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.
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 still in the atmosphere.
So putting your data centre right next to a hydroelectric or nuclear power plant is the gold standard.
Where do you get the 1.6% figure from? It's not mentioned anywhere in the attached link. Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year so 1.6 seems exceedingly low
I'm a fan of the general concept of credit-based market systems and for carbon or carbon equivalents it is basically fungible by location.
That's not true for other pollutants though, which is one of the reasons that e.g EVs shifting emissions to powerplants is good because cars are used in dense urban environments where the pollution affects more people.
I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the additionality of their clean energy purchases and offsets. They have the data to refute this if they can do so. I'd guess they can't due to their renewables and other offers being further away from population than these data centres.
Additionality means "does this purchase of clean/green energy increase the total amount on the grid or does it just take it from other users who are now associated with the emissions of the non-clean energy".
Or more broadly "the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not have occurred in the absence of the intervention."
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent.
If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has global impact]:
1) If place A has 10 ppm and place B has 10 ppm, then nobody is sick
2) If place A has 15 ppm and place B has 5 ppm, then people in place A are sick
Public policy generally doesn't work well with averages and similar analyses, because outcomes are usually discrete for each individual; it's not a stew where you can mix outcomes together and get something good.
As another example, if the economy results in one person making $1 billion and 999,999 making nothing, the average is $1 million per person - but what does that mean? 999,999 people are still in dire poverty. (It does have some significance, for things society does collectively - fund police and fire, and even help for poor people.)
The marginal health impact of 1 ppm (of what?) may not be the same across all concentrations, not least because of adaptive behaviors: avoiding outside exercise, using air filters.
But in general I agree that you should be able to look at tradeoffs of a set of actions and allow of the possibility that some negatives are offset by positives.
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
Not exactly. The other place might have people die from poverty, illnesses and godknowswhat much earlier so the effect of pollution shifting doesn't manifest itself or even gets masked off by rising life expectancies in general - that's the dirty secret behind the move of dirty and toxic productions to Asia.
Without agreeing with the paper’s general point, imagine a coal plant that emits particles which cause asthma within a 25 mile radius of the plant that also buys legit offsets for all the carbon they emit. They aren’t buying offsets for the local harms.
Something else has to be added, or you could just have coal plants perpetually moving around and buying credits by shutting down the previous one.
Now if they offset by buying scrubbers that cleaned similar particulates elsewhere in the world you'd have a "average stayed the same" but the problem moved.
If a mitigating action had decreased CO in my neighbor's house by at least as much as it increased in mine, then potentially yes, a neutral researcher should consider that as an offset at the population health level.
Not sure why we need an analogy, though. How about sticking to standard air pollution, which has direct impact of its own? CO poisoning seems a bit extreme as a comparison.
No, it's not that extreme. If the offset comes from a zone where air quality is already "good enough", no extra lives are saved, so it's still net negative.
Oh c'mon are we still buying into the carbon offset greenwashing bullshit. There research that it's mostly a big fraud is piling up at this point. Can we stop gurgling on corporate misinformation
I'm skeptical of carbon offsets for direct polluters. But the idea that Big Tech data centers "costs US public health $5.4bn" comes mostly from the precise inverse of carbon offsets, where a prorated share of the local electric company's emissions is imputed to them. Presumably big tech would be just as happy if the local grid were 100% renewable, and the article quotes Google at least saying they actively try to use clean energy when it's available.
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 of drink-victims? If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.
> but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.
Hard to tell if they're singling out AI because it's the current hot thing that everyone's talking about (and afraid of being replaced by), or if they're singling out "big tech" because they're rich and cool to hate on.
And with good reason - some particularly enterprising miners revived a coal power plant of all things. Other meme coins wasted insane amounts of HDDs and SSDs. I'm glad it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum that are left over these days.
The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.
>The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
The problem is that's basically entirely based on vibes. For crypto opponents it's justified by crypto not doing anything that the traditional finance system can't do, and for AI opponents it's justified by AI only being able to rehash soulless copypasta while stealing jobs. As a result the whole argument just becomes a roundabout way of arguing "[technology] sucks".
Actually, the real danger in society is AI and Big Tech is the only one you can trust. Everyone else should stop research in AI because of carbon emissions!
De-development is saying we have to e.g. stop driving cars. Regulations that make dirty power more expensive are the likes of a carbon tax, which you can avoid while still having a car by getting an electric car and charging it from solar panels.
The cars is a perfect example. Many people who want there to be much fewer car miles in toto will argue they're polluting, but will also not want anything that makes them not polluting - because they're not actually arguing for pollution reduction, they're arguing against the car.
Same with this, I feel. It's not anti-pollution, it's anti-AI.
You cant make a car not pollute. Even EV pollutes the local neighborhood. Ever notice how tires and the stains on the curbs and the black soot you wipe off the window sills are all the same color? How tires get bald? You are probably breathing tire right now. It is probably getting on your plate of food and you are eating tire.
As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.
I worry about a public opinion chaining on switching to opt-out in the US so it has to evaluated carefully.
I'm guessing the US wait time is long because there are a lot of people with failing kidneys due to poorly managed diabetes and high blood pressure. But there are a whole host of auto immune and genetic diseases also.
