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.
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.
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.
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).
Nuclear is the most expensive form of clean energy. It is likely to bankrupt at least one company.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
This is Finland. A third of the country is above the Arctic circle. In the winter the sun barely gets above the horizon. Nuclear makes a lot of sense there.
Wind works great in Finland. They've grown their wind power from effectively 0% a decade ago to 25% of their yearly electricity production, replacing coal, gas and peat. They also have Hydro both domestically and in neighboring Sweden to use as storage for when the wind is not blowing.
Agreed, it makes sense for Finland, one of the very few places it does. But in the future of global energy supply, nuclear will be a far less serious player than it was in the 20th century.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
When your supplier is threatening to invade and kill your people, and has critical control over supply of parts of your reactor, and regularly commits acts of nuclear terrorism such as droning the newly completed sarcophagus around Chornobyl:
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
There would not be a critical control over the reactor, just the opposite. Finland would control everything and could have even bought fuel elsewhere.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
> Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
From Wiki[1], I see:
> In March 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish Government declared that a rapid independence from Russian energy production is desired, and that the construction of the plant should not continue. Mika Lintilä, Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, declared that he would not issue a construction permit.
1. Consistent stable long-term energy
2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
I think it is reasonable that the Finnish gov't cancelled the permit to build a Russian design reactor while NATO is deeply involved with the largest conflict with Russia since its founding in 1949. However, you raise some good points in your reply. They should have switched to a different design, such as EU, US, Canada, or Korea. All have modern, well-proven reactor designs.
You should read on the history of Finnish nuclear reactors. The disaster of Olkiluoto showed that French can't be trusted.
USA (Westinghouse) nuclesr development was/is in the gutter as well, plus there are risks giving it to the USA (the biggest hybrid and non-hybrid war wager in the world).
Then read about the history of Pyhäjoki/Hanhikivi. Finns really did try to get anyone else, RosAtom was not in the initial running. Unfortunately one after another each candidate was eliminated/wighdrew. In the end there were zero. It is at that point that RosAtom came in and saved Finnish nuclear future. They wanted to do that because the project in Finland (with a very strict Stuk government nuclear safety agency) would be a really good reference for the rest of Western Europe. Check the number of nuclear stations built by RosAtom. They really are very professional and a leader in the field.
What most people are missing in this conversation is that they think that building a Russian nuclear station in Finland would increase the amount of Finnish energy dependency on Russia. In reality it is the exact opposite, the dependency would decrease. There would be more energy produced in Finland, by Finns, instead of importing it via sea cables (can be cut) from other countries, including Russia (yes, Russia!). In case of Putin's malevolence, what would be easier for Putin, to stop providing energy via a cable, or to disrupt the work of the Finnish nuclear station?
The answer is clear. That's my point, the decision makes sense only if you don't think about it. With a little depth, you realize how incredibly emotional and stupid the decision was.
A one party state where the plants are owned, insured, backstopped and cleaned up for free by the government doesn’t have the same economics as free market builds.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
China is only building a token amount of nuclear compared to storage wind and solar. It makes a lot of sense for a large nation like China to waste a bit of money on nuclear power just to provide support for the core national security interest: nuclear weapons.
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
Here in Norway we already have issues with volatile and high electricity prices, because:
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Germany became a net electricity importer after shutting down its final nuclear power plants in 2023.
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
In absolutely no way is that true. The EU price varies by renewables production. When it's dark and still that's when electricity costs the most, and that's when Germany imports energy. It exports when there's sun and wind, but then the energy is cheap. So Germany sells low and buys high. Doesn't matter if Germany is a net exporter because it exports at the wrong time.
Germany has excess coal and gas capacity which they can turn on when needed. They, like most people import when it's cheaper than the local alternative.
Interconnected nations all importing when cheap electricity is available lowers costs for everyone.
Looking up the numbers Germany sells high and buys low when it's net importing
In the long term interconnected nations might make electricity cheap everywhere. Currently it's mostly making it more expensive everywhere else. (As someone living in south of Sweden.)
This may be technically true at the moment, but the underlying reason for the high prices is fossil fuels: when renewable generation is low, natural gas peaker plants are generating, and these have the highest cost of any generation source, and by the merit order rules under which commodity markets such as electricity operate, the highest source price sets the price of the commodity.
The obvious and affordable mitigation for high prices is to build out massive battery storage capacities so that natural gas plants are needed far less often.
92 units (1 MW or larger) were connected in the first half of 2026 adding 842 MW/1.8 GWh, which is more than all of 2025 so this is both happening and accelerating. In addition small scale storage also seems to be adding a significant amount of capacity.
