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.
Because without enough information to truly place it in context, you may be focusing on something that may not have a notable impact on the overall problem.
For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.
How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?
That is not what this debate is about. The debate is about whether we know that the point of focus can be described as massive GHG when compared in proportion to other emitters.
How much is the plant actually going to emit? Is the number the largest because the field is dominated by many many smaller things that cumulatively sum to a figure so large that if any one value (even if the largest) is removed, it makes no meaningful difference.
What happens to the fuel if they don't use it? Does it get used by someone else who would otherwise had used renewables.
I don't think it is unreasonable to have the relevant information to hand before making a decision. I might make the same decision as you have already done. I'd just like it to be based on actual information that I have.
We have all the info we need to know this is not something we should build if we want to preserve our environment. But yeah keep pretending we don’t or whatever.
I think, much of the problem is we do not expect better.
For every person asking a company to do the right thing there seems to be a dozen who will say there's no point and how dare you even talk to them.
I don't think that represents the majority of people. I think, in general, people see the toxicity of the debate and decide to just keep their heads down.
> Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?
It was sarcasm. It's also not particularly insightful. "AI data centers" get immense scrutiny right now. Astoria has a similar generation capacity in a much denser (and human populated!) area.
Because combining "Amazon", "top source" "climate", and "pollution" should make this headline a top source of the clicks that Ars needs to pay its own bills?
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.
>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.
I think of this as the Wikipedia effect. People perceive Wikipedia as unreliable because they can perceive the mechanism by which it can be wrong. Study after study has shown Wikipedia to be more reliable than other encyclopedic sources that simply assert their accuracy while leaving the mechanisms by which they work hidden.
It is similar to the idea that something that saves 5 unidentified lives at the cost of one identified life is considered far worse than something that costs 5 unidentified lives to save one identified life.
Crypto and AI have also the problem that people cannot understand scale. How much is a million litres of water in terms of swimming pools, or showers? Thing uses as much electricity as [country that uses gas for heating and does not have typically have air conditioning]. Or Training an LLM produces a big looking number of CO2 which is as much as n cars in their total lifespan which makes it look like a different scale. Weirdly, the last figure I read on that suggested that if 10% of Americans trained their own personal leading edge LLM from scratch, cars would still emit more CO2. I don't know if that is true or not, but it frames the entire thing in a different light.
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.
This is a national security nightmare. For better or worse, fossil fuels have massive energy densities, which makes economics in defense context (and others) extremely favorable.
Even with today’s energy polices, electricity costs have skyrocketed (this was the case before the data center demand). Couple that with electrification of vehicles, phase out of natural gas/oil heaters, I think its reckless abandon to push policies which harm middle and lower class families. Not to say some of these countries even consider nuclear energy “evil”.
Absolutely ridiculous.
The national security nightmare is the dependency on fossil fuel sources. If we were to lose our crude oil supplies because of a war in the Middle East, blocking a strait for tankers, we would be well and truly fucked. We don't produce enough domestic natural gas to replace it.
The only options we have today are solar, wind, and, given enough time, nuclear. These three sources remove external dependencies for generating energy. I'm not sure how much uranium we have in the States, but once the blades are spinning or the sun is shining, we keep getting energy, and no war overseas can stop that.
Electric prices are climbing because we're doing externalities wrong. For example, utility charges for data centers should be significantly higher than what we charge residential and non-DC businesses. The goal is for data centers to absorb the cost of the impact they have on the grid and water.
They could have on-prem power plants, but those plants should belong to the local utility and charge the data centers the data center rate. It also should be a surcharge for the air pollution those fossil fuel monstrosities create. Again, paying for the externalities.
They could get a break if they deployed gigawatts of solar and batteries or used their waste heat for district heating, but yeah, I'm tired of letting them get away with dumping externalities on us. We now have a nicely delineated scenario where we can focus it on them and make them pay.
In broad strokes I tend to agree. I think there is a fairly good path to moving most things to electricity and in turn moving most electricity generation to renewables.
The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job.
By and large, renewables are marching towards a state where they will provide enough of the generation that what remains would be insignificant.
I would be interested to know where the gas is coming from for this particular data centre. There are a few cases that generation by gas is preferable to what is happening right now. One good example is if the gas is from sources that would otherwise be flared off. I have heard in the past that businesses have been reluctant to harness energy from gas rather than flaring it off because any user of the energy gets tagged with the CO2 emissions. If it just gets burnt off it makes no difference to the amount of total emissions, but it avoids the CO2 being attributed to their industry.
While a good point, it also creates lock-in effects. If you look at the top EV adopters, they barely use gas power. This likely isn't a coincidence.
Now you will have the AI lobby pushing against EVs (so that oil drilling can create gas as a byproduct), as if it wasn't already an uphill battle in the US...
Worse, EVs start demand destruction for gasoline, which makes the other fractions from the refining process more expensive because gasoline is now a waste product. Or so the crayon chart on the restaurant placemat seems to indicate.
It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.
That would suggest if no-one purchased it, it would just be flared off. Does the negative price come about because of pathological financial conditions, or is it the case that the producers are financially penalised for flaring?
It acts as a negative feedback signal for producers because there is limited physical pipeline capacity. I think there are some financial incentives to reduce flaring for the LNG export market, but only a small amount of gas was flared in that region (less than 5%).
There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
> I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants
It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far less than my father did throughout his life.
Life isn't some strict binary, all or nothing affair.
