New data centers should have to pay on a sliding scale based on energy availability in the local grid. And if they want to build out generation it should be solar and wind only.
New datacenters should be heavily regulated for emissions (including sound) and water consumption and should provide their own power as much as possible (renewables and SMRs come to mind).
Except for AI, fuck those.
Agree entirely about the regulation, that’s lagging everywhere.
SMRs are a distraction. Lots of little, less effective nuclear generation doesn’t fix the problems nuclear faces - the waste (yeah, smrs still make nuclear waste!) and cost / approval / certification timelines. by the time we waste years fiddling with SMRs we could buildout huge swathes of renewables that work today.
Not exactly, they reuse waste which reduces the amount of waste but makes the remaining waste more radioactive.
That isn’t a reason to not use nuclear though since either: the waste can be made worse (which also makes it better because it doesn’t last as long) and can be buried only for 200 years which is easy to manage, or the waste can be used as an ingredient in betavoltaics which gets rid of the waste (and might get us to the point where we need to spin up nuclear reactors just to make more waste to use).
Either way it doesn’t matter, green generation and storage are now to cheap for nuclear to be considered economical anymore.
New data centers should have to pay on a sliding scale based on energy availability in the local grid. And if they want to build out generation it should be solar and wind only.
New datacenters should be heavily regulated for emissions (including sound) and water consumption and should provide their own power as much as possible (renewables and SMRs come to mind).
Except for AI, fuck those.
Agree entirely about the regulation, that’s lagging everywhere.
SMRs are a distraction. Lots of little, less effective nuclear generation doesn’t fix the problems nuclear faces - the waste (yeah, smrs still make nuclear waste!) and cost / approval / certification timelines. by the time we waste years fiddling with SMRs we could buildout huge swathes of renewables that work today.
Newer designs eat waste, don’t they?
Not exactly, they reuse waste which reduces the amount of waste but makes the remaining waste more radioactive.
That isn’t a reason to not use nuclear though since either: the waste can be made worse (which also makes it better because it doesn’t last as long) and can be buried only for 200 years which is easy to manage, or the waste can be used as an ingredient in betavoltaics which gets rid of the waste (and might get us to the point where we need to spin up nuclear reactors just to make more waste to use).
Either way it doesn’t matter, green generation and storage are now to cheap for nuclear to be considered economical anymore.