Technology

I'd rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources

Is nuclear not?

I've got so many ads so far for how adding new taxes is bad even if it pays for good things, and all of the issues they are arguing about aren't even adding any taxes. Actually adding taxes seems like a great way to make political enemies, even though it's often the best tool there is for a thing.

Eh, I would say investment into R&D should be encouraged and maybe allow tax write offs. Even of the end goal is a private power source. Once that R&D turns into workable, operable, sellable products, then tax the fuck out of them. Perhaps disallow making things that can be a boon to public infrastructure from being deem proprietary, so that it can be more easily adapted to public use.
I dunno, I'm typing from my couch after a few beers.

The cleanup for fossil fuels is an order of magnitude more expensive, and an order of magnitude more difficult. It also impacts so many things that its true cost is impossible to calculate.

I'm aware of the issues with nuclear, but for a lot of places it's the only low/zero emission tech we can do until we have a serious improvement in batteries.

Very few countries can have a large stable base load of renewable energy. Not every country has the geography for dams (which have their own massive ecological and environmental impacts) or geothermal energy.

Seriously, we need to cut emissions now. So what's the option that anti-nuclear people want? Continue to use fossil fuels and hope battery tech gets good enough, then expand renewables? That will take decades.

Everyone pays for not using nuclear too, a thousand fold more so.

no one’s certain this will be cost-effective either

One of the great sins of nuclear energy programs implemented during the 50s, 60s, and 70s was that it was too cost effective. Very difficult to turn a profit on electricity when you're practically giving it away. Nuclear energy functions great as a kind-of loss-leader, a spur to your economy in the form of ultra-low-cost utilities that can incentivize high-energy consumption activities (like steel manufacturing and bulk shipping and commercial grade city-wide climate control). But its miserable as a profit center, because you can't easily regulate the rate of power generation to gouge the market during periods of relatively high demand. Nuclear has enormous up-front costs and a long payoff window. It can take over a decade to break even on operation, assuming you're operating at market rates.

By contrast, natural gas generators are perfect for profit-maximzing. Turning the electric generation on or off is not much more difficult than operating a gas stove. You can form a cartel with your friends, then wait for electric price-demand to peak, and command thousands of dollars a MWh to fill the sudden acute need for electricity. Natural gas plants can pay for themselves in a matter of months, under ideal conditions.

So I wouldn't say the problem is that we don't know their cost-efficiency. I'd say the problem is that we do know. And for consumer electricity, nuclear doesn't make investment sense. But for internally consumed electricity on the scale of industrial data centers, it is exactly what a profit-motivated power consumer wants.

Yes it's obviously better than using fossil fuels, nobody's arguing that. What I'm talking about is the direction the global economy and the people making the decisions are taking.

No matter how much nuclear energy you use, you are still putting a lot of additional strain on the environment. It's not just the CO2 emissions that matter, that's just one of the problems. It's the increase in extracted materials for data centers, reactors and nuclear fuel, which causes the destruction of multiple ecosystems and the contamination of waters and soil from the pollutants produced(even radioactive waste in the uranium case).

It's also that Google could have been taxed more(I'm sure they can take it) and the money the government gained could be directed to investments on nuclear plants that would actually replace fossil fuels instead of adding energy demands on top of them. Because the fact of the matter is that in 2024 we categorically cannot be talking about not increasing fossil fuel consumption, we have to be talking about how to reduce emissions drastically every single year and why we are already tragically behind on that regard.

And it seems like Google's funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs

Hopefully.

But the cynic in me is always concerned when shareholder owned companies are operating something that has the potential to go very wrong very quickly if/when they cut too many corners in the pursuit of that extra 0.5% of profit.