Now we have better drugs for treating diabetes like Ozempic and SGLT so hopefully that improves the situation for kidney failures caused by diabetes.
I myself had an auto immune disease IgA nephropathy 10 years back but at that time there were hardly any drugs targeting it. I've since was on dialysis and recently got a kidney transplant. But the positive at the same time a half dozen drugs have been approved or under trial to slow down the progression of IgA nephropathy.
From the article you linked
> We’re all for saving lives—we aren’t saying that we should stop self-driving cars so we can preserve a source of organ donation. But we also need to start thinking now about how to address this coming problem.
It doesn’t matter how much they try to walk it back and not sound so criminally insane. Refer again to my second paragraph: The issue is, would the author ever think of writing this article for any other instance of saving lives? If not, then it’s a case of selective focus, the same problem in this submission.
I mean, why not just say the organ shortage is bad, without pointing the finger at the latest hip, hot button issue, out of all the possible life-savers?
You could also use some other way of looking at the problem instead of "lives". For example, from some morbidly accounted points of view, reducing deaths of able-bodied young people by incidentally increasing deaths of older, organ-needing people results in more "able-bodied life years" saved or something.
Of course, down this path too far and you start looking at prisoners and death sentences and organ harvesting, which I think most people would agree ain't right.
I dont think they are walking anything back. They seem a lot more positive about self driving cars then a lot of people. The controversial part of the article for most would be the suggestion to an allow organ market
The article is part of a series about challenges with future technologies. They note that 1/5 of donations come from traffic accidents and there is already a major shortage. If self driving cars reduce most accidents that will mean nearly 1/5 of donations will need to be replaced
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.
Its not so much people with little financial interest, but rather interest with more financial power. After all having a life cut short, or being uprooted by climate events or killed is of a huge cost - individually and socially.
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.
Everyone pays it, but the distribution of costs depends on nature and not on rational policy. It also depends on having the wealth to avoid certain costs, e.g., by leaving dangerous areas.
> Quick googling found a stat that 1.6% of the whole world's electricity supply going on computing
That would imply that it isn't the major issue. Electricity generation as a whole is less than half of US energy consumption, US electricity generation is 35% nuclear or renewable, and computing is using 1.6% of electricity. This is a rounding error compared to e.g. transportation at 37% of all energy consumption, or HVAC at another double-digit percentage.
> And we need more!
New generation capacity in the US is disproportionately renewables because renewables will remain cheaper until they're closer to half of all generation and then have to really deal with the storage issues. Willingness to approve fossil fuel plants doesn't mean anybody really wants them. The large tech companies are buying nuclear:
We've been trying to build more clean nuclear plants for decades, but its been ironically the self-proclaimed environmentalists who have been blocking it every step of the way. We could have had 0 carbon electricity production nation wide since the 1980's.
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)
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.
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.
"Air pollution derived from the huge amounts of energy needed to run data centres has been linked to treating cancers, asthma and other related issues, according to research from UC Riverside and Caltech."
"The academics estimated that the cost of treating illnesses connected to this pollution was valued at $1.5bn in 2023, up 20 per cent from a year earlier. They found that the overall cost was $5.4bn since 2019."
Note that pollution is not defined in the article.
Increased levels of NO2, SO2 and PM2.5 are going to have a direct impact on the health of people living close to these facilities. The unlicensed gas turbines in Memphis are probably the worst offender.
Just wait until you see how much C02 is being emitted sucking down energy from green sources that could have heated homes or supplied other essential services.
"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".
Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.
There’s nothing specific to data centers here, just electricity use. The electricity use generates a shit load of GDP and soft power for the U.S., way more than $5.4B over 5 years.
So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries.
> So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries.
It feels like you're arguing against a strawman.
I can only speak for myself, but I would like CO2 emissions to be taxed appropriately, so that fossil fuel producers and consumers actually pay a somewhat proper price for the damage that they cause (negative externalities).
Sure, that might slow growth, but I see so evidence that this difference in growth has much of a negative effect on US citizens:
How much GDP growth do you think we actually need as a nation to stay satisfied? Double our GDP every 20 years? More? Less?
Because I know that I would trade a good fraction of my "growth boosted" past and present wage in exchange for climate change already being solved (and be happier as a result).
PS: I would also like to point out that any significant constant rate of growth is inherently unsustainable by definition; as a species, we need to arrange ourself with the fact that we'll be unable to continue growing our energy consumption exponentially-- the sooner, the better.
According to the paper, the public health cost from data centers is 1/3 of the road transportation emissions of California. The tool they used (https://www.epa.gov/cobra) to calculate the emissions impact doesn’t have aviation emissions.
Following from your model California is responsible for roughly 9.6% of the total road transportation emissions in the U.S > So 1/3rd of that is 3.2% . So road transportation's health cost is roughly 30x higher than datacenters'. Aviation, while extremely polluting (~9%), is also dwarfed by road transport due to the latter's shear volume
Another thing to observe: The paper's claims are based on a McKinsey projection to 2030 that assumes 'a strong decrease of road transport emissions' and a 'surging demand for AI data centers' that 'outweighs power plants emission efficiency improvement'.
