Alienware no longer shipping high end gaming PCs to certain US States, citing new power consumption regulations

[mariushm]

I've seen nuclear energy being brought up by a person in this thread and others discussed it. 

Yeah, it's cool, but what nobody said is what do you do with all the nuclear waste, the spent fuel?  That has to go somewhere, and has to be stored for 50+ years. 

 

In the case of my country, we have two nuclear power stations, each producing 700 MW (megawatts) 

Each of these power stations consumes approximately 100 tons of uranium per year, which is extracted from local sources.  Another report says a local factory produces the fuel rods and that around 10800 fuel rods are consumed each year so these spent fuel rods then have to be stored for at least 50 years 

 

here's a Google Translate of a section of a PDF talking about management of spent fuel : 

 

Quote

Storage of burned fuel for a period of at least 50 years, in conditions of nuclear safety both for the operating personnel and the population and for the environment, by:

> ensuring barriers to contain the fuel against the environment (outside the fuel sheath);

> removal of residual heat from stored fuel, by natural convection of air;

> ensuring the storage area against external phenomena (natural and man-induced);

> ensuring adequate biological protection

”DICA is a modular construction, which allows expansion in stages, as the fuel is consumed in the reactor. Each module consists of a parallelepiped reinforced concrete construction of about 21.6 m x 8.1 m x 7.5 m which includes 20 cylindrical metal enclosures arranged vertically; In each of these enclosures, 10 burnt fuel baskets will be stacked, after which the enclosure will be covered with a reinforced concrete plug and a welded metal plate and will be sealed according to IAEA requirements.

Thus, each module will eventually store 12,000 burnt fuel bundles.

 

Also nobody talks about the effects of environment, where to put these power stations. Our nuclear power stations are strategically placed by the Danube river, to have access to water all the time, and they're relatively away from civilization 

The power station has a 1 km exclusion zone around it (around 0.6 miles for the US people)

 

So yeah, there are good nuclear power station designs, they're safe, they can produce a lot of power... but you need fuel and you need to store spent fuel for decades. 

 

 

[mariushm]

As for saving power, could save A LOT of power by banning outside billboards, advertising signs, or at least requiring them to have their lights turned off after let's say between 11 pm .. 5am

 

Switching to LED lightning is a thing, but it has to be made with attention, because during winters some led lights don't produce as much heat as the incandescent/halogen bulbs so things like semaphores could get frozen... basically, you'd have to add a heater element for the semaphore glass and monitor the temperature, making it another point of failure and a more complex design.

 

The benefits of LEDs is that you can have multiple leds in parallel inside a semaphore light, so if a few leds die, the others still produce light, so you don't have to replace lights so often. 

 

 

[Mister Woof]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

I've seen nuclear energy being brought up by a person in this thread and others discussed it. 

Yeah, it's cool, but what nobody said is what do you do with all the nuclear waste, the spent fuel?  That has to go somewhere, and has to be stored for 50+ years. 

 

In the case of my country, we have two nuclear power stations, each producing 700 MW (megawatts) 

Each of these power stations consumes approximately 100 tons of uranium per year, which is extracted from local sources.  Another report says a local factory produces the fuel rods and that around 10800 fuel rods are consumed each year so these spent fuel rods then have to be stored for at least 50 years 

 

here's a Google Translate of a section of a PDF talking about management of spent fuel : 

 

 

Also nobody talks about the effects of environment, where to put these power stations. Our nuclear power stations are strategically placed by the Danube river, to have access to water all the time, and they're relatively away from civilization 

The power station has a 1 km exclusion zone around it (around 0.6 miles for the US people)

 

So yeah, there are good nuclear power station designs, they're safe, they can produce a lot of power... but you need fuel and you need to store spent fuel for decades. 

 

 

I was reading about molten salt thorium reactors, seems interesting.

[Guest]

44 minutes ago, poochyena said:

Not at all true, even if just from reading the headlines.

"Alienware Claims It Can’t"

"Dell is cancelling"
"Dell just canceled"

"Dell Unable"
Nearly all these headlines lead with DELL. If these headlines began with something like "CA restricts alienware computers" then sure, but the headlines you provided put the emphasis on Dell.

