AI Might Kill Us All (With Carbon Emissions)

July 3, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 32 Comments

So-called artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage right now between your grandma asking ChatGPT how to code in Python or influencers making videos without having to hire extras, but one growing concern is where the power is going to come from for the data centers. The MIT Technology Review team did a deep dive on what the current situation is and whether AI is going to kill us all (with carbon emissions).

Probably of most interest to you, dear hacker, is how they came up with their numbers. With no agreed upon methods and different companies doing different types of processing there were a number of assumptions baked into their estimates. Given the lack of information for closed-source models, Open Source models were used as the benchmark for energy usage and extrapolated for the industry as a whole. Unsurprisingly, larger models have a larger energy usage footprint.

While data center power usage remained roughly the same from 2005 to 2017 as increases in efficiency offset the increase in online services, data centers doubled their energy consumption by 2023 from those earlier numbers. The power running into those data centers is 48% more carbon intensive than the US average already, and expected to rise as new data centers push for increased fossil fuel usage, like Meta in Louisiana or the X data center found to be using methane generators in violation of the Clean Air Act.

Technology Review did find “researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand.” This would mean either reallocating requests to servers in other geographic regions or just slowing down responses for the 80-90 hours a year when the grid is at its highest loads.

If you’re interested in just where a lot of the US-based data centers are, check out this map from NREL. Still not sure how these LLMs even work? Here’s an explainer for you.

Disarming A Nuke… Twice

May 31, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 26 Comments

Since the tail end of World War II, humanity has struggled to deal with its newfound ability to harness the tremendous energy in the nucleus of the atom. Of course there have been some positive developments like nuclear power which can produce tremendous amounts of electricity without the greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels. But largely humanity decided to build a tremendous nuclear weapons arsenal instead, which has not only cause general consternation worldwide but caused specific problems for one scientist in particular.

[Steve Weintz] takes us through the tale of [Dr. John C. Clark] who was working with the Atomic Energy Commission in the United States and found himself first at a misfire of a nuclear weapons test in the early 1950s. As the person in charge of the explosive device, it was his responsibility to safely disarm the weapon after it failed to detonate. He would find himself again in this position a year later when a second nuclear device sat on the test pad after the command to detonate it was given. Armed with only a hacksaw and some test equipment he was eventually able to disarm both devices safely.

One note for how treacherous this work actually was, outside of the obvious: although there were safety devices on the bombs to ensure the nuclear explosion would only occur under specific situations, there were also high explosives on the bomb that might have exploded even without triggering the nuclear explosion following it. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants aren’t the only things that the atomic age ushered in, though. There have been some other unique developments as well, like the nuclear gardens of the mid 1900s.

Hackaday Links: May 11, 2025

May 11, 2025 by Dan Maloney 6 Comments

Did artificial intelligence just jump the shark? Maybe so, and it came from the legal world of all places, with this report of an AI-generated victim impact statement. In an apparent first, the family of an Arizona man killed in a road rage incident in 2021 used AI to bring the victim back to life to testify during the sentencing phase of his killer’s trial. The video was created by the sister and brother-in-law of the 37-year-old victim using old photos and videos, and was quite well done, despite the normal uncanny valley stuff around lip-syncing that seems to be the fatal flaw for every deep-fake video we’ve seen so far. The victim’s beard is also strangely immobile, which we found off-putting.

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Could Nuclear Be The Way To Produce Synthetic Fuel On The Cheap?

November 27, 2024 by Lewin Day 127 Comments

Fossil fuels can be a bit fussy to access, and geopolitics tends to make prices volatile. Burning them also takes carbon out of the ground and puts it into the atmosphere, with undesirable climate implications. The hunt for a solution has been on for quite some time.

Various synthetic fuels have been proposed as a solution, wherein carbon dioxide is captured from the air and chemically processed into useful fuel. Done properly, this could solve the climate issue where any fuel burned has its carbon later captured to make more fuel. The problem, though, is that this process is very energy intensive. Given the demands, it’s no surprise that some are looking towards nuclear reactors for the answer.

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The Diablo Canyon NPP in California. This thermal plant uses once-through cooling. (Credit: Doc Searls)

US DOE Sets New Nuclear Energy Targets

November 14, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 63 Comments

To tackle the growing electrification of devices, we’ll need to deploy more generation to the grid. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled a new target to triple nuclear generating capacity by 2050.