Contrast this to today where energy estimates are 2% for datacenters vs. 80% for road transport. Guess what is causing more outweighing of power plant emission efficiency improvement as that fleet of cars, trucks and lorries is electrifying (the reason for McKinsey's reduction projection)?
Now I'm not saying we should let data-centers get a free pass. Pollution is a serious problem. But in terms of priorities, curbing datacenters might not be the number one concern.
For all the flak that CEOs and taylor swift gets, their contribution to global warming is a drop in a bucket (percentage of aviation emissions that can be attributed to private jets), of a bucket that's being dumped in the ocean (percentage of global warming that can be attributed to aviation). They produce outsized emissions on a personal basis, but there's also so few jets relative to commercial airlines that banning them isn't going to make a dent.
"every bit" also costs political capital. Making any sort of change is going to cause a stir, and if you're going to cause a political shitshow, you might as well get good returns for it. Causing a political shitshow, but only making a modest impact is the worst outcome. Just look at the pasty tax in the UK[1]. The government proposed a change to the VAT rules that would have made a minimal fiscal impact, but generated so much flak that they were forced to back down.
>start with the things with outsized effects with simple alternatives.
The examples you gave all cause disproportionate harm to a small group, which will raise a stink to their local representative, especially if they're being singled out.
An across the board carbon tax avoids both these problems.
Since every activity has some externalities and also unexpected positive effects, isn’t focusing on just the negative effects of this one thing very lopsided?
That’s fine, you can have one article on negative implications and another one on opportunities. It’s two different subjects, with different data and different approaches, and possibly different specialised authors. You don’t have to both-sides everything all the time.
That's true, but the articles on negative implications are being selectively written. For instance, there's a deluge of articles about pollution from AI datacenters (and before that, crypto mining), but hardly a peep about pollution from the US healthcare system, or education, even though those are arguably far higher. As a result, such articles comes across as selectively written hit-pieces rather than objective reporting.
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 using non-nuclear power lead to ICE vehicles remaining more prevalent than they should be, and non-heat-pump heating remaining more prevalent than it should be, leading to millions more years of human lifespan lost.
From a health perspective, blocking nuclear with overregulation was one of societies biggest health policy failures.
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant.
We know from natural disasters that insurance is usually insufficient to cover the true damage. Either governments have to step in, or the victims have to bear the costs. If the government has to pay for damages but someone else pays for safety features, there are clear incentives for overregulation.
The company operating the reactor obviously cannot pay. As long as shareholders are shielded from liability, it's easy enough to structure the company to ensure that it has no major assets beyond the power plant.
> When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage.
Fossil fuels also cause hundreds of billions of damage, simply when being used, no need for accidents. Your argument is useful, because it highlights that we are better equipped to deal with a predictable level of damage than rare events. But overall, having more nuclear plants and using less fossil fuels over a couple of decades would have left us better off by billions of dollars.
It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear.
The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
If someone gets killed at work, how much do they get from workers' comp? What is a micromort and how much does one usually sell for? What did weregeld used to be back when it was still a thing?
I missed where they say insurance solves everything. I understood it as the government running it solves many of the issues introduced by the private sector, and the insurance was another thought.
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 more than nuclear next year, so double nuclear generation per year and still accelerating away from it.
What do you mean over engineered? Genuinely very curious, I thought the problem boiled down essentially to 'lack of will' and that there exist very safe reactor designs.
That's certainly a funny phrase, since it ought to mean that too much engineering effort was put in to getting something right but what it's actually used to mean is that someone got the trade-offs wrong.
In this case it's being used to mean that the regulations are overly restrictive or complicated, and impose higher costs than are reasonable for the benefits they provide. (Or potentially that being overcomplicated actually makes them less effective than if they were done properly.)
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.
> 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).
This is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.
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 or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.
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 sicker population, long term higher energy costs, etc.
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.
Chernobyl was absolute worse case. A massive reactor, with no containment structure (it was essentially in a shed), with a flammable solid state moderator, and no passive cooling. Yet, Europe is not uninhabitable today, infact the above-natural-background radiation in Europe is almost entirely coming from burning fossil fuels, not from Chernobyl.
Specifically, the current regulatory framework requires not just minimization of accident, but also minimization of radiation (to levels well below that of other powerplant types like coal). There probably could be a pretty notable cost savings in nuclear plant construction if they were allowed to regularly leak as much radiation into the environment to that which we already consider acceptable from other power sources.
So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Wind turbines in beauty spots. Remove the air quality equipment from fossil fuel plants. Dam evey river.
> So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable?
I think you missed the point. Coal-fired plants leak radiation significantly. If this is not morally unacceptable in one case, why would it be in another?
They did not say that nuclear should have a free pass, just that the regulations should be consistent.
> And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper.
Different technologies have different downsides and advantages. The parent was talking about 2 technologies having inconsistent expectations for the same metric. Personally, I do not want wind turbines everywhere or a nuclear plant in a city centre, but I think that both technologies (plus solar and hydro) need to be developed, because both have much smaller ecological and human costs than the alternative.
> Dam evey river.