For some reason the HN commentariat is very pro-nuclear, and it drives them INSANE that the shutdown had minimal consequences(as only a small proportion of power production was nuclear and it was entirely replaced by new renewable capacity).
I think no one outside of Germany particularly cares about their internal politics, energy prices, or what role the Energiewende placed in the long-term industrial slowdown. The criticism that Germany gets for the Energiewende is that they decided to shut down nuclear power plants while THEY WERE STILL BURNING COAL! I don't think this legally qualifies as a crime against humanity, but it was horribly negligent.
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
Agreed on all points, but you forgot to mentioned that Google pay close to no taxes in Norway (~1%). At the same time, their hyperscaler in Skien alone will, when finished, consume ~5% of total energy production. Put another way, 25% of what households use.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
China added 315 GW of solar and 120 GW of wind capacity in the year 2025.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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"
Lol, it certainly wouldn't have been decommissioned in any case. For that to happen electricity consumption would need to be going down instead of up and Finland would need to have abundance of steady power to replace it.
No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
> No public money needed, it is easily profitable to do without.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
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.
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 new planned datacenters aren't near major population centers, so potential for district heating might be limited. Eyeballing from the map one of them is about has about 25 km from Oulu (pop 200k), and another is 30 km from Kajaani (30k). But that's about it.
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
The city of Kajaani's district heating (northern Finland) is already completely covered by data center waste heat from CSC data centers (and maybe some other ones).
Microsoft's data centre in Espoo is used for district heating.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force:
- This is a plant that was going to get shut down without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and proximity to Russia, they tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal, they'll be gaining capacity, expertise and follow on investment
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- 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
- Finland will not be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers somehow destroy H20 molecules, because they have one of the best education systems in the world
> while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules
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.
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.
Did Germany plan to increase electricity consumption? Gas heating is still king there, and Germany famously promotes hydrogen (mostly from gas) over battery vehicles.
Ah yes let’s ignore shutting down nuclear reactors replacing them with coal power plants in the name of green energy which was so successful the country goes through a period every year called Dunkelflaute.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
Not really. Situation now is totally different to what it was when Germany made those decisions. In Finland shutting down nuclear hasn't really been something that has been discussed seriously in very long time.
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
Yes and Nordea has predicted housing prices will start to climb again every quarter for the last 3 years. Next quarter I guess!
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
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.
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.
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).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
A quick search shows that there are plenty of alternatives. First, all nuclear power plants keep a excess supply of fuel on site, about 2-3 years. If Russia says tomorrow: "No more nuclear fuel exports to any 'unfriendly' European nations.", there are plenty of alternatives. US-based Westinghouse already produces nuclear fuel that is compatible with many Soviet-designed reactors. Plus France (Framatome and Orano), Netherlands (Urenco), Canada and Kazakstan can easily backfill any European needs, be it raw material or final fuel.
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!
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.
5. when the AI bubble burts, 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)
The humans that use AI should be the ones paying for the extra energy demands, rather than socializing it to everyone else, that's how markets are supposed to work. If we don't know the true cost of AI we can't value it properly.
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.
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?
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.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
This is a weird take. Before the rise of AI/LLMs, a lot of Finland's industry was paper products and high-end manuf'ing. Both of these require a lot of electricity. Did people say the same before? No (or much less).
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.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination?
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.
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.
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
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
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
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
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
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.
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.
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)
That chart needs a companion chart showing “amount of effort needed to prevent deaths”. Since that is missing lots of people think nuclear is safe when it’s actually by far the most dangerous.
Such charts exist - they're the "costs per unit" charts; perhaps broken down into (say) capital upfront plant costs, ongoing running costs per unit generated, and decommissioning costs.
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.
True enough but there's an order of magnitude difference in those costs. For nuclear the costs extend beyond out ability to predict the future, and they simply can't be ignored whatever they amount to.
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant. Such cleaning at end of life has to be done also for many kinds of chemical plants, chemical storage tanks, otherwise you get a catastrophe like in Bhopal, India.
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
>Nuclear power plant after removal of nuclear fuel and decontamination is inert as abandoned fossil plant.
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
Civil nuclear power plants accumulate funds for decommissioning and disposal of nuclear waste. It's part of the electricity costs. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US are military/research facilities.
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
We have developed cheap glass that can be mass produced and sucks electricity from sunshine, can be placed on already occupied surfaces to produce 100x more electricity than we are currently consuming. It requires basically no maintenance or operating costs for decades and is xheap enough for an average home-owner to meet at least half of their electricity needs.
