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Comment by miiiiiike | Hacker News Reader

I’m only talking about my local area. I’m not defending the Colossus sites. I don’t live near them.

It is much more than the Colossus sites, I would look at the capacity additions in the regional grids you are apart of and what is being funded to meet these increases in demand from data centers. The majority of it is natural gas generation and a sizeable but minority amount of battery storage. Just outbidding people for a relatively fixed amount of clean nuclear ignores the second order effects of adding large loads like these. What happens in your area does have larger impacts.

Again, I’m talking about my region. We have a nuclear generating station 16 miles from the proposed site of the data center. That station sells 80-85% of the power generated wholesale to other parts of the state and grids regionally.

The nuclear generating station is part of a larger system. Say you build enough data centers in your local area to use up all the station power so that 80% is no longer exported, what is getting built somewhere else to make up for that missing generation the data centers now use? Its not new nuclear. When you add data center load to a grid how the additional generation is supplied is really what matters in terms of impacts.

We should have been building additional nuclear capacity for the past 50 years. The kinds of anti data center activism we’re seeing now was directed at nuclear back then.

It would take decades to build enough data centers to use 100% of the station’s capacity.

We can build capacity as we build consumers. It’s all about balance.

I also don’t believe that we’re going to be building all of the 1200 proposed data centers in the US.

Being next to a nuclear power plant but attached to a regional grid is not that relevant in terms of total additive emissions from a data center build out. You have to look at the change in emissions of the grid as a whole. Companies are incentivized to care about disclosing a narrow boundary view of scope 1 & 2 emissions but we live in the real world not a spreadsheet.

US electrical emissions YOY increased in part due to data center build out and energy demand.

I’ve made a few comments around this. I’m going to wind down my involvement in this thread.

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