That is counter-productive as there are diminishing returns, and not every river is worth daming.
But it is not morally acceptable for coal to release radiation either. It was politically acceptable for a while but less so now. It is right to hold new plants to a higher standard. And as I have been reminded repeatedly in these kind of threads it is perfectly possible to build reactors that have negligible radiation release.
The real question is if humans really can tweak the tradeoffs like this. Can you really change a design to be less safe on a controllable way.
Also, as you say different technologies have different advantages and downsides. That does mean different regulation.
"better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope.
but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that?
IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).
$PROBLEM_2 being worse than $PROBLEM_1 does not mean $PROBLEM_1 is over regulated.
Nuclear Waste handling and disposal is a significant regulatory issue and includes many REACTIVE measures that have been hard-learned over the past century at sites like Pennsylvania, Fukushima, and Chernobyl.
This blind lashing out at any and all forms of regulation is ignorant. Each of these situations needs to be considered thoughtfully and contextually to find a balance between short term and long term objectives.
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).
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. :-)
> 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.
Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change.
But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this).
I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past.
> 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).
Tow points here:
Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume).
Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there...
> Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider:
Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this?
My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants).
Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.
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.
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 still in the atmosphere.
So putting your data centre right next to a hydroelectric or nuclear power plant is the gold standard.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37660256
Where do you get the 1.6% figure from? It's not mentioned anywhere in the attached link. Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year so 1.6 seems exceedingly low
>Bitcoin mining alone peaked at over 10% of the world's energy usage one year
Where are you getting that from?
I'm a fan of the general concept of credit-based market systems and for carbon or carbon equivalents it is basically fungible by location.
That's not true for other pollutants though, which is one of the reasons that e.g EVs shifting emissions to powerplants is good because cars are used in dense urban environments where the pollution affects more people.
I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the additionality of their clean energy purchases and offsets. They have the data to refute this if they can do so. I'd guess they can't due to their renewables and other offers being further away from population than these data centres.
> additionality
Why do people keep adding "ality" to words? "Addition" works fine here:
"I've seen the work that big tech has published to justify the addition of their clean energy purchases and offsets"
Additionality means "does this purchase of clean/green energy increase the total amount on the grid or does it just take it from other users who are now associated with the emissions of the non-clean energy".
Or more broadly "the extent to which something happens as a result of an intervention that would not have occurred in the absence of the intervention."
How is that not contemplated in "additional"?
Clean air is default. You can’t make ‘more clean’ air to offset dirty air. You can just hide real and compound health impacts with the fact that someone else exercises more in clean air and lives better.
No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent.
If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
The average ppm cancel out but the outcomes don't, because you have more sick people: Let's say 12 ppm is the maximum safe ratio for some pollution [edit: assuming it is a pollutant that has local impact, not like CO2 which has global impact]:
1) If place A has 10 ppm and place B has 10 ppm, then nobody is sick
2) If place A has 15 ppm and place B has 5 ppm, then people in place A are sick
Public policy generally doesn't work well with averages and similar analyses, because outcomes are usually discrete for each individual; it's not a stew where you can mix outcomes together and get something good.
As another example, if the economy results in one person making $1 billion and 999,999 making nothing, the average is $1 million per person - but what does that mean? 999,999 people are still in dire poverty. (It does have some significance, for things society does collectively - fund police and fire, and even help for poor people.)
The marginal health impact of 1 ppm (of what?) may not be the same across all concentrations, not least because of adaptive behaviors: avoiding outside exercise, using air filters.
But in general I agree that you should be able to look at tradeoffs of a set of actions and allow of the possibility that some negatives are offset by positives.
> If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.
Not exactly. The other place might have people die from poverty, illnesses and godknowswhat much earlier so the effect of pollution shifting doesn't manifest itself or even gets masked off by rising life expectancies in general - that's the dirty secret behind the move of dirty and toxic productions to Asia.
Without agreeing with the paper’s general point, imagine a coal plant that emits particles which cause asthma within a 25 mile radius of the plant that also buys legit offsets for all the carbon they emit. They aren’t buying offsets for the local harms.
Something else has to be added, or you could just have coal plants perpetually moving around and buying credits by shutting down the previous one.
Now if they offset by buying scrubbers that cleaned similar particulates elsewhere in the world you'd have a "average stayed the same" but the problem moved.
> Why not?
If your house had a carbon monoxide leak but your neighbor’s house did not, would you consider your carbon monoxide leak to be “offset” by that fact?
If a mitigating action had decreased CO in my neighbor's house by at least as much as it increased in mine, then potentially yes, a neutral researcher should consider that as an offset at the population health level.
Not sure why we need an analogy, though. How about sticking to standard air pollution, which has direct impact of its own? CO poisoning seems a bit extreme as a comparison.
No, it's not that extreme. If the offset comes from a zone where air quality is already "good enough", no extra lives are saved, so it's still net negative.
One person remains fine, the other is dead. That's a net loss...
