The Fjord-Cooled Data Center 195
1sockchuck writes "A new data center project in Norway plans to use a fjord-powered cooling system, drawing cold water from an adjacent fjord to cool data halls. The fjord provides a ready supply of water at 8 degrees C (46 degrees F), eliminating the need for an energy-hungry chiller. The Green Mountain Data Center joins a small but growing number of data centers are slashing their cooling costs by using the environment as their chiller, tapping nearby lakes, wells and even the Baltic Sea."
New life to be found (Score:5, Funny)
Hydrothermal datacenter vent creatures...
Re:New life to be found (Score:5, Funny)
Who would have thought. . (Score:4)
Building things in a cold climate keeps them cold.. . Film at 11
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Building things in a cold climate keeps them cold.. . Film at 11
Also up at the 11 o'clock news: data center opens up a seafood restaurant, claims no ovens or stoves needed.
Hitchhikers Reference (Score:5, Funny)
As long as they do not destroy Slartibartfast's fjords then I am "cool" with it.
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Really Afjordable Option (Score:5, Funny)
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Well done!
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No one wants to be pining for the fjords....
Hey! That was uncalled for, you insensitive clod!
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Well played.
Nothing new to see here... move along (Score:5, Informative)
The industrial revolution was growing on chill-water supplied by nature long before the triode, never mind the transistor, had been invented. And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.
Re:Nothing new to see here... move along (Score:5, Informative)
And all the environmental issues came up long before Al Gore was born.
Gore was just graduating from college when Environmental Impact Statements became required under law.
FYI, the straw that broke the camel's back and forced modern american environmental laws into existence was a *blowout on a drilling rig off the shore of California.
A couple years later, the EPA was created and the Clean Water Act was passed, along with a bunch of other environmental laws.
I'd hope that not everyone has to learn responsible stewardship the way we did.
*The largest oil spill of its time, currently the #3 largest oil spill in the USA
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Of course. (Score:2)
Strangely (Score:2, Funny)
I have been pining for this
Hmmm (Score:2)
I wonder why it is that the thought of running a light-water nuclear fission power plant with only the atmosphere for cooling doesn't bother me, but the thought of using a fjord to cool a data-center does.
It's an unsettling feeling...there must be a reason, I just can't think of it right now.
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Can't think of one.
The water that comes out won't be more than about 50C at the most, and if it's a cold environment and they run the exhaust water over a wide slipway and then let it fall through the air back into the fjord (or better yet, use it for office heat even before that), it will lose a lot of its heat to the atmosphere before it even gets back into the water. The waste heat from a data center is nothing, even to a small lake.
Simpsons did it. (Score:2)
Oh, every week there's a canal.
Or an inlet.
Or a fjord.
Numerous places for Americ (Score:2)
But even better would be the ski resorts. Plenty of bandwidth close to these, esp in Colorado. Likewise, plenty of cold and energy.
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Wrong story (Score:3)
I came here looking for a chjevy-powered cooling system.
This will never work (Score:2)
Datacenter location is more complex than cooling.. (Score:2)
You have to figuring in more than just cooling:
1. How much does power cost in the location
2. How much power is available. Data centers suck huge amounts no matter how efficient.
3. Do people want that heat island near them.
4. Is the data center near the consumer of its resources? Latency still matters to me.
Re:Datacenter location is more complex than coolin (Score:4, Informative)
3/ Do you really think this is going to pump out much heat in comparison with realitively trivial heat sources like factories for making potato chips? Also since most of that heat is supposed to be going into the massive heatsink of a deep Fjord connected to a cold ocean it's not going to matter beyond a few metres from an outlet anyway.
4/ For most purposes within the same hemisphere is plenty.
Seawater cooling is an expensive pain in many ways but there's well over a century of experience with it. The data centre itself will probably have a freshwater loop and then a heat exchanger keeping that corrosive seawater out of the place.
Dark Side of the Moon (Score:2)
Or somewhere similar in space.