Using a combination of existing Generation III+ reactor designs, upcoming small modular and micro reactors, and “legislation like the ADVANCE Act that streamlines regulatory processes,” DOE plans to add 35 gigawatt (GW) of generating capacity by 2035 and an additional 15 GW installed per year by 2040 to hit a total capacity of 200 GW of clean, green atom power by 2050.

According to the DOE, 100 GW of nuclear power was deployed in the 1970s and 1980s, so this isn’t an entirely unprecedented scale up of nuclear, although it won’t happen overnight. One of the advantages of renewables over nuclear is the lower cost and better public perception — but a combination of technologies will create a more robust grid than an “all of your eggs in one basket” approach. Vehicle to grid storage, geothermal, solar, wind, and yes, nuclear will all have their place at the clean energy table.

If you want to know more about siting nuclear on old coal plants, we covered DOE’s report on the matter as well as some efforts to build a fusion reactor on a decommissioned coal site as well.

Retrotechtacular: The Other Kind Of Fallout Show

April 16, 2024 by Dan Maloney 29 Comments

Thanks to the newly released Amazon Prime series, not to mention nearly 30 years as a wildly successful gaming franchise, Fallout is very much in the zeitgeist these days. But before all that, small-F fallout was on the minds of people living in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain who would have to deal with the aftermath of a nuclear exchange.

“Uwaga! Pył promieniotwórczy“ (“Beware! Radioactive Dust”) is a 1965 Polish civil defense film from film studio Wytwórnia Filmów Oświatowych. While the Cold War turning hot was not likely to leave any corner of the planet unscathed, Poland was certainly destined to bear the early brunt of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, and it was clear that the powers that be wanted to equip any surviving Polish people with the tools needed to deal with their sudden change in circumstances.

The film, narrated in Polish but with subtitles in English, seems mainly aimed at rural populations and is mercifully free of the details of both fallout formation and the potential effects of contact with radioactive dust, save for a couple of shots of what looks like a pretty mild case of cutaneous radiation syndrome.

Defense against fallout seems focused on not inhaling radioactive dust with either respirators or expedient facemasks, and keeping particles outside the house by wearing raincoats and boots, which can be easily cleaned with water. The fact that nowhere in the film is it mentioned that getting fallout on your clothes or in your lungs could be largely avoided by not going outside is telling; farmers really can’t keep things running from the basement.

A lot of time in this brief film is dedicated to preventing food and water from becoming contaminated, and cleaning it off if it does happen to get exposed. We thought the little tin enclosures over the wells were quite clever, as were the ways to transfer water from the well to the house without picking up any contamination. The pros and cons of different foods are covered too — basically, canned foods dobry, boxed foods zły. So, thumbs up for Cram, but you might want to skip the YumYum deviled eggs.

Dealing with the potential for a nuclear apocalypse is necessarily an unpleasant subject, and it’s easy to dismiss the advice of the filmmakers as quaint and outdated, or just an attempt to give the Polish people a sense of false hope. And that may well be, but then again, giving people solid, practical steps they can take will at least give them some agency, and that’s rarely a bad thing.

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You Got Fusion In My Coal Plant!

February 24, 2024 by Navarre Bartz 48 Comments

While coal was predominant in the past for energy generation, plants are shutting down worldwide to improve air quality and because they aren’t cost-competitive. It’s possible that idle infrastructure could be put to good use with fusion instead.

While we’ve yet to see a fusion reactor capable of generating electricity, Type One Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Oak Ridge National Lab have announced they’re evaluating the recently-closed Bull Run Fossil Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee as a site for a nuclear fusion reactor. One of the main advantages for siting any new generation source on top of an old one is the ability to reuse the existing transmission infrastructure to get any generated power to the grid.

Don’t get too excited as it sounds like this is yet another prototype reactor that will be the proof-of-concept before construction of a reactor that can produce commercial power for the grid. While ambitious, the amount of investment by government entities like the Department of Energy and the state of Tennessee (>$55 million) seems to indicate they aren’t just blowing smoke.

If any of this seems familiar, you might be thinking of the Department of Energy’s report on placing advanced fission reactors on old coal sites. A little fuzzy on the difference between a stellarator and a tokamak? Checkout this explainer on some of the different ways to (non-explosively) do fusion on Earth.