Why chasing the AI dragon may force big tech to take sustainability seriously

It's hard to suppress an eyeroll when the world's largest consumers of datacenter resources talk about sustainability. Putting the planet ahead of profits is often not at the top of the to-do list in large-scale, performance-driven environments. Sure, the hyperscalers talk a good game. Carbon offsets, green bonds, and lofty …

[codejunky]

Eh

It's hard to suppress an eyeroll when the world's green nuts talk about sustainability. Green insanity has brought economies to their knees and the war in Ukraine has exposed how bad an idea the green madness has been.

"What about datacenters powered by wind, solar, hydroelectric, and other sustainable energy sources."

Probably offline or relying on burning of wood chips (and they call that green). And what is the great danger of these datacentres? My guess is nutters using it to 'prove' green madness as our religion of salvation.

[elsergiovolador]

Greenwashing

Carbon footprint is a term designed to control the pleb.

There are already plans that will have your carbon footprint correlated with your Digital ID, CBDC and social credit score. If you go over your limit you won't be able to buy certain products or even leave home until your carbon footprint credit gets topped up with your monthly allowance.

This of course will not affect billionaires. They'll continue to enjoy their private jets and laugh from the skies at the new feudal system they created.

All based on fear mongering.

[Mike 137]

Re: Greenwashing

Meanwhile, almost 40% of the world's populatrion subsists on arounf $2.00 per day and has access to none of the products or advantages of high technologies, but in many cases suffers from the toxic effects of dumping tech kit rendered obsolete by churn.

[Snowy]

Re: Greenwashing

There is no place in the western world where if you live have a place to live that you can live for under $2 a day.

[Richard 12]

Re: Greenwashing

That whooshing sound is the entire bloody point screaming over your head.

Most of the world's population do not live in the "western" world.

[Snowy]

Re: Greenwashing

Sorry I'll correct myself there is no place in the world where you can live for under $2 a day, some 700 million ( no where near 40% of the world population) may subsists but that is not living.

[cornetman]

While I accept that some Data Centre endeavours are probably inefficient and unnecessary, I do take issue with the assertion that data centres that consume large amounts of power are necessarily inefficient or bad for the environment compared to the alternatives.

Many companies are going to off-premise computing solutions as a cost/power alternative to on-premise. Aggregating computing in this manner is absolutely more efficient and better for the planet than every company having their own computing facility. The real measure is not the amount of power that the data centres consume, but what the alternatives would look like.

It might seem superficially awful to look at the electricity bill of a Google/Azure/Amazon node, but when aggregated over the huge geographical that it is typically serving, such an analysis is extremely naive.

[Pascal Monett]

"Where are my nuclear-powered datacenters?"

Good question. Ask Greenpeace, who has developed such a rabid anti-nuclear stance that they have approved, or at least shut up about, Germany's decision to build new coal plants.

NEW coal plants.

We are apparently going towards a civilization of electric cars, ubiquitous smartphones and electric heating everywhere. Diesel fuel is being pushed back as fast as governments can turn a whole population around. Fuel-based central heating is now forbidden in new homes in France.

All that is very nice, but wind and solar are not going to replace and improve on a coal plant. Nuclear does.

Of course, it might be a good idea to abandon the pressure-water reactor technology which was not made to power the grid but to provide plutonium for atom bombs.

We've passed the stage where we need so much plutonium. Any country today that launches a nuclear attack can be guaranteed to be put on ban from the rest of Humanity. Not to mention that you can't control where the fallout goes, meaning that you could very well get some of it on your own territory. Using a nuke is insanity (of course, Trump has no problem with that).

No, the future of nuclear is Thorium. A passively-secured nuclear technology that guarantees two things : minimal radioactive residue and, if anything goes wrong, automatic shutdown of the reaction.

Todays' PWR plants need constant surveillance from several experienced teams working 24/7.

A Thorium-based plant could have one engineer on standby with a pager.

Until we get reliable fusion, Thorium is the only way we are going to provide enough electricity for an ever-increasing load.

[veti]

Re: "Where are my nuclear-powered datacenters?"

Source for Germany building new coal plants?

People have been talking about thorium for 30 years, and it seems we're still nowhere near having a design for a working generator. It's a lot like fusion in that respect.

No, if we're going to build nuclear plants now, today, they'll be PWRs or BWRs, or some equally dirty tech. Which isn't to say we shouldn't do it, but don't try to sell nuclear on the prospectus of something that doesn't exist.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: "Where are my nuclear-powered datacenters?"

Germay saw a massive upsurge in burning of nasty brown coal for power generation - pretty much the worst coal there is - just to keep the lights on when they made the ridiculously short-sighted decision to shut down their perfectly functional nuclear power stations, after Fukishima.

Power stations that were in exactly zero danger of being knocked out by a tsunami.

They weren't buring all that coal before, so how do you think they were able to burn it for power after the nukes were culled?

[veti]

Re: "Where are my nuclear-powered datacenters?"

They reopened plants that had been closed, of course.

That's not the same as building new coal plants. "NEW coal plants."

Please understand, I'm not defending Germany's decision, which was counterproductive. But GP made a very specific claim, even emphasised it, and I haven't seen any evidence for it.

[Jimmy2Cows]

Re: People have been talking about thorium for 30 years...

Google is your friend. Well... your abusive friend, but still...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02459-w

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsindonesia-signs-mou-on-molten-salt-reactor-8055819

The first link is about a prototype being built in - surprise - China.

The second link is an MOU with one of the many companies working in the area of MSRs.

[veti]

Re: People have been talking about thorium for 30 years...

The first is about a 2 MW, yes a whole 2 MW, prototype reactor entering tests in China. "Entering tests" is great, but it's still a fair way from "completing tests", let alone being ready for building at scale, let alone being commercially viable. So far all I can find is a conspicuous lack of bragging about how their tests are going.

The last time an "experimental" reactor was built in the UK was the prototype AGR at Windscale. It was more than 12 years after that before the AGR was considered ready to be built for production, and it became a hugely expensive glowing white elephant that has dragged the nuclear industry down ever since.

The second is about signing an MOU "to study developing a thorium molten salt reactor (TMSR) for either power generation or marine vehicle propulsion". That's right, they haven't even decided yet (as of July 2020) whether they're trying to power a ship or a city. That's ... not evidence of a "working design".

Thorium generation sounds wonderful, but it's still a technology that doesn't fucking exist. So can we please stop talking as if everything was done and dusted and nothing left to do but pour the concrete?

[Claptrap314]

AI...dragon...sustainability

And here I thought that there might be SOME mention of China's abysmal performance on this front. But..nope.

Seriously enforce environment regs on datacenters & you will get serious migration of compute away from the regulation.

Of all places, I would expect El' Reg to understand this.