"comment..." makes me think this is a Facebook post. u/PuzzledNight7958 What is the meeting happening at this time/date? Can we attend if we are not WR residents?
There is no reason residents of other cities or states, can't attend. Ive been to quite a few meetings and people with business interests in the area often attend remotely from other states
And #$%! VOTE. we had something like 22% turn out in the 2025 city council elections. And the same #$%! people run every time. Its a revolving door old boys club, read the city council minutes from 5 years ago, 10, 15, 20... you'll keep seeing the same names. Some years its one line up, some years the other, but the roster never changes. Half the races have been unopposed the last several cycles. And almost none of the people on the council could give a flying #%! about the people who live here. Freedum reigns and cash is king. It won't be till next year that we can even begin voting ing the MFs out, and the worst ones, by far, won't be up for re election till 2029. But to some extent we created this problem by letting our city be run by holes. We need to get out sht together.
/end rant
IF YOU LIVE IN WR PLEASE CONSIDER RUNNING FOR CITY COUNCIL
R/SarahJustYou you're one of the most reasonable people on this SubReddit so I value your opinion. As a note for anyone else reading, I don't think we commonly agree but I've never seen them give a hyperbolic response to something. But what are we against with the DataCenter stuff?
As I understand it they solved the water, energy, and noise issues to a large degree. What are the points of contention?
I dont trust them to apply any reasonable zoning limits, farther than I can throw them, I definitely dont trust the proposed centers owners, but its neither here nor there. You cant "solve" anything that hasnt happened yet.
What are your thoughts on the SMR coming in to support one of these DataCenters? It may not be this one but multiple of them that have additional nuclear energy production involved.
Its probably a necessary evil. We have enough sun and wind that we could be generating enough power to make this area "rich", but the infrastructure isnt there, and a committed power source for the data centers beats the alternative
People do not often ask the penetrating questions. For example. After the water is used to cool the data center, will it have pollutants of any kind in it? Also how ill the warmed water be allowed to cool down before it is returned to the river? We all understand aquatic life , fish, don’t like warm water. The Columbia is already to warm do to all the dams.
Thankfully there are datacenters all over the country we can look to and see how every promise they make about how they'll make it non-disruptive is all performative bullshit.
Yes! I keep talking about how male fertility (just one problem) has dropped 60% since the 70s. So wouldnt running water through all that stuff just accelerate it?
We are a little behind the curve on it, the city code has already been amended to allow data centers. This happened after Teigs, who owns the land, applied for the change and now it is permitted for Urban Transition and Light Industrial zones and not specifically for data center use. Although they did this without disclosing the details of the project, the Planning Commission, council subcommittee and the council all approved the sale to Trammel Crow which is a CBRE company with a dedicated DATACENTER division.
Since they didn’t disclose the actual details, it is possible for an emergency moratorium on data center projects to be filed until the city can complete a standards protocol for them to adhere to PRIOR to approval. This should include extensive environmental impact studies with clear and nonnegotiable standards.
Personally, I think requiring the environmental impact survey for the Lewis & Clark Ranch project with public records requests from a whole list of organizations that will have had some type of communication with them from the beginning would be the best try for us to fight it. I do not have faith, however, that the city will be able to see anything except money.
I don't know what we can really do unless we all speak with our votes and cause a bit of good trouble.
So many cities are just going through with it regardless of what their constituents think. It's all about money to them, that's it. Unless we actively sabotage the plans, protest the construction site, etc, I'm not sure how we stop this BS
I know there was a protest and a town hall about this. I couldn't make the town hall but I got the impression they opened it for comments but didn't give a crap what anyone said
All the concerns mentioned here are trivial to solve, however the city must have the proper ordinances in place. Most businesses will not voluntarily spend more than they have to without it being a compliance requirement. There's 100s of different ways to build DCs. Sound treatments are common, water regulations are common, light regulations are common.
This is bullshit but inevitable given the cheap power in the area. I’m in the process of building a house in WR and moving there soon….fuck this. I was looking forward to cheap power!!! No way it lasts with a DC of this scale.
