The only threat to stable and affordable electricity supply is government regulations. The idea that we will from here on just have degrown and decline is insane. I'm not up for that. Which means we will always need more electricity, so time to get building more power plants. There is no bounds to how much electricity humans need, and the more we have the more prosperity we will have
As for water supply. Data centers barely make a blip on the water usage.
> The water, light and noise pollution?
The only one of these which actually has any validity is noise pollution, and the US has one of the lowest population densities of any country in the world, and data centres don't need to be close to population centres.
At least were not at this point yet:
"Mill and factory owners took to shooting protesters and eventually the Luddites were suppressed by legal and military force, which included execution and penal transportation of accused and convicted Luddites."
In most communities these days you’d have better luck proposing to build a toxic waste processing facility than a data center.
While I cautiously circle the AI programming concept, one thing close to my mind has definitely been whether the ultimately cloud-tied nature of it is what makes me much more stand offish to it.
It just doesn't make sense! Surely they were manipulated to hate progress!
vintagedave•37m ago
'The largest estimate for any single facility ever.'
'Minor source.'
I give you double-speak, gentlefolks of HN. Name it something - anything - and you frame it in those terms forever. It will take significant work to not refer to these as 'minor sources' when debating if they are a minor source.
internet_points•23m ago
> Based on Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (VA DEQ) air permit No. 74242, the facility is authorized to operate eight natural-gas simple-cycle turbines and more than fifty diesel generators, including emergency and black-start units
consp•18m ago
docdeek•11m ago
From the researcher: 'We estimated between $53 million and $99 million in annual health damages from associated air pollution — among the largest health-damage estimates produced for a single facility to date.' [0]
Still enormous, but there is a significant difference between being 'THE X of all time, and being 'among the X of all time'.
Regarding 'minor source', in this case the expected additional premature deaths in the research range from 3.4 to 6.5 annually. [1] At the same time, air pollution leads to about 100,000 deaths a year in the US. While tragic at an individual level, adding 0.006% to the annual premature death count is fairly minor, just as reducing the deaths to 999,994 would be considered a pretty minor fix to the issue.
[0]: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/analyzing-air-pollution-health...
[1]: https://www.pecva.org/wp-content/uploads/Health-Impacts-Vant...
[2]: https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/identifying-sources...
vintagedave•7m ago
j1elo•7m ago