Common in the water-cooling days. (Score:2)
This isn't new. Control Data, when they were next to Seymour Cray's farm in Minnesota, was dumping hot water into a well, while pumping cold water up from another nearby well. Once you drill down 15m or so, ground water temperature doesn't change much year round, and in Minnesota, it's around 46-52F.
Good thing it isn't California (Score:5, Interesting)
A while back a business here wanted to use Pacific water to cool its equipment. They got turned down because discharging Pacific water back into the Pacific was deemed "contaminating" it because of the contaminants already present in the water that was going to be drawn from the ocean. I think they ended up going to a saner state.
Re:Good thing it isn't California (Score:4, Insightful)
Source? This sounds like the sort of heavily distorted (or outright fabricated) story that one might hear from Rush Limbaugh or some other professional liar.
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This happens in a lot of places. We discharge water into the Brisbane river that is far cleaner than the river requires and is almost of drinkable quality. Yet we're riding on the edge of our waste water licence.
While I wouldn't drink our discharged water, I wouldn't even eat any fish we caught in the river given it's currently environmental rating of F (on a scale of A-F) [healthywaterways.org]
The data center is full of (Score:2)
Another major innovation, again scandinavia. (Score:3, Interesting)
see the evils of socialist (social democrat in world political jargon) education and continued governance. (for the majority of last 80 years at least).
more innovation per resource and population than the totally 'innovative' capitalist u.s. where is the wealth the 1% hoarding ? apparently not into innovation. for, if it did, we would be colonizing mars by now with the resources and population america has. but instead, there are homeless in the streets and police beating down students.
No... Canadians in 2001, even that wasn't the 1rst (Score:3)
But... (Score:2)
Doesn't that warm the fjords?
I need to get out more (Score:3)
As soon as I saw the word "fjord" in the title, I stopped thinking about the topic and started planning a Monty Python tie-in post.
Fjord-powered cooling systems? (Score:2)
Intriguing..... intriguing.....
Why is this needed? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was applying for a job as a system administrator in the northern parts of Norway.
They had simply drilled their datacenter into the mountain. They had a steady supply of 8 degree Celsius air from the surrounding cool mountain.
It might not scale as well as cooling with water, but there is lot of rock in Norway...
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Re:Why is this needed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Using water has difficulties, though, which may have been the reason this data center you mentioned didn't use it. Unless you have a really exotic setup, you don't cool the processors directly using sea water; you use the cold water to generate cold air, and blow the air across the racks. That extra step requires a beefy heat exchanger, which adds costs. The infrastructure to get and transport the water is also capital-intensive compared to just having a lot of big air intakes. At some scale (i.e., X megawatts of cooling load), water will still win out because it is such an efficient heat transport fluid compared to air.
Seems expensive. (Score:2, Funny)
How do they afforjd this?
Less effective during the summer? (Score:2)
Granted, Norwegian summers hardly last all year, but sea temperatures are not a steady 8 degrees throughout the year as the article seems to imply. People can and do bathe in the ocean in southern Norway during the summer and temperatures can reach 18+ degrees in the water. 8 degrees is probably the average, but a "steady supply of water at 8 degrees C" seems somewhat misleading.
Am I missing something here or is this simply normal overselling?
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Having just had a "doh"-moment, I'll reply to my own post. They are obviously not using the water from the very top ocean layers. The temperatures near the seabed are probably much more steady throughout the year and will certainly not be 18+ during nice summer days.
The fjord cooling system... (Score:2)
... I was just pining for one of those.
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Sheesh - as if anything would mattter at all at this point
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Insightful)
I would be more worried about the marine life being affected more than the heat generated.
And speaking of marine life, remember how environmentalists were worried about such things as salmon and dams?
Remember how environmentalists are worried about eroding soil and hurricanes?
You know what... look at the history of what "environmentalists" have saved us from, and then come back and say something.