Oh c'mon are we still buying into the carbon offset greenwashing bullshit. There research that it's mostly a big fraud is piling up at this point. Can we stop gurgling on corporate misinformation
I'm skeptical of carbon offsets for direct polluters. But the idea that Big Tech data centers "costs US public health $5.4bn" comes mostly from the precise inverse of carbon offsets, where a prorated share of the local electric company's emissions is imputed to them. Presumably big tech would be just as happy if the local grid were 100% renewable, and the article quotes Google at least saying they actively try to use clean energy when it's available.
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 of drink-victims? If you don't like what electricity is being used for, argue for specific regulation to make it more expensive.
> but this article (ironic for FT) reads like veiled de-development.
Hard to tell if they're singling out AI because it's the current hot thing that everyone's talking about (and afraid of being replaced by), or if they're singling out "big tech" because they're rich and cool to hate on.
Probably the latter. A few years ago the same argument was being trotted out for crypto mining.
And with good reason - some particularly enterprising miners revived a coal power plant of all things. Other meme coins wasted insane amounts of HDDs and SSDs. I'm glad it's mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum that are left over these days.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
Nobody is writing "providing heat to elderly people in northern cities costs US public health $5.4bn" because most people feel that "keeping people from freezing to death" is worthwhile for society.
>The underlying assumption in both is that "what the electricity is doing is basically worthless" - for society or by some other measurement.
The problem is that's basically entirely based on vibes. For crypto opponents it's justified by crypto not doing anything that the traditional finance system can't do, and for AI opponents it's justified by AI only being able to rehash soulless copypasta while stealing jobs. As a result the whole argument just becomes a roundabout way of arguing "[technology] sucks".
The media A/B tests headlines to see what generates the most clicks.
The journalists then learn what their audience responds to and creates narratives around that.
The result is the reality and the narrative often differ dramatically.
"News" is just "Reality TV" but in text format.
As an aside I've noticed this in real time on Youtube - titles of videos just released changing before my eyes.
It’s deflection from the real polluters
Cars and suburban sprawl
Actually, the real danger in society is AI and Big Tech is the only one you can trust. Everyone else should stop research in AI because of carbon emissions!
> 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?
De-development is saying we have to e.g. stop driving cars. Regulations that make dirty power more expensive are the likes of a carbon tax, which you can avoid while still having a car by getting an electric car and charging it from solar panels.
The cars is a perfect example. Many people who want there to be much fewer car miles in toto will argue they're polluting, but will also not want anything that makes them not polluting - because they're not actually arguing for pollution reduction, they're arguing against the car.
Same with this, I feel. It's not anti-pollution, it's anti-AI.
You cant make a car not pollute. Even EV pollutes the local neighborhood. Ever notice how tires and the stains on the curbs and the black soot you wipe off the window sills are all the same color? How tires get bald? You are probably breathing tire right now. It is probably getting on your plate of food and you are eating tire.
Practically speaking, poor people can't just get an electric car.
Agreed. It reminds me of the article about how self-driving cars, by being safer, would worsen the organ waitlist.[1]
Like, in what other context would you raise this concern about saving lives?
It's the same kind of dishonesty, picking out one hot-button source of pollution, apportioning out its health impact, and complaining about it alone.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2016/12/self-driving-cars-will-...
As someone who got from an organ transplant, I'd still push for self-driving car and safer cars. My hope is pig organ transplants make it through trials soon. That could push a 7 year wait for kidney transplant down to a year which is a big deal because the long time on dialysis can have a lasting impact.
Couldn't we just make donation opt out and solve the problem?
US has the second highest deceased organ donor rate after Spain despite US being opt-in.
https://www.irodat.org/?p=database#data
I worry about a public opinion chaining on switching to opt-out in the US so it has to evaluated carefully.
I'm guessing the US wait time is long because there are a lot of people with failing kidneys due to poorly managed diabetes and high blood pressure. But there are a whole host of auto immune and genetic diseases also.
Now we have better drugs for treating diabetes like Ozempic and SGLT so hopefully that improves the situation for kidney failures caused by diabetes.
I myself had an auto immune disease IgA nephropathy 10 years back but at that time there were hardly any drugs targeting it. I've since was on dialysis and recently got a kidney transplant. But the positive at the same time a half dozen drugs have been approved or under trial to slow down the progression of IgA nephropathy.
From the article you linked > We’re all for saving lives—we aren’t saying that we should stop self-driving cars so we can preserve a source of organ donation. But we also need to start thinking now about how to address this coming problem.
It doesn’t matter how much they try to walk it back and not sound so criminally insane. Refer again to my second paragraph: The issue is, would the author ever think of writing this article for any other instance of saving lives? If not, then it’s a case of selective focus, the same problem in this submission.
I mean, why not just say the organ shortage is bad, without pointing the finger at the latest hip, hot button issue, out of all the possible life-savers?
You could also use some other way of looking at the problem instead of "lives". For example, from some morbidly accounted points of view, reducing deaths of able-bodied young people by incidentally increasing deaths of older, organ-needing people results in more "able-bodied life years" saved or something.
Of course, down this path too far and you start looking at prisoners and death sentences and organ harvesting, which I think most people would agree ain't right.
