I have long advocated that EU should be in the forefront and start sunsetting fossil fueled power generation, by setting a date when no new construction is allowed and then letting the existing fleet naturally die. It would send a strong signal to the rest of the world that we can't keep constructing new thermal power stations that continue to burn fuel whenever we have need to increase capacity and grid stability.
Sadly there aren't much support to do this. The largest coalition see thermal power stations as critical to manage grid stability and voted to have natural gas defined as "green", since they view it as necessary to enable renewable energy to be built. The other major coalition do want to decrease the need for thermal power plants by increasing base load through nuclear power, but they are not openly against thermal power plants as a way to reduce costs. EU lacks any movement that are willing to pay the cost of not burning fuel in order to generate electricity. Same for basically every other place on earth right now, despite EU and most countries being in agreement that climate change is real and fossil fuels should be stopped yesterday.
In broad strokes I tend to agree. I think there is a fairly good path to moving most things to electricity and in turn moving most electricity generation to renewables.
The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job.
By and large, renewables are marching towards a state where they will provide enough of the generation that what remains would be insignificant.
I would be interested to know where the gas is coming from for this particular data centre. There are a few cases that generation by gas is preferable to what is happening right now. One good example is if the gas is from sources that would otherwise be flared off. I have heard in the past that businesses have been reluctant to harness energy from gas rather than flaring it off because any user of the energy gets tagged with the CO2 emissions. If it just gets burnt off it makes no difference to the amount of total emissions, but it avoids the CO2 being attributed to their industry.
While a good point, it also creates lock-in effects. If you look at the top EV adopters, they barely use gas power. This likely isn't a coincidence.
Now you will have the AI lobby pushing against EVs (so that oil drilling can create gas as a byproduct), as if it wasn't already an uphill battle in the US...
It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.
That would suggest if no-one purchased it, it would just be flared off. Does the negative price come about because of pathological financial conditions, or is it the case that the producers are financially penalised for flaring?
There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
> I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants
It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far less than my father did throughout his life.
Life isn't some strict binary, all or nothing affair.
You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"
This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.
That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.
I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.
It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?
That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.
Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.
I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.
People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.
People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)
The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:
(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well
(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)
(3) Bogus concerns about water.
We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.
Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR here a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good.
Yes at the current rate but if I drew a line at the 2006 rate of solar growth would it have anything to do with the rate now? How about 2016? I’m down about our prospects for limiting the damage but let’s not be irrationally doomer about it either.
Physical limitations dictate it'll stop (being worth it economically to keep extracting) by like 2080 or 2090, but we'll be in way worse shape by then.
That said there has never been argument about whether we are on that trajectory, we want to be on that trajectory
I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption
The harder thing would be to explain why your species continues to get energy by burning things despite having multiple alternatives and that many people are deeply ideologically opposed to moving away from burning things.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is a civilizational growing pain these aliens are familiar with. Maybe they went through the same period themselves.
Imagine the type II alien nods with understanding in a human way that your species just isn't ready and it might not ever be as it erases your memory of the encounter and returns to the stars, stopping only to scan your anal sphincter because all the type II civilizations remain puzzled by it.
Once the Ancient Greeks had copper and iron they could potentially do wind and hydro electricity and metal-air batteries - and the civilization would probably go just fine without fossil fuels.
I think they'd give you some leeway if you fired up gas plants to not freeze in the winter, I want to see their faces when you tell them you turned them on because you wanted to generate more digital slop during a climate crisis
It's possibly worth noting that the source for this is an application for a
permit
>GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States
Immediately following that is the text
"It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow"
It's also worth noting that the headline turns "largest single source" of CO2 to "top source" of climate pollution. They say pollution in the text, but context would suggest they are talking about CO2. To say otherwise would be a much stronger claim which I don't think you can assume unless they clearly assert it.
I'm not sure if it is possible to quantify scale of climate impact between different types of pollution, but it seems like a stretch to unilaterally declare that the single top producer of CO2 is the top environmental impact. It may be, but they are making claims beyond what were made in their sources.
I was under the impression that there were a few chemicals that had an outsize effect on climate pollution.
When crypto rage was at its peak and people had done math to figure out precisely the energy impact it had, people were up in arms about how much it used.
I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way.
People raged at me for saying this and assumed I was a crypto shill, in spite of me loathing crypto and never owning any.
All this to say I appreciate your comment and the desire for precise criticism. I hate aggrandizement whether I agree with the position or not.
Because without enough information to truly place it in context, you may be focusing on something that may not have a notable impact on the overall problem.
For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.
How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?
> Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?
It was sarcasm. It's also not particularly insightful. "AI data centers" get immense scrutiny right now. Astoria has a similar generation capacity in a much denser (and human populated!) area.
Because combining "Amazon", "top source" "climate", and "pollution" should make this headline a top source of the clicks that Ars needs to pay its own bills?
