I saw a poll recently that people would rather live near a nuclear power plan than a datacenter. That's... their choice, of course, but doesn't seem logical to me.
I have heard several "concern stories" about them on NPR recently. Maybe there is a political component to it. But I do worry there is some kind of manipulation being done.
https://youtu.be/_bP80DEAbuo?si=4XpIb0vb8YjY1g_k
https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?si=EB8zAF0JYHvOB23a
https://youtu.be/3VJT2JeDCyw?si=ak7haiWzbX9O8BL9
Then, tell me if you want to live anywhere near those.
Then, tell me of a nuclear power plant that has that bad a repo.
Also, I thought the response by Benn Jordan on Bluesky was informative. https://blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-benn-jordan-data-center...
> When low-frequency sound becomes strong enough to be heard or otherwise felt, it can cause annoyance, discomfort, and sleep disruption like any other normal noise pollution.
So which is it? Sure, I don’t really believe that there is magical super special harmful noise from a datacenter, but are these monster datacenters emitting disruptive amounts of low frequency sound or are they not?
Wouldn't the question be more simply, Do you want your power bills to go up for the same power used?
And the nuclear accidents that have happend have mostly been overblown (apart from Chernobyl).
A large part of my extended family lives near a large facility. Wind turbines launching ice at the nearby roads is a larger (yet trivial), safety concern.
> The Stratos Project moved forward with far too many unanswered questions around water, power, cost, and transparency.
- Noise (from fans to generators to possible infrasound concerns)
- Air pollution (from data centers semi-permanently running on generators)
- Electricity prices (although I don't understand how this is supposed to work)
- Water consumption affecting the population (water restrictions, price increases, water table dropping)
Many of these are one-sided stories told from the perspective of the residents that I didn't try to verify, but I suspect some of these concerns are legit.
The company building the datacenter has a lot of incentives to cut corners and/or cause some of these impacts, externalizing its costs (e.g. by saving money at the expense of noise emissions, running the DC on unpermitted gas turbines to be able to build a DC where there isn't enough grid, negotiating clever deals that benefit the company but screw over the utility forcing it to raise prices for others, using groundwater for evaporative cooling to make cooling cheaper, etc.)
The company building the datacenter also likely has a lot more experience while the people of the town and the town itself are doing this once, so there is an inbalance in experience that makes it easy for the company to get away with some of these.
There is very little benefit that the people of the area can expect from a data center - as I understand it, there are very few jobs in one past the construction phase, even the construction jobs are often filled with experienced travelling workers, and given the negotiation imbalance, a town seems likely to get screwed on any contributions that the data center promises.
Maybe the solution would be some kind of framework/organization that guarantees (ideally with binding, well tested contracts) that the datacenter won't be a nuisance, builds a reputation for being reliable, and in exchange, companies that work under that framework can expect quick approvals and less pushback.
Until that exists, or companies start offering guarantees up front (e.g. guaranteeing a certain power price or noise level), I'm not surprised that people push back (especially if the company building the data center has screwed up in the past).
Data centers come with gas-fired plants that pollute the air and reduce your life span. It’s quite rational to not want to live next to one of these: https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-...
Yay people have finally become rational about nuclear power safety !!!
...right, right?
Do you think Virginia is adding solar, battery, and wind proportional to that additional power draw? Nope! It's natural gas and coal power imported from PA and WV. It would be one thing if I was paying more to build out renewable energy for environmental purposes and to set up a reliable and clean grid for the future. But no, I'm just subsidizing these huge companies and hurting the environment to boot.
We should be mandating green power, to a great extent, be built to support these facilities.
We (US states) should not be competing, in a race to the bottom, to be the state to give the biggest tax breaks and pass the cost to the citizens.
We should not be ignoring the citizens who will have their health and livelihoods affected.
AI data centers, for better or worse, are very necessary for many reasons. They could be built responsibly, or at least less hazardously, but the care isn't being put into that aspect of their construction.
A nuclear plant creates energy and a decent amount of jobs, while a data center’s value is dubious to the average human and the data center barely brings in any jobs.
https://www.breatheutah.org/news/the-stratos-project-questio...