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Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020
Dionysius, God of Wine and Leaf, writes with a link to a New York Times story on a source of pollution that doesn't leave contrails: "The world's data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co. ... [C]omputer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance."
Data centers, though, might have more options for going green than airlines do, given present technology.
Hardly.
Most datacenters are contracted out. The companies hiring the datacenters do so based on price. And clean fuels have an enormous amount of catching up to do if they ever want to compete with coal. But let's say that a carbon tax is applied. Then these datacenter contractors will simply move their operations to somewhere that doesn't have these taxes. Heck, why do you think there are so many datacenters in the US?
But what if the companies hiring these datacenter contractors decide that they want to be green? Then these datacenter contractors will simply do some half-assed unproven carbon-offset like dumping iron into the oceans or planting trees in a place that can't support them (cheap real estate like tundra or desert wins here--especially if it is done in the 'future' while the offset company is preparing its sites).
The only real solution is the one that applies to the entire electricity grid. Either you need to massively subsidize renewable fuels or slightly subsidize nuclear power to deal with your entire electrical grid carbon problem. You have to do subsidies because you are competing with the energy prices with places like China.
Excellent, the faster this planet's resources are used up the faster we start using other planets resources.
...to play warcraft.
Aiso.net is a smallish hosting provider utilizing ACTUAL SOLAR to power their datacenter,
NONE OF THIS CARBON TRADING MALARKY. And they're super flexible because they're not huge yet.
Located in San Diego I believe. Phil, their big tech cheese, is VERY generous with his time.
Vote with your feet, clean with your wallet, live by your choices.
Data centers need electricity, not jet fuel. There are many semi-environmental ways to generate electricity. At some point companies will do that purely out of cost saving.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
let me ask you this - what resources would be consumed if we DIDN'T use computers for these jobs? how many forests would we cut down to store the data in the worlds data centers?
i think people who write this kind of dribble lack any perspective. computers are energy savers, not wasters.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I went to a seminar on building new data centers. There we a part about location of new data center. The favorite places in Europe were France and Germany, because of cheap power generated by non-polluting nuclear power plant.
I am aware of the end-of-life problem surrounding nuclear power, but you got to admit that if your goal is to avoid burning stuff, you cannot get any better than this. Especially in crowded, not-so-sunny Europe, where you cannot even make a "what if we paved the desert with solar cells" hypothesis.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Existing computers hog power whether they are computing or not. Whats needed perhaps is a way to allow them to consume power only when computing. Technologies to better pool resources would also be nice.
Table-ized A.I.
The average X86 server running a single app utilizes about 5% - 10% of it's resources. The average server running VMware utilizes 80% - 120% of it's resources (due to CPU scheduling, transparent page sharing, etc.) It's no wonder that every major datacenter is switching to VMware as the default x86 platform. Buy up that VMware stock, kiddies - it's the next Google!!!
Always good advice to live by.
Anyone else remember when "pollution" was stuff like sulfuric acid, low-level ozone, toxic chemicals, and stuff like that? Carbon di-oxy-ide, who'da thunk, eh?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
At the late 19th century steam engines were well established technology for shipping, trains and factories but they were very inefficient. Somewhere in the range of 15%. By the early 20th century steam power was at least twice as efficient (maybe more). Today most servers in data centers run around 15% utilization, doubling the utilization will slow the increased need for power. Virtualization, efficient parallel programming, thin client and network centric computing all have potential to double the efficiency of data centers. What would really be a breakthrough is a hybrid plane. Maybe with wireless power from space.
The article's claim is probably not true. While the amount of electricity used by data centers has been greatly increasing, that's only because so many new ones are being built. Eventually, we get to the point where everyone and their dog has their own data center, and the trend stops. Also, Moore's Law means that data centers in the future will do more work with less hardware and less electricity. Trying to predict how much electricity will be used by computers in 2020 is silly, because even Intel can't know that.
At least when it comes to my customers, the stuff that lives in datacenters is there - at least in part - to support distributed workers. In droves, they are shifting towards working from home, avoiding a lot of transportation-intensive face time, and learning to take advantage of not having to have their same back-office systems humming in a closet in a rented office where nobody shows up any more, except to reset the router so they can go back home and get some damn work done.
