Greenpeace Takes on Apple and Other Tech Companies over Coal-Powered Data Centers

[John.B]

Piece of advice to Greenpeace: US-based coal-fired plants is NOT part of the problem.

Thanks to very strict EPA regulations, coal-fired powerplants must have extensive emission controls to drastically reduce the smoke and particulate output and also filter out the sulfur that becomes poisonous and highly acidic sulfur dioxide gas. They're certainly WAY cleaner than any coal-fired power plant in China, that's to be sure.

What about mercury?

 

[AllieNeko]

But go ahead and keep making excuses for how SAFE nuclear waste is. We can start by storing it in your neighborhood and see how safe you feel then.

My neighborhood would be an EXTREMELY dangerous place to store nuclear waste. I live in a part of northwest Montana that is relatively wet (not rainforest by any means, but has abundant ground water, many lakes, and massive amounts of snow run-off from the mountains in the spring). Heck, to avoid road erosion from random waterfalls, one canyon wall close to me with a road through it has a PVC pipe the engineers stuck into the mountain (basically a very primitive well) to bleed off ground water pressure in the mountain and reduce rockslide and erosion dangers. The water flows fast and cold year round (where in then crosses a drain under the road, when people aren't filling buckets from the very clean water (it is groundwater and very clean), and feeds the river just like all mountain run-off. It's just controlling where it runs off instead of having random waterfalls onto the road LOL).

NOT the kind of mountain to put nuclear waste in! So NO, I WOULDN'T feel safe if it was in my area.

BUT if I lived in the middle of the desert, you know - somewhere they don't have to deliberately bleed off aquifer pressure in the mountain to stop waterfalls that would erode the road (what do you think they'd do to nuclear waste containers...) - I'd feel totally safe with it.

 

[Liquorpuki]

What? Don't you know that they produce carbon dioxide, the poison to end all poisons??? Hey, so do humans and animals! I think we better ban exhaling! (Plants LOVE C02, BTW; it's like Miracle Grow to them and the give off oxygen in the process. Don't plant more, though. Wipe out the source of energy and let everyone freeze to death because you know burning wood is so much cleaner.... )

CO2 is poisonous. Inhale too much of it and you die. Mountain climbers and divers know this..

If you have reservations about nuclear, you should have similar reservations about clean coal because carbon capture/storage is treated the same way radioactive waste is - by storing it underground and hoping it doesn't escape its containment. You end up with a large concentration of CO2 gas that's lethal if it escapes. Since CO2 isn't radioactive, it won't cause radiation poisoning. Instead, it'll cause mass asphyxiation. If nuclear engineers are setting themselves up for an inevitable meltdown, then clean coal engineers are setting themselves up for an inevitable Lake Nyos.

Far as the idea we should be pro-coal because it releases CO2 which is beneficial to plants, sulfur emission from coal also causes acid rain, which destroys plants. Same goes with the idea China is helping the earth by using high-sulfur coal. Thanks to high-sulfur coal, they now have a massive acid rain problem over there - destroying forests, making lakes toxic, etc. It's not that simple.

 

[roadbloc]

I think Apple should start using Welsh slaves to power their datacenters.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

BUT if I lived in the middle of the desert, you know - somewhere they don't have to deliberately bleed off aquifer pressure in the mountain to stop waterfalls that would erode the road (what do you think they'd do to nuclear waste containers...) - I'd feel totally safe with it.

I'd feel safe as long as it stays a desert, but historical data shows that area used to be underwater. Now admittedly that was a LONG time ago, but some of this waste will be around a long time and we already have people telling us we may be in for extreme climate change. What happens if we have a magnetic pole reversal or as some believe, a sudden axis tilt change might occur (rather than gradually)? I'm just saying you can't account for all variables and that nuclear waste is nearly irretrievable once it starts to break out of the containers it's in (and may be nearly so once we 'permanently' close the place by filling it in with rock, etc. as the plan I read suggested. Maybe that sort of thing will have no impact on me, personally, but it's not something I feel good about leaving future generations to deal with and I'd feel that much worse if we ramped up nuclear only to come out with viable fusion plants in the next 20-30 years (test plant will be finished ~2019 in France).

re/storage is treated the same way radioactive waste is - by storing it underground and hoping it doesn't escape its containment. You end up with a large concentration of CO2 gas that's lethal if it escapes. Since CO2 isn't radioactive, it won't cause radiation poisoning. Instead, it'll cause mass asphyxiation. If nuclear engineers are setting themselves up for an inevitable meltdown, t

CO2 is poisonous. Inhale too much of it and you die. Mountain climbers and divers know this..

Yeah, I don't think the amount of extra C02 we're talking about is in danger of killing us. It's the greenhouse effect that seems to have so many concerned. I'm simply saying that sulfur in the atmosphere actually counteracts the effects and it's at least possible the global 'cooling' trend we saw in the sixties and early seventies may actually have been at least partially due to our high sulfur coal burning in the early part of the century. So we might not like China polluting with acid rain, but we might not like our ice shelves melting and drowning the coast lines even less (assuming the models are correct for a moment). It may be a case of the lesser of two evils at some point.

If you have reservations about nuclear, you should have similar reservations about clean coal because carbon captuhen clean coal engineers are setting themselves up for an inevitable Lake Nyos.

I don't like "clean coal" C02 storage. It's the storage part I don't like. They should find a way to recycle it back into oxygen instead. Certainly, this shouldn't be too hard to do. Combine it with algae-based production of hydrogen gas as an alternative fuel (research seems to be coming along there) and you might have a winning combination. That at least makes more sense to me than storing something that could later escape all at once.

 

[Cvstos]

This is kinda sad

You know Greenpeace, I get it, I really do. I support your goals, but lying like this isn't doing you any favors, seriously. Instead of going after companies that also get it and are trying to do the right thing environmentally, why not go after companies that are very much doing the opposite? They're out there; you've no shortage of scumbags to choose from. Just come clean about Apple and go after the real bad guys.