 

The tom's hardware headline is very bad though. headline "Cannot Ship Alienware PCs" article "can no longer ship some of its Alienware gaming desktops". totally misleading to imply its their entire lineup.

The thing is, this has been in the works for ages.  Most PC builders have changed their builds to comply.  The fact that Dell hasn't falls completely on Dell for being irresponsible.  They're using up a bunch of old hardware they've had sitting around for five years and that's not going to cut it.

[wanderingfool2]

8 minutes ago, mariushm said:

In the case of my country, we have two nuclear power stations, each producing 700 MW (megawatts) 

Each of these power stations consumes approximately 100 tons of uranium per year, which is extracted from local sources.  Another report says a local factory produces the fuel rods and that around 10800 fuel rods are consumed each year so these spent fuel rods then have to be stored for at least 50 years 

I know wiki isn't a great source, but it says 1000 MW = 27 tonnes (metric)

 

To put things in perspective as well, 19 tonnes of uranium = 1 cubic meter (based on 19 grams to 1 cubic cm, this is rough math by numbers collected online so take with a grain of salt).

 

It was said that 12,000 tonnes are created globally (632 cubic meters)...That's about the size of 3 houses (albeit there are containment chambers and stuff that aren't really factored in)...but they are building deep mine shafts in order to store nuclear waste anyways.  It's important to remember, uranium is heavier than lead which I think is important to remember when thinking about the weights.

 

25 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Also nobody talks about the effects of environment, where to put these power stations. Our nuclear power stations are strategically placed by the Danube river, to have access to water all the time, and they're relatively away from civilization 

The power station has a 1 km exclusion zone around it (around 0.6 miles for the US people)

 

So yeah, there are good nuclear power station designs, they're safe, they can produce a lot of power... but you need fuel and you need to store spent fuel for decades. 

Well the issue is there isn't any magical energy source...hydro floods plains (and creates river management problems), solar needs storage at night, wind is inconsistent (or the resources needed), coal is dangerous (in multiple ways), fusion radiates anything in the room (and thus isn't easily serviceable...also there is the problem that it's always 10 years away)....actually fun fact, coal power plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants

[mariushm]

42 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Well the issue is there isn't any magical energy source...hydro floods plains (and creates river management problems), solar needs storage at night, wind is inconsistent (or the resources needed), coal is dangerous (in multiple ways), fusion radiates anything in the room (and thus isn't easily serviceable...also there is the problem that it's always 10 years away)....actually fun fact, coal power plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear power plants

 

The problem is aging infrastructure, and undersized infrastructure ... and it's gonna get worse, much worse, when more and more people shift to using electric cars. 

 

There's already problems with excess energy produced by some countries, for example Germany producing so much wind and solar power energy they can't transport it where it could be consumed.. see https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/germanys-stressed-grid-is-causing-trouble-across-europe

 

Also see https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/10/is-germany-making-too-much-renewable-energy/

Quote

Although Germany is generating record amounts of clean energy in the north, its grid is too weak to transport all the power down to load centers in the south — a longstanding challenge for the country that is only getting worse.

One of the most visible effects of this renewable energy saturation on the German grid is negative wholesale electricity prices, times when consumers are effectively being paid to use excess power.

 

As favorable weather conditions pushed renewable energy up to almost 43 percent of the power supply mix in 2019, “there was an increase in the number of hours with negative prices due to high generation from renewables,” according to Agora Energiewende, a German think tank.

At the same time, growth in German offshore wind installations is creating problems for Germany’s neighbors.

 

TenneT, the transmission system operator that serves the Netherlands and part of Germany, brought a record 20.2 terawatt-hours of energy onshore in 2019, or enough to power more than 6 million households. But because of a lack of adequate grid infrastructure, not all of it ends up going to German customers. Instead, experts said peaks in offshore generation had spilled over to Denmark, Poland, the Netherlands and beyond.

“This is not particularly desirable,” said Tom Andrews, a senior analyst at London, U.K.-based Cornwall Insight.

