Now imagine how much pollution from the airline industry costs public health ...
Or superfluous private jet usage by executives “super commuting” between states …
Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
81–90 of 168 posts
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear kills less people than almost any other source.
Though probably not the two main modern rivals, wind and solar, which are also cheaper (and lives and money are, at a very abstract level, interchangeable). I've not seen numbers updated with the latest data, the old data had them basically drawn on death per TWh and in the time between that data being gathered solar and wind have gone from a rounding error even when combined to each individual predcited to generate…
Except nobody can survive solely on solar and wind. There must be another, stable energy source for the quiet nights.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#83Earlier 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…
you forgot hydro, which is the current leader for worlds deadliest power plant disaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl and Fukushima put together
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#84This 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,…
Some reports say carbon offsets suffer from widespread fraud [1] - if you emit pollution, pay someone to 'protect the rainforest' and they 'protect' some rainforest that wasn't at risk anyway? Your emissions haven't actually been offset. Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's sti…
[deleted]
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, w…
> 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!
I fully agree that nuclear plants are cheaper in bulk (and when you can guarantee that there will be continuous future demand!).
But your numbers are extremely unrealistic. US GDP has basically quintupled since 1990-- we'll never be able to build nuclear plants for so cheap again.
Vogtle (and also current European and Korean reactors) give a much more realistic baseline for cost estimates than just inflation adjusting the price of old reactors that were built when everyone was poor (=> Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect).
> 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.
Yes, but this is somewhat disingenuous framing; no consumer needs a baseload provider. Providing baseload is a privilege you get to enjoy when your marginal cost is much lower than anyone elses all the time. This is increasingly less the case for e.g. coal power in China, but even for nuclear plants in countries like France (mainly because renewables).
Nuclear power plants thus pair very poorly with renewables, because those eat into nuclear profits whenever they are available. It is highly doubtful to me that you could get nuclear plants price-competitive with renewables even if you committed massive amounts of money immediately, and the situation grows worse for nuclear basically every year.
Companies like Neoen show that with renewables/batteries, you can just install the things at scale while turning a profit, right now.
My conclusion is that any tax-funded investment into nuclear power is questionable/wasteful at best (and this also holds for fusion, but you can write that off as science, at least).
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone needs a pollution tax, hardly anyone wants one
Mancur Olson's work "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups" would suggest that lots of people want one, but only a little (they'd gain billions spread over half a billion people) while a few actors who it would financially affect directly really don't want one and the latter wins.
Depends on the type of pollution, I guess?
To reduce carbon emissions, one would put a tax on gasoline, natural gas, coal, and electricity from plants powered from those sources.
The thing is, that hits every single voter in the pocketbook.
And what's more, a voter on $20,000 drives about the same amount as a voter on $200,000 - so if the gas tax costs both drivers $1000 a year, the former will feel it a lot harder.
So our politicians are scared to do it.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#87This 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,…
Some reports say carbon offsets suffer from widespread fraud [1] - if you emit pollution, pay someone to 'protect the rainforest' and they 'protect' some rainforest that wasn't at risk anyway? Your emissions haven't actually been offset. Likewise if you pay someone to plant a tree that'll reabsorb the carbon you've emitted over the course of 40 years, and they cut it down and burn it after 15 years - the carbon's sti…
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Greed is why people are going to spend CapEx installing solar to reduce OpEx buying coal. Greed pushes people out of the status quo. Greed is why fusion reactors will be reduced in size, cost, and complexity.
That’s quite the mental leap. Innovation and investment isn’t greed — especially not to what OP is referring to.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mancur Olson's work "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups" would suggest that lots of people want one, but only a little (they'd gain billions spread over half a billion people) while a few actors who it would financially affect directly really don't want one and the latter wins.
Depends on the type of pollution, I guess? To reduce carbon emissions, one would put a tax on gasoline, natural gas, coal, and electricity from plants powered from those sources. The thing is, that hits every single voter in the pocketbook. And what's more, a voter on $20,000 drives about the same amount as a voter on $200,000 - so if the gas tax costs both drivers $1000 a year, the former will feel it a lot harder.…
They're not scared of the reality as it is incredibly easy to directly offset that back to consumers in a variety of ways who then get to choose whether to spend it on fossil fuels or do something cheaper.
They're afraid of the relentless propaganda campaign that will wash that reality away, funded by the concentrated forces that will lose business if forced to account for the damage their products cause.
Also, Americans think carbon fees are impossible, yet they're implemented all across the globe, including several US states. It's a political dysfunction that is particularly evident in the US, not a fact of life.
Re: Pollution from Big Tech's data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The other part of this is that expensive silicon is not going to sit idle. It needs baseload power Why not? Just have the excess of computational capacity in many different regions and compute where the sun is shining bright now.
Because amortised capital cost > operational (power) cost It's cheaper to build a 1 GW baseload power plant to sit beside your existing GPUs, than to buy another 1 GW of GPUs to place on the other side of the planet. Also, latency. Also, a large scale roll out of nuclear would be cheaper than solar regardless. Most of the cost of recent nuclear builds is learning cost. We build them so infrequently that people retire…
But is it cheaper? Building 1GW nuclear power unit costs about 4 billion dollars [0]
[0] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Белорусская_АЭС#Стоимость_прое...