I toasted a bagel this morning and I calculate that it required about .0000012% nukes to do so! If ten million people toast bagels every morning that's like an entire nuke going off in Americans' kitchens!!1!!1!
I enjoyed most of the article, and I think that "energy released on shorter timescales is more destructive" and "(almost) everything that uses energy eventually converts it into heat" are useful contributions to improving understanding around this topic (and physics in general). Still, I'd like to push back against the section that compares nuclear bombs.
I could argue that Little Boy was not among the smallest nuclear weapons ever developed (Wikipedia states the W54 had yields between 10 and 1000 tons of TNT), but honestly that is a nitpick. My main gripe is that Little Boy's detonation over Hiroshima is *the* bomb people think of when they think of the power of atomic bombs, and pointing out the existence of larger bombs doesn't help the reader better understand the heat dissipation from either bombs or data centers.
As an analogy, if a journalist were to write "the energy used to power this device is equivalent to 5 lightning bolts per day", the reader would have some intuition of what this means, and arguing against the comparison with "actually I could have used superbolts and divided this number by 1000" is not helpful.
Having just visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the perfunctory 'while horrible' followed by an enthusiastic comparison of bomb sizes felt unnecessary. The argument works fine without it, and the casualness sat badly with me.
Thank you for writing this! I wish I had written it.
Although you've included a screen capture from northern Utah's ABC affiliate, I think the heat island impact of the proposed Stratos data center was first reported in this article by Leia Larsen in the Salt Lake Tribune:
Unfortunately Larsen also included the atom bomb comparison, which came from a physics professor at Utah State University. The Tribune article has a number of issues, but at least they didn't put the atom bomb count into the headline.
I'm personally acquainted with Larsen, who used to work for the local paper here in Ogden. She's a good reporter but doesn't have a physics background. I've just emailed her about her article, and included a link to this page.
2.4 degrees celcius is more than the Paris accord of keeping global temperatures rising to less than 2 degrees celcius (related to global warming and carbon emissions). What I understand from climate scientists 2 degrees would already be pretty bad, so naively 2.4 degrees without more context sounds really bad but I always find it hard with these numbers as well to get a grasp of what this would actually mean for my life.
Off-course I wouldn't mind it just being 2 degrees hotter outside for my own experience of the weather, but I have to assume this also impacts things like rainfall, plant growth and the local ecosystem, do you have a sense of how big these effects would actually be? You were talking about 2.4 degrees on its property, maybe locally enough that there are no climate impacts and 0.4 degrees to the whole city, is that the number we should care about?
Once you start spreading heat across volumes, the effect becomes minuscule. Hot air rises, and you should image a gradually dissipating "heat plume" here, not "the city literally warming up noticeably". If you were on the actual property, you'd notice. If you were immediately downwind, you'd notice a slightly warm breeze. Also, hang gliders and sailplanes should have a lot of fun directly overhead. YMMV as to whether you'd want to live nearby.
The 2.4C of the Paris accord is "global mean surface temperature". Back-of-envelope math: If you spread the 16 GW of the DC over the Earth's surface, you end up with something like 0.000031 W/m2, while the quickest-available IPCC data puts current human-caused heating from emissions at 2.72 W/m2.
2 degrees for the entire planet from global warming is worse than 2 degrees for a single city in part because the former is just an average, and specific regions would have temperature increases far greater than just 2 degrees.
Somewhat off topic, part way through the "Hail Mary" film I realized: They have a bacteria, that with two sheets of glass and some stuff from home depot, can collect 100% of the solar energy incident on the glass and store it at antimatter density. And then release it instantly with the right wavelength of $0.10 LED. That world is doomed.
Agreed that it's not a fair metaphor. Question: someone had asked why these data centers are being proposed in confrontational locales, instead of in boondocks eg off near a freeway. Would that not make more sense?
This is why we can't have nice things. If The Left [sic] insists on lying and Doom-ifying everything, they will not only not be taken seriously, they will continue to alienate the median voter.
To quote lefty comic Marc Maron, “We annoyed the average American into fascism.”
Alternatively, let's measure everything we do in units of one atomic bomb.
Like saying brewing my coffee this morning was around 6.25 nano atomic bombs sounds pretty badass.
