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Microsoft deal would reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI (www.washingtonpost.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/news@hexbear.net
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The tax breaks in the Inflation Reduction Act are crucial to making the deal economically feasible, according to Constellation. They provide a credit for every megawatt hour of nuclear energy produced.

The whole energy credit system is a fascist shell game. Instead of imposing transition requirements and bench marks, taxing corporations at higher rates based on their carbon impact, the government creates a speculative asset for these "green" initiatives that become more valuable then the actual product being produced. They can be sold in some cases, or in this case remove "taxes". But naturally, there are zero stipulations on HOW the energy produced is even used.

If approved by regulators, Three Mile Island would provide Microsoft with the energy equivalent it takes to power 800,000 homes, or 835 megawatts.

So instead of this easing the burden of energy costs on citizens, it eases the tax burden of corporations. Naturally, M$ is using this for bullshit AI slop too.

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[–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I keep coming back to this sense that technological advancement has just sort of hit a wall. In the last 20 years we've seen processing power become cheaper and not much else. This has given us new, arguably shittier forms of mass media, but nothing really different. And notably it's given us a parade of bullshit and bubbles pretending to be the Next Big Thing. The VR dream keeps recurring in various forms, 3D displays, 3D printing, blockchain, the gig economy, "AI," almost everything in the "green" apocalypse mitigation field, and now I guess cold fusion.

The only thing I can see as having real potential is quantum computing, because scaling it up would obsolete fundamental security features of almost every computer on the planet, but that's still in the early experimental phase and the bullshit artists haven't figured out how to market it widely.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    The promise of quantum computing isn't to break encryption, that would make it a pointless billions-dollar Y2K-like makework project to reconfigure all our systems to use post-quantum cryptography schemes. Quantum computers are primarily interesting because they promise to get a "native" speedup at simulating quantum-mechanical objects like molecules and proteins. So drug & material design could benefit. However, the field has been stalled for the past decade.

    I do disagree that technological advancement has hit a wall, though. Things are moving faster than ever. To choose a single example, the impact of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries has been enormous. Displays also really have improved a lot.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I think 3D printing has potential because it can close the gap between hobbyist crafts and commercial grade manufacturing. Print the item for a run of 25, then you can move up to a real mould for 25,000.

    It also leans into repairability-- replacement parts that might not be feasible to whittle one at a time from wood can be reliably made in a plastic comparable of strength to the original, and tge designs shared widely

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