Power and cooling were at fixed levels and computers couldn’t really sleep, so cpu cycles were just wasted without seti@home. Nowadays computers idle efficiently, so something like that would make your computer louder and more expensive to run.
I’m probably about median age for HN and when I was looking into folding Seti@home I had no idea and didn’t worry about power cost because it was subsidised by my parents or university. Plus energy was cheaper then. Now as an adult seeing a month of a few GPUs running on the utility bill really hurts.
After looking at my utility bill, less than half of the cost is electricity and natgas; the rest is delivery charges -- that is, paying to maintain the power grid itself. Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly, reducing the cost of electricity here probably wouldn't decrease my utility bill as dramatically as one might guess. (And I live in California, where electricity prices are notoriously high.)
What doesn't make sense to me is why this delivery charge keeps going up? Is it just PG&E throwing a fit about having to modernize its lines so they don't cause fires anymore?
Ah, the good old pass-the-buck-to-my-future-self strategy that is leaving the US with trillions in infra repair bills to be paid by my (millennial) generation and younger.
Everything in California is explained by boomers voting themselves out of paying taxes. In this case the regulator never let them raise prices for maintenance so it's all coming due now.
(PG&E is basically nationalized already, they don't make their own decisions here.)
> Assuming the utility is breaking that down more or less honestly
That's a bit of an odd one, as the amount of electricity you consume has little direct effect on maintenance costs. Now, it might be in some sense "fair" to charge heavier consumers more, and there's a second order effect whereby if total demand exceeds some threshold, the grid must be upgraded to cope, but if that "delivery fee" scales with your consumption then you're definitely looking at some "creative" accounting.
I have had around 13 power outages this week. I live right in the middle of Silicon Valley. Most of the charges from PG&E are indeed the grid charges, the rest is supposedly a mandatory green energy. This is depressing.
Fellow SV resident (does Cupertino count?) and my eyes water when I look at my energy bill. Then I lose power for two days and learn that people REALLY dislike PG&E. And I thought National Grid was bad.
Let's put all our power lines up in the air, they said. It'll be fine, they said.
While other countries have stable and reliable power in the face of hurricanes and ice storms, our power is routinely knocked out by cars, trees, and basically any act of nature.
I love how expensive everything is for how behind we are from the entire rest of the world. Too bad the expenses keep me trapped and poor, unable to do anything about it—even just move to any other country.
I'm guessing much of that delivery cost is due to the additional energy transmission and storage infrastructure needed to incorporate intermittent energy from solar/wind.
Mind you, this could change if we get an economical way to generate hydrocarbon fuels from renewable electricity, so I'm certainly not pessimistic about solar/wind's long term prospects.
With articles like "Save North Dakota Oil and Gas!" I'm sceptical of that study.
Wind and solar were 30% of Great Britain's electricity last year. The National Grid is a private company, so their costs are clear, 3% of the average bill.
Nuclear power has proven to be a lot of things, but cheap is not one of them. In theory it is possible to build nuclear power plants at scale and at reasonable cost, but in practice that has not worked out in the real world.
You mean the places and times and regulatory environment that brought us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima?
I'm not going to get into a debate over the safety of nuclear over other generation options, but is it conceivable that, if the modern regulatory environment were in place when those three plants were built and operated, they never would have suffered major incidents?
Having a fukushima and a three mile island happen every year would be easily worth it if it made nuclear 20% cheaper (feel free to do the maths if you dont believe me). And it would actually make things fourfold cheaper judging by the difference in price per KW between the 80s and now.
Those power plants wouldn't have been allowed to be built... so yes? With the modern regulatory environment, those three nuclear power plants would never have melted down (because they wouldn't exist).
Molten salt reactors might provide superior safety (the thorium is irrelevant to that). However, they also would likely imply higher operating costs, because now instead of being sealed in fuel elements your fuel is flowing through a larger part of your reactor, and volatile fission products are escaping into the off gas and have to be trapped in another system (which will have to be cooled to prevent melting). So you now have complex systems that are too radioactive for anyone to touch for maintenance. Reactor structural elements are also now exposed to more neutron radiation as well.