I toasted a bagel this morning and I calculate that it required about .0000012% nukes to do so! If ten million people toast bagels every morning that's like an entire nuke going off in Americans' kitchens!!1!!1!
Nitpick: re-entry heating for spacecraft is mostly compression not friction
Yes, also known as "ram rise"
I enjoyed most of the article, and I think that "energy released on shorter timescales is more destructive" and "(almost) everything that uses energy eventually converts it into heat" are useful contributions to improving understanding around this topic (and physics in general). Still, I'd like to push back against the section that compares nuclear bombs.
I could argue that Little Boy was not among the smallest nuclear weapons ever developed (Wikipedia states the W54 had yields between 10 and 1000 tons of TNT), but honestly that is a nitpick. My main gripe is that Little Boy's detonation over Hiroshima is *the* bomb people think of when they think of the power of atomic bombs, and pointing out the existence of larger bombs doesn't help the reader better understand the heat dissipation from either bombs or data centers.
As an analogy, if a journalist were to write "the energy used to power this device is equivalent to 5 lightning bolts per day", the reader would have some intuition of what this means, and arguing against the comparison with "actually I could have used superbolts and divided this number by 1000" is not helpful.
Having just visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the perfunctory 'while horrible' followed by an enthusiastic comparison of bomb sizes felt unnecessary. The argument works fine without it, and the casualness sat badly with me.
Thank you for writing this! I wish I had written it.
Although you've included a screen capture from northern Utah's ABC affiliate, I think the heat island impact of the proposed Stratos data center was first reported in this article by Leia Larsen in the Salt Lake Tribune:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-data-center-could-create/
Unfortunately Larsen also included the atom bomb comparison, which came from a physics professor at Utah State University. The Tribune article has a number of issues, but at least they didn't put the atom bomb count into the headline.
I'm personally acquainted with Larsen, who used to work for the local paper here in Ogden. She's a good reporter but doesn't have a physics background. I've just emailed her about her article, and included a link to this page.
Thank you! Happy to edit to show the original
2.4 degrees celcius is more than the Paris accord of keeping global temperatures rising to less than 2 degrees celcius (related to global warming and carbon emissions). What I understand from climate scientists 2 degrees would already be pretty bad, so naively 2.4 degrees without more context sounds really bad but I always find it hard with these numbers as well to get a grasp of what this would actually mean for my life.
Off-course I wouldn't mind it just being 2 degrees hotter outside for my own experience of the weather, but I have to assume this also impacts things like rainfall, plant growth and the local ecosystem, do you have a sense of how big these effects would actually be? You were talking about 2.4 degrees on its property, maybe locally enough that there are no climate impacts and 0.4 degrees to the whole city, is that the number we should care about?
Once you start spreading heat across volumes, the effect becomes minuscule. Hot air rises, and you should image a gradually dissipating "heat plume" here, not "the city literally warming up noticeably". If you were on the actual property, you'd notice. If you were immediately downwind, you'd notice a slightly warm breeze. Also, hang gliders and sailplanes should have a lot of fun directly overhead. YMMV as to whether you'd want to live nearby.
The 2.4C of the Paris accord is "global mean surface temperature". Back-of-envelope math: If you spread the 16 GW of the DC over the Earth's surface, you end up with something like 0.000031 W/m2, while the quickest-available IPCC data puts current human-caused heating from emissions at 2.72 W/m2.
So this DC would add 0.0012% to that.
2 degrees for the entire planet from global warming is worse than 2 degrees for a single city in part because the former is just an average, and specific regions would have temperature increases far greater than just 2 degrees.
Somewhat off topic, part way through the "Hail Mary" film I realized: They have a bacteria, that with two sheets of glass and some stuff from home depot, can collect 100% of the solar energy incident on the glass and store it at antimatter density. And then release it instantly with the right wavelength of $0.10 LED. That world is doomed.
Agreed that it's not a fair metaphor. Question: someone had asked why these data centers are being proposed in confrontational locales, instead of in boondocks eg off near a freeway. Would that not make more sense?
This is why we can't have nice things. If The Left [sic] insists on lying and Doom-ifying everything, they will not only not be taken seriously, they will continue to alienate the median voter.
To quote lefty comic Marc Maron, “We annoyed the average American into fascism.”