Worried the United States could fall behind in artificial intelligence, the White House wants to encourage data centers and dedicated power plants.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/55Ede
Worried the United States could fall behind in artificial intelligence, the White House wants to encourage data centers and dedicated power plants.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/55Ede
Great solution. Poison the ground in ten thousand years so you don’t have to care. You realize there’s enough to make the entire world unlivable for nearly a million years, right? And we’re still producing. A little tiny amount escaped into an ocean in Japan that covers nearly half the globe and it is still detectable in the US, that watered down. Now imagine hundreds of thousands of metric tons seaping into the soil and water table for hundreds of thousands of years from mines all over the world. You realize the deepest mine we’ve ever created barely scratches the surface of the Earth, literally, right. We don’t have the technology to dig deep enough for it to be safe once the encasing cracks.
Wow all of what you said is bullshit or overblown alarmism, bavo bravo. No it wont sterilize the fucking earth, if it was possible the iridium layer would’ve done so eons ago. Also sure we can detect the left overs from Fukushima, but its still lower than the effect most volcanic events have on local water tables since volcanoes actually have quite a bit of raw nuclear material mixed quite toxic too.
You wouldnt need to dig deep enough to chuck it into the mantle, just deep enough to compress it into a particularly exotic ore when you cave the entire damned mine in.
Also the reason I dont care about 10,000 years from now is cause mankind will either be gone, so primitive it doesnt matter, or technologically advanced enough to deal with the problem. As I said all of human history fits into 10,000, years with about 4,000 to spare.
Yeah but only a tiny bit escaped from Fukushima into an ocean that covers a large part of the world and it’s still detectable. And there’s a big difference in the effects of things around you being irradiated and things you eat and drink being irradiated.
And sure in 10,000 years things will be different, but eliminating the possibility for all large animals to survive in a part of the world for a million years after 10,000 seems like a bad plan. And if humans aren’t around or don’t remember, it will be a particularly horrible way to die off when the radiation does start to escape and slowly spread out from each of the dumps across the world.
Its barely detectable the reservoir effect isnt strong enough to do anything, frankly speaking ocean acidification is the bigger problem. Hell im pretty sure the only reason we can detect it in such small amounts is because radiation detection equipment is old, universal, and well developed. The closest second is probably arsenic or lead testing.
Also the reason that I dont considsr it an extinction level threat is because we have had equivalent amounts spewed out through natural means. That is to say there are multiple layers of minerals that are identified via nuclear materials, include ones we traditionally consider synthetic. To put it lightly according to you these layers should all be associated with global mass extinctions but only two of them are, the grest dying which was when Siberia decided it in fact wanted to be a volcanic hellscape and the Yucatan impact aka when an asteroid made sweet love with the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Also as a quick aside the current effect that is going on with animal life in the Pacific from those materials is a recycling effect, basically the animals are pissing and shitting it out of their systems where smaller creatures proceed to eat and and then repeat ad nauseam. The only way the situation could get worse is if the decay rate of said materials increased which is impossible without a reactor.
I’m not saying the Fukushima event will have any lasting effect. I’m saying that the type of materials that were released (I.e. nuclear fision waste) are exponentially more dangerous than any naturally occurring radioactive materials. And that is evidenced by the fact that it’s detectable with all of the other naturally occurring “background” radiation in the ocean already. The fact that such a tiny bit, watered down by such a huge amount of water and animal life, is still detectable means that if a fraction of the current US stockpile of 90,000+ metric tons of material were to leak into the ground water, it would be unimaginably more problematic.
You’re talking about radiation like it’s a single thing. Like, oh because these few types of naturally occurring radioactive materials that are composed primarily of low energy alpha particles exists like radium or U-238, that PU-240 or U-235 or any of the other high level waste coming out of reactors, especially if we start up the old reactors to power AI that produce more weapons grade materials than the more modern ones. There’s a reason you can’t just dig up uranium and build reactors or weapons to use it. It has to be enriched and concentrated.
You really should take a class in basics of radioactivity before considering yourself knowledgeable about the subject. I spent a year studying it in the Navy, and although I didn’t really use it practically that much, it’s always been an interest, so I’ve studied it quite a bit. It’s not as simple as this is radioactive and not that bad so all radioactivity must not be bad. We’re talking tens or hundreds of thousands of times more energetic between some of these things.
I get all of that, the point ive been trying to make is that the risk of them being pollutants is relatively low. The reason I brought up these rare but notable events for example is cause they are so violent as to create traditionally synthetic materials that are extremely deadly, the reason we even know about them is because of highly specific forms of weathering on say fossils or bones with the younger ones.
The problem I have with your pollution point is that there is basically no way for it to all get out and get to everything. A facility failing in Idaho probably wouldnt do anything to California unless Yellowstone went off and at that point we have other problems. Any containment failure would be largely localized events unless they are right on a river or ontop of an oceanic stream. Which to me just means we need to build these reactors qnd their sotrage facilities in infinitely more remote locations. If anything us not having a centralized stockpile makes such a mass containment failure pretty much impossible. 90,000+ metric tonnes of material isnt that much scattered across the US, sure its a lot but for perspective thats about one and half M1 Abrams.
Also im somewhat ignoring your points on variable emitters since without actual numbers we have no clue what it all constitutes. Without numbers half of it could all be materials set aside for depleted uranium rounds or alloys that use spent fuel in production, orr it could be a shit tonne of high energy emitters. We dont know and I kinda doubt the agency in charge of this has public numbers.
Also I agree with you on reactivating these old reactors, I want them upgraded before use preferably ones that can reuse old fuel. Also frankly I dont trust these AI companies to run old reactors, its an annoying amount of work for basically no gain. The only upside is that it may give new fuel towards building modern reactors that have minimal waste and upgrading old reactors. Hell preferably we would have some thorium-plutonium reactors built into the mix.
Problem is that there is currently no actual place to put the stuff so it’s not localized. If a war broke out or a serious terror campaign, the first thing to be targeted would be the locations of power infrastructure and this waste. Not to mention natural disasters or them just being ignored for too long like global warming has been. In a few decades the amount could easily double or more. There’s plenty of it that if it were to reach a major river or other waterway it could spread significantly.
My point is, why risk it when this technology doesn’t even produce as much energy as we could produce with renewables with comparatively little risk of pollution? The only reason it looks good on paper is that no company expects to exist long enough to care about the waste, so no money is set aside to deal with it. Just like no money is set aside to deal with climate change. And even if it was set aside to deal with the current waste by pitting it in long term storage. That storage isn’t long-term enough to actually keep it until it’s safe. Sure it will be safe for a long time, but eventually it will leak and if no one knows it’s there or the tech to deal with it isn’t there by then, it will spread and if will spread far and wide over the hundreds of thousands of years it has to spread. And sure the US is landlocked and may find a place that the tectonic plates never split the continent. But in a million years it’s unlikely that Europe will look the same do it’s likely the Atlantic will get contamination and Japan is a volcanic island so it’s pretty likely it will leak into the Pacific. I’m saying there’s enough in existence already for the majority of the world to get contaminated. And if life hasn’t already been wiped out by climate change or war, it likely will face an existential threat from this. So why use it if there are alternatives that are really not that much more expensive to construct? It’s only because those are less expensive to maintain and thus less opportunity for extracting profit from those services.