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Big tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google are driving the nuclear revival, as to get new power-hungry data centers built in the US and Europe, they have to solve the problem of power generation. Their net zero pledges mean that the sources of power that they have pledged to use have to be low carbon, and they have already invested heavily in wind and solar, but their data centers still need a steady base load, so for big tech, investing in nuclear energy makes a lot of sense.
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50 Comments
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Thank God this is not what Matt Mullenweg meant by "scorched earth nuclear approach".
I'm going to be so livid if capitalism actually solves the climate crisis 🤦🏽♂️
Man I hope this scales.
But Robert you didn't tell us how much electricity a gamma presentation costs
"Big Tech need a steady base load". Common sense. But try explaining that to the wind and solar obsessed politicians that are going to ruin Europe.
Crypto and AI choking the world.
The are hammering the last nail of their cross.
Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show folks. AI is gonna turn out to be about 10% of the hype, and these companies are gonna dump billions into expensive energy that gets priced out of the market before it gets turned on.
I really think this demand for enegy is overhyped as people underestimate the advances in energy conservation of GPUs over time, people are thinking energy demand and compute move 1 to 1 when in reality energy usage for compute power moves down over time, there is still tons of fomo and room to go higher but at some point Unilities will crash down to normal PE ratios as energy efficiency increases
Wait, in the middle of a talk about AI is using too much power and water, we have an ad for something that's AI driven? Is that right?
Now you've done it …. again.
Tesla Fan Boys will tweet, tweet Elon who will tweet tweet Mark Zuckerberg to challenge you to a cage match. lol
"Britain unsuited for wind power"……. Patrick, have you been sleeping too little? What a gaffe. Britain is one of the windiest countries in the world, in fact all of the north sea countries have superb wind conditions.
Tis the season to share this chestnut again. I think it fits with Patrick's deadpan delivery. It's on Youtube but I first heard it on an NYC radio station.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p3YBCUwopU
Always interesting, informative, and well presented. The charts and graphics however, have text too small and are on the screen for too short a period to be analyzed and fully understood. It takes some time to look at the X, Y axis, and see the color coding. Before one can do this, it's gone. If you are going to use such graphs, your need to use them effectively. Thanks. Regards.
Nukes are a scam – one disaster and the developed world will cancel all contracts. The whole idea is to get huge investments now, skim a share of the cash flow, then let it crash. Just like crypto, NFTs, etc. It's all about milking the cash flow.
What if we actually have to learn to use less energy? What if we need to scrap private vehicles, commercial flying, and useless nonsense like "AI"?
What if we have to learn to live in balance with the Earth, and not just find a way to game the system one more time?
Our grandchildren will ask – "Why did they not change the way they were living when they had the chance?"
@PBoyle I am somewhat taken aback by how matter-of-factly you discuss this worrying development. How can nuclear energy even be an option to meet the growing demand for energy if there is still no place to store the waste that is produced?
Are you by any chance familiar with the effort required to dismantle a reactor that has gone wrong once? It takes years to dismantle all the parts of the plant, store them in drums and transport them away as nuclear waste, which, as already explained, can only be stored temporarily.
advanced economies are not advanced anymore, relax man, you are living in 1991
Criminal Gov in the West want their populations to use electricity to power their lives.
Unfortunately, there's not enough available and people are paying a financial penalty.
Meanwhile, politicians and Bureaucrats are each using 10× the amount of energy that the normal person, and their getting it for free.
A great positive I see with SMRs is that they could go from planning into production, in under 5 years
ie under an election cycle
Any politician taking a punt on it will see a pay off before the next election
Excellent analysis
Thank you Sir
Interesting… very interesting
Wonderful discussion
Thank you Patrick
Humour unmatched!!!
How can you invest in this ?
AI is catalyst for human Advancement.
Isnt it funny how people gatekeeping these energies and always introduce solar panel but the moment they can get left behind and now all hell break loose.
SSD also gets ALOT cheaper. Wonder why lmao.
14:40 you say that the UK is ill suited for wind generation?
The UK currently produces over 81 million MWh/p.a. each year from wind energy. That's 20 million homes.
With the UK government stating:
"The United Kingdom is the best location for wind power in Europe and one of the best in the world"
We have loads of off shore wind generation plans too. And many projects have been completed to great success – if expensive.
Kudos for being one of the few influencer who knows how to pronounce nuclear. (Peter Zeihan take note!)
SMRs sound like the beginning of our Isaac Asimov story arc…
This video is so frustrating to watch. Humans are such stupid sheep. We should have gone nuclear in the 70s and 80’s, done an infrastructure overhaul in the 90s. But no, people are scared of the safest, cleanest, most efficient per KwH energy source we’ve yet found and we’re still BURNING COAL in 2024!
Nuke cycle was figured out in seventies. Hidden after
Patrick, first of all, I am huge fan of the channel almost since day one, even though you should upload videos about rapping more often, this is the course the channel should have followed. I have a question, could you explain me (or even better do a video about it😅) why in such a strong stock environment gold is experiencing such rise? Thanks in advance!
Pikachu of Wallstreet
They dont want government or outside influence to get control of their power and turning off their AI.
