Lessons from Nuclear Waste, Applied to eWaste
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/french.html
Things were going very well until the late 80s when another nuclear issue surfaced that threatened to derail their very successful program: nuclear waste.
French technocrats had never thought that the waste issue would be much of a problem. From the beginning the French had been recycling their nuclear waste, reclaiming the plutonium and unused uranium and fabricating new fuel elements. This not only gave energy, it reduced the volume and longevity of French radioactive waste. The volume of the ultimate high-level waste was indeed very small: the contribution of a family of four using electricity for 20 years is a glass cylinder the size of a cigarette lighter. It was assumed that this high-level waste would be buried in underground geological storage and in the 80s French engineers began digging exploratory holes in France's rural regions.
To the astonishment of France's technocrats, the populations in these regions were extremely unhappy. There were riots. The same rural regions that had actively lobbied to become nuclear power plant sites were openly hostile to the idea of being selected as France's nuclear waste dump. In retrospect, Mandil says, it's not surprising. It's not the risk of a waste site, so much as the lack of any perceived benefit. "People in France can be proud of their nuclear plants, but nobody wants to be proud of having a nuclear dustbin under its feet." In 1990, all activity was stopped and the matter was turned over to the French parliament, who appointed a politician, Monsieur Bataille, to look into the matter.
Bataille discovered that the rural populations had an idea of "Parisians, the consumers of electricity, coming to the countryside, going to the bottom of your garden with a spade, digging a hole and burying nuclear waste, permanently." Using the word permanently was especially clumsy says Bataille because it left the impression that the authorities were abandoning the waste forever and would never come back to take care of it.
Fighting the objections of technical experts who argued it would increase costs, Bataille introduced the notions of reversibility and stocking. Waste should not be buried permanently but rather stocked in a way that made it accessible at some time in the future. People felt much happier with the idea of a "stocking center" than a "nuclear graveyard". Was this just a semantic difference? No, says Bataille. Stocking waste and watching it involves a commitment to the future. It implies that the waste will not be forgotten. It implies that the authorities will continue to be responsible. And, says Bataille, it offers some possibility of future advances. "Today we stock containers of waste because currently scientists don't know how to reduce or eliminate the toxicity, but maybe in 100 years perhaps scientists will."
Nuclear waste is an enormously difficult political problem which to date no country has solved. It is, in a sense, the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry. Could this issue strike down France's uniquely successful nuclear program? France's politicians and technocrats are in no doubt. If France is unable to solve this issue, says Mandil, then "I do not see how we can continue our nuclear program."
Google follows Microsoft's Lead, Hired a Power and Cooling Expert from HP
Christian Belady has been widely covered in in the industry and was a big hire for Microsoft. Google followed Microsoft's lead and hired his successor at HP, Christopher Malone. Christian and Chris's names are listed on many HP papers.
1 HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006). Energy-to-Acquisition Cost Ratio (EAC) is defined as the ratio of the 3 year cost of power and cooling for IT equipment to the acquisition cost of the IT equipment. For instance, the EAC for blades, 1U, and 2U servers may be greater than 100%. This indicates that the 3 year cost of power and cooling exceeds the cost of the hardware.
3 HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0
4 HP, Christopher Malone, PhD, Christian Belady, P.E., “Metrics to Characterize Data Center & IT Equipment Energy Use”, Digital Power Forum, Richardson, TX (September 2006) & “How to Minimize Data Center Utility Bills”, HP C. Belady, P.E., Sept 2006, https://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7881&pg=1&topicID=0
I would say Microsoft got the best guy picking first. Also, it will be interesting if Google & Microsoft go down the path of water cooled servers as both Christopher and Christian were believers of water cooling while at HP.
UPS Avoids the EBay Mistake, Being Fined for Air Pollution from Diesel Generators in their Green Data Center
Many of you have read the SearchDataCenter article about United Parcel Service’s Green Data Center efforts. The interesting part behind the scenes is UPS runs its diesel generators frequently and stays in compliance with local emissions standards. A $79,200 mistake eBay made.
Given Georgia’s water shortage jeopardizing nuclear power plant operations, a reliable power supply seems an issue. Digging a little deeper, I found it interesting that CARMA.org has UPS listed as a power plant. Then I found this article in Diesel Progress with details on how UPS installed an Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system to allow to meet the Georgia EPA emissions standards, and run the diesel generators when spot demand power prices go above 7 cents/kWh.
Parrino said Windward uses the generator sets during a total loss of utility power, during brownouts/voltage swells or grid instabilities, during power switching activities from other users on the nearby grid, during maintenance or troubleshooting by Georgia Power, as well as peak shaving when the cost of electricity exceeds 7 cents/kWh.
Windward developed a program that would put the facility in compliance with the clean air requirements, and allow it to obtain a new air permit that provides the facility the flexibility to run its generators in the ways best suited to the data center a any time of the year, as well as to not degrade engine performance.
But, there is now a bureaucratic overhead for UPS as a power plant.
As easy as it was to obtain the approval from GA-EPD, complying with the quarterly air permit reporting requirements was painstakingly difficult, the project team members said. Windward’s air permit had many requirements scattered throughout that had to be compiled into a simplified format.
Examples of this are minute-by-minute logging of the urea injection rates, then obtaining 60 minute averages for each gen-set. With six gen-sets logging an average of 130 hours of runtime annually, the database becomes very bulky in a short amount of time. Other reporting requirements include cumulative run-hours on the first of every month. From the cumulative run-hours, the monthly run-hours are then computed.
If I was UPS I would consider installing the power generation software solution from OSIsoft. Pat Kennedy, OSIsoft’s CEO also pointed out that if you were in San Diego you could turn on your generators before a blackout, but if you were in SF you would have to wait for the blackout before switching on your backup generators.
Microsoft Research Publishes Study Saving DiskEnergy in a Microsoft Data Center
Adding another Microsoft Research paper on saving energy by turning off Windows Live Servers in addition to the below about DiskEnergy.
Appended Feb 4, 2008
Microsoft Research has been applying some of their resources to Microsoft Data Centers. The latest public information is being presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008. If you want to read their paper you can go to here.
Power consumption is a major problem for data centers of all sizes which impacts the density of servers and the total cost of ownership. This is causing changes in data center configuration and management. Some components already support some power management features, for example server CPUs support dynamic clock and voltage scaling that enables power requirements to be reduced significantly during idle periods. Storage subsystems do not have power management and are consume a significant amount of power in the data center. Modern enterprise grade disks require approximately 10W when idle. As storage requirements generally increase in data centers, the number of disks in data centers is increasing proportionally.
Based on 1-week long traces of core servers in our data center, we have found that there are significant periods of idle time during which disks can be spun down, and even longer “write-only” periods during which all I/O operations are writes. Based on this we have developed a technique called “write off-loading” which allows disks to stay spun down during these write-only periods, by temporarily off-loading the write requests to other volumes in the data center. Our results show that this provides power savings of 45—60%. This work will presented at the Usenix FAST conference in February 2008.
We believe that write off-loading is a viable technique for saving energy in enterprise storage. In order to use write off-loading, a system administrator needs to manage the trade-off between energy and performance. We are designing tools to help administrators decide how to save the most energy with the least performance impact.
Appended Feb 3, 2008.
Based on this post, we can expect more content from the Microsoft Research group in regards to data center technologies.
Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.