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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Jörgen Christensen
Nuclear Technology | Volume 40 | Number 3 | October 1978 | Pages 227-233
Technical Paper | Reactor | doi.org/10.13182/NT78-A26720
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Low-grade heat is of rapidly increasing importance in Sweden and, therefore, so is the economic evaluation of such heat. The present heat cost is based on a detailed feasibility study of large-scale heated horticulture combined with electricity production from a Swedish boiling water reactor power plant. To estimate judiciously the cost of heat from a dual-purpose plant—such as a large-scale horticultural installation combined with and using low-grade waste heat from an electric power plant—is an almost classical problem; a measure of arbitrarity is unavoidable. The opportunity cost approach shown has presumably some new features. Incidentally, it results in an estimated cost of heat delivered from the turbine condenser heater in the power plant of 1.4 $/GJ (or 6.1 Swedish Crwn/GJ) in 1980, which is less than one-third of the cost of fuel only with conventional oil-fired heaters.