this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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Who says you power that thing with fossil fuels? The real way to do that is via giant nuclear reactors or reactor complexes.
Fission power can be made cheaper per MW by just making the reactors bigger. Economies of scale, the square cube law and all that. The problem with doing this in the commercial power sector is that line losses kill you on distribution. There just aren't enough customers within a reasonable distance to make monster 10 GW or 100 GW reactors viable, regardless of how cheap they might make energy.
But DACC is one of the few applications this might not be a problem for. Just build your monster reactors right next door to your monster DACC plants.
But then the power generated by those reactors is better used to power things that burn fossil fuel in a less efficient way or to simply replace the fossil fuel powered electricity generators...
Quebec transports its electricity over more than a thousand kilometers, surely distance from nuclear reactors isn't an issue if you build the infrastructure around it.
Only when the last carbon based power plant is close, we can see if there's energy left to waste on that capture carbon machine.
I'm sure the AI datacenters would have a few GW to spare if we put the LLMs on pause.