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- Hacker News
- 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.by cloudie78
- 24/7 365 - unless it gets warm, of course. Luckily that's not going to be- oh noby Timon3
- The problem is that the people who want to build nuclear plants are precisely the people I don't trust to build nuclear plants.
Personally, I think we should look at a structure similar to the military for running the plants. No profit motive, enlistment terms, court martial, stigma associated with dishonourable discharge, veterans benefits, etc. The military is the only one I know of with a track record in nuclear energy that I would trust.
by harimau777 - BUT NUKES!
All jokes aside, yes, we should invest massively in nuclear.
- 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.by dev_l1x_be
- Sorry, best I can do are a bunch of activist hippies.
- Unless you're French.by dukeyukey
- 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...
by philipkglass - who cares, poor people ought to dieby heyaco
- 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!by roughly
- 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.by trhway
- 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.
by brandonagr2 - The article says "could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States".by tzs
- I'm so old I can remember when ars technica published actual technical content.by jbellis
- 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.by tptacek
- The consequences of environmentalists killing nuclear.by nba456_
- there is actually more nuclear pollution thanks to their efforts.
when you burn coal you liberate radioactives trapped in it.
by teravor - "They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes."
Per kWh, natural gas plants emit half as much CO2 as coal plants and almost zero sulfur and particulate pollution.
They emit little nitrous oxide and almost zero mercury/heavy-metals.
by ETH_start - This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
- Imagine that you need to explain to a type II alien that your species still burns things.by dev_l1x_be
- 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
- > fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday
At the current rate it will stop in four to ten centuries.
by delichon - I remember a couple of years ago Amazon added a new leadership principle:
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
We started in a garage, but we’re not there anymore. We are big, we impact the world, and we are far from perfect. We must be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of our actions. Our local communities, planet, and future generations need us to be better every day. We must begin each day with a determination to make better, do better, and be better for our customers, our employees, our partners, and the world at large. And we must end every day knowing we can do even more tomorrow. Leaders create more than they consume and always leave things better than how they found them.
these actions are exactly the opposite of what they claim to try to strive towards.
by matt4711 - This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.by tptacek
- 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.
by Lerc - 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.
by belorn - 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.
by Lerc - 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.
by madrox - You're right--it's probably fine. Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?by nielsbot