Comment on We have brownouts in the summer and Kevin O'Leary wants a Data Center built here.
Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 7 hours agoTo keep on topic what I could find was 17% of all lung cancer cases in heavily impacted regional studies. That is communities within a 2- to 5-kilometer. It’s fairly insignificant or inconclusive for people further outside that range. Seems like there just needs to be a buffer zone around said gas fired powerplants which honestly I think everyone wants. I can’t imagine home prices near any form of powerplant or data center are amazing.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
Just fyi, asthma is not “off topic”. Natural gas is one of the leading causes. I tell you this as someone who now has life long asthma, likely because of my family’s natural gas stove.
A “buffer zone” doesn’t do anything when an inversion happens, because an inversion traps the bad air at lower levels (you know, where people breathe) and the bad air spreads much further because of that.
Zephyr@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
I just meant the topic of cancer which seemed to be a focus. Also I’ve noticed a continual jump between power plants and stoves or other gas appliances. You are right though that geography and wind patterns definitely play a role. If a buffer zone didn’t matter that would mean one could put a gas fired powerplant on the other side of the earth and they would be at the same health risk as if they were camped out feet away from the exhaust which simply isn’t true. There’s some degree of distance where the effects become negligible. Generally speaking though no one wants to live near power generation of nearly any sort or high power lines which have their own issues.
I don’t think anyone is advocating for us to go back to a time before electricity. PV, solar thermal, hydro, geo thermal, and wind are good, some depending on how they store power, ultimately nuclear is the king and hopefully one day fusion will come around to solve the issue once and for all. Maybe if we find a novel and efficient way of generating antimatter that would be the true ultimate. Coal and gas still have a role to play in many areas not well suited for greener energy and where people get the heeby geebys about nuclear. It does cost more but that could generally be managed by government subsidies.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 hours ago
It’s not a jump. They’re both bad for the same reasons, they both burn methane and leak into the air before combustion even happens.
I didn’t say there was not a such thing as a buffer zone, I said there’s no buffer zone in the case of inversions in valleys. An inversion traps the gas in the lower levels because of the flipped temperature graident. Here’s a picture of an inversion in the Wasatch Front:
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Those are heavy gasses. That’s not fog. That is pollution. Pollution primary from refineries and gas power plants, along side vehicles.
Kevin O’Leary is building a natural gas powered data center in this valley. Those gasses will get trapped. This discussion isn’t necessarily about alternative fuels, it’s about whether natural gas has harmful effects. It does, especially when it gets trapped in inversions. Yes, if he was building a data center with nuclear power, that would probably be ideal. But none of his data centers are doing that, and they’re in places that suffer from inversions. He (and the natural gas companies) are going to get more people sick.