That is not how that works. Las vegas is full of pools and fountains... INDOORS. they retain the moisture in their enclosed ecosystems. We have ACs that pull water out of the air, and we also know how to make buildings.
You can't just have AC when it comes to industrial cooling. You have to have chillers connected to cooling towers and those work on evaporative cooling. Feel free to debate all day on this though...I literally run the department in charge of it at a semiconductor manufacturing plant.
So is the problem then that you can't push enough heat into the air, so you need to evaporate water? Sounds like a nice input to a desalination plant. Does this mean you agree that Arizona is a strange choice?
If they need so much water, does that mean you agree that
Absolutely it's a strange choice. From a power perspective it can make sense since solar works very well, but from a water perspective it's a very strange choice. Cheap land is also a very big factor. TSMC purchased over a thousand acres. Where else in the US can you find a thousand acres so near a populous area and so easily accessible off a major freeway like that?
Tax promises and Trump trying to sway the state for the 2020 election had more to do with the choice than anything I think.
the west coast also has a pretty low incidence of natural disasters. The east coast regularly gets bad hurricanes, the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms, plains states regularly get tornadoes, etc, but on the west coast if you pick a region that's not geologically active then there aren't really a ton of huge natural disasters that occur regularly.
of course I guess there's wildfires now too, but that's not really an Arizona thing either.
of course you're not wrong about companies often being lured by the particular states that are willing to offer them massive tax breaks, in some cases even to places like Texas that do get hurricanes on an occasional basis. And that doesn't always work out well in the end like with the Texas power outages that seem to be occurring more and more frequently, there are a LOT of fabs in Dallas/etc that are having to deal with widespread power outages multiple times a year.
(you're the expert here but it seems like the generator capacity usually isn't sufficient to continue normal operation of the fab, it's more to maintain containment/purity of the feedstock and you still lose wafers that were in-process at the time? that's the impression I've gotten at least)
No semiconductor site has enough backup generators to run continuously and you can only have so much diesel onsite to run those generators (a few hours or maybe a full day if you are lucky). They are there for basic safety systems, air handling and lighting. For example Samsung was down for many weeks after the February storm that caused power outages and fuel delivery issues. They literally ran out of diesel to run the generators and their cleanroom air stopped circulating. It took weeks to get things back to normal and my understanding is getting the air quality back was the hardest part.
> the northeast and midwest get really bad snowstorms
I’m curious what the supposed issues around snowstorms are. In the Midwest at least you typically lose a day of “work” (not going into the office) a couple times per winter and that’s only because of school closures. The roads are rarely an issue for more than a couple hours unless it’s REALLY bad storm.
I don’t see why you couldn’t keep running the fabs through that.
Power bumps are a major issue and even with redundant power you get them. Even a bump that loses 15-20% of voltage on a single phase for 3-6 cycles (of 60Hz, so like 0.05-0.1s) is a huge impact to fab production tools.
I've seen impacts from cars hitting telephone poles 20 miles away that have been enough to impact the fab, let alone tree branches snapping from snow and ice.
I guess I don't know why this would be an issue - you just pick an area that uses buried power lines, and there are plenty of them. And ignoring that - if you're Intel building a fab, you setup shop near one of the major transmission lines that run well above the treeline. Or build your fab just down the street from the power plant...
St. Cloud, MN. Palo, IA. Brownville, NE. Burlington, KS. - nuclear plants.
I'm sure they all have plenty of cheap land to put fabs up on and if you take one of the norther states you'll cut your cooling bill to less than zero for several months out of the year without any evaporation.
re: West coast - one of the big wild fires got within five miles of Cupertino two years ago, local friends got evacuation notices before the fire was stopped, and all homes and I imagine even manufacturing buildings have to be built to withstand an earthquake all along the coast.
I have a backburner idea of a VR library room. It would be neat to have a database I could sort how I liked (for example, by fiction/non, then publication year -> but series use the AVERAGE single year for the series) That sorting is a mess on its own.
It also needs a way to pull spine images or have a computer go from bad spine pics to simplified colour-matching digital ones.
Other options - finding when you have a room with books from multiple homes (blended families, inherited), insurance, or for a "why is book 7 of the series here" massive sorting project with a good audiobook for company.
Perhaps because it seems overly complicated, with a lot of manual parts prone to error? You made something that is N long (scan each book) into something over 3N (photo all might not be N, but transcribe titles, pull out, open, photo, then transcribe isbn/info is 3N or more.) I got the idea from a book (24 Hour Bookstore/Ajax Penumbra) but a panorama of a room to pick up the spines would be amazing.
I don't see it here, but even accepting the need to barcode/isbn all the books, I would like a way to pull digitized or high-quality spine images for a VR library that is fed from an ISBN database of what you want it stocked with, using a query for shelving/sorting. I fear that this is a whole new project, akin to the original good cover scans, but lacking even a starting point from publisher sites.
When you see a lot of books, ask the seller for a bulk discount. Check with recycling centers and ask really nicely. Third, local libraries get donations they then sell for money donations or they have to dispose of - especially old text books.
These are ways to acquire books, but maybe not quality or good condition. Another option is Half Price Books sells "books by the foot" like old encyclopedias or law books for aesthetic value.
Thanks for all of these, I'm making note of all the great tips.
I'd have never thought of any of these. I just feel like the older I get the more precious books and knowledge become. Like if there's anything at all worth collecting it's books.
I can't believe books are sold by the foot now! I used to save money from doing odd jobs to get encyclopedia Britannica volumes as a kid, those and the Wildlife Treasury Series. When I got a bit older those damn Scholastic catalogs got me too! XD
