Skeptics of the proposed hyperscale data center in Box Elder County are sweating about a lot more than its energy demands and potential toll on water supplies.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but shouldn’t something generating the heat of several atom bombs be utilized as a heat source for making energy, instead of energy used to cool it?
I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but shouldn’t something generating the heat of several atom bombs be utilized as a heat source for making energy, instead of energy used to cool it?
It’s really difficult to recuperate waste heat spread across such a large space in a way that doesn’t compromise on cooling effectiveness.
I haven’t read the article, and am not a thermo-engineer, but the problem is probably one of too low of a heat for too long. To make lower you generally have to boil water into superheated steam and then can use it to turn a turbine where it loses some heat and we can extract that difference as energy. The hottest parts of the chip are probably still cooler than the steam condensing on the output of a standard steam generator.
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