If it wasnt for them, we would be drinking firewater(literal firewater), sucking in coal ash, and dealing with randomly placed toxins.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder if someone would calculate how much power/heat would be needed to raise the temperature enough to affect it.
Considering that this "Fjord" Is actually the east side of a small island which has the North Sea on the west side - a huge amount!
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Toronto has been using this technology for years (http://www.enwave.com/district_cooling_system.html), taking water from deep in Lake Ontario and cooling office towers downtown. No worry about the lake warming up - it gets refereshed every year with this thing called "Winter".
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Funny)
Won't someone please think of the norwegian blues?
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Next up, a project to cool servers by having Norwegian Blue Parrots flapping their wings.
(However it won't work with dead parrots)
Maybe swallows would be better
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Oblig:
African or European?
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I know they're Pontiacs, but what about the Fjerbird and Fjero?
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It's time for a car reference.
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I think he wants AN ARGUMENT you silly bunt!
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In Soviet Russia, the Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect you!
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Lovely PLUMAGE, the Norweigan Blue!
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Insightful)
But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists -- they can't separate the forest from the trees (I'm only being slightly sarcastic here). From what I've been able to tell by talking to these 'greenies', any environmental impact is bad. It's not enough to be carbon neutral, or conserve energy, save the whales, or whatever else is currently in vogue in their movement. It is a political movement that is based on a sliding scale of "purity". I can easily see one of them extolling the virtues of living in a house that has no electricity, is built entirely out of clay, and they don't cook their food (because fire releases carbon). What's worse, they feel guilty about having any modern conveniences, and so they try to buy indulgences like "carbon credits" or "EVA cars" ... which when you look into the total lifecycle of the vehicle and it's total environmental impact, you don't wind up any better off than a conventional car. A lot of environmentalism is just a shell game... it's moving the responsibility around so they can claim they're "carbon neutral" or whatever while someone else (usually the government, or some corporation) are the bad guys.
The bottom line is, the problem with the movement is that they can't see that progress towards environmental goals are only achievable by being economically competitive. I mean, everybody right now is going crazy about living "grid free". But the problem isn't the grid. The 'grid' is just a collection of wires and transformers. It's the management and production of that resource that is the problem; If the environmentalists wanted to "save the planet", they'd come up with a way to transport electricity over very long distances with minimal losses. That, right there, is the kind of tech we need to reduce our dependence on coal, oil, etc. Until we can cheaply move energy to where it's needed on demand, we're stuck with dino fuel because it's the only thing with a high energy density that can be built right now -- you can't build a nuclear power plant anywhere in this country right now even if you wanted to... and even if you could, nobody wants it near a city, which is where it needs to be to be useful.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, it's your standard straw man extreme environmentalist. It's pretty popular to refer to them these days, but it's extraordinarily rare to observe them in the wild. I'm sure they do exist somewhere, but I've never met one personally.
They remind me of white crows [cornell.edu] -- rare and not typical of the species.
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I have an environmentalist friend who knows one. I consider the guy to be a bit on the extreme side, and a bit dumb about it, but when someone he knows is 'too extremist', you know they have issues.
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They have a very limited habitat on some little Canadian island near Newfoundland. I know a couple of them.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Funny)
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So basically, you find problems with their way of life to make you feel better about yourself. Congrats.
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Sounds like most environmental groups these days. You hear the one about bananas lately?
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Insightful)
You're grouping environmentalists all in to one bucket. It doesn't work that way.
I am an avid environmentalist. According to you, I don't support Nuclear power in my backyard. Yet, I actually support it. Newer technologies mitigate a lot of the safety concerns and we can figure out better ways to store waste and even better technologies that yield less waste.
As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium power sources produce hydrogen from water and all you would need to do is ship them back to a Nuclear power plant where it would be vastly more efficient to remove the Oxygen to recondition the power source.
That's a pretty progressive idea.
