Island just came online in Georgia last year. Vogtle 3 and 4 will produce a combined 1.2 GWe at peak capacity.

    These reactors took 16 years and multiple bailouts and bankruptcies to complete, costing an estimated $34B to finish.

    Hopefully, future power construction will move a little smoother.

    As a comparison, the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant took ten years to complete at the cost of around $7.5B and it has a peak generation of 3.3 GWe

  • Jode@midwest.social
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    4 months ago

    We should have finished those Nukes that were proposed and then canceled post TMI. It would have been easier at this point to phase out the fossil and phase in the renewable without fucking the baseload.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers.

    Industry forecasts show the centers eating up a larger share of U.S. electricity in the years that follow, as demand from residential and smaller commercial facilities stays relatively flat thanks to steadily increasing efficiencies in appliances and heating and cooling systems.

    Data center operators are clamoring to hook up to regional electricity grids at the same time the Biden administration’s industrial policy is luring companies to build factories in the United States at a pace not seen in decades.

    A huge amount of clean energy is also needed to create the green hydrogen championed by the White House, as developers rush to build plants that can produce the powerful zero-emissions fuel, lured by generous federal subsidies.

    That power crunch threw a wrench into the plans of Michael Halaburda and Arman Khalili, longtime data center developers whose latest project involves converting a mothballed tile factory in the Portland area.

    The result, said Ben Hertz-Shargel, who authored the Wood Mackenzie analysis, is that crypto’s drain on the grid threatens to inhibit the ability of Texas to power other energy-hungry operations that could drive innovation and economic growth, such as factories that produce zero-emissions green hydrogen fuel or industrial charging depots that enable electrification of truck and bus fleets.


    The original article contains 2,514 words, the summary contains 240 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!