cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36128488
In the face of intense public opposition, the city’s Chamber of Commerce has gone to unusual lengths to promote Musk’s xAI facility: sending out a mailer, for the first time in recent memory, that includes misleading facts.
Memphis is on the Mississippi. Evaporating the volume of the Mississippi at Memphis with graphics cards would be a pretty impressive feat.
kagis
https://snoflo.org/flow/report/tennessee/
345,000 cubic feet of water per second is a pretty substantial amount of water.
EDIT: Water has a heat of vaporization of 2.23 kJ/g.
345k ft³ water is 9.7×10⁹ cm³, so 9.7×10⁹g
That’s about 2.2×10¹⁰kJ to vaporize it (disregarding the specific heat of water, just the heat of vaporization).
1kJ ≈ 0.28 Wh.
So 6,160,000,000 Wh to vaporize the water going through in a second.
3,600 seconds in an hour.
So at a flow rate of 345k ft³ that’d sink about 22 trillion watts through vaporization alone.
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/egee102/node/1925
8760 hours in a year. So global average power usage is about 21 TW.
If we put the entire world’s generated electricity towards heat to vaporize the Mississippi at Memphis, it’d still fall a bit short.
EDIT2: I also inadvertently transposed two digits (should be 354,000 ft³/sec rather than 345,000 ft³/sec) in transcribing the initial flow rate, so it’d fall slightly shorter.