Nuclear reactors across the US and Europe have been a complete project management omnishambles and consequently have been massively costly and massively late.
SMRs are vapourware and are similarly economically uncompetitive.
Just build solar, wind, and batteries, and we'll worry about solving for the last 15% of electricity demand when that is actually a live problem (for which there are solutions that don't involve nuclear power and don't rely on magic beans being invented).
1. Any equipment or substance that is both nuclear and potentially dangerous has some sort of magical mutant super-power to stimulate superhumanly idiotic behavior in a non-trivial fraction of the people handling/operating/managing the equipment or substance. That behavior is almost always coupled with pathological denials - both from the mutant super-idiots and their supposedly non-mutant peers.
2. General population humans are quite aware of problem #1, hence extremely distrustful when any human experts or organizations try to reassure them as to the safety of anything nuclear.
3. That "reprocessing" ain't nothing resembling "put on a lead apron and pour it through a coffee filter". Instead, it's a quagmire of chemicals and processes that'd still be horrific if nothing nuclear was involved, plus weapon proliferation overtones, plus all the problems noted in 1. and 2. above.
1. Plant construction is very expensive, and not in small part because people who don't actually understand the technology take every opportunity to tie up construction in the courts and regulatory agencies.
2. General population of humans are quite aware of #1, so even though they know nuclear wins on a technology basis, they know it will be unduly expensive, preferring to knuckle under to the mob instead of doing the right thing.
3. People not familiar with the technology don't realize that while we don't generally do reprocessing in the west, it's primarily due to cost, and that Japan will start reprocessing 800 tonnes of fuel per year starting next year.
The technology is the safest way we have to generate power, and could be the lowest cost if the regulatory environment was adjusted properly. It's just a shame there are so many people who are irrationally opposed.
I've no doubt that fusion will be solved, technically.
I am hugely skeptical that it will be solved economically given that it suffers from many of the problems currently pricing coal and nuclear out of the market.
But just think, when the climate collapses and we can’t go outside anymore for large portions of the year, we’re gonna be Really happy we’ve got all this AI slop to keep us entertained!
I wish there was a source of energy that has 100-1000x energy density compare to other sources and it is controllable so capacity factory is close to 100. Ohh wait.
It seems strange for this article to word this as a new or unusual source of pollution, natural gas is the primary source of energy in the US, adding 10% to existing thermal fleet in ERCOT https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards is not a huge deal and its disingenuous to say this one plant will become a "top source of US pollution".
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
Sure, climate change is bad and has the potential to disrupt and end the lives of many in the future. But other forms of air pollution like pm2.5 particulates in the air are already causing an estimated 5 million premature deaths per year as well as a slew of other health problems including lowering of IQ.
This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
I have long advocated that EU should be in the forefront and start sunsetting fossil fueled power generation, by setting a date when no new construction is allowed and then letting the existing fleet naturally die. It would send a strong signal to the rest of the world that we can't keep constructing new thermal power stations that continue to burn fuel whenever we have need to increase capacity and grid stability.
Sadly there aren't much support to do this. The largest coalition see thermal power stations as critical to manage grid stability and voted to have natural gas defined as "green", since they view it as necessary to enable renewable energy to be built. The other major coalition do want to decrease the need for thermal power plants by increasing base load through nuclear power, but they are not openly against thermal power plants as a way to reduce costs. EU lacks any movement that are willing to pay the cost of not burning fuel in order to generate electricity. Same for basically every other place on earth right now, despite EU and most countries being in agreement that climate change is real and fossil fuels should be stopped yesterday.
thats an excellent way to make your populace poorerand therefore more willing to degrade the en>ironment for a better quality life
Why? Because you said so?
So China and India can use all the fossil fuels they want, and other counties too not just them.
But the West has to kowtow to Net Zero / ”Renewables” nonsense?
We’re not buying it anymore.
Everything has tradeoffs.
Destroying the economy and letting low income and poor people freeze in the dark or melt in the sun is passé.
But doesn’t China have the largest rollout of solar in the world?
In broad strokes I tend to agree. I think there is a fairly good path to moving most things to electricity and in turn moving most electricity generation to renewables.
The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job.
By and large, renewables are marching towards a state where they will provide enough of the generation that what remains would be insignificant.
I would be interested to know where the gas is coming from for this particular data centre. There are a few cases that generation by gas is preferable to what is happening right now. One good example is if the gas is from sources that would otherwise be flared off. I have heard in the past that businesses have been reluctant to harness energy from gas rather than flaring it off because any user of the energy gets tagged with the CO2 emissions. If it just gets burnt off it makes no difference to the amount of total emissions, but it avoids the CO2 being attributed to their industry.
While a good point, it also creates lock-in effects. If you look at the top EV adopters, they barely use gas power. This likely isn't a coincidence.
