According to the Russia Today report, authorities in Kazakhstan are considering building a nuclear power plant following the rapid growth of cryptocurrency mining, which has seen the Central Asian country suffer from serious electricity shortages. Speaking on Tuesday, Minister of Energy Magzum Myrzagaliev revealed that the government is currently considering two locations for a thermal power station to help close the capacity gap.
Around 70% of Kazakhstan’s plants run on coal.
Currently, around 70% of the country’s plants run on coal. Kazakhstan is the world’s largest uranium miner and has considered building a nuclear plant for more than a decade. The country began to suffer from power shortages earlier this year, immediately after the Chinese government officially outlawed cryptocurrency mining. Crypto miners opted to bring their hardware to Kazakhstan, where electricity is cheap. This caused significant energy issues for Nur-Sultan, which was forced to buy electricity from Russia to fill the gap. Cryptocurrency mining uses electricity and high-powered computers to solve computational math problems.
Pomponio says there is no need to apologize for bitcoin’s energy use.
As reported earlier, bitcoin influencer and podcaster Anthony Pompliano said, “there is a linear relationship between energy consumption and the dollar system; to support more users and more transactions, we need to consume more energy, more data centers, more bank branches, more ATMs. Bitcoin blockchain does not have this same linear relationship with energy consumption.” “Regardless of the number of transactions per block, each block has the same energy consumed. As Bitcoin scales, it will become more efficient because you will be able to add more economic value to each of these blocks,” he added.
