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

theNoble1 said:
Odd that no one is harnessing river power for datacenters. Most major cities have some major river flowing through them. Seems they could turn turbines and produce enough energy. Could also probably use the cooler river water as some sort of chiller for cooling needs.

I don't know all the ins and outs of hydroelectric power but it seems it could be implemented pretty widespread with a very low environmental impact.
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It cooks some of the life in the river and lets algae grow better. Fish have a narrow range of temperatures. Unless it is a huge river (or a small heat-sink) these things actually cause all sorts of problems.
 
Wikipedia says:
"Coal power in the United States accounted for 42% of the country's electricity production in 2011."

I don't think it's Apple's fault that almost half of America's energy come from coal, for better or for worse. If you're really anti-coal and looking to blame someone for Apple using some coal-generated power, blame the U.S. energy system.
 
not all valid points

daxomni said:
Several problems with nuclear energy as well...

Nuclear Energy is not renewable. It is a finite resource that can and will be exhausted.

Much of the commercial grade uranium comes from foreign sources outside of the United States.

Mining uranium involves conventional diesel-burning mining equipment.

Refining uranium involves energy intensive processing plants.

Building nuclear power plants is resource intensive.

Decommissioning and burying nuclear facilities (processing plants, power plants, etc.) is energy intensive.

Shipping uranium from source to processor to generator to permanent storage is done by conventional diesel burning equipment powering ships and trucks.

Nuclear power plants require enormous amounts of fresh water to function properly, far more than most other forms of power generation.

Nuclear power plants are susceptible to heat waves and can be forced to shut down when the weather gets too hot.

The full cost of designing, building, running, decommissioning, shipping, and storing a nuclear power plants costs more than any other form of commercial scale power generation.

Only a series of lopsided risk-reward contracts written in the 1940's and 1950's on the backs of the American taxpayer allow nuclear power operators to claim a net positive balance sheet.

In many cases today's nuclear power operators did not actually fund or build the plants. They merely purchased what was left after the original owner was unable to fully recover from the enormous cost of the original build.

And then there's always this...

The most persistent forms of nuclear waste will outlive global warming by about a million years.
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Although several of the points are true, using the argument that shipping of parts or fuel with diesel trucks is not green doesn't hold much weight. The same argument could be made that constructing giant wind and solar farms shouldn't be done because of the diesel fuel spent to ship and assemble those parts.

Next thing you know, Greenpeace will tell people to stop eating food because grocery stores use diesel trucks to deliver the groceries to the stores. Farmers markets will be the next target since every farmer has a pickup truck to bring their organic food to the parking lot... which is made of asphalt - another byproduct of crude oil... BUT WAIT, plants also generate CO2 at night so we should stop planting crops since everyone will have stopped eating anyway... if we all stopped breathing, a major source of CO2 generation could be eliminated... on the count of three, everyone hold your breath forever in order to save the world... 1, 2...
 
helmsc said:
Makes me wonder...What OS these activist use? :D:p
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I'm more curious about how they power their homes, how they get to work, where their clothes come from.

Cause I bet they aren't totally self sufficient using solar panels etc, riding their bikes to work and wearing hand sewn clothes made from cloth they wove themselves from fibers they grew themselves in the backyard, dyed with all natural pigments (from plants they also grew themselves).

And what about every other company out there. Greenpeace is going after tech because they can use Apple to get hits but what about the car companies, what about the utilities etc. What about the government that stifles things like the electric car and building 'clean' energy sources because they don't want to piss off the oil lobby.
 
Anybody remember the Greenpeace's 1950's diesel trawler flagship, the Rainbow Warrior. Makes me wonder how many 1000s of gallons of diesel leaked out of that ship before it was sunk? Not that matters. Environmentalists don't need to be green. Just everybody else.
 
Damn hippies.

I assume that their websites, cars, ships and pamphlet printers run on the smugness that comes out when their bodies as methane?
 
baryon said:
Yes, Apple is doing a lot to be as green as they can, but it's good to have a motivating factor to make sure they keep doing it.
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They have one that is better than Greenpeace.

Profit. If they have their own solar farm giving them a chunk of the power they need then that's less power they have to buy which reduces costs and raises their profits. As a company that runs on making money, that's the biggest motivator of all.
 