Now you will have the AI lobby pushing against EVs (so that oil drilling can create gas as a byproduct), as if it wasn't already an uphill battle in the US...
I suppose EVs are putting pressure on their precious grid.
It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.
That would suggest if no-one purchased it, it would just be flared off. Does the negative price come about because of pathological financial conditions, or is it the case that the producers are financially penalised for flaring?
There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
> I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants
It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far less than my father did throughout his life.
Life isn't some strict binary, all or nothing affair.
This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.
Unfortunately opinions don't change the reality of physical processes.
Fortunately.
In the same way “smoking causes cancer” was a minority opinion in the 50s and 60s.
You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"
This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.
That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.
A surprisingly small number though. 15%.
> This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.
Texas is the largest producer of renewable energy in the country.
Yes, because they have open permitting and encourage development. But they are also the largest producers of fossil fuels in the country.
They're actually not the highest on a per capita basis. 3 states produce more than double Texas's, by that metric.
I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.
Yes, but I wouldn't fault Texas for producing electricity to sell to other states.
And in any case, that lowers Texan per capita consumption even more given that they're not actually consuming all of it.
Indirect side effect of the fact that you can build things in Texas.
It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.
Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-da...
The "9 out if 10 Americans vote to light other Americans on fire" effect.
I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.
People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.
People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)
The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:
(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well
(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)
(3) Bogus concerns about water.
We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.
Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR here a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good.
> fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday
No worries, at the current rate it will stop in four to ten centuries.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPXRjoqbcAATWUu?format=jpg
Yes at the current rate but if I drew a line at the 2006 rate of solar growth would it have anything to do with the rate now? How about 2016? I’m down about our prospects for limiting the damage but let’s not be irrationally doomer about it either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Physical limitations dictate it'll stop (being worth it economically to keep extracting) by like 2080 or 2090, but we'll be in way worse shape by then.
That said there has never been argument about whether we are on that trajectory, we want to be on that trajectory
I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption
Imagine that you need to explain to a type II alien that your species still burns things.
The harder thing would be to explain why your species continues to get energy by burning things despite having multiple alternatives and that many people are deeply ideologically opposed to moving away from burning things.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is a civilizational growing pain these aliens are familiar with. Maybe they went through the same period themselves.
Imagine the type II alien nods with understanding in a human way that your species just isn't ready and it might not ever be as it erases your memory of the encounter and returns to the stars, stopping only to scan your anal sphincter because all the type II civilizations remain puzzled by it.
Or maybe you'd prefer this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI
Imagine they got here without burning anything, ever, in the history of their species.
Once the Ancient Greeks had copper and iron they could potentially do wind and hydro electricity and metal-air batteries - and the civilization would probably go just fine without fossil fuels.
I think they'd give you some leeway if you fired up gas plants to not freeze in the winter, I want to see their faces when you tell them you turned them on because you wanted to generate more digital slop during a climate crisis
Who were you able to entertain with that "digital slop", and how many father's did you disappoint with it?
It's possibly worth noting that the source for this is an application for a permit
>GW Ranch received a permit from the state of Texas allowing the gas power plant to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. If the project emitted that much CO2, it would be the largest single source of pollution in the United States
Immediately following that is the text
"It’s worth noting that companies rarely emit as much as their permits allow"
It's also worth noting that the headline turns "largest single source" of CO2 to "top source" of climate pollution. They say pollution in the text, but context would suggest they are talking about CO2. To say otherwise would be a much stronger claim which I don't think you can assume unless they clearly assert it.
I'm not sure if it is possible to quantify scale of climate impact between different types of pollution, but it seems like a stretch to unilaterally declare that the single top producer of CO2 is the top environmental impact. It may be, but they are making claims beyond what were made in their sources.
I was under the impression that there were a few chemicals that had an outsize effect on climate pollution.
When crypto rage was at its peak and people had done math to figure out precisely the energy impact it had, people were up in arms about how much it used.
I tried to point out that we're only talking about this because the public ledger makes it easy to measure such things, and we have nothing to really compare it to and we judge no other industry this way.
People raged at me for saying this and assumed I was a crypto shill, in spite of me loathing crypto and never owning any.
All this to say I appreciate your comment and the desire for precise criticism. I hate aggrandizement whether I agree with the position or not.
You're right--it's probably fine. Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Because without enough information to truly place it in context, you may be focusing on something that may not have a notable impact on the overall problem.
For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.
How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?
Edit: https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers
Texas is just ripping through these things since it’s so permissive. That’s troubling for the other states who will all inevitably bear some burden.
> Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?
It was sarcasm. It's also not particularly insightful. "AI data centers" get immense scrutiny right now. Astoria has a similar generation capacity in a much denser (and human populated!) area.