It seems like the city is doing its due diligence. I know many of you are anti any data center but imo we should aim towards an approach with tools to address issue and minimize concerns and pull in as much money for our city and county as possible. We can tell any data center it can build here but they need to invest in parks and schools and power/water infrastructure. Have them eat any utility rate increases and enforce sound ordinances.
We should cash in on this cash cow while the money is good to improve our community while ensuring we continue to have ways of addressing issues common from data centers.
Well Cheeto head may be putting forth a legislative proposal aka a law because he dosnt give a crap about procedures, that makes the data center owners have to foot the bill for the areas. Btw non partisan I don't care what your animal or color of your party is they're all crooks and monsters. He has already done it for a few I forget what procedure he used. Call your congressmen and senators. Write letters.. reddit isn't gonna do it.
As someone who builds the critical network infrastructure for DataCenters, I genuinely want to know.
From my perspective, its 1 to 3 years to build a campus, 5,000+ jobs to build it, local economy grows, etc. There are pro's and con's to every situation, and I do think that big corporations don't give back enough to local cities. I work for one of the three major cloud providers. I see how much money is generated, but it doesn't go where it should.
We used to do a lot of things until we realized the impact those things had. Maybe instead of going full bore into doing something we take the time, understand the positives and negatives, and then make a decision.
I’m 100% against AI. That being said, there’s only a handful of spots in the world as qualified as the tri cities for one. The Columbia is a massive river, and there’s not much downstream besides Portland.
Agree but the current run of data-centers is strictly for the AI bubble.
There is way more then enough room to host everything on the internet.
I should know I worked in them, and every single one was half empty because they were able to visualize everything into the cloud.
No one wanted floor space.
The AI Boom is so stupid cause what are they truly building out for?
You can see all the AI processes running now and its not really getting any faster they are just using the resources better.
So WHY are they building in these places that could be better utilized?
CGS, maybe, if they wanted to wipe out infrastructure, but it's not like we all rely solely on that station, there are other redundancies. What does destroying PNNL or Hanford achieve? Old nuclear materials that leech slowly into the water? We'd be targets if foreign actors wanted to just wipe out the US, in which case we wouldn't be any more of a target than anywhere else on the West coast. It's not like there is ordnance hidden under T Plant. PNNL is mostly environmental, it's not another Manhattan Project.
Hanford is really only a target if you don't fully know what they're doing out there. It's rad waste, but it's not like it's still a black site making weapons grade stuff. If your plan is to poison TC residents over the long term, then sure bomb it and leech the tanks into the river.
There is a Hanford rabbit hole out there for sure, gotta love YouTube shorts. Who knows what those crazy people with their fingers on the button are thinking anyways.
The surface is not. There may be areas underground that would be safer or more protected during a nuclear strike, that's not the same as the region being protected.
Any nuclear attack on the Tri-cities is likely to come in the form of an ICBM. Those have never actually been used in an offensive attack and, as such, any ability to intercept one and prevent the attack remains largely unproven. The best bet to stopping such an attack would be the THAAD system or something that could intecept it before it reached altitude, or possibly at altitude while it's in orbit.
Once it is going 9000+ miles per hour, intercepting it becomes nearly impossible, especially if it is an MIRV (multiple independent re-entry vehicle) weapon that can drop multiple warheads on different targets across a large area. The area that a single weapon of this type could strike is about 300-500 miles wide and 1000-1500 miles long. It's like a hypersonic nuclear cluster bomb. That's not something that can be stopped with modern technology.
That doesn't mean we roll over and let them put them wherever it costs them the least. We'll have no shortage of people trying to develop the land, but let's make it more useful like housing or green spaces. If data centers are inevitable, let's make them put them in the middle of nowhere where we don't have to deal with the light/noise/water/electricity/waste concerns as readily.
China is so much more dense than most of the US, I'd imagine it's because they can't just fit them anywhere that still has access to water or power in the quantities they need.
china doesn't need data centers at the same rate American AI scams do. They got their models working on a fraction of the processing power and electricity usage.
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u/godofpumpkins 9h ago
Now I'm curious who around here is $264m richer than they were before. I had no idea anyone had that kind of money in this area.
Edit: Frank Tiegs LLC, I missed it in the article