In January, TenneT said its 12 German North Sea offshore grid connections were already carrying more than 7 gigawatts of power, exceeding the federal government’s 2020 target of 6.5 gigawatts.

To prevent neighboring grids from being overwhelmed, Germany is installing phase-shifters on interconnectors, allowing for the blocking of loads at times. Phase-shifting transformers are hardly an elegant solution to Germany’s grid capacity problems — but then neither are some of the other options on the table.

 

So yeah, you'd say increase the transmission lines, more cables... well, you got your hippies that don't want power cables over their heads  : 

 

Quote

But progress is hampered by local community resistance. “A lot of the lines will have to be underground,” explained Andrews. “This takes a lot longer, costs a lot more and potentially causes a lot more environmental damage than pylons.”

Another option would be to introduce different electricity price areas across the country. Having cheaper electricity in the north might encourage large power users to set up shop closer to where offshore wind is generated, Bach said.

Yet while electricity price areas are a common feature of Nordic energy markets, in Germany the idea of citizens in one place paying less for power than citizens in another is a political anathema, Bach said.

One final way to deal with Germany’s energy conundrum would be to find a way of mopping up excess power in the north.

“There are plans to consume excess renewable power by producing green hydrogen, which can be shipped via gas networks or stored for generation later," Andrews said. "We’re expecting a raft of announcements soon which will introduce subsidies for early movers on green hydrogen.”

 

There are plans to make huge solar panel farms and for example, there's a plan in Australia to make a very long high voltage DC cable between Australia and the continent to transport that energy to the continent and sell it.  Even with losses of 10-20% in the cable, it's still worth it for them to spend billions on such transmission cables and the solar farm.

 

Here's a video explaining the project and doing the math on the losses : 

 

 

 

 

There's also a more recent development, a company plans to make solar and wind power in Morroco and use a high voltage ocean cable to send up to around 10 gigawatts to  to UK : https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/22/submarine-cable-to-connect-10-5-gw-wind-solar-complex-in-morocco-to-the-uk-grid/

 

Quote

UK-based Xlinks is planning to build a 10.5 GW renewable energy complex linked to 5 GW/20 GWh of storage in Morocco and connect it to the power network in the United Kingdom via a 3.6 GW submarine cable.

The company, which includes among its board members Paddy Padmanathan, the president and CEO of Saudi energy giant ACWA Power, is planning to deploy the project, which would consist of 7 GW of solar capacity and 3.5 GW of wind in Morocco.

 

The huge complex would be connected to the UK power network in Alverdiscott, Devon and Pembroke, Wales, via a 3,800 km high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line, which the developer said would comprise four separate cables and will be the longest subsea power transmission link in the world.

The cable would cross international waters and dip into the territorial waters of European countries such as Portugal, Spain and France on four occasions, which, according to the developer, should make planning permits easier to obtain. “For its deployment, three different routes were considered and the one not touching territorial waters reached depths of 3,000 meters, so we opted for the shallowest route that goes no deeper than 700 meters,” Morrish said. “This means we do go inside the territorial waters of Spain, Portugal and France and we are now in the process of beginning the related approval requests.”

 

Cable losses along the entire transmission line are estimated between 10 and 12%, but these are justified, according to the CEO, by a very low LCOE for the solar and wind power plants in Morocco, which he expects ultimately to be very close to the world record low price of $0.0104 reported for the second round of Saudi Arabia's renewable energy program. “We are currently calculating an LCOE of $0.013/kWh, but we are being very conservative on this, given the size of our project,” he stated.

 

The people charging electric cars in US will want to charge their cars in 30-45 minutes, so pretty much all fuel stations will want to have a bunch of fast chargers. 

People park the cars, start charging them, go inside to have a coffee or lunch and 20-30 minutes later they'll leave with the car charged at 50-75%, maybe 100%  

 

But the problem is such fuel station with 10-20 charging spots will have peak power draws equivalent to maybe a few hundred houses... and you'd need a fat cable / high voltage cable to the location.... not all places have these. 

 

Then think ahead... think of all those truck parking lots and fuel stations on highways and when there's gonna electric trucks in around 10-20 years.