Because this one lets consumers pretend they aren’t the source of pollution lol
Because combining "Amazon", "top source" "climate", and "pollution" should make this headline a top source of the clicks that Ars needs to pay its own bills?
If only we had the technology and ability to produce enormous quantities of energy non-stop 24/7 365, no matter day or night wind or no wind.
BUT NUKES!
All jokes aside, yes, we should invest massively in nuclear.
Nuclear reactors across the US and Europe have been a complete project management omnishambles and consequently have been massively costly and massively late.
SMRs are vapourware and are similarly economically uncompetitive.
Just build solar, wind, and batteries, and we'll worry about solving for the last 15% of electricity demand when that is actually a live problem (for which there are solutions that don't involve nuclear power and don't rely on magic beans being invented).
No we shouldn't. Nuclear waste is not and will never be solved. Nuclear meltdowns are real. Also, nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar.
Deaths per terawatt-hour of nuclear is still lower than any fossil fuel per https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It takes up a tiny amount of space, and can be reprocessed if necessary.
Nuclear's top 3 problems:
1. Any equipment or substance that is both nuclear and potentially dangerous has some sort of magical mutant super-power to stimulate superhumanly idiotic behavior in a non-trivial fraction of the people handling/operating/managing the equipment or substance. That behavior is almost always coupled with pathological denials - both from the mutant super-idiots and their supposedly non-mutant peers.
2. General population humans are quite aware of problem #1, hence extremely distrustful when any human experts or organizations try to reassure them as to the safety of anything nuclear.
3. That "reprocessing" ain't nothing resembling "put on a lead apron and pour it through a coffee filter". Instead, it's a quagmire of chemicals and processes that'd still be horrific if nothing nuclear was involved, plus weapon proliferation overtones, plus all the problems noted in 1. and 2. above.
Nuclear's top 3 problems:
1. Plant construction is very expensive, and not in small part because people who don't actually understand the technology take every opportunity to tie up construction in the courts and regulatory agencies.
2. General population of humans are quite aware of #1, so even though they know nuclear wins on a technology basis, they know it will be unduly expensive, preferring to knuckle under to the mob instead of doing the right thing.
3. People not familiar with the technology don't realize that while we don't generally do reprocessing in the west, it's primarily due to cost, and that Japan will start reprocessing 800 tonnes of fuel per year starting next year.
The technology is the safest way we have to generate power, and could be the lowest cost if the regulatory environment was adjusted properly. It's just a shame there are so many people who are irrationally opposed.
Nuclear waste is a nice problem to have, and fairly simple compared to most pollution sources associated with our lifestyle.
No need to worry though, on the current trajectory I doubt our civilization will have the opportunity to deal with it.
Nuclear material literally came out of the ground...m you can put it back..we have literally infinite amount of rock under us
We absolutely will solve it. That's called fusion.
I've no doubt that fusion will be solved, technically.
I am hugely skeptical that it will be solved economically given that it suffers from many of the problems currently pricing coal and nuclear out of the market.
You don't even need that. Fast breeder reactors are enough.
But just think, when the climate collapses and we can’t go outside anymore for large portions of the year, we’re gonna be Really happy we’ve got all this AI slop to keep us entertained!
we'll have cyber-organic bodies by that time which will do fine in the acid rain in 50 C heat with 100 mph light breeze.
All to power the generation of text nobody wants to read, images nobody wants to see and video nobody wants to watch.
enshittification accelerators
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
I wish there was a source of energy that has 100-1000x energy density compare to other sources and it is controllable so capacity factory is close to 100. Ohh wait.
Amazon is also investing in nuclear power for data centers:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/amazon-updates-s...
However, building new nuclear reactors is a slow process. These reactors aren't expected to be built before the 2030s.
China is currently the fastest at bringing new reactors online. Even there it takes 6-7 years from construction start to commercial power generation, e.g. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-reactors...
Yeah they are betting on everything at this stage.
Unless you're French.
Sorry, best I can do are a bunch of activist hippies.
Don't worry, the solar dude is about enter the chat.
It seems strange for this article to word this as a new or unusual source of pollution, natural gas is the primary source of energy in the US, adding 10% to existing thermal fleet in ERCOT https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards is not a huge deal and its disingenuous to say this one plant will become a "top source of US pollution".
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
I'm so old I can remember when ars technica published actual technical content.
The article says "could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States".
Why do we put so much focus on CO2 emissions?
Sure, climate change is bad and has the potential to disrupt and end the lives of many in the future. But other forms of air pollution like pm2.5 particulates in the air are already causing an estimated 5 million premature deaths per year as well as a slew of other health problems including lowering of IQ.
> Why do we put so much focus on CO2 emissions?
Any amount of focus would be "so much".
I gather you believe other people pay too much attention to CO2.
That the planet is warming suggests to me they do not pay enough.
Why not both?