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
> Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
You're absolutely correct that oil and gas extraction activities need to be properly decommissioned, and that is expensive.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
Cheap solar, yes you can now buy PV quite cheap. How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies? Also subsidies in form of cheap Chinese coal electricity, polysilicon production is very energy intensive.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better, but import all of it PV panels. And electricity only a part of primary energy consumption in both in China and Germany.
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
>China still produced only 11% of electricity from solar, Germany 18%, so in this metric Germany is better
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
>currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
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.
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.
Only if demand increases to the point where supply cannot meet demand in a short enough time frame. Capacity is a factor here.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
What it does allow is for Google and the governemt to say these data centres aren’t generating any co2
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Google has been doing all of that for decades. I remember when they started building their first data center (back when almost no companies required enough compute for an entire data center) they chose the location due to the cleanest energy they could find (hydroelectric on a river that wasn't blocking fish migration).
It is worth noting that Finland is a member of Nord Pool (for electricity) which includes all Nordic nations. You cannot consider Finland alone in your supply and consumption expectations -- you need to include Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. Both Norway and Sweden have massive annual electricity exports exceeding 30 TWh for each country. 60 TWh is the equivalent of four EPR nuclear power units that can produce about 14 THw per year! That is crazy over capacity in my view. The block has plenty of supply.
Further, the article specifically says:
> Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.
You can't sum like that, though. Connections between regions and countries have capacity limits, so it would matter where in Finland you placed a data-center, if you wanted to take into account the electricity coming from Sweden and Norway.
Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
A customer willing to make a multi-decade deal for half a reactor at a stable price is perfect for incentivizing new nuclear buildouts. The basic financial problem of nuclear is that it' capex heavy and opex-light, so the costs of the entire enterprise are set during the buildout stage, but the revenue is volatile.
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.
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.
I predict that within 100 years, data centers will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive that only the 5 richest kings of Europe will own them
It reminds me of "640KB of RAM is enough for everyone". Look where we are right now. We always find a way to spend resources. I was frustrated with my last laptop because of frequent swapping/OOM, so I built a desktop with 64GB RAM during covid. I thought I would never have this problem again, I even disabled swap. Now I regret I didn't get 128GB instead to fit bigger local LLMs. But even without LLMs, my Firefox crashed with OOM just yesterday. Apparently I open too many tabs too quickly.
I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
So this is the actual long-term bet, where there's incentive to start building more power infrastructure? You'd prefer Finland gets the medium-term results where they don't find a way to finance more nuclear then have to buy gas from Russia like Germany?
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadNot Texas and Arizona. Why?
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
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.
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
What do you mean Texas is anti-resident?
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:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
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:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
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.
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.
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.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
1. Consistent stable long-term energy 2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
USA (Westinghouse) nuclesr development was/is in the gutter as well, plus there are risks giving it to the USA (the biggest hybrid and non-hybrid war wager in the world).
Then read about the history of Pyhäjoki/Hanhikivi. Finns really did try to get anyone else, RosAtom was not in the initial running. Unfortunately one after another each candidate was eliminated/wighdrew. In the end there were zero. It is at that point that RosAtom came in and saved Finnish nuclear future. They wanted to do that because the project in Finland (with a very strict Stuk government nuclear safety agency) would be a really good reference for the rest of Western Europe. Check the number of nuclear stations built by RosAtom. They really are very professional and a leader in the field.
What most people are missing in this conversation is that they think that building a Russian nuclear station in Finland would increase the amount of Finnish energy dependency on Russia. In reality it is the exact opposite, the dependency would decrease. There would be more energy produced in Finland, by Finns, instead of importing it via sea cables (can be cut) from other countries, including Russia (yes, Russia!). In case of Putin's malevolence, what would be easier for Putin, to stop providing energy via a cable, or to disrupt the work of the Finnish nuclear station?
The answer is clear. That's my point, the decision makes sense only if you don't think about it. With a little depth, you realize how incredibly emotional and stupid the decision was.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
That probably matters a lot less for AI.
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar. 2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future. 3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped 4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Weird
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
Interconnected nations all importing when cheap electricity is available lowers costs for everyone.
Looking up the numbers Germany sells high and buys low when it's net importing
https://www.stromdaten.info/ANALYSE/importexport/index.php
This may be technically true at the moment, but the underlying reason for the high prices is fossil fuels: when renewable generation is low, natural gas peaker plants are generating, and these have the highest cost of any generation source, and by the merit order rules under which commodity markets such as electricity operate, the highest source price sets the price of the commodity.