There was less than 100 deaths from chernobyl, and only one person died directly from fukushima[1]. I suspect more people have died from falling off roofs while fitting or cleaning solar panels than that.
You're correct that nobody builds rbmk reactors any more, but others of the design continued to operate safely for many years.
There may well be tens of thousands of deaths from Chernobyl. No, we can't state that these deaths absolutely occurred/will occur -- they are spread throughout large populations, mixed into the vast number of naturally occurring cancers -- but technology regulation is not like criminal prosecution where things must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty.
> Technologies are not innocent until proven guilty
That depends entirely on the technology, and who is paying who. Fossil fuels have been proven guilty of numerous sins time and again and are still relentlessly defended as innocent. Leaded fuel in particular enjoyed an undeserved benefit of the doubt. Food additives are another category of chemical with very permissive regulation, provided they don't cause lab rats to immediately keel over.
Technology regulation is unprincipled at best and outright corrupt at worst, and even with the most pessimistic estimates nuclear power has the best safety record per watt of any power generation technology (and it's not close).
That's nice, but it's no justification for that earlier poster lying about the number of people killed by Chernobyl. There's very good reason to think the number is much larger than 100.
Fossil fuels being bad is an argument for getting off fossil fuels, not an argument for nuclear in particular.
Did you read the source I linked? It gives a good estimate.
"2 workers died in the blast.
28 workers and firemen died in the weeks that followed from acute radiation syndrome (ARS).
19 ARS survivors had died later, by 2006; most from causes not related to radiation, but it’s not possible to rule all of them out (especially five that were cancer-related).
15 people died from thyroid cancer due to milk contamination. These deaths were among children who were exposed to 131I from milk and food in the days after the disaster. This could increase to between 96 and 384 deaths, however, this figure is highly uncertain.
There is currently no evidence of adverse health impacts in the general population across affected countries, or wider Europe."
Yes, and you totally ignored the cancers that could occur due to low levels of additional radiation in the population at large. You are simply presuming that such cancers cannot occur.
What you are doing here is demanding that the cancers actually be demonstrated, requiring that radiation be treated as innocuous until it can be conclusively shown it isn't. This is the mindset behind those ranting against the linear no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis.
But regulation doesn't work this way. Nuclear isn't something that must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
First, the costs of nuclear power are quite substantial AND they are front-loaded making it a bad investment. You will need to go through a lot of red tape and spend all the money right away to get some benefit later when it's built.
Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.
Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades. While that is not a concern in our lifetimes, some progress on thorium plants and so forth must be made for nuclear to be a long term solution.
> Second, it's not zero carbon if you include building the plants, since the plants have a limited lifespan, so there's still a carbon footprint for the materials.
Nothing is zero carbon either. Batteries have a very long supply chain that involves a lot of carbon heavy steps, and their disposal also creates pollution. The same goes for solar panels, but people conveniently choose to ignore that.
> we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades
We dont need uranium to run on nuclear power. There are several alternatives already.
>>Third, if you switch all of our energy to nuclear today with a magic switch, we would run out of all easy to mine uranium in a few decades.
There are vast quantities of uranium in ocean water in concentrations that while low, still allow it to be extracted. More importantly, breeder reactors can harvest 100X more energy from uranium than currently deployed reactor types, and in the process eliminate all of the long-lasting nuclear waste, i.e. those with a half life of millions/billions of years.
With known supplies of uranium and thorium on Earth, nuclear fission can provide 100% of humanity's current energy needs for something like 2 billion years. For reference, the sun's rising luminosity is expected to boil Earth's oceans away in 900 million years. We could 1000X current energy consumption with nuclear, and have enough fuel on Earth for over a million years. Long before the fuel runs out, we will be able to exploit resources beyond Earth.
