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Some Genius Has Made A Cryptocurrency Farm That Runs On Nuclear Power

Mike Diver

Published 

Some Genius Has Made A Cryptocurrency Farm That Runs On Nuclear Power

Featured Image Credit: HBO, Activision

News fresh in from the cryptoworld (uh, cryptoworld, wtf): a power company in the US is setting up a crypto-mining operation and data centre in the shadow of a nuclear power station. Sounds a lot like the start of some awful disaster movie, but go off, tech bros.

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This freshly hellish development in cryptocurrency production comes to us via PC Gamer, which reports that the operation, run by Cumulus Coin in cooperation with Talen Energy at the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Pennsylvania, will have an on-site power of 300MW by the time of its completion, sometime in mid- to late-2022. It'll begin mining in the spring of next year with an initial power of 164MW, before escalating to a proposed maximum of 1GW in the future.

We've no properly relevant video to embed for this one, so why not enjoy this clip of an old man having a great time playing Forza. It's a heartwarmer.

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Look, I could Google for what all of that really means, but I'm not going to, and chances are nor will you. The takeaway here isn't about power, or capacity. It's that a major power supplier in the US - Talen Energy has an annual revenue of some $4.3 billion, and has plants in several states - is getting on board the crypto train (it's a train, now?), and that's absolutely a kind of endorsement for an industry that is still wildly divisive.

Bitcoin is big business, and while the power consumption to mine for currency has been almost universally criticised, the environmental impact of the activity is considered less important for participants than the profits to be made.

Regarding the power usage for this Pennsylvania operation, however, PC Gamer reports that Talen's nuclear-powered facility will "provide low-cost, reliable, carbon-free power to the data centre clients on campus. This allows clients to benefit from carbon-free, 24/7 power being supplied directly to the campus, without the intermittency that renewable energy can experience, or requiring fossil fuels."

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So that's... good? Maybe? Is nuclear power good, now? Did people not watch Dark, or read about Chernobyl, or... You get the picture. It's probably fine. Probably. In related crypto news, which gaming sites seem obliged to cover now, some cheeky chancers in Ukraine were recently rumbled after using thousands of PlayStations to mine for virtual fortunes, and a quarter of all GPUs purchased in 2021 so far have been used not for work, or games, or porn, but to mine for crypto. What a timeline to be on.

Topics: News, Cryptocurrency

Mike Diver
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