Some newly used rack space in datacenters actually offsets other daily fuel burning - sometimes a lot of it.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't want my datacenter to start using doing things in a supposedly "green" way for any of the following reasons:
a) because a government forces them to
b) because an activist forces them to
c) because they think it'll be a selling point
d) because they believe its the Right Thing (tm)
The ONLY reason that I want my datacenter to switch to "Green" power is if and when it is CHEAPER to do so.
Any other reason will make data more expensive, slowing down the economy. It will be rife with unintended consequences. It will be more feel-good, accomplish-nothing "Green" activism.
How about we build some refineries for the short term and nuke plants for the long term, and solve everything?
People that make such sweeping claims as this crap just light my fuse. They want to complain, and it seems their only point is to offer compromised solutions... Its like they fell like they're being helpful by getting in the way. If people would just start thinking realistically about these problems and allow the building of Nuclear Power plants, this problem would be solved. But it seems that these people don't want solutions, they want to complain about something. All they can do is point to a NEAR catastrophe, which was a mere accident at 3 mile island 30 years ago. Give. Me. A. Break!
You get more radiation from eating a BANANA than you do from living next door to a nuclear power plant. And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
this will help elleviate such concerns.
Or we could go back to trying to do nuclear powered aircraft. This image depicts a single prototype engine--its resting place is in southern Idaho.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
However the problem is that significantly more than "5 nines" of people cannot think far enough ahead to factor in the *real long-term economic impact" of what they're doing.
Seriously, if you could factor in *all* the really really really long-term implications (ie "costs") of most things people do today "in modern society" you'd be truly horrified.
So let me repeat myself, in order to be *really* clear about this - "The Economy" is *all* about money, but when people say "it's not economical" what they really mean is "it's hard to justify based on short-term returns", where "short term" is "before I die/retire/get voted out".
NOBODY who is thinking about "the economy" is actually factoring in the financial impact out to (for example) 200 years (or 500 years) from now. (and if you're one of those people who think that what we do now will be irrelevant by then, you're mentally incompetent and should not be in a position responsible for *any* decision making whatsoever ).
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
A cursory look at a map shows that most of Africa is in the Northern Hemisphere--my eye says about two thirds. I didn't have a great map to look at, but some of Africa is more northerly than Texas or Florida.
I'll bet there's a huge consulting wing at McKinsey, waiting to help you redesign your data center.
While it's true that cost savings aren't being seen because data center/NOC design is state-of-the-art 1995, there's lots being done to achieve better savings. Virtualization (while not green, still a good performance/watt idea) works wonders. SaaS is in its infancy. Higher storage/watt is here, today, as well. Until we find the end of Moore's Law, we'll continue to be more efficient, if only because energy==money.
The whole thing smells of consultants wanting money, rather than citation of methods that pursue more efficiency. Maybe Iceland still needs to be the data center of the earth (think geothermal, and they have mindless amounts), but TFA is largely specious.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
do you know anything about physics or airplanes? What would you envision a "hybrid" airplane does that's "hybrid"? For reference, airplanes run the engines at very close to max efficiency; they're optimized and flown in 2 fairly narrow operating ranges ... climb and cruise. The engines are sized and optimized for that. They're not at all like wheeled vehicles that need continuous performance from 0-150 KPH.
John
AC has a very good point. Go virtual. Less hardware = less power consumed.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I may just be ignorant, but...is there something specific about the airline industry that makes it a bad thing to surpass it? I haven't seen actual numbers on emissions for airliners, but it seems like we could drum up some other things that burn more fuel. Like, oh, I don't know, the *auto industry*? What about manufacturing plants? Chemical/pharmaceutical facilities? Any class of facilities that process raw materials?
But of course the randomly selected slashdotter has some vested interest in data centers, so we're all for any solution that doesn't involve taking away our servers. What? We are. We seem pretty ready to jump all over people who say global warming isn't real or isn't man-made. We're eager to denounce big energy corporations for milking fossil fuels for all they're worth. But as soon as someone talks about regulating *our* stuff because of energy consumption or emissions, we want to pursue other options.
The reason we have the impact we do on the environment is that there are just too damn many of us, and not many are volunteering to leave the party. Instead, they're inviting their kids over.
And I'm no one to talk, either. I've procreated a little more than my fair share, and my wife won't let me redress the balance. But still, global warming proves that we finally have reached the point where our numbers are detrimental to humanity's welfare. And eating less meat, driving less often, recycling more, etc. just postpones the inevitable reckoning: there needs to be fewer of us, not more.
That, or we colonize Mars. Preferably with penal colonies-- like Australia in the 1800's.