I dont think they are walking anything back. They seem a lot more positive about self driving cars then a lot of people. The controversial part of the article for most would be the suggestion to an allow organ market
The article is part of a series about challenges with future technologies. They note that 1/5 of donations come from traffic accidents and there is already a major shortage. If self driving cars reduce most accidents that will mean nearly 1/5 of donations will need to be replaced
Sounds to me like the real criticism is dirty electricity generation.
> Sounds to me like the real criticism is dirty electricity generation.
Not when that "dirty electricity generation" was planned to be shut down before the data centers arrived: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_datacenters_coal/, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m..., https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/31/datacenter_power_crun..., https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/eric_schmidt_speech/.
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.
Its not so much people with little financial interest, but rather interest with more financial power. After all having a life cut short, or being uprooted by climate events or killed is of a huge cost - individually and socially.
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.
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.
Everyone pays it, but the distribution of costs depends on nature and not on rational policy. It also depends on having the wealth to avoid certain costs, e.g., by leaving dangerous areas.
You can only trust Big Tech, make sure everyone else stops their AI research (due to environmental concerns of course).
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/trump-ai-power-plants-data-...
Drill baby drill! Using electricity on compute is driving future dirty power generation.
> Quick googling found a stat that 1.6% of the whole world's electricity supply going on computing
That would imply that it isn't the major issue. Electricity generation as a whole is less than half of US energy consumption, US electricity generation is 35% nuclear or renewable, and computing is using 1.6% of electricity. This is a rounding error compared to e.g. transportation at 37% of all energy consumption, or HVAC at another double-digit percentage.
> And we need more!
New generation capacity in the US is disproportionately renewables because renewables will remain cheaper until they're closer to half of all generation and then have to really deal with the storage issues. Willingness to approve fossil fuel plants doesn't mean anybody really wants them. The large tech companies are buying nuclear:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/business/energy-environme...
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
We've been trying to build more clean nuclear plants for decades, but its been ironically the self-proclaimed environmentalists who have been blocking it every step of the way. We could have had 0 carbon electricity production nation wide since the 1980's.
relevant song that i listen to far too much - https://youtube.com/watch?v=VGZ1zZ-drQk
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.
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.
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.
West Virginia is not West Virginia. Makes more sense if you flip it around.
West Virginia is not west Virginia.
Also West Virginia would more accurately be North Virginia.
John Denver made the same mistake
The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06288
"Air pollution derived from the huge amounts of energy needed to run data centres has been linked to treating cancers, asthma and other related issues, according to research from UC Riverside and Caltech."
"The academics estimated that the cost of treating illnesses connected to this pollution was valued at $1.5bn in 2023, up 20 per cent from a year earlier. They found that the overall cost was $5.4bn since 2019."
Note that pollution is not defined in the article.
https://archive.is/N0UGX
Thanks! the captcha is annoying tho
https://archive.md/20250223051355/https://www.ft.com/content...
Increased levels of NO2, SO2 and PM2.5 are going to have a direct impact on the health of people living close to these facilities. The unlicensed gas turbines in Memphis are probably the worst offender.
Just wait until you see how much C02 is being emitted sucking down energy from green sources that could have heated homes or supplied other essential services.
Is it just me that finds the angle here odd?
"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".
Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.
There’s nothing specific to data centers here, just electricity use. The electricity use generates a shit load of GDP and soft power for the U.S., way more than $5.4B over 5 years.
So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries.
> So what do these degrowth people want exactly? Cant have resource extraction. Can’t have manufacturing, pollution. Can’t have tech, pollution. Just twiddling thumbs and money will come? Or keep all the benefits while offloading all the downsides to Mexico? And a few years later they will complain about dependence on foreign countries.
It feels like you're arguing against a strawman.
I can only speak for myself, but I would like CO2 emissions to be taxed appropriately, so that fossil fuel producers and consumers actually pay a somewhat proper price for the damage that they cause (negative externalities).
Sure, that might slow growth, but I see so evidence that this difference in growth has much of a negative effect on US citizens:
How much GDP growth do you think we actually need as a nation to stay satisfied? Double our GDP every 20 years? More? Less?
Because I know that I would trade a good fraction of my "growth boosted" past and present wage in exchange for climate change already being solved (and be happier as a result).
PS: I would also like to point out that any significant constant rate of growth is inherently unsustainable by definition; as a species, we need to arrange ourself with the fact that we'll be unable to continue growing our energy consumption exponentially-- the sooner, the better.
They are the people who think only one move in chess. I hope this answers your question.
Now imagine how much pollution from the airline industry costs public health ...
According to the paper, the public health cost from data centers is 1/3 of the road transportation emissions of California. The tool they used (https://www.epa.gov/cobra) to calculate the emissions impact doesn’t have aviation emissions.
Following from your model California is responsible for roughly 9.6% of the total road transportation emissions in the U.S > So 1/3rd of that is 3.2% . So road transportation's health cost is roughly 30x higher than datacenters'. Aviation, while extremely polluting (~9%), is also dwarfed by road transport due to the latter's shear volume
Another thing to observe: The paper's claims are based on a McKinsey projection to 2030 that assumes 'a strong decrease of road transport emissions' and a 'surging demand for AI data centers' that 'outweighs power plants emission efficiency improvement'.