Well, for those who want to ban gas stovetops in new biulding, it is a binary world. The reality is that home cooking is a rounding error in terms of energy usage.
But methane leaks from residential connections are a significant source. Requiring people who want to cook with gas inside or outside to use bottles instead of a piped connection is not unreasonable, IMO.
You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"
This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.
That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.
I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.
You seem to have a huge misunderstanding of how big the Texas grid is. And no, it shares almost nothing which is why we had a huge power crash in the freeze of 2021.
>Texas led the nation in energy consumption in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA reported Texas' total energy consumption was twice as much as California's, the second-highest energy-consuming state, and more than three times as much as third-place Florida. The EIA's State Energy Data System finds U.S. total energy use peaked in 2007. Between 2007 and 2023, Texas energy consumption rose 21% while U.S. energy use decreased 5%.
I have zero idea where you're thinking that Texas exports power, or doesn't use it all, but it's very odd given the plethora of evidence to the contrary.
Correct. We have very little cross transfer capability to other grids. Add to that the Texas grid consumes 2x the power of California, so the scales are huge.
It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?
That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.
Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.
I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.
People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.
People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)
The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:
(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well
(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)
(3) Bogus concerns about water.
We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.
Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.
I'm not seeing polling break, just opinion writing. You're kind of making my case for me when you talk about people showing up to protests with guillotines.
I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.
It is kind of bonkers if you consider that all of us already had "data centers" in our backyards already.
Every corporation and even most small businesses have had a machine room, wiring closet, or some kind of server shoved into a room, since 30 years ago now. They all had them in every office building you ever drove by, or lived next to, or shopped near. It's simply that people didn't even register them, because none of the general public really sees or knows what goes on in office parks, and behind the tinted corporate windows. It could be as benign as a toy distributor or as wicked as a defense contractor, and from the outside, they look alike.
But they've all had computers, and networks, for decades. And what we are seeing now is consolidation and concentration. The offices and parks and buildings are hollowed out -- they've laid off workers, they've gone WFH, and most importantly, they've gutted their machine rooms and removed on-prem equipment in migration to the cloud. So each and every company that migrated to the cloud has shrunk their own machine room's footprint by X amount that is reflected in data-center capacity by an identical (or perhaps larger) X. And that, of course, means that power, cooling, and resource consumption is not necessarily enlarged, but merely transferred and concentrated into DCs rather than power-hungry machine rooms, humming secretly inside every office building.
I look back to my first job--I worked at an ISP, and we colocated with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The SDSC was a data center par excellence with the finest machines that ever existed on the floor. And I was still a kid when I'd be admitted to the main floor, I'd walk past a Y-MP, a Thinking Machine, an Intel Paragon, a Nearline Tape Robot, and there were our humble little pizza-boxes, sitting on a table trying to keep up with Usenet. Our own ISP offices didn't even have a machine room of our own, just a rack with a hub--yeah a hub--and a Sparc 2 pizza box to serve the office. We were already "in the cloud", as it were. More or less literally--SDSC was where they tested nuclear weapons, predicted the weather, and explored outer space, through the magic of FORTRAN...
So what people are complaining about is something they can see. If you're dying of cancer for 20 years but you never go to a doctor, you won't feel it. Once you see the doctor, the chemotherapy starts, and then you croak from the chemo. So this building of datacenters is simply bringing this into the open, and into the light. And people are angrily reactive at social media, and techbros, and surveillance capitalism, and AI-job-losses, and corporate hijinks in general, so data centers do give a focus to that futile rage.
But it's futile, and we all depend on data centers already, even before they are built, and we need DCs now to sustain our economy and our civilization as it already is. It's futile to resist and if you want to come in with a tractor to demolish them, you'll be arrested, and the Flock camera attackers will be hauled into prison too, and technology will just impassively march along as a juggernaut with no feelings, no remorse, and no mercy.
It's a pity; we were really nice folks for a few hundred years.
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.
Yes at the current rate but if I drew a line at the 2006 rate of solar growth would it have anything to do with the rate now? How about 2016? I’m down about our prospects for limiting the damage but let’s not be irrationally doomer about it either.
And that is due to external actors, aka China, not the US and it's policies. We had the ability, technology, and desire to do what China is doing now back in 2006... But instead we made a housing bubble, then we dumped every investment dollar into silicon valley startups to make apps.
Physical limitations dictate it'll stop (being worth it economically to keep extracting) by like 2080 or 2090, but we'll be in way worse shape by then.
That said there has never been argument about whether we are on that trajectory, we want to be on that trajectory
I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption
The harder thing would be to explain why your species continues to get energy by burning things despite having multiple alternatives and that many people are deeply ideologically opposed to moving away from burning things.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is a civilizational growing pain these aliens are familiar with. Maybe they went through the same period themselves.
Imagine the type II alien nods with understanding in a human way that your species just isn't ready and it might not ever be as it erases your memory of the encounter and returns to the stars, stopping only to scan your anal sphincter because all the type II civilizations remain puzzled by it.
Once the Ancient Greeks had copper and iron they could potentially do wind and hydro electricity and metal-air batteries - and the civilization would probably go just fine without fossil fuels.
I think they'd give you some leeway if you fired up gas plants to not freeze in the winter, I want to see their faces when you tell them you turned them on because you wanted to generate more digital slop during a climate crisis
I believe so, They have also increased their coal consumption.
The #1 increase in world electricity demand is people rising out of poverty. China has been producing the most solar in the world and still hasn't been able to cover their own demand increase with it. Eventually that form of growth will slow down. Sustainability should always look at the second derivative.