A long haul truck's gonna have maybe 10+ times as much battery as a regular car (it can be both on the truck and across the length of the trailer to spread the weight) and they'll want to park and charge over night so they can drive 8 hours the next day or whatever .. a driver's hours are limited by law so they don't like wasting time. 

So imagine having 20-50 trucks, maybe more parked for the night and all plugged in, charging. 

 

[oali24]

 

On 7/27/2021 at 7:06 AM, Mister Woof said:

Summary

Due to new power consumption regulations on consumer computer devices, Dell/Alienware isn't shipping certain high-end gaming PCs to select states. In December 2021, this will also apply to other devices such as high refresh gaming monitors.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

I am a bit concerned about this, as I am not aware if it only applies to pre built OEM/SI systems, or also individual DIY parts, and even so, I don't know how this will affect other non DIY parts. I can't see a way to get around not being able to buy high refresh gaming monitors, for one.

 

Sources

 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/

I've got to say, fairly unpopular opinion, but frankly I agree with this ban, graphics cards have been getting more and more power hungry and this has got to stop, of course people are going to listener measures the government could take to lower carbon emissions and I agree that they should be taking those actions but at the end of the day almost any action will still probably be worthwhile and since this doesn't cost anything to implement I think it's still good, the danger comes in thinking that these sort of actions are enough they aren't, but every little bit counts.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Mister Woof said:

I was reading about molten salt thorium reactors, seems interesting.

They are also an excellent way to process the existing spent fuel rods which aren't actually "spent", they have become neutron dense and unable to react in that design of reactor, but can be used in molten salt designs.

 

So it's a good option even just for disposal of sent fuel rods, even if they are utilized in a way produce zero power in to the grid.

[Ydfhlx]

On 7/27/2021 at 7:39 AM, poochyena said:

PCs are sooooo inefficient compared to laptops

Efficiency costs money. That's one of the reasons laptops are more expensive for same performance. In desktops, people don't really care about it as much.

 

On the other hand, banning gaming PCs will only lead to black market, so people going to other states and paying taxes there...

[oali24]

16 minutes ago, Ydfhlx said:

Efficiency costs money. That's one of the reasons laptops are more expensive for same performance. In desktops, people don't really care about it as much.

 

On the other hand, banning gaming PCs will only lead to black market, so people going to other states and paying taxes there...

This should be applied to the whole US then, inefficient devices being sold today is unacceptable, they don't sell cars with the same enissions and efficiency of engine and exhaust systems from 20 years ago.

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

They are also an excellent way to process the existing spent fuel rods which aren't actually "spent", they have become neutron dense and unable to react in that design of reactor, but can be used in molten salt designs.

 

So it's a good option even just for disposal of sent fuel rods, even if they are utilized in a way produce zero power in to the grid.

 

It's also really important to remember that a lot of the high level waste that comes out of many types of reactor in the form of spent rods can be reprocessed to create new fuel rods. only a portion of the fuel in any given rod gets used up before fission byproducts start gumming up it's function so bad that it needs them separating out, in effect it needs refining again.

 

Uranium is incredibly energy dense, around 45 terrajoules per KG if my memory is correct, if even a tenth of that, (fossil fuel plants normally exceed this percentage significantly), can be ultimately extracted as electrical energy thats enough to provide a constant year long output of 142KW's. A 100 tons of uranium under those conditions should be able to produce nearly 15GW's of constant output over the course of a year.

 

And that ignores as you mention thorium or other reactor types that run on other less troublesome stuff.

[Curufinwe_wins]

6 hours ago, mariushm said:

I've seen nuclear energy being brought up by a person in this thread and others discussed it. 

Yeah, it's cool, but what nobody said is what do you do with all the nuclear waste, the spent fuel?  That has to go somewhere, and has to be stored for 50+ years. 

