this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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I would gladly take a nuclear power plant or oil field in my backyard than a useless AI center that is worse for the environment than those two.
you're vastly underestimating how destructive a typical oil field is, and overestimating nuclear.
An average oil field will produce tens of millions of barrels of oil per year which releases tens of millions of tons of CO2 per year.
Assuming a worst case datacenter pulling few hundred MW continuously on a coal power grid, it would be a few million tons of CO2 per year, like an order of magnitude less. But most of the time datacenters are running on natural gas which is slightly cleaner and more efficient than coal. And most datacenters are not using hundreds of MW.
As for nuclear, it's pretty much 100% clean energy after its initial facility construction. Incidentally, they are working on building datacetners with small modular reactors. The benefit there is they can skip connections to the power grid which is the main bottleneck for getting datacenters operational now.