Maybe we should be looking inward as to why solar isn't more easily deployable in the US. Local zoning, permitting, and community opposition are some of the top road blocks there...
Solar needs to address its dispatchability problem before it becomes viable as anything other than a vanity project.
Australia is experiencing this problem now to a limited extent, and is walking in to a disaster scenario with the scheduled shutdown of 5 gigawatts of coal fired electricity generating across three sites over the next three years with nothing in the pipeline to replace that 5GW.
Solar has a problem so it's a vanity project, but coal has a billion problems but it doesn't matter because you can adjust the output?
Like it genuinely sounds like you're suggesting our current terrible system shouldn't even be attempted to be improved unless there's a magic perfect solution to replace it.
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!
"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.
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.
Hang tight because after them, the guys that paid top dollar for their EVs and need to tell you how not it’s not anxiety; but that they really enjoy watching and mentally considering the charge and rate of depletion everywhere they go all the time.
Nuclear reactors across the US and Europe have been a complete project management omnishambles and consequently have been massively costly and massively late.
SMRs are vapourware and are similarly economically uncompetitive.
Just build solar, wind, and batteries, and we'll worry about solving for the last 15% of electricity demand when that is actually a live problem (for which there are solutions that don't involve nuclear power and don't rely on magic beans being invented).
1. Any equipment or substance that is both nuclear and potentially dangerous has some sort of magical mutant super-power to stimulate superhumanly idiotic behavior in a non-trivial fraction of the people handling/operating/managing the equipment or substance. That behavior is almost always coupled with pathological denials - both from the mutant super-idiots and their supposedly non-mutant peers.
2. General population humans are quite aware of problem #1, hence extremely distrustful when any human experts or organizations try to reassure them as to the safety of anything nuclear.
3. That "reprocessing" ain't nothing resembling "put on a lead apron and pour it through a coffee filter". Instead, it's a quagmire of chemicals and processes that'd still be horrific if nothing nuclear was involved, plus weapon proliferation overtones, plus all the problems noted in 1. and 2. above.
1. Plant construction is very expensive, and not in small part because people who don't actually understand the technology take every opportunity to tie up construction in the courts and regulatory agencies.
2. General population of humans are quite aware of #1, so even though they know nuclear wins on a technology basis, they know it will be unduly expensive, preferring to knuckle under to the mob instead of doing the right thing.
3. People not familiar with the technology don't realize that while we don't generally do reprocessing in the west, it's primarily due to cost, and that Japan will start reprocessing 800 tonnes of fuel per year starting next year.
The technology is the safest way we have to generate power, and could be the lowest cost if the regulatory environment was adjusted properly. It's just a shame there are so many people who are irrationally opposed.
Sounds like anyone who needs actual, delivered, at-scale power (in the real world) should immediately adopt an "Anything But Nukes" policy.
Vs. those with both the unquenchable zeal and bottomless resources to win a multi-decade crusade to prove that they're Ultimately Right (but no short-term need for electrical power) should embark on an epic quest...
We absolutely should invest in nuclear. We won't have enough with solar anymore. AI and EVs alone have blown our projections off by 1000x at this point. Can't put the genie back in the bottle either.
I'm not saying there are no risks, but if we don't start making more nuclear power companies, Elon will and he will go from $1T to $8T. Who am I kidding, he's probably the only one that can turn them around in 2yrs with nextgen tech. Everyone else is going to keep faking it and build them in 20 years for 100x budget.
I've no doubt that fusion will be solved, technically.
I am hugely skeptical that it will be solved economically given that it suffers from many of the problems currently pricing coal and nuclear out of the market.
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.
It seems strange for this article to word this as a new or unusual source of pollution, natural gas is the primary source of energy in the US, adding 10% to existing thermal fleet in ERCOT https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards is not a huge deal and its disingenuous to say this one plant will become a "top source of US pollution".
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
Sure, climate change is bad and has the potential to disrupt and end the lives of many in the future. But other forms of air pollution like pm2.5 particulates in the air are already causing an estimated 5 million premature deaths per year as well as a slew of other health problems including lowering of IQ.
> I gather you believe other people pay too much attention to CO2.
Why would you think that? I care a great deal about the environment.. I've been working on several reforestation projects for the last 5 years.
I wish there was 100x more funding for CO2 emission reduction. But it frustrates me far more how little attention pm2.5 pollution gets. I live in Asia and see the effects that pm2.5 pollution has on 100's of millions of people every day.
1786171869 | Amazon behind private gas plant for new data centers | https://finance.yahoo.com/energy/articles/amazon-behind-mass... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49219445
1786183626 | New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S. | https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
1786210072 | Amazon Is Creating the Biggest Pollution Source in the Country | https://newrepublic.com/post/214111/amazon-data-center-bigge... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49223845
1786350058 | Amazon plans gigantic gas power plant for new AI data center | https://www.heise.de/en/news/Amazon-plans-gigantic-gas-power... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49240853
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.
You're right--it's probably fine. Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Because without enough information to truly place it in context, you may be focusing on something that may not have a notable impact on the overall problem.
For starters, why focus on the plant being built when it has been permitted. If you focused on the permitting process presumably you could prevent many instances simultaneously.
How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact? It probably shouldn’t have been permitted in the first place so I’m with you let’s block it there next time. But in the meantime… we should just let it get built?
