Technology

Amazon has a space program with rockets, Google is acquiring the nuclear facilities, will Microsoft develop a weapons manufacturing facility?

I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
Like people asking "why do we need to go to the moon?!".

Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.

Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.

GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.

This time it is commercial.
I'd rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.

For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.

Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it's Google. So.... Kind of a win?

I still think it's too expensive, and this contract doesn't change my position. Google is committing to buying power from reactors, at certain prices, as those reactors are built.

Great, having a customer lined up makes it a lot easier to secure financing for a project. This is basically where NuScale failed last year in Idaho, being unable to line up customers who could agree to pay a sufficiently high price to be worth the development risk (even with government subsidies from the Department of Energy).

But now Google has committed and said "if you get it working, we'll buy power from you." That isn't itself a strong endorsement that the project itself will be successful, or come in under budget. The risk/uncertainty is still there.

Well, once the AI hype calms down and people realize the current approach won't lead to actual intelligence or "The Singularity", there may be quite some nuclear plants left over. That or they will be used to mine shitcoins.

1. Tax them enough that they don't have the cash to just up and build their own personal-use nuclear powered, nation spanning infrastructure.

2. Use those taxes to build a nation spanning nuclear infrastructure that everyone can use.

Fun Times! Because everyone pays for the waste and when something goes wrong. Privatizing Profits while Socializing Losses. The core motor of capitalism.

We're living in a cyberpunk nightmare

The other side of the coin is that AI currently uses more power than is produced by all renewables across the globe annually. So at least they'll be offsetting that, which would be a net positive.

And it seems like Google's funding will help advance safer and more modern nuclear plant designs, which is another win that could lead to replacing coal plants in many countries with small scale reactors that don't run on uranium.

The meltdown that happened in Chernobyl happened because of mismanagement. Yes, there were design flaws in the system, but lots of rules had to be broken before the design flaws were triggered.