The obvious and affordable mitigation for high prices is to build out massive battery storage capacities so that natural gas plants are needed far less often.
https://modoenergy.com/research/en/germany-battery-buildout-...
>Net imports amounted to only 1.3 TWh, compared with 9.6 TWh during the first half of 2025.
Though 1.3 TWH is a huge improvement over 9.6 by any standard.
https://energy-charts.info/?l=en&c=DE
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
339 gC02eq/kwH
for the past year. That's ten times the level of France.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
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.
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.
"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"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?
OL3 will generate ~745 TWh over his life, from a total investment of ~€11bn.
Loviisa life extension will generate ~170 TWH, from an investment of ~€1bn.
Considering the capacity factor, we are comparing 6€/MWh for Loviisa against ~15€/MWh for OL3.
So, it is worth mentioning that extending the life of an existing power plant can be a really good investment.
Main difference is in initial setup/concrete installment!!
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
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.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
- This is a plant that was going to get shut down without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and proximity to Russia, they tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal, they'll be gaining capacity, expertise and follow on investment
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- 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
- Finland will not be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers somehow destroy H20 molecules, because they have one of the best education systems in the world
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.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...
In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
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...
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.
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).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
2. AI requires power^
3. AI companies purchase/produce power
4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)
^Same for water
This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
5. when the AI bubble burts, 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)
Not all humans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loviisa_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
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.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads
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.
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.
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
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
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
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
We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
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)
" Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity. "
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.
A fossil plant can simply be abandoned, and the damage will be minimal compared to abandoning a nuclear plant.
Without this information the chart is repeatedly used as an argument that nuclear power is safe, which is of course the direct opposite of the truth. It is the option that requires the most money and effort to keep safe and nothing is even a close second.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
If you are looking for long term storage of spend nuclear fuel, it's mostly a political issue, not technical issue. In U.S. there is WIPP, in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years. But this is only licensed to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
Finland is building Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
There is also hazardeus chemical waste which is stored in underground. The Herfa-Neurode underground landfill ( UTD Herfa-Neurode ) is the world's largest underground landfill for hazardous waste, includes 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury , 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide , and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
The site itself sure, but the "removal" just moves the remaining cost somewhere else, it doesn't /re/move it.
The remaining costs for "decommissioned" power plants usually end up with the military. Sellafield in the UK, INL in the US for example.
The problem with the idea of a multi-century stable solution is that we make mistakes. The WIPP facility in the US had a similar cousin in Germany, the Asse II mine. Also planned to be permanent storage until they had to empty it because water found a way in. Several new billions of euros will now be drawn from taxpayers to pay for "decommissioned" plants.
It can be argued that so far, there has been no fully decommissioned, as in "stopped costing any money" nuclear plants, anywhere.
Fossil plants however can be fully decommissioned with 0 remaining costs. Thank god, because that's what we should do of course!
"Asse II: A lesson that is making modern deep repositories safer"
https://www.nagra.ch/en/news/asse-eine-lektion-die-moderne-t...
There were reports in 2008 about brine contaminated with radioactive caesium-137, plutonium and strontium. I would be interested about the amounts of these isotopes in the brine, as we can detect extremely small quantities of radioactive isotopes.
For example for caesium-137 we can measure amounts as low as 5 Bq/kg, the decay of 5 atoms of caesium-137 per second in 1 kg of sample.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK594677/
An adult person usually has activity of 3,000–6,000 becquerels (Bq) of potassium-40. 3,000–6,000 potassium-40 atoms decay and emit a beta particle in adult person every second.
https://stuk.fi/en/radioactivity-in-human-body
We have also discovered cheap containers that can be built using the fourth most common element in the earths crust to store that electricity for when it's needed.
All of this can be built cheaply, massively, quickly, and be deployed anywhere with no conceivable risks of either massive disasters or proliferation of destructive weapons.
The end result is electricity creation distributed everywhere, so cheap that it's realistic to have small communities provide all the electricity they need. Resilient to failure, sabotage or natural disasters.
Why argue for massive amounts of money, manpower and time being spent to create central power plants that take a decade to build, end up controlled by a few masters who can milk the customers at will forever, when we can have so much better?
You say that, but someone still has to pay those costs which are rarely factored in and are significant.
To the north of my state we are faced with the costs of decommissioning and removal of 35 platforms, 6076 km of pipelines and static umbilicals; 483 subsea lifts; 11 floating facilities, 120 risers and 548 wells to be plugged - in addition to kilotons of offshore steel and concrete.
eg: One project is the Northern Endeavour is a 274-metre floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) facility. The Australian Government took responsibility for the decommissioning of the Northern Endeavour after the liquidation of its owner.