Edit: https://cleanview.co/reports/behind-the-meter-data-centers
Texas is just ripping through these things since it’s so permissive. That’s troubling for the other states who will all inevitably bear some burden.
>How would focusing on one of the largest new CO2 emitters not have a notable impact?
Because without context you have no idea what that actually means.
If you get attacked by an unknown number of duck sized horses, how much of an effect would defeating the largest of them have?
So what context do you think is missing from this debate about whether massive GHG emissions are good or bad?
That is not what this debate is about. The debate is about whether we know that the point of focus can be described as massive GHG when compared in proportion to other emitters.
How much is the plant actually going to emit? Is the number the largest because the field is dominated by many many smaller things that cumulatively sum to a figure so large that if any one value (even if the largest) is removed, it makes no meaningful difference.
What happens to the fuel if they don't use it? Does it get used by someone else who would otherwise had used renewables.
I don't think it is unreasonable to have the relevant information to hand before making a decision. I might make the same decision as you have already done. I'd just like it to be based on actual information that I have.
We have all the info we need to know this is not something we should build if we want to preserve our environment. But yeah keep pretending we don’t or whatever.
Regardless, we expect better from our corporate overlords.
I think, much of the problem is we do not expect better.
For every person asking a company to do the right thing there seems to be a dozen who will say there's no point and how dare you even talk to them.
I don't think that represents the majority of people. I think, in general, people see the toxicity of the debate and decide to just keep their heads down.
> Why focus on this one source of pollution when there are others?
Couldn't you just say this about all the others too, then why do anything at all? If you wanted to actually reduce pollution, doesn't it make sense that everyone focuses on a few first, then hopefully maybe the rest could fall in line?
It was sarcasm. It's also not particularly insightful. "AI data centers" get immense scrutiny right now. Astoria has a similar generation capacity in a much denser (and human populated!) area.
Because combining "Amazon", "top source" "climate", and "pollution" should make this headline a top source of the clicks that Ars needs to pay its own bills?
Because this one lets consumers pretend they aren’t the source of pollution lol
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.
>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.
I think of this as the Wikipedia effect. People perceive Wikipedia as unreliable because they can perceive the mechanism by which it can be wrong. Study after study has shown Wikipedia to be more reliable than other encyclopedic sources that simply assert their accuracy while leaving the mechanisms by which they work hidden.
It is similar to the idea that something that saves 5 unidentified lives at the cost of one identified life is considered far worse than something that costs 5 unidentified lives to save one identified life.
Crypto and AI have also the problem that people cannot understand scale. How much is a million litres of water in terms of swimming pools, or showers? Thing uses as much electricity as [country that uses gas for heating and does not have typically have air conditioning]. Or Training an LLM produces a big looking number of CO2 which is as much as n cars in their total lifespan which makes it look like a different scale. Weirdly, the last figure I read on that suggested that if 10% of Americans trained their own personal leading edge LLM from scratch, cars would still emit more CO2. I don't know if that is true or not, but it frames the entire thing in a different light.
This is so unacceptable. Build as many data centers as you want, but fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday.
I have long advocated that EU should be in the forefront and start sunsetting fossil fueled power generation, by setting a date when no new construction is allowed and then letting the existing fleet naturally die. It would send a strong signal to the rest of the world that we can't keep constructing new thermal power stations that continue to burn fuel whenever we have need to increase capacity and grid stability.
Sadly there aren't much support to do this. The largest coalition see thermal power stations as critical to manage grid stability and voted to have natural gas defined as "green", since they view it as necessary to enable renewable energy to be built. The other major coalition do want to decrease the need for thermal power plants by increasing base load through nuclear power, but they are not openly against thermal power plants as a way to reduce costs. EU lacks any movement that are willing to pay the cost of not burning fuel in order to generate electricity. Same for basically every other place on earth right now, despite EU and most countries being in agreement that climate change is real and fossil fuels should be stopped yesterday.
This is a national security nightmare. For better or worse, fossil fuels have massive energy densities, which makes economics in defense context (and others) extremely favorable.
Even with today’s energy polices, electricity costs have skyrocketed (this was the case before the data center demand). Couple that with electrification of vehicles, phase out of natural gas/oil heaters, I think its reckless abandon to push policies which harm middle and lower class families. Not to say some of these countries even consider nuclear energy “evil”. Absolutely ridiculous.
I apologize, but I must disagree.
The national security nightmare is the dependency on fossil fuel sources. If we were to lose our crude oil supplies because of a war in the Middle East, blocking a strait for tankers, we would be well and truly fucked. We don't produce enough domestic natural gas to replace it.
The only options we have today are solar, wind, and, given enough time, nuclear. These three sources remove external dependencies for generating energy. I'm not sure how much uranium we have in the States, but once the blades are spinning or the sun is shining, we keep getting energy, and no war overseas can stop that.
Electric prices are climbing because we're doing externalities wrong. For example, utility charges for data centers should be significantly higher than what we charge residential and non-DC businesses. The goal is for data centers to absorb the cost of the impact they have on the grid and water.
They could have on-prem power plants, but those plants should belong to the local utility and charge the data centers the data center rate. It also should be a surcharge for the air pollution those fossil fuel monstrosities create. Again, paying for the externalities.
They could get a break if they deployed gigawatts of solar and batteries or used their waste heat for district heating, but yeah, I'm tired of letting them get away with dumping externalities on us. We now have a nicely delineated scenario where we can focus it on them and make them pay.