 

In the case of my country, we have two nuclear power stations, each producing 700 MW (megawatts) 

Each of these power stations consumes approximately 100 tons of uranium per year, which is extracted from local sources.  Another report says a local factory produces the fuel rods and that around 10800 fuel rods are consumed each year so these spent fuel rods then have to be stored for at least 50 years 

 

here's a Google Translate of a section of a PDF talking about management of spent fuel : 

 

 

Also nobody talks about the effects of environment, where to put these power stations. Our nuclear power stations are strategically placed by the Danube river, to have access to water all the time, and they're relatively away from civilization 

The power station has a 1 km exclusion zone around it (around 0.6 miles for the US people)

 

So yeah, there are good nuclear power station designs, they're safe, they can produce a lot of power... but you need fuel and you need to store spent fuel for decades. 

 

 

Okay, so I actually am a nuclear engineer. The truth is people have no sense of scale. Scope insensitivity.

 

EVERYONE talks about the waste and resource requirements as if they are anything. Wind per unit energy installed (not produced) uses 1000x the concrete of nuclear, for example. Chemical wastes need trapping literally forever (mercury, cadmium etc are poisonous indefinitely). Those few tons a year are probably less waste than a single apartment building generates, and despite it being a solved problem for decades (we know how to store safely, we know how to reprocess safely), it still isn't a problem. Numerous sites in the US, for example, have their entire lifetime produced waste stored on site without any problems at all, 60 years of production barely taking up a large parking lot of space, completely safely stored.

 

Nuclear power is the only power source that is held responsible for mine to end of time every aspect of its power generation and waste stream. If you held any other power system to that same standard it would be completely impossible to build solar cells for example due to high level chemical waste, or similar size fossil fuel plants that process in excess of 10,000 tons of material per DAY and send all of that pollution straight up into the air. 

 

Without being hyperbolic, you will get more radiation living next to a fossil fuel plant than a nuclear one, and yet the radiation isn't even the biggest risk. The co2 isn't even the biggest (local) risk. It's toxins like mercury and other chemical impurities in the fuels thar spread over 1000s of tons a day that really are killers.

 

-------

Edit: with this being said, it is off topic. If anyone wants to discuss with further, or doubts my credentials I can provide more details in a different chat environment.

 

[Mark Kaine]

9 hours ago, mariushm said:

That has to go somewhere, and has to be stored for 50+ years. 

This is factually false (and yes i have seen who provided that info, some us nuclear institution…)

 

""High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.

Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. "

 

10000s of years it usually agreed upon, at least in europe.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/amp/

 

 

btw id rather use uranium than burning up fossil fuels, but the waste is a "long term" issue indeed. 

 

[Mister Woof]

10 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

This is factually false (and yes i have seen who provided that info, some us nuclear institution…)

 

""High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.

Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. "

 

10000s of years it usually agreed upon, at least in europe.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/amp/

 

 

btw id rather use uranium than burning up fossil fuels, but the waste is a "long term" issue indeed. 

 

That's what made me really interested in the breeder and thorium salt reactors.

 

It seems they haven't been able to make them viable for large scale use, and they're still considered next gen tech, but it seems promising from my high level laymen view.

 

We got covid vaccines and other stuff pretty quickly when the whole world thought it was something that needed to be done immediately.

 

Maybe if the same focus was spent on renewable/sustainable energy, we'd get somewhere.

[poochyena]

10 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

All you need to do is look at how many people were blasting about the law being horrible (lawmakers being uninformed), to realize that the way things were written there is a bias towards blaming the law instead of Dell

but not by journalists, its by idiots over-reacting. There are people claiming CA is "banning gaming computers" despite any article claiming that. The articles ALL put emphasis that DELL'S computers have problems. I doubt anyone confused by this even read the articles. I even see it here, they hate CA, so they purposely misinterpret the headline to fit their anti-CA narrative.

9 hours ago, jonnyGURU said:

The thing is, this has been in the works for ages.  Most PC builders have changed their builds to comply.  The fact that Dell hasn't falls completely on Dell for being irresponsible.  They're using up a bunch of old hardware they've had sitting around for five years and that's not going to cut it.

exactly, and the articles paint that clearly, but people are too excited to hate CA that they ignore the fact that this only affects alienware and only some of their computers.

7 hours ago, Ydfhlx said:

Efficiency costs money. That's one of the reasons laptops are more expensive for same performance. In desktops, people don't really care about it as much.

Thats exactly why legislation has to be passed. Things won't change otherwise.