If you post it, they will read.
By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?
First, which side gets the data centres used by the airlines?
Second, what idiot is predicting the relative growths and advancements of two industries twelve years from now?
Let me guess, airlines won't pollute as much because most of us will be in our flying cars.
Shut up.
What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Although the other thing typical of tundra environments is the lack of sunlight, which may be more of a problem than the cold.
For those of you who are keeping score on who's talking the talk and who's walking the walk I offer this:
A tale of two houses
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Servers run at low capacity for two important reasons:
* User load/demand is variable. A lot of the capacity sizing is not for average demand but for peak demand. For example, mail servers see a lot more use at 1pm on Monday than at 5am on Sunday. Mail servers need enough capacity to deliver an all-company email from the CEO in a timely manner. If you reduce capacity to "even it out", big spikes in email, such as that all-company email from the CEO, cause mail delivery to be delayed many hours. The same applies to many applications -- the servers housing financial apps, for example, might see low utilization most of the year, but when quarterly reports are due, the finance people will be unhappy because the servers are running so slowly. Servers doing network management can go crazy during event storms such as major outages, which is when you most need them to be responsive. Many/most other kinds of servers have their own patterns of variable demand.
* Demand increases over time. Upgrades are far more expensive than energy cost, not just because of new hardware, but because of labor and downtime. Over-specifying a server up-front lets the system go longer without an upgrade, which is cheaper.
Wouldn't going green be easy for most good data centers?
Already have tons of batteries and infrastructure to be able to work off the grid. Diesel generators could be powered by bio-diesel.
Really this is kinda stupid. Data Centers don't emit anything. If the electrical power generators were green, Data Centers would be by default.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
You can go now, I think your tank is getting cold.
What if people who studied economics were actually taught that money is only relative ? - A large pile of money with no food available is totally useless.
So, I think its the *mis*perception that economy is about money that causes some people not to even think about future living standards.
Did you consider, even for a brief moment, that he actually cared about the environment when he had his house designed to consider it?
Was the limited square feet not a clue?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
What percentage of the power consumption of running a data center is cooling? If they were to build a data center in a really cold environment, I wonder if they could pump the resulting heat under the ground in the immediate area, warming it up enough to plant trees...
Planting trees in cold climates would increase warming not decrease or slow it. That's because darker colors adsorb heat. This is happening in the Arctic, ice reflects light but as it melts into liquid water the water adsorbs the light and warms up.
FalconShould there be a Law?
No data center will deposit water in the strathospheric clouds, causing destruction of ozone.
No data center will contribute to the deaths from carconima, that jet airplanes will.
You can run a Data Center off of Solar/Wind/Hydroelectric. Cant do that for jets.
Why not put Data Centers RIGHT IN THE CENTER OF A NUCLEAR PLANT. Its secure!
Economy is about resources. Money is merely one storage medium, and an imperfect one at that.
We require more! BTW you must construct additional pylons!
these people seem to think we won't have super dense storage units or chips in the triple digit terahertz range by then.
Your "data center" may very well sit in a 6x6 foot storage closet in your own headquarters.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Transmission loss over long distances is only a problem with AC. Transmitting electricity as DC at high voltages reduces the loss. Here's a page on using DC in Data centers: Edison's Revenge: Will DC power rise again?.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Can anyone tell me what trolls actually get out of posting this sort of thing? Is there some kind of satisfaction in it? I would have thought that maybe once or twice, someone in a really bad mood may feel it's a way to vent their frustrations, and perhaps an immature kid may do it once or twice "for laughs" (after which, they realise it wasn't actually that funny anyway), but it almost seems there's a dedicated group of people that do this. Bizarre... really bizarre.
Data centres emit absolutely no carbon. Zero.
Electricity generation *can*, but it doesn't need to. The simple fact is that we can generate electricity without any carbon emissions with hydroelectric where available and nuclear where not. There's no justifiable reason to attribute carbon emissions from a coal fired plant to it's clients; alternatives are available, but regulators have dropped the ball in allowing coal to be used.
Knowing that, I'll go make some PCBs in my garage and start burning them in my backyard.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Carbon dioxide is what plants respirate. You exhale it.
I think you have made some interesting points.
However, I think the major issue is this: The people who design datacenters are some of the smartest people in the world. They've certainly thought about the issues. They know the cost of electricity.