In the EU's case, dependence on Russian gas is already a national security nightmare.
thats an excellent way to make your populace poorerand therefore more willing to degrade the en>ironment for a better quality life
In broad strokes I tend to agree. I think there is a fairly good path to moving most things to electricity and in turn moving most electricity generation to renewables.
The more nuanced view is that I would support a residual use of fossil fuels for niche applications that require the properties of the fuel in instances where no known substitute solution would do the job.
By and large, renewables are marching towards a state where they will provide enough of the generation that what remains would be insignificant.
I would be interested to know where the gas is coming from for this particular data centre. There are a few cases that generation by gas is preferable to what is happening right now. One good example is if the gas is from sources that would otherwise be flared off. I have heard in the past that businesses have been reluctant to harness energy from gas rather than flaring it off because any user of the energy gets tagged with the CO2 emissions. If it just gets burnt off it makes no difference to the amount of total emissions, but it avoids the CO2 being attributed to their industry.
While a good point, it also creates lock-in effects. If you look at the top EV adopters, they barely use gas power. This likely isn't a coincidence.
Now you will have the AI lobby pushing against EVs (so that oil drilling can create gas as a byproduct), as if it wasn't already an uphill battle in the US...
I suppose EVs are putting pressure on their precious grid.
Worse, EVs start demand destruction for gasoline, which makes the other fractions from the refining process more expensive because gasoline is now a waste product. Or so the crayon chart on the restaurant placemat seems to indicate.
It’s largely associated methane co-produced from oil production in the Permian. The economics of co-production means that the gas is often the cheapest in the nation and can have negative prices during large oil production swings. I believe it went nearly -$10 MMBtu this year at one point.
That would suggest if no-one purchased it, it would just be flared off. Does the negative price come about because of pathological financial conditions, or is it the case that the producers are financially penalised for flaring?
It acts as a negative feedback signal for producers because there is limited physical pipeline capacity. I think there are some financial incentives to reduce flaring for the LNG export market, but only a small amount of gas was flared in that region (less than 5%).
There is a time and place for fossil fuels. I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants (electrifying a commercial kitchen is a massive ask).
> I see too many people scream for electrification in new biuldings yet do not hesitate to operate a backyard grill, or eat out at restaurants
It's not hypocrisy to want things to be better and tolerate that some things are net negative. I have a fireplace and enjoy using it. But it's bad for my kids health and neighborhood air quality. So I use it far less than my parents did theirs. I also don't commute and fly far less than my father did throughout his life.
Life isn't some strict binary, all or nothing affair.
Well, for those who want to ban gas stovetops in new biulding, it is a binary world. The reality is that home cooking is a rounding error in terms of energy usage.
But methane leaks from residential connections are a significant source. Requiring people who want to cook with gas inside or outside to use bottles instead of a piped connection is not unreasonable, IMO.
Side question, what is your native language or autocorrect/keyboard application?
You've spelt "building' wrong twice, the exact same way 'biulding'.
Lol. GrapheneOS. I like it but it does have the worst autocorrect ever, so bad i have disabled it.
It sounds very hypocris to want your things better and tolerate neighborhood things worse.
Ah yes, 20GW of new LNG based power generation is the same as the occasional backyard grill usage, or eating out at restaurants...
Very whataboutism
This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.
In the same way “smoking causes cancer” was a minority opinion in the 50s and 60s.
You hope. People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!
(I think the way through this mess is huge investment in renewables, and that blue states have calamitously dropped the ball by pushing so much data center construction to red states that aren't going to incentivize that.)
"People who believe things you disagree with say the same thing about their beliefs!"
This statement can be applied to literally any topic and it fills me with a dread that is only matched by trying to fathom the inifinite nature of the universe and time. The notion of having good faith, well intentioned debate and discourse around any conceivable subject just feels impossible most of the time.
That was my point. People disagree about this topic. I happen to agree that climate change is a real and imminent problem (though probably not, with the previous commenter, about its solution space). Pointing to public opinion about smoking in the 1950s is a conclusory argument; it doesn't get us anywhere.
The problem is that the two sides disagreeing are not equal.
Unfortunately for your point, their votes count equivalently.
It’s a good thing then we know the science for smoking is bad and too many data centers == bad
A surprisingly small number though. 15%.
> This is, putting it gently, not a majority opinion in the US and especially not in Texas.
Texas is the largest producer of renewable energy in the country.
Yes, because they have open permitting and encourage development. But they are also the largest producers of fossil fuels in the country.
They're actually not the highest on a per capita basis. 3 states produce more than double Texas's, by that metric.
I think you're talking about coal production that's sold to other states. Texas leads in both coal and natural gas consumption by far. Texas produces an insane amount of energy.
Yes, but I wouldn't fault Texas for producing electricity to sell to other states.
And in any case, that lowers Texan per capita consumption even more given that they're not actually consuming all of it.
You seem to have a huge misunderstanding of how big the Texas grid is. And no, it shares almost nothing which is why we had a huge power crash in the freeze of 2021.
>Texas led the nation in energy consumption in 2023, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The EIA reported Texas' total energy consumption was twice as much as California's, the second-highest energy-consuming state, and more than three times as much as third-place Florida. The EIA's State Energy Data System finds U.S. total energy use peaked in 2007. Between 2007 and 2023, Texas energy consumption rose 21% while U.S. energy use decreased 5%.
I have zero idea where you're thinking that Texas exports power, or doesn't use it all, but it's very odd given the plethora of evidence to the contrary.
