This is basically due to Google probably rightly believing that electricity price in Finland is going up due to all these datacenters and also a pr stunt that the current government loves because they can claim that they aren't allowing these datacenters to raise electricity price.<p>This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
Good on Google.<p>Finland has low emissions from electricity :<p><a href="https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly" rel="nofollow">https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly</a><p>71 gC02eq/kwH<p>France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
At least Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries and causing some rather extreme price volatility.<p>A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
With hindsight, it wasn't a very good idea to shut down 6 of 12 nuclear reactors. Still much better than the situation in Germany, but that's a very low bar.<p>It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
There's a simpler solution, stop letting the AI turn everything into paperclips
> Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK<p>The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.<p>If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.<p>You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
I’m starting to think that perhaps the government here in .se should support new reactors. It won’t be cheap though…
>you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.<p>yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
Well, we don't have fjords or mountains in Sweden, otherwise a great plan.
There are both mountains [0] and fjords [1] in Sweden, but
not of the Norwegian kind they were probably picturing.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Mountains" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Mountains</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullmarn" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullmarn</a>
This assumes that there is excess power at some point. This will soon become unrealistic: we either need power for data centers during the day or charging vehicles during the night.<p>The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
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> As part of the deal, Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.<p>> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
I hope the data center's waste heat can be used for some form of district heating! Finland has pretty great municipal infrastructure, but I don't know enough about its heating systems.
Google already does this at their existing Hamina data center. The building is also a repurposed paper mill.<p><a href="https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-globe/google-europe/our-first-offsite-heat-recovery-project-lands-in-finland/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...</a>
there are some papers about communal gardens heated by data centers... since they don't produce as much there, hope it also paves the way for developing indoor agriculture
For those regions green house and barn heating is a major cost (to the point that Norway for example subsidizes barn heating for dairy farmers), while pretty much all the energy consumed by a datacenter goes straight to heat without any meaningful work (in thermodynamic sense) done, so it sounds like a good match.
>the data center's waste heat<p>One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)<p>On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
Relatively uncongested…for now
Up to 50%
Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.
Will all these data centers really be needed in 5 or 10 years from now?<p>The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring
less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.<p>Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
The (naive or forward thinking depending on your opinion) is that cheaper 'inference' will result in more demand, like the more efficient Watt steam engine increasing consumption of coal.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox</a>
The trillon dollars question is more, will the current GPUs still be relevant in 3 years? 5? 10?<p>Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?<p>The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.<p>For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
It's a big bet to not have a plan for needing power.<p>I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
We will all be happy with our local inference, but how will our overloards be able to surveil and control us en-masse without them?
Energy usage for computing by humanity will only go up with time. It should be obvious that most of our energy will go to computing for anyone who's worked with computers. At some point you exhaust the kinds of things you can do in the physical world, but you can compute infinitely. There's limits to where you can go but not to what you can think about.
Probably yes, and if not, it can most likely be repurposed
I guess Finland has strong geopolitical security motives here, to create more dependence of the US on them, like in Taiwan.
It’s crazy that Google and TikTok, which mainly produce consumer software to serve ads, have grown to the scale where they literally need to set up data centres in northern countries while getting their power from nuclear power plants.
The power plant is about 1000 MW BTW.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant</a>
Only because the power company won't let them buy all of it, because their finance team wants a diversified customer base
The his will likely put a strain on neighbouring countries energy supply who used to buy that surplus before. Prices will go up even more.
I think that’s a good thing, they could also build a nuclear reactor or two or three. Wouldn’t hurt.
Do you know the specific of which countries buying how much electricity from this plant, or just your wildly guess?
Oh god, they're actually going to directly hoover up electricity supply and cause it to get massively more expensive for us mere mortal domestic users trying to stay alive
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively.<p>Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
If a community's usage is say 60% of what a plant can produce, and $TECH_GIANT comes and buys the other 40%, what happens next?<p>Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.<p>I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
I would go even further to say if we can get zero taxpayer dollars in funding, fair and equitable land costs, infrastructure paid for by the companies, and solid ecological plans that are leveraged on threat of removal (not fines), they could be a net good where they are built
Should this apply only to AI compute facilities or all industries?<p>I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.<p>Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
> I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions<p>The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.<p>For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.<p>The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.<p>Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.<p>So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.<p>But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though <i>not</i> doing those things would be the <i>absence</i> of subsidies.
The principle prevents governments from taking actual realities of any specific scenario into account, so it seams bad.
I think it should apply to all industries. But for many (or most?) countries where power generation is privatized in the first place, this shouldn't be a problem that we need to fix. The trickier question might be about the grid, which in most cases is publicly funded.