They know that Intel is delivering 45 nanometer CPU designs. They know that Intel is working on 32 nanometer CPUs, and that there will eventually be 22 nanometer processors, for delivery in 8 years. Each new processor architecture uses less power. So, the problem will solve itself, to some degree.
The article in the New York Times is ignorant, meant for ignorant readers who don't know any better. Maybe someone took money; maybe the NYT article is really a public relations stunt, a way for McKinsey & Company to attract as clients managers who have little technical experience.
A lot of people who talk about being "green", are people who are green in the sense of having little experience.
That instead of using mutliple individual boxes we have one big main machine which would be designed for virtualisation and fault tolerance.
We could call this new kind of machine a MainFrame or something similar. I'm sure the clever guys at IBM or the other big tech companies could come up with something.
there will be no airline industry in 2020...
With a properly designed power supply, it can be done with over 90% efficiency, possibly even more.
Furthermore, newer data centers tend to be wired with DC power, so that there is only AC/DC conversion at the UPS. DC/DC conversion can be made even more efficient.
Contrast this with running a gasoline engine, which is about 20% efficient.
If people would just start thinking realistically about these problems and allow the building of Nuclear Power plants, this problem would be solved.
Then you'd just be exchanging one set of problems for another.
And while on the subject, I used to think that these people were simply "NIMBY's", the age old Not In My Back Yard type of folks. But these people aren't NIMBY's, These people are BANANAS! Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything. They are flat out anti-progress and they do it in the nicest way "we're trying to help".
I and a lot of other people are all for building geothermal and solar power plants as well as wind farms, even in their own back yards. The state I live in, Minnesota, has a number of wind farms and I'm all for building more. Not only is it relatively clean but it also creates a new income stream for farmers. If I lived in California near Yellowstone I'd be just as supportive of building geothermal plants there as is currently done in Hawaii. And if I lived in Cape Cod I'd be just as supportive of building off shore wind farms.
I say BULLSHIT! You have three choices: Nuclear Power, Agrarian Society, Global Warming. Pick one.
What's BULLSHIT is this. The Rocky Mountains along have almost enough potential wind power to provide all of the lower 48 states with electricity. And as that Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States shows other states have a lot of potential wind power as well. In "A Solar Grand Plan" Sciam lays out how solar power can provide "69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity" by 2050. In "Hot Rocks: Tapping an Underutilized Renewable Resource" Sciam reports how geothermal power plants can provide a lot of energy as well. Since 2000 "a geothermal power plant in northern California" has been powering 750,000 homes. Yellowstone is capable of generating more. In Hawaii geothermal provides the Big Island (Puna) with 30% of it's electricity.
FalconShould there be a Law?
http://www.solarhost.com/ looks like it is extremely unreliable.
Seeing as how my ISP couldn't find it I'd say it's totally unreliable. However I found it about 10 years ago and it was up for years.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If your business saves money by using information technology it most likely *prevents* pollution.
IT improves efficiency. Efficiency is generally improved by not wasting things. Things that take energy and other resources to manufacture, ship, etc. And what of the business trips that have been saved by better messaging and communication services?
And anyway, data centers require electric power. We have mature technology to produce base load electric power cleanly (nuclear) and we are well on the way to develop other technologies to an equivalent level of maturity (solar thermal, geothermal, etc). For some reason we choose not to this technology and continue building dirty coal plants instead.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. Are tundra areas typically covered with snow most of the time? I just had a look in wikipedia and a lot of the examples were more rocky than snowy, and also with grasses and small plants. It also depends on how much difference a few trees would make to the albedo of the earth at that latitube vs the lower carbon footprint of the data center (due to less cooling requirements) and the carbon that the trees themselves are sucking out of the air.
On a related note, how often are data centers that happen to exist in cold climates built to redistribute the heat throughout a building, potentially offsetting the heating costs? (that is, for example, pumping the heat into other parts of the building instead of into the atmosphere)
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Respiration: cellular respiration: the metabolic process by which an organism obtains energy by reacting oxygen with glucose to give water, carbon dioxide and ATP (energy).
Photosynthesis is what, in plants, takes CO2 out.
Don't be an idiot. "Exists in nature" doesn't mean "green". Not unless you enjoy tasty, tasty arsenic.
CO2 is a problem because the amount of it is changing rapidly, and that's causing the climate to change. It's not "destroying" the climate, it's changing it, and, yes, there's good reasons that's bad.