Doesn't Texas have a separate grid which would mean that they can't sell electricity to other states?
Correct. We have very little cross transfer capability to other grids. Add to that the Texas grid consumes 2x the power of California, so the scales are huge.
Indirect side effect of the fact that you can build things in Texas.
Unfortunately opinions don't change the reality of physical processes.
Fortunately.
It's not majority opinion to be against data centers? One of the largest bipartisan issues of our time, something like 70% of the US population being against it in some capacity (likely even higher)?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...
That poll says Americans broadly oppose data centers in their local area. A poll of all Americans would likely find broad majority support for the construction of data centers in Texas; a poll isomorphic to this one would also find similarly broad opposition to the construction of apartment buildings in their local area.
Reuters/Ipsos did some polling on general sentiment about data center construction nationwide last month. “Building data centers at a rapid pace across the US is mainly a good thing” only 33% support, which is a +15% change from local community buildout but hardly a majority.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-wary-ai-driven-da...
The "9 out if 10 Americans vote to light other Americans on fire" effect.
That is the most American thing I've ever read.
I'm not convinced these two things (data centers vs apartment buildings) are that similar, though there is probably some overlap.
People don't just hate the idea of data centers "in their backyard" the way they do with housing, they also just fundamentally despise the tech companies and personalities who are creating these data centers.
People say this all the time online, but actual opinion polls show otherwise. People generally love Amazon, and have a high opinion of OpenAI (if you're not in the industry, it's not unlikely you don't really know who Anthropic is.)
The underlying principal components of these data center polls are very probably just:
(1) Concern about electrical bills, which are often valid, and noise, which sometimes can be as well
(2) Political polarization (Democrats --- I'm a lifelong Democrat --- are currently getting marching orders to oppose data centers)
(3) Bogus concerns about water.
We spend a great deal more time and energy thinking about DCs on HN than the median poll respondant ever will. And still, the idea that there's striking public opposition to data centers anywhere in the country is hard to support with evidence.
Fortunately, I think the public opinion fever about data centers is starting to break. I'm reading more and more left-leaning stories questioning the narrative. I think there's a good chance this sentiment crystalizes to something more specific and productive, like "stop letting Elon Musk do things".
What polls are you seeing where public opposition is starting to break? All the polling seems to be heading strongly in a negative direction. The Texas governor even had to accept political reality and seem like he was recognizing public anger. At a protest in Salem OR a guy just the other day showed up with a literal guillotine and the CEO had to leave the meeting. People making rational arguments don’t recognize this has become a deeply emotional argument and the emotions right now are broadly not good. It feels similar to the Tea Party movement after 2008.
I'm not seeing polling break, just opinion writing. You're kind of making my case for me when you talk about people showing up to protests with guillotines.
I don’t know if I would trust opinion writing to be predictive of a growing reactive populist movement. I would caution people being dismissive of how angry people are, data centers are just a political focusing mechanism. It will get worse of course if all of this ends with an economic shock.
I agree that a lot of data center advocacy is just incoherent polarization and populism, as evidenced by the guillotines.
It is kind of bonkers if you consider that all of us already had "data centers" in our backyards already.
Every corporation and even most small businesses have had a machine room, wiring closet, or some kind of server shoved into a room, since 30 years ago now. They all had them in every office building you ever drove by, or lived next to, or shopped near. It's simply that people didn't even register them, because none of the general public really sees or knows what goes on in office parks, and behind the tinted corporate windows. It could be as benign as a toy distributor or as wicked as a defense contractor, and from the outside, they look alike.
But they've all had computers, and networks, for decades. And what we are seeing now is consolidation and concentration. The offices and parks and buildings are hollowed out -- they've laid off workers, they've gone WFH, and most importantly, they've gutted their machine rooms and removed on-prem equipment in migration to the cloud. So each and every company that migrated to the cloud has shrunk their own machine room's footprint by X amount that is reflected in data-center capacity by an identical (or perhaps larger) X. And that, of course, means that power, cooling, and resource consumption is not necessarily enlarged, but merely transferred and concentrated into DCs rather than power-hungry machine rooms, humming secretly inside every office building.
I look back to my first job--I worked at an ISP, and we colocated with the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The SDSC was a data center par excellence with the finest machines that ever existed on the floor. And I was still a kid when I'd be admitted to the main floor, I'd walk past a Y-MP, a Thinking Machine, an Intel Paragon, a Nearline Tape Robot, and there were our humble little pizza-boxes, sitting on a table trying to keep up with Usenet. Our own ISP offices didn't even have a machine room of our own, just a rack with a hub--yeah a hub--and a Sparc 2 pizza box to serve the office. We were already "in the cloud", as it were. More or less literally--SDSC was where they tested nuclear weapons, predicted the weather, and explored outer space, through the magic of FORTRAN...
So what people are complaining about is something they can see. If you're dying of cancer for 20 years but you never go to a doctor, you won't feel it. Once you see the doctor, the chemotherapy starts, and then you croak from the chemo. So this building of datacenters is simply bringing this into the open, and into the light. And people are angrily reactive at social media, and techbros, and surveillance capitalism, and AI-job-losses, and corporate hijinks in general, so data centers do give a focus to that futile rage.
But it's futile, and we all depend on data centers already, even before they are built, and we need DCs now to sustain our economy and our civilization as it already is. It's futile to resist and if you want to come in with a tractor to demolish them, you'll be arrested, and the Flock camera attackers will be hauled into prison too, and technology will just impassively march along as a juggernaut with no feelings, no remorse, and no mercy.