These are non trivial undertakings with costs running into the billions.
But that's a separate activity from shutting down electric power plants. Oil rigs will continue to operate even if all gas and oil power plants were shut down tomorrow, since only about 25% of all oil and gas is used for electricity generation.
Costs estimates for Energiewende are in hudreds of bilions of euros.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13705-017-0141-0
https://www.euractiv.com/news/blackout-the-battle-to-rewire-...
The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out
https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article-abstract/20/3/1311/652...
This is what matters.
>How much of this costs (research, developmemt, building large factories in China) was payed by German EEG money and different subsidies?
This doesn't matter whatever the answer is. Cheap solar is what matters, not how humanity made the breakthrough or who paid for the research or build-out.
Personally, I think China deserves credit here. They made a political decision to develop batteries, solar and EV's as part of their long-term planning several years ago and have been wildly successful with all 3.
That Germany (and most other western nations) failed to do this themselves is unfortunate, but having a sour grapes attitude about it is not constructive. Cheap solar and cheap batteries are here now. All countries should make the most of it as quickly as possible. Particularly Germany, and I'm happy to see Munich getting one of the first Sodium BESS storage facilities from CATL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/germany
I'm interested how China could decarbonize, as they still building a lot of coal power plants. They are slowly decreasing coal electricity production, but ramping up syntetic fuel from coal production.
So if Germany wants to follow Chinas path, they should build a lot of solar, wind, coal, some nuclear and hydro power plants, stop building gas power plants. You don't want it, as coal burning still has significant health impacts in Germany.
https://caneurope.org/publications/coal-burning-eu-countries...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373512769_Environme...
The long-term political decission of China is to become independent of energy imports, they are well aware of their energy import vunerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malacca_dilemma
Medium-term thinking in Germany is to import a lot oil, natural gas, PV. Long-term thinking in Germany to import a lot of hydrogen, PV. Nobody talks about Germany becomming energy independent.
Best place for batteries for decarbonization is in EVs, not grid stabilization. Even better for decarbonization are electric trains, electric trams, trolleybus, they run directly from electric grid.
I think it's more interesting to compare actual production in this case. Here is a truly mindblowing statistic:
China's solar panels already produce more than twice the total amount of electricity consumed by Germany per year.
China's solar growth is equivalent to "one Germany" every 2 years.
Batteries follow a similar curve to solar panels, and I disagree strongly that they should not be used for grid stabilization. In fact, nothing stabilizes the grid better than batteries. They should of course also replace fossil fuels in transportation as well, and that's been happening for years now.
I recall many similar arguments for EV's as we now see for grid storage. "It's too expensive", "We can't make enough batteries". Turns out it wasn't, and we could.
I'm sure we can again, and China is basically proving it repeatedly. All that our politicians in the west need to do is get out of the way, and I'm sure it will solve itself without any further involvement from them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
We will see how the battery costs change over years, currently they are still very expensive for quantities necessary for large grid stabilization in Europe.
But they start to make economic sense in regions with lot of sun and high electricity costs.
https://www.electrotech-revolution.com/p/harnessing-the-sun-...
In China politicians give the way and whoever is in the way, is removed. It an error of Europe to make itself depend from China. The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
They are at about 100 euros per KWh now, which is small potatoes for the hyperscalers building AI-centers for 10s of billions of euros. How about we demand that any data center being built in Europe needs to provide at least 8 hours of battery backup for max power draw? Most of the time that battery backup will not be needed, and can then benefit the grid.
Google is building multiple 1GW data centers in europe, 8 GWh of battery backup at each of those would stabilize the grid nicely!
>The political system China is the same as in Russia and we can see the result of such dependancy.
Here I agree 100%. We are fortunate that Xi seems relatively benign for a despot but we should not count on that fortune lasting indefinitely. It's imperative that we in the west start making our own solar panels and batteries as quickly as possible.
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.
If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
Further, the article specifically says:
That nuclear power plant has two reactors that each produce about 8 TWh in total per year. So Google bought 4 TWh per year. Meh, no biggie. The Nordic Pool has plenty of capacity.Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
Sweden sent 10.6TWh in 2025:
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kraftsystemdata/elstatis...
This matches what Finland says about imports - imported 8.1TWh from Sweden but 0.2TWh from Norway in 2024
https://energia.fi/en/statistics/statistics-on-electricity/
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
https://www.entsoe.eu/data/map/
Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.
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.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.