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Biden drafting plan for construction of AI data centers on federal lands
(www.washingtonpost.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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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.