It's a pity; we were really nice folks for a few hundred years.
Really living up to the name there. :)
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.
> fossil fuels NEED to stop yesterday
At the current rate it will stop in four to ten centuries.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPXRjoqbcAATWUu?format=jpg
Yes at the current rate but if I drew a line at the 2006 rate of solar growth would it have anything to do with the rate now? How about 2016? I’m down about our prospects for limiting the damage but let’s not be irrationally doomer about it either.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
And that is due to external actors, aka China, not the US and it's policies. We had the ability, technology, and desire to do what China is doing now back in 2006... But instead we made a housing bubble, then we dumped every investment dollar into silicon valley startups to make apps.
Physical limitations dictate it'll stop (being worth it economically to keep extracting) by like 2080 or 2090, but we'll be in way worse shape by then.
That said there has never been argument about whether we are on that trajectory, we want to be on that trajectory
I mean, marginally, any data center (or mall, house, but the numbers involved are smaller) you'll build in Texas is going to be a lot of tons of CO2 just from their added marginal power consumption
Imagine that you need to explain to a type II alien that your species still burns things.
The harder thing would be to explain why your species continues to get energy by burning things despite having multiple alternatives and that many people are deeply ideologically opposed to moving away from burning things.
Or maybe not. Maybe this is a civilizational growing pain these aliens are familiar with. Maybe they went through the same period themselves.
Imagine the type II alien nods with understanding in a human way that your species just isn't ready and it might not ever be as it erases your memory of the encounter and returns to the stars, stopping only to scan your anal sphincter because all the type II civilizations remain puzzled by it.
Or maybe you'd prefer this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbT1fCHOjfI
Imagine they got here without burning anything, ever, in the history of their species.
Once the Ancient Greeks had copper and iron they could potentially do wind and hydro electricity and metal-air batteries - and the civilization would probably go just fine without fossil fuels.
I think they'd give you some leeway if you fired up gas plants to not freeze in the winter, I want to see their faces when you tell them you turned them on because you wanted to generate more digital slop during a climate crisis
Who were you able to entertain with that "digital slop", and how many father's did you disappoint with it?
Why? Because you said so?
So China and India can use all the fossil fuels they want, and other counties too not just them.
But the West has to kowtow to Net Zero / ”Renewables” nonsense?
We’re not buying it anymore.
Everything has tradeoffs.
Destroying the economy and letting low income and poor people freeze in the dark or melt in the sun is passé.
But doesn’t China have the largest rollout of solar in the world?
I believe so, They have also increased their coal consumption.
The #1 increase in world electricity demand is people rising out of poverty. China has been producing the most solar in the world and still hasn't been able to cover their own demand increase with it. Eventually that form of growth will slow down. Sustainability should always look at the second derivative.
It’s worth pointing out that already last year while China’s coal power capacity grew their actual power production from coal fell.
Also need to reduce use of coal in steel production too, yet.
Maybe we should be looking inward as to why solar isn't more easily deployable in the US. Local zoning, permitting, and community opposition are some of the top road blocks there...
Solar needs to address its dispatchability problem before it becomes viable as anything other than a vanity project.
Australia is experiencing this problem now to a limited extent, and is walking in to a disaster scenario with the scheduled shutdown of 5 gigawatts of coal fired electricity generating across three sites over the next three years with nothing in the pipeline to replace that 5GW.
Solar has a problem so it's a vanity project, but coal has a billion problems but it doesn't matter because you can adjust the output?
Like it genuinely sounds like you're suggesting our current terrible system shouldn't even be attempted to be improved unless there's a magic perfect solution to replace it.
The consequences of environmentalists killing nuclear.
there is actually more nuclear pollution thanks to their efforts.
when you burn coal you liberate radioactives trapped in it.
But just think, when the climate collapses and we can’t go outside anymore for large portions of the year, we’re gonna be Really happy we’ve got all this AI slop to keep us entertained!
we'll have cyber-organic bodies by that time which will do fine in the acid rain in 50 C heat with 100 mph light breeze.
The flesh was weak, we have transcended the flesh
"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.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49220350
I wish there was a source of energy that has 100-1000x energy density compare to other sources and it is controllable so capacity factory is close to 100. Ohh wait.
Amazon is also investing in nuclear power for data centers:
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/amazon-updates-s...
However, building new nuclear reactors is a slow process. These reactors aren't expected to be built before the 2030s.
China is currently the fastest at bringing new reactors online. Even there it takes 6-7 years from construction start to commercial power generation, e.g. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-reactors...
Yeah they are betting on everything at this stage.
Unless you're French.
Sorry, best I can do are a bunch of activist hippies.
Don't worry, the solar dude is about enter the chat.
Hang tight because after them, the guys that paid top dollar for their EVs and need to tell you how not it’s not anxiety; but that they really enjoy watching and mentally considering the charge and rate of depletion everywhere they go all the time.
If only we had the technology and ability to produce enormous quantities of energy non-stop 24/7 365, no matter day or night wind or no wind.
BUT NUKES!
All jokes aside, yes, we should invest massively in nuclear.
Nuclear reactors across the US and Europe have been a complete project management omnishambles and consequently have been massively costly and massively late.
SMRs are vapourware and are similarly economically uncompetitive.
Just build solar, wind, and batteries, and we'll worry about solving for the last 15% of electricity demand when that is actually a live problem (for which there are solutions that don't involve nuclear power and don't rely on magic beans being invented).