Fun fact: Nuclear power isn't actully carbon free… in large part because concrete actully produces tons of CO2.
Also while nuclear plants can provide a baseload for the grid they already do this. Coal tends to be used to adapt to current demad and nuclear is the worst at doing this (water is the best). As such you cannot simply replace coal plants with nuclear ones.
One more note: France is also the country with the most nuclear accidents though a lot of theirs have been fairly minor and not well reported. They also export quiet a bit of their nuclear waste to germany (one reason for the resistance there)
Big tech going proton xpr
I’m wondering when you will tell us something we don’t know
“Unfortunately, Brtiain is not only ill suited to solar and wind”
I assume this is a mistake – the UK has some of the best wind resources in the world, and is one of the birthplaces of offshore wind along with Denmark. We have loads of onshore wind in Scotland, but we don’t build as much in England as we could due to NIMBYs; however more densely populated countries like the Netherlands manage to build more onshore wind, and our offshore wind capacity is second only to China.
Algorithm comment
So we can’t get governments to build nuclear plants to provide cheap energy for the commoners, but for tech bros to make AI puppies and lower wages for the commoners it’s a go. Got it.
can you not show us bright white news articles when the rest of the video is dark and earth-tone shots of your office
FUCKING FINALLY-
Anti-nuclear environmentalism is among the dumbest activist sentiments in the last century and I think the long view of history is going to look at the last half-century where everyone wrung their hands over nuclear waste and pursued inefficient "renewables" as a brief energy dark age. There exist no high wealth, low energy countries on the face of the planet, and that was true long before highly valuable, high tech companies took the lead on nuclear. Living in a world with nuclear power and continuing to use coal is like living in a world with magic and continuing to use physical, manual labor.
They sent manufacturing overseas to places with cheap power. They don't need to build nuclear power plants. They can just send the AI development overseas too. Have them run on coal plants in China just like all the goods being manufactured. Being de-industrialized is surely a bigger national security risk than that of data theft. I'm of course being cynical here. As far as I can see the only difference is large powerful companies protecting their profits. The government's policy is based around that and not around the well-being of its citizens, expect in the areas where the two overlap. It seems to me that multinational corporations should not be allowed to lobby governments except under the rules of foreign entities. If corporations are people, what is a multinational? Certainly not a citizen.
Move fast and break things is moving into radioactive materials….
I’d be happy to see more nuke power but I’m not sure these guys are the people who should do it, they tent to ask for forgiveness rather than permission….
An oops with radiation is not cool.
Kinda reminds me of fallout :p
Its not big tech, its a cover up. They are powering the old nuclear plants to produce nuclear bomb material in a rush. Currently neither russia nor america have any active nuclear bombs. You can not store a nuclear material for ever in a nuclear warhead. You need to produce them before you launch them. Storing them near impossible. We are heading to nuclear war
Your remarks on fusion are not really correct. You are repeating the fusion hype that has kept investment flowing into that hole for decades without a payoff. All fusion processes currently under development will produce substantial nuclear waste because they all produce neutrons. Further, some of the SMR designs may be able to reduce the current stock of nuclear waste. Even the D-D reaction has a side chain that emits neutrons. Further, the D-T process will require the world’s production of Beryllium to run. Do a little more research and create a follow-up report.
Nuclear plants are actually really clean but they are vulnerable to natural disasters and second problem is those who have it can have nuclear weapons too. used nuclear fuel can be turned into nuclear weapons fuel (plutonium 239) third problem is that they essentially can't be turned off and they always need to be cooled
And now you know why the push for citizenship to use less energy.
I'm honestly fine with this, nuclear energy like it or not needs to be in the conversation when it comes to the decarbonisation of economies. I would much prefer if political leaders were a bit braver in facing up to this fact and had the political will to kickstart new plants but its a tough sell to a lot of people. There is huge misconceptions about nuclear energy flying around and the emotional argument is difficult to factcheck around.
When they finally untether AI and allow it to freely answer the question, what's the best power source for AI, it will of course say, coal fired power stations. 😂
16:03 this fish disco 😂
Lol, AI, blockchain, crypto mining, data centers all will get the nukes and the rest of us will be stuck with garbage "renewables" with just enough coal and gas plants to just barely keep the lights on. Meanwhile they have to rob taxpayers to even support "renewable" energy with huge subsidies. Then "renewable" energy companies can run to the feeding trough and rake it in, while utility companies kill things like rooftop solar so they dont have to buy back from the folk. Same people involed in "big oil" are the same involved in "green" energy and lithium and they dont give a damn about you, me or the environment. Lithium mining, industrial solar farms, wind farms all have HUGE environmental and human costs. Im all for nuclear and giving it subsidies but it will need time to better mitigate its mining collateral, improve its efficiency and safety and deal with its spent waste issues.
We need all of it. We need to massively spend on transmission and batteries, both long and short term. Then nuclear, lots of wind and PV, and at least mid-sized demo plants for the wonkier stuff (wave, fusion, new geo, SMR, etc). As mentioned, we need 5x what we currently produce. So yeah, all of it.