The thing that gets me is why the hell are these things being powered with loud generators and fossil fuels? These facilities are billed as being 21st century technological marvels. But what's actually delivered looks like something out of the industrial revolution. Harvesting old jet engines from decommissioned planes in order to power your facility? You've got to be joking.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to get private investment for solar farms from multi-trillion dollar market cap firms and we're squandering it in order to construct noisy, polluting behemoths that belong firmly in the prior century. Talk about wasting our political capital.

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WorkingDead an hour ago | parent [-]

How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered? The only on-the-shelf low carbon tech with the reliability and deployability we need is nuclear. Any other discussion is just pointless.

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stdgy an hour ago | parent | next [-]

This is a good example of feeling like I've been transported back in time. A time before people had an answer to the question: How can I use a computer if I've disconnected it from the grid? (I guess that takes us back to 1980)

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stetrain an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> How do you run the data centers during the night if they are solar powered?

A combination of battery storage and grid power, which is generally quite cheap overnight if current off-peak and on-peak pricing is any indicator.

I do not see any evidence that nuclear is quickly and economically deployable. The latest nuclear expansion to come online in the US took 15 years, 35 billion dollars, and resulted in power bill increases for customers to pay for that cost. If we can actually solve that it would be nice, but it hasn't been shown yet.

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WorkingDead an hour ago | parent [-]

Neither of those get to the carbon neutral point of the whole endeavor. Just more complicated steps to shuffle the deck chairs around. Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. The costly part is a political and regulatory problem that is more easily solved than paving over all the farm land with solar panels or strip mining third world countries for lithium.

	▲	stetrain an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Nuclear power is just magic rocks that get hot, put them in the water to make steam for the turbines. Oh I see, I didn't realize it was so simple. Let's meet back in a week and we can compare my backyard solar + battery demonstration to your nuclear demonstration.