The simplest reason is that we've optimized our activities - particularly farming - to the current climatic patterns, and changes in those patterns will require (costly and inefficient) changes in our activities. Consider, for example, the drought over the last few years in Australia, which has slashed the exports of what is traditionally a major grain exporter; that's the kind of disruption climate change can bring.
That is why CO2 is a pollutant - because it makes the world a harder place for humans to live in. Saying "but it's natural!1!" is just as stupid as saying "lead is natural, so you must not mind being shot."
After all, you have to boil the oceans to use a ZFS storage pool.
Wouldn't it be possible to efficiently capture and reuse the heat generated by data centers to convert it to some sort of power? Energy is not my specialty, but I spend a lot of time in rack bays and I can tell that even with good air conditioning, the amount of heat generated is huge. Can't we use some of it to generate power? Right now it's pretty much wasted : lots of hot air is compensated by sending even more cold air, so that the average temperature is acceptable (around 19 C). What if we properly extracted the hot air and made something useful with it?
This brings up an important point about "Stealth Emitters" of greenhouse gasses. There are many products out there touted as "saviors" of the planet that are actually more damaging and polluting than the "non-green" products they intend to replace.
Most people don't think that the computer they leave on all the time because it takes too long to boot is just sitting there churning out mercury, sulfur, NOx gases, and of course CO2, all back at the coal-fired power plant that is providing its electricity.
The data center at my office (of about 300 employees) is on 24x7 and consumes an entire 3-phase 208V circuit - about 20kW. This doesn't even include the 400+ workstations that are required to be left on 24x7 so that updates and security patches can be pushed every night.
I wonder how many power plants we could simply turn off if we were not to leave millions and millions of computers on all the time.
I won't get into listing other Stealth emitters, but they are not hard to find in our homes, on the road, or on some commercial rooftops.
So wait... you are saying for something which is used by a significant part of the worlds population every day it still takes 12years until it exceeds something, which is mainly used by a few percent of the inhabitants industrialized, rich countries (http://www.transtats.bts.gov/, 660Mio Pass/Year are less than 2Mio/day -> like one percent flys each day).
Yea, thats a funny comparison i should say. it's like calculating when China will overall consume more drinking water than the US.....
Not only that. Tundra's also contain large amounts of organic matter in a frozen state (permaforst). Thawing them would release a huge amounts of methane and carbondioxide. The biggest worry is that that would result in a runaway greenhouse effect.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
You aren't. But one day soon you won't have the right to run your air conditioner in your home whenever you want, either. Utility companies have already started handing out "free" control units to their customers, which allow them to shut off your AC whenever they want. This program is of course voluntary - for now. One day soon you'll also be forced to start using those God-awful blue-light-emitting, headache-causing, mercury-filled CFLs in your home, too. Then the quality of the light in your home will equal the quality of the light in your cube. Won't that be wonderful? And won't it be wonderful when people toss all those CFLs out with their regular trash, and they end up in in landfills where they break and release their contents into the environment? And you think other countries are pissed at us now? Just wait until large portions of the world's population start dying off because we'd rather burn our food in our cars than keep the market flooded with cheap staples.
Hmmm... i guess we'd better let the permafrost stay frozen then
Is the heat coming out of my laptop?
brrr!
Big news folks: using electricity (from our current grid sources) means releasing carbon! This is equally true of every use of electricity. Manufacturing, office HVAC, home HVAC, municipal services, and many other segments use lots of electricity, too. Data centers are not more evil for emitting carbon than anyone else. The report's focus should not be how much total carbon data centers emit, nor how fast that number is growing.
The focus should be whether there is opportunity in data centers to produce the same useful work for less carbon. To that end, the report should state its assumptions -- (a) that data centers consume most of their power inputs whether they are fully utilized or not and (b) that power consumption doesn't rise significantly as utilization goes up. If those things are true, then the data centers can improve efficiency on their end without having to get others to change the grid for them. (Not that changing the grid would be a bad thing, but it's less in the data centers' control.)
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Do so many countries buy corn from USA then? Maybe it will help instead because you can make your fuel within USA instead of buying etanol from Brasil and then they can make food instead of sugar canes?
Regarding CFL most of my light in my appartment are those, I live in Sweden but I just have them here at home so far and would never throw them with regular garbage, and I hope most other people wouldn't either. I don't know about the non-swedes living here thought, maybe they don't understand (or care) where to throw it. Most of them don't seem to understand that where to throw the garbage at all but just leaves their bag on the ground at random locations...