All those options are significantly more expensive than what we've been building. I mean, we've built fast reactors, and thermal breeders with thorium, and had pilot efforts for U extraction from sea water. None of them could compete with LWRs with a once-through fuel cycle on conventionally mined uranium.
Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality (that is, an actual nuclear explosion) in a serious accident if enough of the core melts and moves around.
In any case, costs can be brought down significantly with 1. more reasonable regulations and 2. economies of scale, which just requires building more plants.
So if - due to massive expansion of nuclear power - we get to the point that uranium supplies are dwindling and causing the price of uranium ore to rise, we may still see breeder reactors with lower construction and operating costs than current generation reactors.
I suspect modularity in reactors, that enables a genuine global market to emerge in reactor manufacturing, would be instrumental in bringing down reactor construction costs.
>>Fast reactors also present the possibility of prompt fast criticality
I'm quite the layman in this subject, but my understanding is that there are fourth generation fast reactor models, with passive safety features, that effectively eliminate that possibility.
The claims that costs can be brought down with better regulations and economies of scale are often made, but the evidence for that is marginal.
For regulations: how does one identify "reasonable" regulations? How is this to be determined? The usual way this is done in other industries is by allowing accidents to happen, then add regulations that would have prevented them. I doubt that would be acceptable for nuclear: unlike (say) aviation accidents, the cost of an individual accident can be extremely large.
As for economies of scale, the evidence for that in nuclear is slight. Maybe S. Korea? But elsewhere costs seem to have increased with experience rather than decreasing. Nuclear involves large units that take a long time to build; there's not much room for anyone to gain much experience over their career. If anything, experience decay (as organizations and individuals age) seems to overwhelm experience growth.
> fast reactors
Fast reactors inherently have this problem, since a fast chain reaction occurs without a moderator. In a LWR, concentration of the fuel in an accident reduces reactivity, as the moderator is reduced. In a fast chain reaction, concentration of the fuel will increase reactivity. Putatively safe 4th generation reactors merely assert that such rearrangement cannot happen. If the analysis that led to that conclusion is found to be in error then anyone who has built such a reactor will be in deep trouble. Perhaps molten salt fast reactors will have sufficiently credible analysis, but those have their own issues (such as need for large amounts of isotopically separated chlorine in molten chloride reactors and exposure of the walls of the reactor to unshielded/unmoderated fast neutrons.)
I'm only including things that are viable. It seems it's just going to be cheaper to build out significant wind and solar, while keeping nuclear around for the times there's neither wind nor sun.
That's a complete terrible way to use nuclear. The cost per unit of produced energy will be so large that other systems (like storage, including burning hydrogen in turbines) would be much more economical to cover those dark-calm periods.
Nuclear should either be operated all the time, or it shouldn't be used at all.
That's like a project manager blaming the missing of deadlines on "the opinion of certain people in the company and the bureaucracy within the company".
No heroics from any project manager would eg let 1980s Ford stop selling internal combustion engines and go all-in-one electric cars. So any deadlines would be missed.
Another way to look at it: there is no miracle solution.
It´s easy to look at any situation and say ¨If only they´d _just_ XXX¨. It´s never that simple.
Even if you deeply believe your solution is flawless and people ¨just¨ need to be convinced, the very fact that the situation is happening at all is an indication it will be a long and dire fight...
Counterpoint: France is doing extremely well in Europe and is the only country that is doing well (I'm talking energy-wize). France is a nuclear energy country.
So yes, there is 1 pretty great solution to the energy problem and yes it has existed since the 50's..
Sure, when you convert energy you need to do maintenance and keep things up to date and if you don't do that bad things happen. That goes for all methods of energy conversion.
How does that have anything to do with the discussion about energy conversion types methods and their pros / cons?
