HN Reader

It looks like wishful thinking. There were reasons why USA for decades was buying Russian nuclear fuel and not building new nuclear power plants. Meanwhile, Russia and China were building them all over the world. Restoring competences and building lots of new stations in just 10 years seems not realistic.

How on earth did a blog post with five paragraphs devoid of any content get voted to the front page?

This seems to boil down to AI uses lots of power and some of that currently comes from nuclear so we’re going to definitely ramp up nuclear energy production. It in no way addresses the cost, regulatory, or public acceptance issues. It also completely ignores things like grid storage that could make renewables a viable alternative. I don’t know if nuclear energy production is going to increase and after reading this I’m absolutely no closer to a deeper understanding of the issue.

I hope it's not just US but the world!

At the risk of looking like [0] guy, i suggest this is incredibly far from the truth.

First of all, because building a new nuclear plant in 10 years is all but impossible. Therefore, since there isn't many of them under construction now already, not many will be built within 10 years regardless of demand.

Secondly, if demand comes from AI, it is used for training AI models and is thus not very time-sensitive. If those data centres can buy electricity very cheaply, they will happily do it half of the time, especially as GPUs wear out from constant use, and have a longer "moral" lifespan due to obsolescence than physical, so they won't be losing much from keeping them off for part of the day if that buys them much cheaper power - and buying it NOW, not in 10 years. In this case, AI can even help deployment of renewables because they can feed extra "free" electricity during peak production hours, to the data centres, getting something rather than nothing for it, thus reducing "duck curve" problem of curtailment.

[0] https://external-preview.redd.it/nv9Rv16O4tFC4rWm443AW3oBdyK...

So to be clear this is just a blog throwing out unfounded predictions?

It's a measure of the failure of nuclear power that a blogger making wild predictions is estimating that the country with the most nuclear plants installed will be getting less than half their new power from it in a decade.

Anybody can predict anything. This seems extremely unlikely, unless we magically start building a whole lot of plants today, and they somehow are able to be finished in 10 years. The author of this blog seems completely out of touch.