Enviro-mental-ists like Greenpeace, who don't understand the necessities of running a business or how electricity grids actually work, just make we want to go out and set fire to a tree. Just because.
 
Perfect timing... Apple at least is currently investing in solar or other energy sources. So when they implement it, Greenpeach can shout "look what we forced them to do PLEAS DONATE!!!!!!"
 
Stephen123 said:
The LEED Platinum rating on that data center is a lot more significant and credible than anything Greenpeace has to say.
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LEED ratings are based on theory rather than hard numbers and are ripe for abuse. You can make all sorts crazy claims as to the impact of your decisions and if the LEED folks aren't going to give you the rating you want you can simply lobby them to revise their figures and give you a better rating without changing anything. And what if your theories prove to be completely off base? Who is going to come back and take that Platinum win away just because the actual numbers proved your theories wrong?

It's as much about image and spin, or "green washing" as they say, as it is about increasing verifiable efficiency and reducing actual pollution. Is that to say that LEED is completely worthless? No. However, it's really not saying nearly as much as many people seem to think it's saying. Even their most impressive ratings are easy to win if you understand how their system works. Not to mention that many companies only build a handful of LEED buildings as a bullet point incubator and leave the bulk of their buildings relatively untouched.
 
Shut up!!!

So tired of these special interest groups attacking anyone who doesn't agree with them. I say support the coal miners and Burn More Coal.
 
iKitten said:
Nuclear power is clean energy.
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Nuclear Power Is The Problem, Not A Solution

(and don't bother with the "TL;DR", if you're posting on here, educate yourself, for the love of god, it'll take you five minutes to read one of the best scientific analyses to date, and this tidbit should catch the attention of many of you:
Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans
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)

There is a huge propaganda push by the nuclear industry to justify nuclear power as a panacea for the reduction of global-warming gases.

In fact Leslie Kemeny on these pages two weeks ago (HES, March 30) suggested that courses on nuclear science and engineering be included in tertiary level institutions in Australia.

I agree. But I would suggest that all the relevant facts be taught to students. Mandatory courses in medical schools should embrace the short and long-term biological, genetic and medical dangers associated with the nuclear fuel cycle. Business students should examine the true costs associated with the production of nuclear power. Engineering students should become familiar with the profound problems associated with the storage of long-lived radioactive waste, the human fallibilities that have created the most serious nuclear accidents in history and the ongoing history of near-misses and near-meltdowns in the industry.

At present there are 442 nuclear reactors in operation around the world. If, as the nuclear industry suggests, nuclear power were to replace fossil fuels on a large scale, it would be necessary to build 2000 large, 1000-megawatt reactors. Considering that no new nuclear plant has been ordered in the US since 1978, this proposal is less than practical. Furthermore, even if we decided today to replace all fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power, there would only be enough economically viable uranium to fuel the reactors for three to four years.

The true economies of the nuclear industry are never fully accounted for. The cost of uranium enrichment is subsidised by the US government. The true cost of the industry's liability in the case of an accident in the US is estimated to be $US560billion ($726billion), but the industry pays only $US9.1billion - 98per cent of the insurance liability is covered by the US federal government. The cost of decommissioning all the existing US nuclear reactors is estimated to be $US33billion. These costs - plus the enormous expense involved in the storage of radioactive waste for a quarter of a million years - are not now included in the economic assessments of nuclear electricity.

It is said that nuclear power is emission-free. The truth is very different.

In the US, where much of the world's uranium is enriched, including Australia's, the enrichment facility at Paducah, Kentucky, requires the electrical output of two 1000-megawatt coal-fired plants, which emit large quantities of carbon dioxide, the gas responsible for 50per cent of global warming.

Also, this enrichment facility and another at Portsmouth, Ohio, release from leaky pipes 93per cent of the chlorofluorocarbon gas emitted yearly in the US. The production and release of CFC gas is now banned internationally by the Montreal Protocol because it is the main culprit responsible for stratospheric ozone depletion. But CFC is also a global warmer, 10,000 to 20,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

In fact, the nuclear fuel cycle utilises large quantities of fossil fuel at all of its stages - the mining and milling of uranium, the construction of the nuclear reactor and cooling towers, robotic decommissioning of the intensely radioactive reactor at the end of its 20 to 40-year operating lifetime, and transportation and long-term storage of massive quantities of radioactive waste.