I am not against the whole cooling from the fjord idea, but you would have to be a complete idiot not to realize that an environmental impact study would need to be conducted if the hot water was being put right back in the fjord. Of course they don't have to do that at all. They can just use passive heat exchangers with the surrounding air instead. Better yet, use the heat for surrounding buildings, offices, etc. or even convert it back into energy. So many more options than just dumping it back in the fjord.
There is a difference between "screaming hysteria" and "gee what happens when we raise the water temperatures around the datacenter a couple degrees?".
Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
Short term pain == Long term gain. Problem is nobody wants to sacrifice and any environmentalist that proposes serious sacrifice is labeled a hypocrite (appropriate in some situations) or just plain crazy.
As for off the grid people, all you can really do in the end is control your own actions and voice your opinions and ideas cogently and passionately and hope it helps. Those people you are denigrating are doing the sacrificing because it is what they can do. I sacrifice as much as possible, and writing on a laptop does not make me a hypocrite.
P.S - It's not so black and white when you label people. I propose extreme austerity measures but also very aggressive and progressive changes.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Interesting)
Up to that point I suspected you knew what you were writing about, but this is where you've dropped out of your depth. Avoiding the problem of hot water in the Fjord can be done even with GW heat sources by using a combination of holding dams and distributed outlet pipes - that's the sort of thing that's done with nuclear power plants on rivers. The "passive heat exchangers" would be cooling towers, they come in small sizes as well as large and you can see the small ones as part of large air conditioning installations - however the entire point of siting next to a Fjord is to have cold water and a really huge heatsink! The water goes through and the surrounding environment is not measurably heated up if it's done properly.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Interesting)
With those dams and outlet pipes, is there a heat transfer to the surrounding environment, particularly air? Yes - you have your heat exchange.
Is there a high energy mechanism (fan, pump, etc) set up to increase the transfer rate? No - you have passive.
That's a form of passive heat exchange.
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The aluminum/gallium/hydrogen cycle is incredibly inefficient and expensive. But don't let that get in the way of the "neato" factor. :P
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Hmmm... I may just put a patent on that.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Informative)
Why would venting heat to the atmosphere be unproblematic but venting it to seawater be potentially problematic ?
RennesÃy isn't some deep-and-narrow inlet, infact it's hardly in a fjord at all, but more akin to in open ocean. Have a look at the map: http://g.co/maps/ucfvs [g.co]
Heating the ocean itself by dumping waste heat, would take *tremendous* amounts of power, many orders of magnitude more energy than any data-center could possibly use.
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The potential issue, is ciruclation. Air moves around a lot, so you have to pump a lot of heat into it to have a noticeable effect.
Depending on the location (usually lakes with relatively low in/out flow compared to volume), water moves around rather slowly, and it takes a lot less heat input to have a huge environmental impact.
I suspect, provided they don't open a lot more of these cooling centers, the extra heat being dispersed might even have a positive impact.
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As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium power sources produce hydrogen from water and all you would need to do is ship them back to a Nuclear power plant where it would be vastly more efficient to remove the Oxygen to recondition the power source.
Wait. We can put an electric potential between two cables and pull energy out hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. Instead, you want to ship aluminum ingots back and forth across the country. What. The. Fuck.
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Al, is that you?
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Nice post.
I am an avid environmentalist. According to you, I don't support Nuclear power in my backyard. Yet, I actually support it.
I am an avid environmentalist too because pollution harms me directly. I am against nuclear power because I don't trust the people in charge of designing or running it, but apparently that makes me hysterical in the GP's eyes.
As for the transport of electricity I think there already is an excellent method. Aluminum Gallium
Actually this is a solved problem. You can use long range DC line transmission with low loss. The EU is planning to run them from north African solar thermal plants back to western Europe.
Short term pain == Long term gain
Agreed, governments need the backbone to enact strong laws that make the short term pain
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Insightful)
The people in charge of designing and running the plants are not the problem. I've known a lot of people in that field. Very smart, very thoughtful.
