I was disappointed that LANL didn’t invest in large scale solar.
I remember (15 years ago?) when the county did a big solar test project
with a Japanese consortium including Nissan and others... there's a
significant array of panels (tracking) on a plot of land next to the
landfill (next to TA-3)... I haven't eyeballed it in quite a while,
trivial I suppose compared to modern commercial arrays (Kit Carson out
of Taos has "several" such arrays). The project included a "smart
house" with a Nissan Leaf battery in the garage and Nissan Leaf HVAC
component to recover heat from graywater (e.g. laundry/shower), etc. I
think it is now rented to some small local company and all the "smart
components" are turned off.
They just get power from the county and have a couple of dedicated
coal-powered turbines. It is the Department of Energy for
goodness’s sake, they should be a leader on it. They even have a
hillside there where they could do pumped hydro.
There was a (natural gas?) driven steam turbine system (long since torn
down and the Center for Integrated Nano Technology built over the top of
it) when I first started (1981) but when the lab did a (very) big effort
to turn over all of the infrastructure to the county (including fire
department, etc) lots of things got folded in/out.
Around 1995 I hiked ( a mile or two) up one of the canyons near the West
Gate and discovered a fairly small turbine hydro-generator... it was
probably smaller than a washing machine but mostly cast iron housing,
steel turbine blades, brass bushings, copper windings I'd guess so
probably weighed a (several) ton or some goofball (not unlike me) would
have hauled it home by then and repurposed it to power their house by
tapping into the city water fire-hydrant system or something.
There was no evident wiring to/from it and no holding dam remaining for
it, it may even have been shifted (by human or nature) from a higher
location at some point? 100 years from now some apocolypse survivor may
find a similar sized deprecated mini-reactor instead?
The LA canyon reservoir (formerly used for "some" domestic water in LA?)
filled with silt/debris after the Cerro Grande... holds no water, but I
suppose it didn't have enough altitude/head in any case... A few dams
around the Valle grande outlets could yeild a serious "crater lake" I
suppose. Maybe a lake at the base of pajarito ski hill (similar to
Tahoe or a hill or two in NZ?).
My impression is that LANL on the production side is still reluctant
to adopt AI. Anyone that has worked there could probably guess why,
but I won’t further comment! [lol] On the Office of Science funding
side, I think it is more progressive.
In any case, national lab HPC is pretty much quaint now compared to
the AI datacenters.
I don't know when that flipped, but I suspect not too far into Google
and Amazon's growth curve? 2010, 2020?
I'm guessing that the internet fabric, even the "edge" nodes represent
something that dwarfs the National Lab HPC loci?
https://semianalysis.com/2024/09/04/multi-datacenter-training-openais/
<https://semianalysis.com/2024/09/04/multi-datacenter-training-openais/>
Maybe someone (Elno and friends, the Saudis once they finish "The Line",
Xi, Putin and his Oligarchs?) will work with a specialized orbital
mechanics transformer model to use a controlled Kessler Collapse to
create a Dyson-Sphere of PV panels absorbing sunlight and LED panels
re-emitting a suitable spectrum/volume to earth with the ones facing
away from the sun emitting heat to the universe, with a layer of
computronium between the two layers (inward/outward facing)?
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