I wonder if they can use the same cooling tower for their nuclear plant and their data center? Colocating fission reactors and datacenters might be a way to get some use out of all those empty malls resulting from amazonification.
Bluestein · 4h ago
This should become industry standard. Well thought out.-
duxup · 9h ago
Couldn't you get the cooling of the ocean from just pumping water through pipes in the ocean and then onto land? And if nitrogen was a big benefit, couldn't you do that on land too?
Not knocking the experiment, it seems very interesting / worth seeing what happens.
Bluestein · 9h ago
I am sure this has got to have been tried before ...
(Then again, pumping the water would consume some energy ...)
more_corn · 8h ago
Yeah Google built a data center in an old paper mill in Norway. They use ocean water to cool the heat exchangers. It’s important not to let the salt water in. Things get a lot more difficult then.
duxup · 7h ago
I suspect it is similar underwater ;)
stevage · 6h ago
Good that this didn't become a trend. Oceans warming is one of the huge threats of climate change, we really don't need to help it.
2four2 · 6h ago
A data center is a near-zero contribution to ocean warming.
stevage · 5h ago
You know if you add enough small things together, they become a big thing, right?
kristjansson · 4h ago
You're not wrong, but not all values of big are equivalent.
e.g. volume of the worlds oceans is ~1e21 L and annual global energy production is ~3e16 Wh = ~1e20 J
1e20/(1e21*4e3) = 0.000025 ΔC
So even all world's energy production dumped into the ocean as waste heat is a minuscule direct effect. It's all in the second order effects of generating that energy...
stevage · 4h ago
What about the local effects of raising water temperature? (In the scenario where a large number of underwater data centers were built near each other)
kristjansson · 1h ago
Yes of course, local impacts would be more pronounced. Wouldn’t want them near coral or anything.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument for underwater DCs. I just think it’s important to keep the scales of these things in view, so one doesn’t dilute actual causes of large scale climate change (GHGs etc.) with things like this that have basically zero chance of any even mesoscale effect.
asacrowflies · 3h ago
It's generally bad and kills local eco system with algae blooms and messing up seasonal cycles of nutrients/food. But that's just with dumping the heat into environment especially in freshwater river based reactors and a pretty raw system of dumping hot water into the river ...
Clever use of physics and cooling towers allows us to mitigate the problem..release the energy slowly over time or use the thermal for something else.but costs a lot more than just dumping it into ocean and doing lazy misleading napkin math.
Bluestein · 3h ago
I am starting to be convinced that anything we do (at scale, over time) will become "counter-environmental" ...
... it is as if the only thing that suits our poor planet is some sort of very delicate homeostasis, which we disrupt, in what amounts to, our fight against entropy.-
Mars008 · 6h ago
Add to that it was done in the North where ocean's cooling is needed for Golf stream to keep circulating.
EugeneG · 5h ago
Don’t ever pee in the ocean … to avoid accelerating global warming
dublin · 6h ago
Hacker News is getting really useless. I thought I'd heard this some time ago, and yep, clicking through,this is indeed "news" that is OVER A YEAR OLD.
Are we just completely ignoring the "News" part of Hacker News now?
Not knocking the experiment, it seems very interesting / worth seeing what happens.
(Then again, pumping the water would consume some energy ...)
e.g. volume of the worlds oceans is ~1e21 L and annual global energy production is ~3e16 Wh = ~1e20 J
1e20/(1e21*4e3) = 0.000025 ΔC
So even all world's energy production dumped into the ocean as waste heat is a minuscule direct effect. It's all in the second order effects of generating that energy...
To be clear, this isn’t an argument for underwater DCs. I just think it’s important to keep the scales of these things in view, so one doesn’t dilute actual causes of large scale climate change (GHGs etc.) with things like this that have basically zero chance of any even mesoscale effect.
Clever use of physics and cooling towers allows us to mitigate the problem..release the energy slowly over time or use the thermal for something else.but costs a lot more than just dumping it into ocean and doing lazy misleading napkin math.
... it is as if the only thing that suits our poor planet is some sort of very delicate homeostasis, which we disrupt, in what amounts to, our fight against entropy.-
Are we just completely ignoring the "News" part of Hacker News now?