Delivering mail is very simple and IO bound. More processor power won't help get the email out faster.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
There is no technology in existance that can provide all of the USA's electricity without carbon, except for nuclear. Things like wind and solar can only provide about 10-15% of the USA's current demand because they only work when the sun shines and the wind blows.
Anyway, 80% emission reductions by 2050 would require that the USA give up a bunch of things, like cars, air conditioning, TV, hair dryers, air planes, buses, and computers. That is because the presidential candidate likes to toss out pleasant figures like 80 by 50 without consideration of reality.
Population growth makes 80 by 50 impossible without a transforming technology like a nuclear powered economy with hydrogen transportation and storage of energy. It's not impossible to achieve, but politicians only like to talk about happy, fuzzy goals absent concrete plans to achieve them or admiting that they are extremely expensive.
But then again, we now that you might gain very little by planning 500 years in the future. Look at Great Wall, Machu Piccht and all other.
Mining and enrichment could theoretically be carbon-free if you used clean nuclear power as the power source.
Nuclear Power is subsidized by the U.S. Government in an interesting way.
In order for the first and any subsequent private nuclear reactors to even be built,
the Congress passed a law capping the amount nuclear reactor operators could be held liable. The operators are required to obtain $300 million per plant in insurance. If claims go beyond that, the industry is on the hook to provide a pool of money to pay claims beyond that $300 million. They are not required to provide this money until an accident occurs and even then, the payments per operator are capped at $15 million per year up to a maximum of $95.8 million. Any amount after that $395 million is to be picked up by the federal government and eventually the taxpayers.
It was felt by Congress that the private nuclear power industry would never get off the ground otherwise because private insurance would never cover potential liability. In addition, GE threatened to get out of the nuclear power business if this law was not passed.
(Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on Governmental Indemnity and Reactor Safety, 85th Cong., 1st sess., 1957, p. 148.)
Also, the government has agreed to ultimately take all spent nuclear waste. That is another function you would have a hard time having private industry take on.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
http://www.flisom.ch/e/index.html
Hackers have long memories. It works both ways.
"By the way, just what IS the ideal average temperature of the Earth, and when was the Earth ever stable at this magical temperature for any appreciable amount of time?"
that's not what is worrisome. what is worrisome is that in the antarctic, the concentration of CO2 gas has NEVER gone above 300 PPM in the past 650,000 years of antarctic ice. As of this year, at the mauna loa observatory (middle of the pacific ocean, as far away from civilization as one can get) we hit 385 PPM of CO2 gas
It's getting about time to start cloning those dinosaurs, because at the rate we're going only cold blooded reptiles will be able to survive the heat without central air.
True, the concentrations in the peak of dinosaur era are estimated as 20 times higher than they are now, but at the current rate of expansion in another 80 years we will have halved the distance to the goal of 'dinosaur CO2 levels' and another 50 years from then and we'll be at the goal line, and you can be assured that any mammal larger than a mouse is going to find itself dead from heat exhaustion, while reptiles come to rule the earth again.
the fact that humans can in 3 generations of their lifespans undo 300 million years of natural changes to the environment is frightening.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The datacenter pollution problem is entirely one of cost---we have ways other than coal to power them, we just have to figure out how to set up the market and subsidies and regulation and whatnot so that the alternative methods actually get used.
Airlines have a bigger problem, because there actually is no other way for them to fly, using current technology.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html simple google search
They may be one of the largest CO2 emitters in the IT industry (and maybe outside of it) due to their huge server farm. Yet they've always stove keep power costs low and green too through custom, innovative sever design. Google probably has the lowest carbon footprint per petabyte.
Uh, given that automobiles and other mechanical devices (especially in industry) have been used for decades now, I don't think we would have been shocked at a prediction of water cooling for chips.
"Hmmm... i guess we'd better let the permafrost stay frozen then :)"
Yes.
And so you go into why really is global warm so worrying. It is not the "pure" situation that average temperature grows 5 C degrees. It's not even that large amounts of people living near the seaside will need to migrate but the "collateral" effects: if permafrost "defrosts" it will reduce albedo and will rise CO2 levels by itself; if polar ices go backwards albedo reduces again and more of the Sun heat will be retained. And some global ocean fluxes will change and so will do the ability for C3 crops to grow and the cascade effect while certainly not affecting life as a whole will indeed affect human life worldwide *very* greatly.
It even doesn't really matter if it is human-caused or not but if we will be able to survive as a civilization on a climate and an atmosphere like that of the Jurassic (hint: not currently, not without paying a tremendously high price).