7 hours ago, Ydfhlx said:

banning gaming PCs

which no one is doing or proposing.

 

[Curufinwe_wins]

36 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

That's what made me really interested in the breeder and thorium salt reactors.

 

It seems they haven't been able to make them viable for large scale use, and they're still considered next gen tech, but it seems promising from my high level laymen view.

 

We got covid vaccines and other stuff pretty quickly when the whole world thought it was something that needed to be done immediately.

 

Maybe if the same focus was spent on renewable/sustainable energy, we'd get somewhere.

The main reason why continuous refueling salt reactors haven't taken off (you can do the exact same thing with the U--238 cycle and Pu-239 btw), is that the very premise of continuous chemical separation is seen as an unacceptable proliferation risk (rightly or wrongly, I disagree with it personally, but still), for  civilian reactors. The idea being that as you are breeding material and chemically separating it anyways, you could potentially divert highly enriched fissile material for weapons use.

 

Now the Th-232/U-233 cycle produces small amounts of U-232 ( a strong gamma emitter) which is extremely difficult to remove and that is claimed by MSR supporters as being sufficient to prevent proliferation issues. There are disagreements within the community if that is actually true.

 

Of course, single fluid salt reactors are still being developed and some limited work (due to many organizations not being willing to fund such a design) is still being done on two fluid salt reactors, and there are still some other issues to solve (like PHX activation and irradiation damage is insanely high), but those are likely to be solvable if you can get over the PR stuff.

 

To be honest that is the biggest obstacle to all nuclear technology, PR, because protests causing delays/cancellations and unfathomably higher standards than any other power system have made it very challenging to make more than a few reactors in the last couple decades in the West. I personally guarantee you, if you were only allowed to make and install 10 new solar cell systems in the last 30 years, the per unit cost and construction time would be way over budget as well. And yet because economy of scale and the loss of the skilled labor to build them have driven up prices, people point to that and say 'see these aren't economical, we shouldn't build them', instead of doing what they did for wind and solar and say 'well they aren't economical now, but if you keep building them the price will drop so much that they will outcompete everything else.'

[Mister Woof]

17 minutes ago, poochyena said:

but not by journalists, its by idiots over-reacting. There are people claiming CA is "banning gaming computers" despite any article claiming that. The articles ALL put emphasis that DELL'S computers have problems. I doubt anyone confused by this even read the articles. I even see it here, they hate CA, so they purposely misinterpret the headline to fit their anti-CA narrative.

exactly, and the articles paint that clearly, but people are too excited to hate CA that they ignore the fact that this only affects alienware and only some of their computers.

Thats exactly why legislation has to be passed. Things won't change otherwise.

which no one is doing or proposing.

 

I find it really odd how you are solely putting the onus of perception on the reader, when it is abundantly clear beyond your literal interpretation of them that the writers' intent is to stir the pot and blame the regulation.

 

From the first paragraphs of each of those articles I linked:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dell-alienware-cannot-ship-to-certain-us-states

"Sometimes the fight for energy efficiency and low power consumption takes rather ugly forms."

 

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/325163-alienware-claims-it-cant-sell-high-end-desktop-pcs-in-6-us-states

"New regulations have gone into effect in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington that prevent Alienware from continuing to ship high-end desktops to customers that live in these locations, the company said."

 

https://www.pcgamer.com/dell-is-cancelling-alienware-gaming-pc-shipments-to-several-us-states/

"Orders placed in California, Hawaii, and four other states will not be honored because of power consumption regulations."

 

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/dell-cancels-alienware-aurora-orders

"Alienware Aurora PCs are officially too powerful for six U.S. states"

 

https://www.techspot.com/news/90575-dell-cant-ship-alienware-pcs-certain-us-states.html

"Facepalm: Interested in a new gaming PC from Dell’s Alienware brand but happen to reside in one of half a dozen states with strict energy efficiency rules? Well, you’re out of luck, as recently adopted laws are now preventing the company from shipping select configurations to customers in six states."

