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Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

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Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#41

Post by kristiandupont »

Hammershaft wrote: post #18
croes wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decides they are over engineered on safety? Didn’t we already learn better safe than sorry?

Even if you account for chernobyl and fukushima the death count from nuclear is orders of magnitudes less than the death count from coal, oil, solar, etc. We overregulated nuclear because the risk of nuclear disasters feels scarier than the real risk of deaths downstream of airborne particulates. There are tradeoffs to every safety regulation on nuclear and those tradeoffs include more climate induced disasters, a si…

>nuclear disasters feels scarier

I am in favor of more nuclear power and I know very little about the field, but this argument never resonated with me.

If the Chernobyl series paints a reasonably realistic image of what could have happened had they not contained the melt down, we are talking "better part of a continent being uninhabitable for thousands of years". When that is the potential risk, comparing death counts from non-catastrophic scenarios isn't what we should be looking at.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#42

Post by Recurecur »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #30
Hammershaft wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not thoughtfully balance regulatory costs on nuclear vs say coal... Nuclear regulatory compliance is orders of magnitude more expensive despite being orders of magnitude safer for human health (on top of the climate).

90% of new electricity generation in the US is solar or wind. Coal generation has generally trended downward since the mid 2000s. We don't need nuclear to replace coal.

We certainly do need nuclear to replace coal.

Coal and nuclear are both reliable sources of energy, unlike solar or wind. I'm sure you're about to go into some battery related hand waving, but that doesn't help in two ways. First, there will be intervals where the lull in production exceeds storage capacity, which means fatalities in many cases. Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).

Also, as far as "coal trending downward", that isn't the case outside the US.

We're going to need a vastly increased energy supply in order to meet the world's needs. Nuclear fission absolutely needs to be part of that mix, as we work to master fusion and other advanced, safe, and environmentally responsible forms of energy production.

Beyond that, high density energy sources are highly desirable off-planet. :-)

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#43

Post by scarab92 »

js8 wrote: post #40
scarab92 wrote: post #3

We should be building far more nuclear. We wildly overengineered on safety regulations making them far more costly and risky to build than they actually need to be. Even our older Gen II nuclear reactors from the 1990's are orders of magnitude safer than current fossil fuel power stations, in terms of both released radiation and lost human lifespan years. Moreover, the higher electricity prices that resulted from usi…

Nuclear is not economically viable compared to renewables (wind & solar), and it's rightfully on its way out. What is really needed is for humanity to say "enough" and stop using fossil fuels. Would it be a problem if training AI models (or running any other analytics) be lot more expensive in winter than summer? I doubt it. There is no reason not to use more renewables for this use case, then.

Nuclear has a far lower LCOE than renewables, when you mass produce them rather than do ad-hoc bespoke builds.

For example, the Gen II+ plants built in the 90's had an (inflation adjusted) price of about $500 million per GWe. Whereas, the cost of the recent Vogtl build was $15 billion per GWe!

Renewables proponents point to the cost of Vogtl (or similar) when they say that Nuclear has a higher cost than renewables, which is dishonest. The incremental cost of new reactors is far lower when you build many of them. The recent projects are mostly learning curve costs because of how long it's been.

The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power, and for solar that means adding batteries, and also downrating the nameplate capacity to it's wintertime capacity. These factors increase the real world cost of renewable power significantly.

Don't get me wrong, I think we should be investing in renewable as well, but it's still a substantially more expensive way to generate power than a serious roll out of nuclear would be.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#44

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

markhahn wrote: post #12

Ugh, this is horrible writing. For instance, "Data centres cause pollution through high eletricity use" - high relative to what, residential housing? Aluminum smelting? It's fine to be skeptical of the AI bubble, but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development. We also don't need any fizzy-drinks - shall we calculate the deaths due to pollution caused by that, let alone the primary effect on health…

> reads veiled de-development.

> If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.

That reads like veiled de-development.

How do you reconcile saying both those things?

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#45

Post by otikik »

markhahn wrote: post #12

Ugh, this is horrible writing. For instance, "Data centres cause pollution through high eletricity use" - high relative to what, residential housing? Aluminum smelting? It's fine to be skeptical of the AI bubble, but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development. We also don't need any fizzy-drinks - shall we calculate the deaths due to pollution caused by that, let alone the primary effect on health…

It’s deflection from the real polluters

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#46

Post by kaonwarb »

This reads as less than useful research to me. E.g.:

"The analysis does not account for the purchase of market-based instruments that are meant to represent investments in new renewable energy in the US and that tech companies buy to offset the pollution from their electricity consumption. ... 'Unlike carbon emissions, the health impacts caused by a data centre in one region cannot be offset by cleaner air elsewhere,' said Shaolei Ren, associate professor at UC Riverside."

Why not? Does clean air elsewhere not matter for the individuals elsewhere? Where is that "elsewhere?"

My admittedly ungenerous interpretation: factoring this context in would be really hard and would decrease the headline factor of the findings, so... publish without.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#47

Post by nindalf »

ipython wrote: post #27

I’m confused by the article mentioning West Virginia as a prime location for data centers along side Ohio - I am not aware of a large concentration of data centers in WV? (Unlike VA, of course) https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/01/16/west-virginia-isnt-...

Maybe the author thought West Virginia was the western part of Virginia? I know it sounds preposterous, but I think it’s commensurate with the quality of the headline and article.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#48

Post by hgomersall »

dmoy wrote: post #38
margalabargala wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell us more about the death count from solar. Is it all people falling off roofs?

Pretty much yea. So not exactly a fair comparison because e.g. grid level solar doesn't necessarily involve roof climbing. But given current installation base, it's like 3x more deaths per unit energy than wind.

I don't know how reliable it is, but the first link I clicked on contradicts your assertion: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#49

Post by solatic »

ipython wrote: post #27

I’m confused by the article mentioning West Virginia as a prime location for data centers along side Ohio - I am not aware of a large concentration of data centers in WV? (Unlike VA, of course) https://westvirginiawatch.com/2025/01/16/west-virginia-isnt-...

In broad strokes, take AWS for example with us-east-1 being in Virginia and us-east-2 being in Ohio, respectively, and wondering how to fuel future East Coast expansion, West Virginia would offer similar latencies in a deep-red state (meaning, deals will happen when palms get greased) with a powerful energy lobby (that would appreciate additional energy demand). Being a poor state, the price of labor will be cheap as well, both to build the data centers and to maintain them afterwards.

Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn

#50

Post by jajko »

willvarfar wrote: post #32
boxedemp wrote: post #26

Sounds to me like the real criticism is dirty electricity generation.

A lot of modern electricity generation is to power data centres and bitcoin mining. Quick googling found a stat that 1.6% of the whole world's electricity supply going on computing and also https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-big-tech-uses-more-... etc. And we need more! On day 2 of his presidency Trump pledged to fast-track new power generation to drive data centres in the US. https://www.axios.com/2025/01/23/t…

Fuck future generations, fuck our kids... often touted by folks without any or at least somehow normally functioning family.

I think we are back in 80s with current orange man defining direction like fashion, 'greed is good' at any cost mantra is certainly back

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