France is one of Europe's top energy exporters, despiting consuming a significant amount of energy itself. Domestic energy prices levelling with prices in neighboring countries, while energy exports rise, is what you'd expect with a country that has a relative abundance of energy along with free trade with neighboring countries.
I'd take your point if French were massively (like 90%) in favor of more nuclear, and saw it as their main energy source for the future centuries. That's definitely not the case [exit: a poll mandated from a nuclear power organisation puts it at 50% of people seeing nuclear plants as a positive asset for the country:
You can then think what you want of the French people and why they could be dead wrong for not thinking like you, but it's another debate: they'll still want to get out of it if given the time/choice.
Uranium and expensive plant resources are much too valuable to waste on this application. Buy some solar panels and do your hobby/discretionary computing using the much cheaper and unlimited power from our sun.
Watts per unit of fuel are cheap but only to the power companies who mark it up. We’re in the middle of Record gouging in energy and food and you think a power company won’t gouge you?
They still charge us for the electricity PLUS extra charges for a fund to eventually decommission the nuclear plant. It’s so expensive.
Well, construction is a lot safer now. The death rate of construction workers has fallen by a factor of 5 since the 1960s in the US. It's possible those lower construction costs were at least in part due to a cavalier disregard for worker safety.
It'd be valuable to determine the additional lives lost due to increased energy costs from these higher construction standards, and the lives saved from these standards.
My wholly intuition-based guess would be that the net effect of these higher construction/safety standards is massively more lives lost.
But if that is the case, it's worth remembering that the lives lost from higher construction standards are a result of second order effects and populist government-interventionist political ideologies are generally quite poor at factoring in second order effects, as we saw with COVID lockdown policies, which resulted in far more lives lost from the second order effects of the lockdowns than lives saved from the lockdowns mitigating the spread of COVID.
Another possibility is that the US simply isn't building as much these days, and heavy construction might have lost economies of scale. The Baumol Effect is another possible contributor. Renewable construction is not of the same kind, especially PV.
Specific construction expertise for nuclear very likely has degraded (the US can no longer forge the large reactor vessels for PWRs, for example.)
Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support. Bespoke turbines from smaller makers will be more expensive.
Building out transmission lines for low-intensity power sources like wind/solar is labor intensive, like nuclear power plant construction, so I suspect factors like the Baumol Effect similarly affect the cost of both.
Nuclear plant construction has the potential to become much less labor intensive if it moves to smaller, standardized nuclear reactors that can be manufactured in factories, using mass-production techniques.
>>Nuclear is going to be further negatively affected if there's a transition away from fossil fuels, since the industrial infrastructure for making steam turbines will no longer have as much support.
True. However this is a surmountable problem. It's just a matter of using subsidies to achieve economies of scale in nuclear plant construction.
I am skeptical of the SMR-built-in-factories schtick. It sure isn't helping NuScale control costs -- they're up to $15/We now, and it will not be surprising if that goes even higher.
The problem with the subsidy argument is there's no good experience to show that subsidies would do more here than just burn money. Nuclear has not had good experience effects. This is in sharp contrast to renewables and storage.
Nuclear is weighed down by the boat anchor of its historically poor performance.
I have a datacenter at home (that is, the top shelf of a cupboard) with my fiber connection, router, a 10 years old tower with a mix of HDD and SDD, a small computer that acts as the router/DHCP/... and a few other equipment - behind a UPS.
I measured the consumption at some point and it is a steady 60W.
I expected more, this setup has a marginal consumption compared to other appliances - and it gives me happiness.
Without doing advanced research, I would guess that a lot of consumption i fixed and hardly compressible (fridge, dishwasher, water boiler, induction plate, typical lights) - at least I hope so.
I just dislike purposefully misused technical terms, including in jest, as that's how we've gotten to this point where every second disagreement boils down to people not agreeing to the same definition.
Nah, HLT is pretty old and even back then had meaningful impact on power consumption. If you were running Win9x though you would've had to install an additional driver for it, as those really just busy waited otherwise when nothing was happening.
