Another bust?

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist

I have followed the energy machinations since the first energy crisis in the fall of 1973. Personally, it has been a big thing, and it also is in the pulp and paper industry where we use lots of energy, mostly self-generated. It has followed a pattern.  

Every crisis is doom, and we’ll never get out of it. Then there is a pronouncement that there are no solutions, learn to live with it. Then a new solution is found by bright people who have figured out a way to make money solving the problems of energy shortages.

This last twist, the last couple of decades, has not been about the quantity of energy but the quality. “Coal is a polluter, nuclear is scary.”

This is just about over. I see coal plants coming back and, even more promising, small nuclear plants popping up everywhere. We are learning that the typical nuclear plant uses about 27 tons of enriched uranium per year (less than two semi-trucks). Sophisticated ways have been developed to handle it.  

Nuclear plant controls today make those at Three Mile Island look like a 1960’s transistor radio. Coal emissions have always been captured, just no one knowledgeable wanted to tell you for it didn’t serve their purposes.

I expect wind and solar devices to DIP (Decay in Place) when the government largess ends, which will be soon.

The next thing after that to DIP is these large data centers they are building everywhere. Meta claims they are going to build one the size of Manhattan.  

Really? It will be obsolete before it is finished.

The one thing that has happened with computers, consistently, since World War II, is that they have shrunk in size, energy use and heat generation. The Apple watch on my wrist has as much computing power as all the computers in the world before 1960.

There is talk about how much power these data centers will require. When one sees the photographs of the interior of one of these, there are rows upon rows of computer banks with zillions of small wires terminated all over the place; a labor-intensive construction project and a huge heat generator.  

I’ll predict that in 15 years the whole thing will be shrunk to the size of my aforementioned watch. That’s been the pattern for the last 80 years.

Maybe we can then turn the data centers into malls – they ought to be back in fashion by then.

Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga. and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.