The problem is the politicians who make the decisions don't have a fucking clue. They then decide to cut budgets, put things in bad locations, etc. The people designing, building and running them don't have the options or resources available to alleviate the issues. They can write reports and make suggestions, but the politicians and bureaucrats tend to ignore these.
Put a plant away from any place that's got an active fault line, and at least 20km from an ocean (with some adjustment for altitude), and you shouldn't have a problem. A modern plant least has triple redundancy and safety features that quash the reaction is they lose power (or are told to do so).
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Economically competitive is just a cop out. What it really means, is that you have a limited commitment towards change. In my personal view, which has had heated debates, we are fucked already. Leave economics out of it and make the hard decisions now. That does mean start building as many nuclear reactors as possible right now because they are the most immediate solution to massive amounts of power generation that can be used immediately for heating, cooling, industry, etc.
I suspect you misunderstand economics. Throw out any ideas of economics being about $'s, the $ is only used in economics as a unit of measurement, and even then only a proxy. Economics is concerned with "the distribution of scarce resources", leading to the principle objectives being improving efficiency (of allocation) and/or increasing the availability of resources (i.e. reducing scarcity). There is no stated time constraint, the implication is you should consider the entire period that it is possible to
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*screams of hysteria*
But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists -- they can't separate the forest from the trees.
Hey smartypants, anyone can?
Polititians, religious leaders, billionairs - the military perhaps?
A European Court judment determined that airlines need to buy carbon credits for 15 % of their carbon (CO2?) emissions.
Prudent step? Maybe, just watch what will happen.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Interesting)
But more seriously,
No you are not serious because you don't know what you are talking about. Your comment reads like a rambling complaint of some person you met who claimed to be an environmentalist. You conflate environmentalism with renewable energy and neglect to realize that most of the major positive environmental progress in the last 30 years has not been due to economic competitiveness, but rather due to the scientific realization that human activity has adverse effects on the environment and human health. GET IT? Most environmentalists I know are scientists who work unglamorously behind the scenes to identify and characterize threats that certain human activities pose to the environment and human health. And, unfortunately, many are simply unwilling to strongly advocate for their issues because the pressure they face by a bunch of wildly ignorant citizens with wildly misinformed views on science and environmentalism. Now, carry on with your ill informed diatribe on electricity infrastructure and everybody's obsession with off-grid living.
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Brilliant. Just brilliant.
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That is, 55-year-old cars are driving around Cuba, spewing last-mile pollution* into the air. Somewhere else, one Cuban Buick could be represented by ~8-10 "new" cars over the years (each of which would have simultaneously served as used cars for someone else for a while). Somewhere else might be a planned-city built from nothing, but based around long-lasting mass transportation vehicles.
* Please spread this term around if it is not al
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*screams of hysteria* But more seriously, that is a problem with environmentalists
Really seriously, this is a problem with assholes who put words in the mouths of environmentalists, and pillory them for positions they never took.
And to the original original asshole who started this thread: the word is "cue" not queue.
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You're partially correct, but you're missing the key point that it's only the puritanical nutjob ones that scream and shout about it that are like that, there are a whole bunch of practical and pragmatic environmentalists out there, they just aren't as loud.
On a related note I recently had a discussion with a group of vegans and when you get a bunch of vegans together a sort of bizarre pack mentality emerges where the least pure is picked on and ultimately leaves because they can't stand it (in this case me
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I think most environmentalists are more rational than you are describing. Yes, there are a few loudmouth, as there are in any politically or socially charged group, but those are the outliers. Also, most environmentalists I know avoid those EVs and tend to stick to smaller cars instead. The EVs target the people who like to think they are helping the environment, and want to have a showpiece to say for it.
Being economically competitive tends to mean being one of the more profitable options - the problem wit
Robocop 2 (Score:2)
From the news [imdb.com]:
Casey Wong: On the international scene, the Amazon nuclear facility has blown its stack, irradiating the world's largest rain forest. Environmentalists are calling it a disaster.
Jess Perkins: But don't they always.