In summary, nuclear power produces, according to a 2004 study by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen and Philip Smith, only three times fewer greenhouse gases than modern natural-gas power stations.

Contrary to the nuclear industry's propaganda, nuclear power is therefore not green and it is certainly not clean. Nuclear reactors consistently release millions of curies of radioactive isotopes into the air and water each year. These releases are unregulated because the nuclear industry considers these particular radioactive elements to be biologically inconsequential. This is not so.

These unregulated isotopes include the noble gases krypton, xenon and argon, which are fat-soluble and if inhaled by persons living near a nuclear reactor, are absorbed through the lungs, migrating to the fatty tissues of the body, including the abdominal fat pad and upper thighs, near the reproductive organs. These radioactive elements, which emit high-energy gamma radiation, can mutate the genes in the eggs and sperm and cause genetic disease.

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen composed of two neutrons and one proton with an atomic weight of 3. The chemical symbol for tritium is H3. When one or both of the hydrogen atoms in water is displaced by tritium the water molecule is then called tritiated water. Tritium is a soft energy beta emitter, more mutagenic than gamma radiation, that incorporates directly into the DNA molecule of the gene. Its half life is 12.3 years, giving it a biologically active life of 246 years.

The dire subject of massive quantities of radioactive waste accruing at the 442 nuclear reactors across the world is also rarely, if ever, addressed by the nuclear industry. Each typical 1000-megawatt nuclear reactor manufactures 33tonnes of thermally hot, intensely radioactive waste per year.

Already more than 80,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste sits in cooling pools next to the 103 US nuclear power plants, awaiting transportation to a storage facility yet to be found. This dangerous material will be an attractive target for terrorist sabotage as it travels through 39 states on roads and railway lines for the next 25 years.

But the long-term storage of radioactive waste continues to pose a problem. The US Congress in 1987 chose Yucca Mountain in Nevada, 150km northwest of Las Vegas, as a repository for America's high-level waste. But Yucca Mountain has subsequently been found to be unsuitable for the long-term storage of high-level waste because it is a volcanic mountain made of permeable pumice stone and it is transected by 32 earthquake faults. Last week a congressional committee discovered fabricated data about water infiltration and cask corrosion in Yucca Mountain that had been produced by personnel in the US Geological Survey. These startling revelations, according to most experts, have almost disqualified Yucca Mountain as a waste repository, meaning that the US now has nowhere to deposit its expanding nuclear waste inventory.

To make matters worse, a study released last week by the National Academy of Sciences shows that the cooling pools at nuclear reactors, which store 10 to 30 times more radioactive material than that contained in the reactor core, are subject to catastrophic attacks by terrorists, which could unleash an inferno and release massive quantities of deadly radiation -- significantly worse than the radiation released by Chernobyl, according to some scientists.

This vulnerable high-level nuclear waste contained in the cooling pools at 103 nuclear power plants in the US includes hundreds of radioactive elements that have different biological impacts in the human body, the most important being cancer and genetic diseases.

The incubation time for cancer is five to 50 years following exposure to radiation. It is important to note that children, old people and immuno-compromised individuals are many times more sensitive to the malignant effects of radiation than other people.

I will describe four of the most dangerous elements made in nuclear power plants.

Iodine 131, which was released at the nuclear accidents at Sellafield in Britain, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Three Mile Island in the US, is radioactive for only six weeks and it bio-concentrates in leafy vegetables and milk. When it enters the human body via the gut and the lung, it migrates to the thyroid gland in the neck, where it can later induce thyroid cancer. In Belarus more than 2000 children have had their thyroids removed for thyroid cancer, a situation never before recorded in pediatric literature.

Strontium 90 lasts for 600 years. As a calcium analogue, it concentrates in cow and goat milk. It accumulates in the human breast during lactation, and in bone, where it can later induce breast cancer, bone cancer and leukemia.

Cesium 137, which also lasts for 600 years, concentrates in the food chain, particularly meat. On entering the human body, it locates in muscle, where it can induce a malignant muscle cancer called a sarcoma.