AI compute is a unique facility: can be placed anywhere, takes in mainly energy, does not produce the same volume or composition of waste, has noise pollution, and needs minimal access.<p>I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
Its best for all these AI companies to invest in nuclear fission, fusion, dark energy, etc.
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
The plant mentioned in the article is by no means new, its two reactors began operation in 1977 and 1981, respectively (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant</a>).<p>Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
Finland they made a few mistakes by becoming overly dependent on Russian reactor designs Russian sourced fuel for those reactors. Relations with Russia are a bit strained (especially recently, but they were always complex). Luckily, the wind sector is booming in Finland in recent years. They have a lot of on-shore capacity.<p>A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.<p>The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).<p>And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
in ur backyard not mine thx
Title from the source: Google to fund Finnish AI with €13bn investment and nuclear power pact
<a href="https://archive.ph/T0CVD" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/T0CVD</a>
Far north cool places seem logical for data centers.<p>Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
Southern states have more republicans so it's easier to sell public land or draw this kind of contracts without a massive community backlash
Not everything is partisan, and land is only a small factor in where to decide to place a data centers. The top 4 out of 5 states with the most data centers are blue states.<p>The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
Politics means putting job creating infrastructure projects in red states to curry favor with Republican demographics.
Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron tbh
The important thing is that they think it is.
The company my brother works for (fairly small) is involved in the construction and maintenance of the electrical side of the data grid. Apparently they need to hire at least 20 people a month for the foreseeable future to keep up with demand, as they're already booked out with projects into 2030 or something like that.<p>Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
> Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.<p>I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
> Calling data centers “job creating infrastructure” seems like a bit of an oxymoron<p>That's your original point, which is wrong since, as you admitted, data center boom is clearly creating jobs.<p>If you meant those jobs are offset by the negative effect of AI in general if we believe AI companies, a study by Anthropic was actively discussed here a few days ago. TLDR: they don't believe there will be mass unemployment because of AI<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626373">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49626373</a>
If everything the AI companies are saying is true, we'll all be living in a utopia while simultaneously annihilated by a rogue AI.<p>It will be pretty, but rather quiet.
Republican south states have also decided to reject science and embrace fossil fuels - global warming shall be the problem of our grandchildren, feel free to build as many gas turbines as you wish!
1. Cheap natural resource
2. Fiber connectivity
3. Low population density
4. Favorable regulatory environment<p>Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
Perhaps the extra cost in freeze proofing certain systems and the inability to rely on evaporative cooling techniques? The availability of power in the winter might be a problem too when northern home's power and energy usage all ramp up. In the summer you need nearly the same amount of capacity for cooling as the south so there isn't much savings there.
Arizona is conducive to abundant solar power, so that'd be a good reason to build there. Similar deal here in Nevada (with the added bonus of Nevada being a giant blob of geothermal heat, further driving renewable energy supply and therefore datacenter attractiveness).
Google claims that 10% of its power goes to non-computing overhead. Even if that were 0 somewhere else, ok how much more expensive is the power in that area, probably more than 11%. And I don't know how much they spend on power to begin with, relative to the other costs that probably go up.
Traditionally you cared alot about internet connectivity and latency to your customer base. I imagine Texas comes out a lot better on that front.<p>That probably matters a lot less for AI.
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.<p>When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:<p><a href="https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/25890-hs-olkiluoto-3-has-been-a-financial-catastrophe-for-areva-siemens.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...</a><p>When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:<p><a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-its-implications" rel="nofollow">https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...</a><p>The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.<p>Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.<p>If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
* good access to power (this might not mean the cheapest always, but actually getting to it.<p>* easy permitting<p>* lots of space
Which makes Arizona an interesting place to place any new builds of any sort of data center. They’ve been talking about the scarcity of resources there for years, and it’s currently in an escalating tailspin of abundance. Power is cheap as hell there, but once the water dries up… things might change quickly.
North Dakota and Alaska also have lots of space.
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Texas though.
Agree with this. Natural gas is effectively free there. Maybe it’s the fiber connectivity that prevents them from being built? I genuinely don’t know.
Alaska has a speed of light problem.
Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.<p>Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.<p>Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
If done correctly there’s a lot of free solar energy in sunny states.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:<p>- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment<p>- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal<p>- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest<p>- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid<p>- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Its pretty delusional to suggest that working nuclear plant was going to be decommissioned without this considering that electricity consumption is projected to rise rapidly. There currently is shortage of steady power in Finland so no nuclear plants are gonna be closed barring catastrophes.
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules<p>This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
Does this mean that no U.S. privacy oriented data will be stored in Finland.
No traceable HIPAA data or financial data and no national security data.
... or is it stored in Finland but encoded.
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1. Humans use AI<p>2. AI requires power^<p>3. AI companies purchase/produce power<p>4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)<p>^Same for water<p>This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
I don't choose to use all the AIs sites keep shoving at me.
