In the day and a half since the election I've seen an article saying the stock market was going down because Democrats won and an article saying stocks were going up because Democrats won.
I'm opposed to NIMBYism 99% of the time, but these data centers aren't being opposed for no reason. There's stories coming out all over the country of negative impacts on communities and backroom deals with local officials who sign NDAs during negotiations. There's a goldrush on in the US to build these out and when that happens companies run roughshod over communities.
Did you know that global average temperatures are the highest they've been in 125,000 years, and temperatures are rising more than 20x faster than natural rates of global warming. Also the oceans are 30% more acidic, and the world's land ice is melting at a rate of like 660 billion tons per year. There's probably around 7% more water vapor in the atmosphere because warmer air holds more moisture and warmer water evaporates more quickly. Fire seasons are getting longer and more intense. Etc etc
Did you know that US produces 30% less carbon than it did in 2004? Even when adjusted for trade, carbon emissions continue to trend down since the early 2000s (absolute terms, not even per capita)
Ok that's nice, but it's not enough and now you want to add a bunch of natural gas power plants? Is that going to increase or decrease geenhouse gas emissions?
Are you arguing we did good so now we can cheat a little bit and have some ice cream? Like someone falling off the wagon on their diet.
That's great, but it's still not enough. We don't just need to drop by 30% of some number, we need to eliminate all carbon emissions and we need to start sequestering the emissions produced for over a century.
...so building that nuclear reactor would be a good thing since it will emit far less carbon than those natural gas generators (not to mention all the other pollution that nuclear plants do not emit). Hook the DC up to the grid and expand nuclear power to simultaneously accommodate the load and decommission fossil fuel plants. Wins all around.
Slow to build, capital intensive. I would have loved a large build out of nuclear 30 years ago. Even now if you get one online more power to you. I just don't see it ever being a major part of the solution now. It's time came and went.
1) Years. I would say reducing carbon emissions is a higher priority for humanity than building more DCs, so building the nuclear plant should be a prerequisite for building the DC.
2) Dry cask storage. It works and it is extremely safe, you can leave the casks on site or bury them wherever you want. The most significant concern with nuclear waste is not the radiation, it is the possibility of radioactive materials leaking into the environment and that is exactly the problem dry casks solve.
2.1) Reprocessing, you can reduce the volume of nuclear waste by recycling fissile uranium and plutonium from spent fuel into new fuel pellets. The remaining waste is typically embedded in glass, which can be placed in dry cask storage (see above).
Nuclear waste is not the problem people think it is. We know how to deal with it and we have been dealing with it for a long time now. For comparison, solar panels do break down over time and solar panel waste includes several toxic heavy metals that can leak into the local environment. Nobody objects to solar power by pointing to the waste stream (let alone the waste created by all those batteries that you need to make solar power useful for industrial operations like DCs).
Imagine we focused this anti-DC energy on things that actually have material impacts, like meat consumption and air conditioning.
I'd imagine it's something like each American eating half as many cheeseburgers a year would offset all current and projected emissions from DC energy usage.
You go first sacrifice yourself, the finances of your family and your town, in order to save the global environment, to set an example, and we'll start to follow your lead when we'll see that your sacrifice has improved the global environment.
It's always convenient for you when someone else has to make sacrifices to their job security, housing, financial future, and comfort in order to save the environment, when you get to enjoy all the perks of their sacrifice, without needing to make any equivalent sacrifices yourself.
Sorry, your small town getting a short stint of construction work followed by maybe 20 sysadmins, is not worth the pollution that DC will pump.
I commute by rail to the tune of ~6000 miles a year. How long would it take for those gas turbines to make those greenhouse savings worth it?
Some napkin math, lets say a conservative 50MW/day? half what the XAI Colossus DC uses. So they'd be generating about 2MWh running 24/7.
Those gas turbines spit out ~700kg of CO2 per MWh.
My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
The drive is far less direct than the train, so lets call it approximately 10k miles in commuting.
In a day, one of those gas turbines would produce about 16.8 metric tons of CO2. Over 3x what my car would produce. In a day. It takes me all year to save 4ish metric tons of CO2 from my personal carbon emissions.
Yeah, so screw your small town and screw the datacenter. We all share this world. Your small town isn't worth the damage.
I don't live there, but this attitude won't make you any friends.
>We all share this world.
Yes, tell me how me and you and Bezos and Musk are all equally sharing the world. We're all in this together and you care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns. That's why there's nice neighborhoods and not so nice neighbourhoods, nice areas to live in and not so nice areas to live in. Because some people have to deal with the pollution so that you can live in nice neighborhoods without any pollution while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society that generate pollution except not in your back yard.
>My car would emit about 5 tonnes of CO2 over about 15k miles(2L hatchback).
And where was that car manufactured? In your back yard or in some industrial town with more pollution? Do you oppose car factories there too?
> care so much about the pollution of other peoples' small towns.
It's CO2, it's in my town too.
I'm saying, the minor economic boon for this small town is not remotely worth the pollution over the lifetime of that data center ran off turbines.
> while still enjoying all the luxuries of modern society
We could enjoy the modern luxuries a bit more without Altman Et. Al. working to centralize labor into expensive automated Capital that we'd all have to rent back. Hell, even with some pollution caused by relocating manufacturing stateside.
I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
>I firmly believe we need to reintroduce friction into our lives to provide them some meaning and experience beyond ordering food on apps and looking at ads.
That's why in my country the government is incentivizing via fiscal policies for employers to be cancelling all home office perks to employers. To get people back to spending money on commuting.
>Michigan
So what's your opinion on building car factories there? If we remove those factories, air there would be cleaner.
Seems like this can go both ways. You should volunteer to have a bank of loud, polluting turbines from obsolete passenger jets running 24/7 next to your home so Meta can serve GenAI ads with 5% lower latency.
Only if you subscribe to the logic that somehow I support datacenters built in peoples' back yards, which I never claimed, but you made up. If you make stuff up, you can make any argument you want.
The graduate is a strange movie for me. I watched it in my late teens and easily identified with Hoffman's character and saw it through his eyes. Seeing it later as a married middle aged man I kind of despised him and his choices.
I loved Mark Twain when I was a kid. Read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn multiple times. I didn't even consider reading it to my kid when she was younger. Wasn't a good way to handle all the N words.
Rooftop solar and grid scale solar farms are two completely different things. Rooftop solar requires a custom install for every home. Solar farms can leverage economies of scale to drive costs lower and lower.
The idea is to allocate academic reviewer time based on the estimated quality of a submitted paper. But critically, you should maintain uncertainty bounds in your estimate. It's kind of like an UCB (upper confidence bound) bandit approach but inspired by cascaded speech translation (where you really should not throw away information at any point in your pipeline).
Seems like neither of those are probably true.
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