Contrast this to today where energy estimates are 2% for datacenters vs. 80% for road transport. Guess what is causing more outweighing of power plant emission efficiency improvement as that fleet of cars, trucks and lorries is electrifying (the reason for McKinsey's reduction projection)?
Now I'm not saying we should let data-centers get a free pass. Pollution is a serious problem. But in terms of priorities, curbing datacenters might not be the number one concern.
Or superfluous private jet usage by executives “super commuting” between states …
For all the flak that CEOs and taylor swift gets, their contribution to global warming is a drop in a bucket (percentage of aviation emissions that can be attributed to private jets), of a bucket that's being dumped in the ocean (percentage of global warming that can be attributed to aviation). They produce outsized emissions on a personal basis, but there's also so few jets relative to commercial airlines that banning them isn't going to make a dent.
Every bit counts. And to make a dent, start with the things with outsized effects with simple alternatives.
It’s easy to make laws about it:
- private jets/charters: only allowed if have enough passengers (calculate the CO2/person)
- old cars - illegal if don’t pass emissions check
>Every bit counts.
"every bit" also costs political capital. Making any sort of change is going to cause a stir, and if you're going to cause a political shitshow, you might as well get good returns for it. Causing a political shitshow, but only making a modest impact is the worst outcome. Just look at the pasty tax in the UK[1]. The government proposed a change to the VAT rules that would have made a minimal fiscal impact, but generated so much flak that they were forced to back down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasty_tax#Aftermath
>start with the things with outsized effects with simple alternatives.
The examples you gave all cause disproportionate harm to a small group, which will raise a stink to their local representative, especially if they're being singled out.
An across the board carbon tax avoids both these problems.
How about flying the jet 5 minutes to another airfield in the same city?
Since every activity has some externalities and also unexpected positive effects, isn’t focusing on just the negative effects of this one thing very lopsided?
That’s fine, you can have one article on negative implications and another one on opportunities. It’s two different subjects, with different data and different approaches, and possibly different specialised authors. You don’t have to both-sides everything all the time.
That's true, but the articles on negative implications are being selectively written. For instance, there's a deluge of articles about pollution from AI datacenters (and before that, crypto mining), but hardly a peep about pollution from the US healthcare system, or education, even though those are arguably far higher. As a result, such articles comes across as selectively written hit-pieces rather than objective reporting.
What about obesity?
Coca Cola and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
(I've always wondered how measurable the effect of subtly reducing the HFCS/sugar quantity in all sodas over decades would be.)
In the future blinking with cost trillions of dollars.
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What does this have to do with the article?
Big tech is building data centres. Data centres pollute. Environmentalists are part of the left wing coalition.
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 using non-nuclear power lead to ICE vehicles remaining more prevalent than they should be, and non-heat-pump heating remaining more prevalent than it should be, leading to millions more years of human lifespan lost.
From a health perspective, blocking nuclear with overregulation was one of societies biggest health policy failures.
How about we build this stuff in deserts where you can just plaster everything with solar in like 10% of time and 30% of money investment.
You now have 70% of budget to build battery/wind and still got enough time.
This is solved with current renewable prices without ideological preferences.
Unfortunately, data centers also need access to considerable amounts of water.
No thank you. Build it in your backyard, not mine.
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant.
We know from natural disasters that insurance is usually insufficient to cover the true damage. Either governments have to step in, or the victims have to bear the costs. If the government has to pay for damages but someone else pays for safety features, there are clear incentives for overregulation.
The company operating the reactor obviously cannot pay. As long as shareholders are shielded from liability, it's easy enough to structure the company to ensure that it has no major assets beyond the power plant.
> When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage.
Fossil fuels also cause hundreds of billions of damage, simply when being used, no need for accidents. Your argument is useful, because it highlights that we are better equipped to deal with a predictable level of damage than rare events. But overall, having more nuclear plants and using less fossil fuels over a couple of decades would have left us better off by billions of dollars.
It's overall beneficial for society to switch to nuclear.
The problem you posed is just a market structure implementation detail. Government could operate the plants, or they could offer insurance to private sector operators.
I'm pro-nuclear but the idea that insurance fixes everything is strange to me. How much insurance money fixes you getting killed, would you say?
This is not a novel question.
If someone gets killed at work, how much do they get from workers' comp? What is a micromort and how much does one usually sell for? What did weregeld used to be back when it was still a thing?
I didn't ask about an unspecified someone else, I asked about yourself. It makes a big difference to understand what I meant.
I missed where they say insurance solves everything. I understood it as the government running it solves many of the issues introduced by the private sector, and the insurance was another thought.
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 more than nuclear next year, so double nuclear generation per year and still accelerating away from it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Except nobody can survive solely on solar and wind. There must be another, stable energy source for the quiet nights.
What do you mean over engineered? Genuinely very curious, I thought the problem boiled down essentially to 'lack of will' and that there exist very safe reactor designs.
That's certainly a funny phrase, since it ought to mean that too much engineering effort was put in to getting something right but what it's actually used to mean is that someone got the trade-offs wrong.
In this case it's being used to mean that the regulations are overly restrictive or complicated, and impose higher costs than are reasonable for the benefits they provide. (Or potentially that being overcomplicated actually makes them less effective than if they were done properly.)
