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Comment by badc0ffee | Hacker News Reader

I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).

Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.

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Gas furnaces and stoves are known polluters of indoor air: https://www.psehealthyenergy.org/gas-stoves-and-indoor-air-p...

Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.

That is true of gas stoves, but gas furnaces don't exhaust into the house.

Lower efficiency gas furnaces don’t have a completely sealed exhaust and rely on a draft for pollutant evacuation. This usually works good enough when properly installed and maintained but can be a source of indoor air pollution. Although typically minimal.

And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas heating devices which exhaust into the home.

But gas turbines do vent to their neighbors’ air, which is the main point here.

>I'm a bit skeptical about this. I know diesel generators make these kind of pollutants, but I haven't heard the same about natural gas.

it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.

What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.

Burning gas always creates stuff you don't want to be breathing. These small portable turbines were allowed to run dirtier than a full-size NG plant because the premise was that they are small and temporary. But then xAI put 40 of them in a parking lot and fired them all up at the same time, which is quite illegal but xAI also controls the government of both Tennessee and the USA, so residents are fucked.

You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.

They certainly can emit NOx. The common technology used today to reduce this is called Dry Low Emissions (DLE - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_low_emission). Emissions can be very low if done correctly.

Global issues start locally. See: tragedy of the commons

Check the map. There's an operational industrial scale natural gas power plant next door to xAI facility. And it was there for what, a decade already? Before it, there was a coal power plant there too.

Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.

That plant is subject to regulation and the xAI turbines evade regulations by claiming they are "portable".

I just looked, and you're right. It's in an industrial area several km from homes, and near existing NG facilities, including one where they flare gas.

https://www.facebook.com/abacustrategic/posts/pfbid02rrUwoWM...

https://maps.app.goo.gl/fYwcSi8vfPBnsYeK7

I don't doubt that it is a source of pollution, but I agree that this is overblown in the same was as the claims that datacentres are using up all the fresh water.

It's not overblown. That plant has sufficient pollution filters installed. You can find more info elsewhere in this comment section.

But it's still not localized to the one neighbourhood in the Time article any more than any other in Memphis (or even West Memphis across the river).

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