> but continue to use AI<p>Not all humans
For over a decade, Google's been wearing the environmentally-friendly / carbon-neutral label as part of their public-facing brand values. It's definitely been eating into their CapEx then, and this isn't much different.
3a. AI companies make hyperbolic projections on the future use of AI and plan building and powering data centers according to that.<p>5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
Oh good. Then Google will be "clean", while countless homes will be getting their power from coal or whatever instead of this nuclear plant.
The plant may be closed without this Google's order. The cost to keep it running is substantial. I guess that's what you prefer?<p><i>"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"</i><p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gives-a-20-year-lifeline-to-nordic-nuclear-power-plant" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...</a>
Finland doesn't get the rest of its power from coal, they're one of the greenest energy markets on the planet.
It's a market. Why can't someone buy it?<p>Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.<p>More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Google is buying the output because they are increasing demand by half a nuclear power plant's worth of power. I actually think it's pretty reasonable to pass a law demanding they build an entire nuclear power plant here.
"The agreement with Fortum provides long-term financial certainty for the Loviisa plant, which currently generates about 10% of Finland's electricity.<p>Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."<p>Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
If I build a house and the demand goes up I don't have to build the solar panels (and everything else involved) to cover it, I pay the utility company to build that based on how much I'm needing to use. Well, normally I pay for whatever they think will make them the most money to deliver that much electricity - Google is specifically paying to make sure the utility company sees it as increased demand and revenue for more nuclear.
I think government regulations to put a cap on utility profits is a better long term move. Force excess to be directed into green energy expansion.
At this point with all the free-market-hand waving going around, it feels like someone telling me that it's not urin raining down on me, just sparkling trickle down economics.
You now have a PhD in your pocket.<p>Is that not the miracle of the free market?<p>King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.<p>Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
> King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king.<p>I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
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King Richard II would look at those devices you're offering and have you flayed for heresy
You’re assuming a large enough supply that can absorb demand. This is true in China but not generally in the West.<p>If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.<p>The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
This is a case where the supply was about to be gone and Google provided funds to keep it operating (the original nuclear reactor began operation in 1977 and it now needed EUR 700M to extend the service life). And one can probably guess that this supply just wasn’t cost competitive in the first place, but Google increased the demand so much that it now becomes cost competitive.
Source? The provider had requested to extend the lifetime of that particular reactor to 2050 2 years ago (something they’d started considering 8 years ago). Now maybe they did this contingent on expecting this Google deal to materialize, but it’s not clear to me these Google funds are strictly the only reason they’d keep operating the plant.
Yes let's shame corporations for spending money on and supporting things that need more support. /s
Somehow folks want this little problem of climate change to go away without any change in their own behaviors. Somehow corporations who sell them goods will just magically "be green" while flying around the world and drinking out of plastic bottles and subscribing to the latest fast-fashion website. But then when the corporations say "yes we should be green" that's a problem too. You just can't please some people, they're just here to complain, not actually see anything positive in the world.
It’s unclear. It helps Google with their marketing that they’re a net zero carbon company. But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon and it’s making it seem like Google isn’t the problem when it actually is - without them that community might otherwise be 100% nuclear and it would be no different from a macro level from Google adding that consumption to dirty sources.
> they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier<p>They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
> But if what’s happening is they’re displacing previous nuclear power users onto dirtier, that’s not really reducing carbon<p>That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing.<p>It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building the thing to connecting it to the grid. To give you a sense of scale, of the 53GW of planned wind projects, only 0.9GW are under active construction.<p>Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
Note that when Fortum was declined it was because two others were given approval. Lack of new nuclear in Finland isn't because no permits, but because Olkiluoto 3 exposed the real costs so Olkiluoto 4 was cancelled. Russia was the partner in the other one so that went to hell with the attack to Ukraine.
Everyone is rushing to send signals of AI growth to the market. Their continued valuation growth depends on it. There is no real use story that cannot be met by smaller distilled models which are far more energy efficient. I am convinced the next step will be scaremongering impending extinction level event followed by need to classify AI activities as national security related. Once you become part of the military industrial complex, it's all gravy baby!
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?<p>Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.<p>But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
Chernobyl disaster was biggest nuclear accident, but not the biggest disaster related to energy production. In 1975 the failure of the Banqiao Reservoir Dam and other dams in Henan Province, China caused more casualties than any other dam failure in history. The disaster killed an estimated 171,000 people and 11 million people lost their homes. It's not much known in the West because various elements of the Chinese government concealed the details of the disaster until the 1990s.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure</a><p>In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster</a><p>Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science<p>2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism<p>3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it<p>4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic<p>Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
What is carbon based proton catching mechanism?
> some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position<p>We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?