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.
> 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).
>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.
This is actually a very good and creative idea, but doesn't account for the cost of the computational capacity (specifically the chips). In the future, if chips become commoditized, your solution could work, but not in the current chip environment.
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 or move on before the next one is built, so we have to learn how to build them from scratch, and develop the supply chains from scratch each time.
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...
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 sicker population, long term higher energy costs, etc.
>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.
> When that is the potential risk
It's not a realistic risk.
Chernobyl was absolute worse case. A massive reactor, with no containment structure (it was essentially in a shed), with a flammable solid state moderator, and no passive cooling. Yet, Europe is not uninhabitable today, infact the above-natural-background radiation in Europe is almost entirely coming from burning fossil fuels, not from Chernobyl.
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...
Got a source for that?
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
Specifically, the current regulatory framework requires not just minimization of accident, but also minimization of radiation (to levels well below that of other powerplant types like coal). There probably could be a pretty notable cost savings in nuclear plant construction if they were allowed to regularly leak as much radiation into the environment to that which we already consider acceptable from other power sources.
So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable? And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper. Wind turbines in beauty spots. Remove the air quality equipment from fossil fuel plants. Dam evey river.
It's the other way around. We should apply equal regulations to coal making nuclear more competing.
> So if we just do something politically unacceptable and probably morally unacceptable then nuclear will be viable?
I think you missed the point. Coal-fired plants leak radiation significantly. If this is not morally unacceptable in one case, why would it be in another?
They did not say that nuclear should have a free pass, just that the regulations should be consistent.
> And of course you could apply the same thing to other sources of energy and they will equally get cheaper.
Different technologies have different downsides and advantages. The parent was talking about 2 technologies having inconsistent expectations for the same metric. Personally, I do not want wind turbines everywhere or a nuclear plant in a city centre, but I think that both technologies (plus solar and hydro) need to be developed, because both have much smaller ecological and human costs than the alternative.
> Dam evey river.
That is counter-productive as there are diminishing returns, and not every river is worth daming.
But it is not morally acceptable for coal to release radiation either. It was politically acceptable for a while but less so now. It is right to hold new plants to a higher standard. And as I have been reminded repeatedly in these kind of threads it is perfectly possible to build reactors that have negligible radiation release.
The real question is if humans really can tweak the tradeoffs like this. Can you really change a design to be less safe on a controllable way.
Also, as you say different technologies have different advantages and downsides. That does mean different regulation.
"better safe than sorry" is the definition of a slippery slope.
but I'm curious: what event do you think taught us that?
IMO, there's far mode damage being done to the world by, say, mercury in batteries than by nuclear accidents (of which chernobyl is the only serious one).
$PROBLEM_2 being worse than $PROBLEM_1 does not mean $PROBLEM_1 is over regulated.
Nuclear Waste handling and disposal is a significant regulatory issue and includes many REACTIVE measures that have been hard-learned over the past century at sites like Pennsylvania, Fukushima, and Chernobyl.
This blind lashing out at any and all forms of regulation is ignorant. Each of these situations needs to be considered thoughtfully and contextually to find a balance between short term and long term objectives.
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. :-)
> 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.
Relying on fusion power to clean up electricity generation is highly irresponsible, because in every remotely credible scenario, rollout is MUCH too slow to meaningfully affect climate change.
But I'm interested in trying to understand your view, and also which fusion power approach you put your faith in (and generally discussing this).
I strongly believe that nuclear power has no future, because it performs very poorly in an energy market where the marginal cost of producing is very frequently near-zero (thanks to renewables). Nuclear power is already quite expensive-- only running the plants half the time ruins cost competitiveness completely. You can see this happening already in countries like France and China, where nuclear and coal power plants are increasingly operating in load-following mode (i.e. not 100% all-the-time), which makes them even less cost competitive than in the past.
> 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).
Tow points here: Intermittency is a problem that actually shrinks at scale: The more spread out your wind parks/panels are, the smaller the periods where they provide unexpectedly little power (=> you need less buffering than you would naively assume).
Second point: a 100kWh battery is already affordable for a single household right now (thats basically big electric car battery). Price trends only go one direction there...
> Second, battery is expensive, so the total system cost can exceed the cost of nuclear (especially with sane regulation and continually improving engineering).
From this I assume you believe that nuclear reactors are not cost competitive mainly because of safety regulations, and "simply" fixing those regulations would make them able to compete on cost? This is likely incorrect. Consider:
Coal power plants are basically a minimally regulated, built-at-scale, super-simplified variant of a thermal power plant. They are the "ideal" that hyper-optimized nuclear reactor designs will never be able to reach (disregarding fuel costs here!). Even so: They struggle to compete with renewable on price already (disregarding fuel costs!). What are your thoughts on this?
My personal favorite: Tax carbon emission, use gas turbines as peaker plants, store energy long term via synthetic hydrogen, which is needed for carbon-free steel production anyway (and can also be used by gas peaker plants).
Then just let the market find out which fraction of batteries, wind, solar, carbon-taxed gas/coal, nuclear etc. works best.