Large-scale offshore wind projects in Europe are now nearly as slow and sometimes more expensive than nuclear.
Solar + batteries are still not enough for countries that have long and grey winters.
No we shouldn't. Nuclear waste is not and will never be solved. Nuclear meltdowns are real. Also, nuclear is more expensive than wind and solar.
Deaths per terawatt-hour of nuclear is still lower than any fossil fuel per https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Nuclear waste is a nice problem to have, and fairly simple compared to most pollution sources associated with our lifestyle.
No need to worry though, on the current trajectory I doubt our civilization will have the opportunity to deal with it.
Nuclear waste isn't a problem. It takes up a tiny amount of space, and can be reprocessed if necessary.
Nuclear's top 3 problems:
1. Any equipment or substance that is both nuclear and potentially dangerous has some sort of magical mutant super-power to stimulate superhumanly idiotic behavior in a non-trivial fraction of the people handling/operating/managing the equipment or substance. That behavior is almost always coupled with pathological denials - both from the mutant super-idiots and their supposedly non-mutant peers.
2. General population humans are quite aware of problem #1, hence extremely distrustful when any human experts or organizations try to reassure them as to the safety of anything nuclear.
3. That "reprocessing" ain't nothing resembling "put on a lead apron and pour it through a coffee filter". Instead, it's a quagmire of chemicals and processes that'd still be horrific if nothing nuclear was involved, plus weapon proliferation overtones, plus all the problems noted in 1. and 2. above.
Nuclear's top 3 problems:
1. Plant construction is very expensive, and not in small part because people who don't actually understand the technology take every opportunity to tie up construction in the courts and regulatory agencies.
2. General population of humans are quite aware of #1, so even though they know nuclear wins on a technology basis, they know it will be unduly expensive, preferring to knuckle under to the mob instead of doing the right thing.
3. People not familiar with the technology don't realize that while we don't generally do reprocessing in the west, it's primarily due to cost, and that Japan will start reprocessing 800 tonnes of fuel per year starting next year.
The technology is the safest way we have to generate power, and could be the lowest cost if the regulatory environment was adjusted properly. It's just a shame there are so many people who are irrationally opposed.
Sounds like anyone who needs actual, delivered, at-scale power (in the real world) should immediately adopt an "Anything But Nukes" policy.
Vs. those with both the unquenchable zeal and bottomless resources to win a multi-decade crusade to prove that they're Ultimately Right (but no short-term need for electrical power) should embark on an epic quest...
We absolutely should invest in nuclear. We won't have enough with solar anymore. AI and EVs alone have blown our projections off by 1000x at this point. Can't put the genie back in the bottle either.
I'm not saying there are no risks, but if we don't start making more nuclear power companies, Elon will and he will go from $1T to $8T. Who am I kidding, he's probably the only one that can turn them around in 2yrs with nextgen tech. Everyone else is going to keep faking it and build them in 20 years for 100x budget.
We also haven't solve carbon waste, and carbon waste seems like a dramatically larger problem than nuclear waste.
Not considering this tradeoff has led to much carbon waste.
Its literally solved decades years ago.
Nuclear material literally came out of the ground...m you can put it back..we have literally infinite amount of rock under us
The problem is keeping it out of the water table.
We absolutely will solve it. That's called fusion.
I've no doubt that fusion will be solved, technically.
I am hugely skeptical that it will be solved economically given that it suffers from many of the problems currently pricing coal and nuclear out of the market.
You don't even need that. Fast breeder reactors are enough.
while at it you might as well argue for highly enriched fuel for compact SMRs.
the politics of the threat of proliferation kills it in the crib.
I'm fine with this, recent geopolitical events showed that proliferation might have deterred the world's biggest bullies.
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.
24/7 365 - unless it gets warm, of course. Luckily that's not going to be- oh no
It seems strange for this article to word this as a new or unusual source of pollution, natural gas is the primary source of energy in the US, adding 10% to existing thermal fleet in ERCOT https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards is not a huge deal and its disingenuous to say this one plant will become a "top source of US pollution".
Solar generation buildout in ERCOT is also proceeding very quickly, the new Tesla megapack factory outside Houston and proposed new solar factory will help speed up the transition to sustainable energy.
It's also, as the article points out later, a permitted cap, not an emissions estimate. New plants generally have permitted caps far higher than their expected emissions.
I'm so old I can remember when ars technica published actual technical content.
The article says "could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States".
All to power the generation of text nobody wants to read, images nobody wants to see and video nobody wants to watch.
enshittification accelerators
Why do we put so much focus on CO2 emissions?
Sure, climate change is bad and has the potential to disrupt and end the lives of many in the future. But other forms of air pollution like pm2.5 particulates in the air are already causing an estimated 5 million premature deaths per year as well as a slew of other health problems including lowering of IQ.
> Why do we put so much focus on CO2 emissions?
Any amount of focus would be "so much".
I gather you believe other people pay too much attention to CO2.
That the planet is warming suggests to me they do not pay enough.
> I gather you believe other people pay too much attention to CO2.
Why would you think that? I care a great deal about the environment.. I've been working on several reforestation projects for the last 5 years.
I wish there was 100x more funding for CO2 emission reduction. But it frustrates me far more how little attention pm2.5 pollution gets. I live in Asia and see the effects that pm2.5 pollution has on 100's of millions of people every day.
Why not both?
You raise the temperature, polar ice melts, and then the real fun pollutants enter the atmosphere. You can't be serious.