this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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How wonderful would it be if the ultimate effect of the AI fad was to use the tech industry’s billions to install tons of carbon free power generation?
Are there no emissions during mining and at eol digging and maintaining a storage?
The emissions are negligible on the grand scheme of things, especially compared to fossil fuels. The manufacturing of solar panels isn't the cleanest either.
What's the grand scheme of things mean to you? If we average it out over 40 years? How does nuclear even fit in when solar and wind are cheaper? Nuclear plants don't provide on demand energy to fill in the gaps, they provide energy constantly.
The only reason it works for microsoft is because they plan to use all that energy consistently. But besides that why should we trust a for-profit company to do anything safely in the first place? Do we have a long history of companies being regulated well or self-regulating well?
Are you implying there is a form of energy that doesn't?
Do they store wind turbines after EOL? I thought they'd just get scrapped and recycled.
The turbine blades are made of carbon fiber. There is no process in effect to deal with them. Too big to crush, not worth scraping or recycling. They all go landfilla.
There currently are processes to deal with them, multiple companies are working on the problem.
Current solutions include shredding them and reconstituting into some sort of alternative building material, chemically separating the parts of the composite and creating recycled resin, and mechanically separating and sorting apart the different materials which are then recombined for alternative use.
This is a good place to look at recent american efforts, but there is more recent information available elsewhere: https://www.energy.gov/eere/wind/wind-turbine-materials-recycling-prize
Of course there are, because mining and construction are powered by the old stuff. That doesn’t seem like a compelling downside to building things that generate clean power, since that’s a downside to building literally anything.