I would have gone with "Utah datacenter power use equivalent to 16 Back to the Future DeLorean's".

What is the standard "atomic bomb" unit these days?

uncircle 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Americans love their measurements in football stadium lengths or bananas, but they do not apply very well to thermal units.

Also what is a ‘standard atomic bomb’? Presumably one kept in a vault at the American National Standards Institute for reference.

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kmoser 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> For a pop culture comparison, the fictional DeLorean time machine in “Back to the Future” required 1.21 gigawatts to power the flux capacitor for Marty McFly to time-travel.

This is an absolutely meaningless statistic. It's pretty hard to believe that it would be included in an otherwise informative article.

	▲	yellowapple 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A single datacenter having the requisite power to travel back to 1955 many times over seems pretty meaningful to me.
	▲	estimator7292 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's also completely wrong. Doc Brown's time machine did not require 1.21 gigawatts. Very explicitly, it's 1.21 jigawatts. Completely different unit. What's a jigawatt? It's a movie, neither jigawatts nor flux capacitors are real things.
	▲	casey2 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The article is the opposite of informative, it meaningless comparing an industrial growth sector to residential. 40k residents use a million times more toilet paper a year. It uses about the same amount of energy as a similarly sized steel mill. There were multiple mills that churned out ~3GW a piece 24/7 IN UTAH! The research has been done, but the article won't inform you on that because they want to pander to brainless boomer NIMBY's that would have been gunned down 200 years ago rule over the country like tyrants far outside their worth or rights.

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cratermoon 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Typically, a Fat Man design as tested at White Sands and used on Nagasaki, or 21 kilotons, sometimes 15 kilotons when Hiroshima is used for comparison, as in the HBO Chernobyl miniseries.