Forget Chernobyl: Your Instagram Feed Might Cause The Next Nuclear Disaster – Sify

In a desperate race for energy, Silicon Valley is resurrecting the nuclear industry. But rushed projects and relaxed regulations are creating a perfect storm for a disaster that could make Chernobyl look small, finds Satyen K. Bordoloi It isn’t just the old; the young are equally ignorant about the tech they use. A few months ago, a Gen Z individual who couldn’t peel his eyes off his phone explained cloud computing: “The data rests in some stratospheric satellite; perhaps Starlink?” Here’s the spoiler: your data, everything from your Instagram feed to the anytime, anywhere email, is stored and retrieved from actual hard disks in humongous data centres, connected by millions of miles of cable that travel thousands of miles across dozens of water bodies and mountains, to reach your phone. And all of this: storage, retrieval and travel of data across continents, requires electricity. Like the endless human farms in Matrix, our world is now dotted with data farms ( Image Courtesy ) Like the endless human farms in Matrix with thousands upon thousands of human pods, server farms on humongous data centres are growing in the world that enable everything from cloud computing to artificial intelligence, from streaming services
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