(Wondering if you'll understand the joke here...)
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Insightful)
It IS something to take into consideration. And it doesn't even have to be some enviro-nut who is tying himself to trees to save the endangered fern.
Here's how it works in reality: many fjords are home to commercial fishing and aquaculture. All those species are adapted to cold water and don't do well in warm water. What happens if a data center warms the water around the effluent by a couple of degrees? Cold-water fish, shrimp, clams move away and the people who depend on them have to move with them. It's probably fine if there's just one data center in the Fjord, and the warming is highly localized. maybe a few hundred square meter of surface area. But what if there's more? What if there are ten data centers in the Fjord? Or other industries in need of cooling? Suddenly the entire fjord warms, and it's not only the fish, shrimp and clams that are gone, but the livelihood of the people in the area.
Environmentalism isn't about building absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. It's making sure that what you build allows others to still live in the area in the foreseeable future and without having to dramatically adapt their lifestyle. Sometimes, it means that a data center using fjord water is ok. Sometimes it means that a data center using fjord water is not ok.
Yeah, life is full of grey and subtilities and hard decisions that aren't black and white. Sorry to disappoint you.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Informative)
The results of the research, performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
Opportunistic species appeared in very high abundances while species with more
narrow tolerances decreased or disappeared. The total production of macrofauna increased.
Total benthic biomass stayed at a high level in the Biotest basin up to 1989,
but during the later years there has been a general decrease in both
biomass and abundance of most common species and the risk that fish food
production is becoming critically low is evident. The scenario â" increasing
fish biomass â" heavy grazing â" benthic fauna collapse â" starving fish â" was
discussed already when the studies started in the Biotest basin. Today, ten
years later, we can see the first signs that these misgivings turn out to be justified.
Yeah, not quite exactly as you portrayed it. Plenty of other stuff in that report that is far, far more ambiguous than you made it out to be, like growth retardation and increased mortality rates for perch. There may be more perch but they are of suckier quality.
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I love it when people cite studies, but fail to read them. It's fun.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Informative)
The results of the research [fiskeriverket.se], performed by the government agency for fisheries (not the nuclear industry) actually indicates that, on balance, fish growth is actually promoted, as are many other species of birds etc.
In fact that very report says that in the short term opportunistic species will rise at the cost of the more vulnerable species and in the long run all species (biomass) will decrease
Goodies Reference (Score:2)
Cod be praised!
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Ever heard the expression "drop in the ocean"?
This time it is to be taken literally too. Warm water of a data center won't change the temperature of the ocean at all.
But any way, what is the other option? The heat has to go somewhere. Warming the air (that will then warm the ocean)?
As long as you go deep enough and that the water is circulating in that fjord, there is no negative environmental impact.
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Fjörd != Ocean
Fjörd == Connected to Ocean
Connected to Ocean != Deep ocean
Fjörd == Heatflow bottleneck
Return environmental_study.
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:5, Funny)
(PS... Want to buy some bütter?)
Re:Queue the screams of hysteria (Score:4, Insightful)
Warm water of a data center won't change the temperature of the ocean at all.
Not the whole ocean, but as I said, it could affect the local environment.
But any way, what is the other option?
Did I say they shouldn't put warm water in the ocean?
What should be done, in all circumstances, is a study on the environmental impact. Such a thing may find (for example) that the original design releases the water in a secluded shallow bay where there is little circulation. As you said, a simple fix would be to make a longer pipe and release the water in deeper water, where there are stronger currents.
Environmentalism is not about doing nothing because well everything affects the environment. It is doing the optimal thing based on scientific evidence.
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If the anti-environmentalists were in charge of overseeing human development, well, the Sahara would be a desert, Ohio would be a wasteland, and the Tigris/Euphrates area would be a salt-laden chain of abandoned cities.
Oh wait...
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Iceland != Norway. Björk is Icelandic. Well, at least technically; she's pretty atypical even by Icelandic standards ;)