Shinra Mako reactors have become an actual thing in real life. Sucking all the life out of everything around it to generate computing power for tech billionaires to burn while creating nothing of value.

Negative value if you look at the impending crash.

The $70 billion project, backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary

Of course it's the wonder valley project. I don't have time to read the full article just now but last I had heard it kind of sounded more like investor fraud than a legitimate project.

Edit: Here's a youtuber covering it. Also at about 5:03 he shows the promo video that Kevin O'Leary AI slopped... It's ridiculous.

On the order of 20MW continuous draw, saved you the math.

That's pretty small for an industrial load and some hyperscale data-centers are in the 500MW scale.

Dino juice should be phased out, and something like this should be required to develop a Candu reactor, than the heat should be shoved up Kevin’s ass!

I've got to wonder if there's some way to install heat exchangers on these data centers to recapture the heat. Nearly 100% of that energy is turned into heat (with a little escaping as sound). I've heard they're wanting to build datacenters inside decommissioned nuclear power plants, so maybe those would even have some of the infrastructure to do it?

It might be tricky if the hot exhaust never gets above water boiling temperature...

Edit: It looks like this is the closest technology we have: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower Building one of those on a datacenter could recover maybe 20-30% of the energy if I'm understanding the article right.

Need an atomic banana for scale...

This heat would be from fossil methane combustion. Who accepted to store all the exhaust in their own backyard?

queue the people telling us how little that is in comparison to the energy of the sun... you know what else the sun is doing? making plants grow! can your data center do that? no it does the opposite...

edit: they are already coming out of the woodworks, just with different "arguments"... 🙄

This website is ad-laden cancer

Good thing we're not dealing with a existential crisis caused by heating the earth, or anything...

Went into the article and no, it doesn't provide actual hard numbers beyond 'atom bombs'. Stupid bullshit.

What an absolutely stupid and intentionally misleading way to frame this.

Keep this yankee bullshit in the backwaters down south, if at all. We don’t want this here

Why dont they boil water with the excess heat to recover a tiny bit of energy? Is that even possible?

Whhhaaaaattttt???

Today in "Possible Future News That May Or May Not Happen". Film at 11:00PM in 15 years. /s

guys remember to use those paper straws that dissolve mid drink, we all have to do whatever we can to fight climate change

That would be about as much electricity as 2% of what the entire USA uses. Wow!

There's next to no networking anywhere near Wonder Valley. It'll never break ground.

Ok.

But, just like Elon's stupid 1 million satellite orbital data center, none of this is going to happen.

Spoiler: it won’t generate even half that much heat if you know how to do basic math and understand what the units mean.

You know what? I think this is justified usage. The average person won't have a good way to interpret joules or watts, especially on the 16-18 gigawatt scale. Props they include the actual number in the article btw.

It's fair game, you need that amount of energy to feed all those waifus.

23 atomic bombs of energy could heat about 1M tea kettles.

So the problem will fix itself. I assume it will stop running if we're not here to press the reset button after a Windows nightly update.

Climate change is a hoax anyway, and the AIs living in this one will prove it!

A proposed data center in northwestern Alberta will reportedly emit a staggering amount of waste heat.

According to an analysis conducted by Utah State University physicist Robert Davies, the Wonder Valley facility will dump “about 23 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs worth of energy every single day” into the surrounding landscape.

“The effect will almost certainly be large, if not extreme,” Davies told the CBC.

Davies conducted the preliminary analysis earlier this year for the Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation (SLCN). The $70 billion project, backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary, is set to be built 80 miles southwest of SLCN’s reserve. While it does not sit inside the reserve, the reporting notes, it does lie in a patch of land that’s considered the First Nation’s traditional territory.

In April, the Alberta government said it would exempt the Wonder Valley project from a more rigorous provincial environmental impact assessment due to its use of standard power and water systems — a move that disappointed, but perhaps didn’t surprise, legal and environmental experts.

Davies echoed the disappointment. “I can’t imagine allowing it to go forward without those full assessments,” he told CBC, adding that it could be the “largest single-site heat source on the entire planet.”

In all, the data center project will use about nine gigawatts of power using on-site natural gas generators per day, instead of drawing power from an energy grid. All that burning fuel, paired with the heat being generated by the data center operations themselves, totals a daily thermal load of between 16 and 18 gigawatts, Davies calculated — the equivalent of roughly two dozen atomic bombs. (If this line sounds familiar, it’s because Davies used the same analogy when he analyzed another O’Leary-backed data center project in Utah with a similar thermal load.)

It’s a sensational reference point, but it captures the unprecedented concentration of heat that the data center will purportedly pose. Since the power is being generated on site and going straight into the data center, the heat isn’t being spread out the way that a typical power plant’s output would, through the various homes and businesses it’s supplying across an entire region. In other words, the gas turbines are spewing heat as they generate electricity, and the racks upon racks of AI chips are generating heat as they use that electricity to perform calculations, all in the same spot.

The facility will also spew about 30 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, according to the analysis — which is more than four percent of Canada’s total emissions.

“When people talk about environmental regulations that these projects have to adhere to, those regulations were not created with anything of this scale in mind,” Davies said.

In September, the SLCN filed an application for a judicial review on the Wonder Valley’s project exemption from an environmental impact assessment, and requested another review last month.

Responding to the request, Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Protected Areas stressed in an October 30 statement that the project will still have to obtain “all required permits, provide detailed technical assessments on impacts to air, land, and water, and demonstrate the project can be built and operated safely before any project can proceed.”

But the permitting process doesn’t gauge the big picture, Davies argued.

“Permits check the parts. An assessment checks the whole,” he told the CBC. “A project this size is exactly what assessments are for.”

Obligatory "Fuck Kevin O'Leary"

Only 1 Atomic Bomb would be needed to make it stop, though.