Plutonium 239, one of the most dangerous elements known to humans, is so toxic that one-millionth of a gram is carcinogenic. More than 200kg is made annually in each 1000-megawatt nuclear power plant. Plutonium is handled like iron in the body, and is therefore stored in the liver, where it causes liver cancer, and in the bone, where it can induce bone cancer and blood malignancies. On inhalation it causes lung cancer. It also crosses the placenta, where, like the drug thalidomide, it can cause severe congenital deformities. Plutonium has a predisposition for the testicle, where it can cause testicular cancer and induce genetic diseases in future generations. Plutonium lasts for 500,000 years, living on to induce cancer and genetic diseases in future generations of plants, animals and humans.

- Yup men, your swimmers could be toxic, or better yet, you could very well become sterile. Fun huh? -

Plutonium is also the fuel for nuclear weapons -- only 5kg is necessary to make a bomb and each reactor makes more than 200kg per year. Therefore any country with a nuclear power plant can theoretically manufacture 40 bombs a year.

Because nuclear power leaves a toxic legacy to all future generations, because it produces global warming gases, because it is far more expensive than any other form of electricity generation, and because it can trigger proliferation of nuclear weapons, these topics need urgently to be introduced into the tertiary educational system of Australia, which is host to 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the world's richest uranium.

Dr. Helen Caldicott is an anti-nuclear campaigner and founder and president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, which warns of the danger of nuclear energy.
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- and WOW, a negative vote on a scientifically published and highly regarded FACTUAL analysis on nuclear energy on MacRumors, interesting that FACTS are ignored or hated on here LOL
 
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aristokrat said:
So what are the better alternatives?
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Each area has it's own best option.

aristokrat said:
Ruining of the rivers through hydroelectric damming? Wait, there are activists who are pro-dam destruction because it allows biomes to regenerate!
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Everybody has their own idea of what's important. On the whole, dams can be built more responsibly than they were in the past. Hydro power can also include newer technologies such as wave action as well.

aristokrat said:
Wind power? Wait, there are activists who are anti-wind power because turbines kill birds (see the troubled California Condor population who just can't seem to stay away from the turbine blades)! And it's inefficient...
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There are many ways to prevent birds from approaching areas where they are at risk or are unwanted. There is nothing to prevent these methods from being used for wind farms as well.

aristokrat said:
Solar power? Wait, there are even activists against this (biome destruction and geothermal equilibrium problems)! And it's expensive and inefficient...
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Solar panels are not that expensive anymore. Solar thermal is even cheaper still.

Hey, where's geothermal and biomass?

aristokrat said:
I'm personally for increased use of nuclear power, but it looks like whatever we do we're screwed. But complaining about one thing without suggesting a solution is pointless.
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The only reason it looks like everything is equally bad is because you're not bothering to look deeper than a cursory glance. There is no one solution to every energy need. So we'll have to come up with several solutions in a country as big as ours. Just because there is at least one group that is against everything doesn't mean everything is equally difficult to fix.
 
Greenpeace hypocrites

Greenpeace hypocrites trying to shake down Apple again.

The whole planet is being blanketed with plutonium from Fukushima which is 1000s of times worse (http://ex-skf.blogspot.com/), and they're going on about pollution from coal.

Greenpeace is "controlled opposition".
 
fletch33 said:
Apple does what it can to be energy efficient as do most publicly watched companies. they need the juice to provide the services that also provide jobs. it is not their decision how the local community produces that energy.
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A citizen cannot support its own green power facility, but big companies can. Also, if Apple had cleaner power sources, all users could take benefit of it, becoming a greener individual.

Big companies should push good social and environmental standards. These days, consumers tend to buy products from more altruistic corporations - e.g. having a mission aligned to what the consumer believes as a good practice. Apple, as the biggest IT/electronics company, must increase its environmental policies to pair with its market share.
 
Economics

TrentS said:
Greenpeace and other "green" groups should be lobbying Washington to figure out how to bring down the high cost of solar power alternatives and other sustainable eneries, instead of griping about big companies that CAN afford it, and are actually doing something about it already.

As long as the price of these "green systems" are unatainable by the every day person, we will never see them adopted on a regular basis.

:D:D:D:D
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How might it be made affordable?
The suggestion of lobbying Washington (as opposed to donations of time/talent/money to scientific organizations) would imply government-provided subsidies. Where would that money come from? More U.S. debt? Increased taxes on U.S. citizens and businesses? Aside from improving the technology to make it cheaper/more efficient (maybe that's what you meant anyway), it can't really be made more affordable. With "solutions" like government-provided subsidies, the only difference is who's paying for it.
 
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