Computers don't pollute, coal power plants do.
You just got troll'd!
Data Centers Expected to Pollute More Than Airlines by 2020... if we stop right now developing our computers and energy sources.
The ideal average temperature of the Earth is of no importance - the questions is: What is the ideal average temperature for us.
The hole stuff is more selfish then the green want to confess: We want an Earth where we can live in comfort.
Martin
Planting trees in cold climates would increase warming not decrease or slow it.
Hmmm... hadn't thought of that. Are tundra areas typically covered with snow most of the time?
It depends on where the tundra is I guess. Arizona has tundra, approximately five square kilometers of alpine tundra exist above 3,500 meters on Mt. Humphreys in the San Francisco Peaks, yet I somehow don't think it's covered with snow most of the tyme.
I just had a look in wikipedia and a lot of the examples were more rocky than snowy, and also with grasses and small plants.
Also check the Google image search results for tundra biome. I may be wrong but I wouldn't think the rocks would adsorb as much heat as trees and the grass and small plants don't have the mass a tree does.
It also depends on how much difference a few trees would make to the albedo of the earth at that latitube vs the lower carbon footprint of the data center (due to less cooling requirements)
Actually the heat generated in the server rooms could be used to heat the rest of the buildings.
and the carbon that the trees themselves are sucking out of the air.
The effects o CO2 levels on tree growth appears to be varied, some research is showing some trees grow slower in CO2 rich environs while others show some plants grow faster. Poison Ivy is one of the plants that grows faster, ready to be itchier and have more rashes?
FalconShould there be a Law?
if permafrost "defrosts" it will reduce albedo and will rise CO2 levels by itself;
With the permafrost melting the CO2 released isn't as big a concern as the release of methane will be. Decomposing dead plants sinking into lakes creates a lot of methane which is 20 tymes more effective as a Greenhouse Gas than CO2.
Another fact that some don't know about is that high CO2 levels in the atmosphere turn the oceans acidic which threatens marine animals adversely, especially shellfish. The acid eats the shells.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It seems France is using Fast Breeder Reactors. From "Science Magazine" dated 1980 "Breeder Reactors in France". Ok, Sciam says France shut down it's breeder reactor, but it doesn't say why. However the nuclear waste, or reprocessed fuel, wasn't the only problem the Spectrum article said the French had, they also had all the toxic chemicals left over from reprocessing.
I admit research may solve all the problems with nuclear power, but so can research with alternative energy sources, geothermal, solar, wind, and others. And with these others, whereas nuclear power requires massive centralized plants that when decommissioned can't be used for anything else, they can have distributed and decentralized electrical generation. I think the energy problem comes from centralized power generation. Another is waste, conservation measures can cut the US's energy needs down a lot as well as waste heat going up smoke stacks when it can be recovered. As more and more Off Gridders are showing simple conservation measures can go a long way to satisfying US energy needs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yea politics matters more than science.
I don't know about this treaty. But it does appear to be a pretty flimsy argument.
Yea a lot of treaties the US signed were flimsy as the US broke them.
If Yucca is used then I think vitrification should also be used. Another possible storage may be Sub-Seabed Disposal in Stable Clay Formations. I admit something needs to be done, the waste that's already been generated needs to be safely stored, but what I think needs to be done is to close operating nuclear power plants and use alternative renewable energy sources such as geothermal, solar, and wind. If there's going to be subsidies then these should be the ones subsidized.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If and when I go Off The Grid I want to build a hybrid system and use solar, wind, or other systems. Unfortunately I don't believe I will ever be in such a position though, I have a permanent disability and don't work.
FalconShould there be a Law?
you can build it all with scrap, and I just saw a mig with gas in a pawn shop for $175... well, you can build all but the inverter with scrap :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
you can build it all with scrap, and I just saw a mig with gas in a pawn shop for $175... well, you can build all but the inverter with scrap :)
I might be able to build an alternative energy system however as I live in a city, and not suburbia, and I rent an apartment so I don't know if I'd actually be able to use it. Again though I don't think I will I hope to go to Brazil for a year as part of a study abroad program, while there I'd like to get involved with something like it. If I can go then when I come back I'll be in a better position to do it with my own place.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Why come back? :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Why come back? :)
To get the degree. If I go it will be through a college's study abroad program. What I'd do afterwards I have no idea.
FalconShould there be a Law?