 

https://wccftech.com/dell-unable-to-fulfill-alienware-aurora-ryzen-edition-orders-in-6-us-states-eco-hazard/

"Dell Alienware Aurora PCs Considered A Eco-Hazard In 6 US States, Unable To Fulfill Ryzen Edition Orders"

 

It is without question that every single one of these articles (within the first paragraph) place the burden of shipping issues on state restrictions, not Alienware's poor business practices and product configurations.

 

Every single one of these are fear mongering and blaming the state, and paints the business, and you as a result, as the victims.

 

If you are honestly seeing that it is the reader who is misunderstanding the articles, and not the author for misleading the reader on the truth, then I am really lost to what to say.

[TheReal1980]

The future is mobile gaming.

[Mister Woof]

Now, let me rephrase those articles to be more honest:

 

"Sometimes the fight for energy efficiency and low power consumption takes rather ugly forms."
"Sometimes the quest for energy efficiency needs companies to adapt and advance"

 

"New regulations have gone into effect in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington that prevent Alienware from continuing to ship high-end desktops to customers that live in these locations, the company said."

"Some Alienware high-end desktops are failing to meet modern regulations that have gone into effect in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington."

 

"Orders placed in California, Hawaii, and four other states will not be honored because of power consumption regulations."

"Orders for Alienware desktops placed in California, Hawaii, and four other states will be cancelled because the systems fail to meet modern power consumption regulations."

 

"Alienware Aurora PCs are officially too powerful for six U.S. states"

"Alienware Aurora PCs are officially too inefficient for six U.S. states."

 

"Facepalm: Interested in a new gaming PC from Dell’s Alienware brand but happen to reside in one of half a dozen states with strict energy efficiency rules? Well, you’re out of luck, as recently adopted laws are now preventing the company from shipping select configurations to customers in six states."

"Facepalm" Interested in a new gaming PC from Dell's Alienware brand but happen to reside in one of half a dozen states? Well, you're out of luck, as these systems fail to meet modern power regulations."

 

"Dell Alienware Aurora PCs Considered A Eco-Hazard In 6 US States, Unable To Fulfill Ryzen Edition Orders"

"Dell Alienware Aurora PCs do not meet modern power efficiency standards in 6 US States, Unable to Fullfil Ryzen Edition Orders."

 

These simple word choices change the entire tone of the articles. The articles absolutely are blaming the States, not Alienware.

 

You know, the only one affected by this.

 

But yes let us examine Alienware's "Too powerful high end gaming PC"

 

[poochyena]

15 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

It is without question that every single one of these articles (within the first paragraph) place the burden of shipping issues on state restrictions, not Alienware's poor business practices and product configurations.

Then why do they focus exclusively on alienware/dell? The articles are explicitly about dell's inability to ship to those states. The articles aren't general information regarding the regulations. This, for example, is that https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-computer-efficiency-regulation-2016aug03-story.html

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

This is factually false (and yes i have seen who provided that info, some us nuclear institution…)

 

""High-level nuclear waste consists largely of spent fuel from nuclear reactors. Though it makes up a small proportion of overall waste volumes, it accounts for the majority of radioactivity. This most potent form of nuclear waste, according to some, needs to be safely stored for up to a million years. Yes, 1 million years – in other words, a far longer stretch of time than the period since Neanderthals cropped up. This is an estimate of the length of time needed to ensure radioactive decay.

Yet existing and planned nuclear waste sites operate on much shorter timeframes: often 10,000 or 100,000 years. "

 

10000s of years it usually agreed upon, at least in europe.

 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2019/11/26/the-staggering-timescales-of-nuclear-waste-disposal/amp/

 

 

btw id rather use uranium than burning up fossil fuels, but the waste is a "long term" issue indeed. 

 

The key is "according to some" and is factually wrong. The longer radiation takes to decay, the less radiological health risk it is (because it is decaying slower). The most dangerous waste is that which decays rapidly (largest contribution to dose), but the largest contribution to long term waste (that which still needs to be stored, and would need to be stored even if it wasn't radioactive because it is chemically toxic as well) is from what is called 'trans-uranic wastes'. We have many reactor designs both in operation (generally research, TRIGA, or military) that are specially designed to produce dramatically less transuranic wastes than current LWRs (which are about the least efficient, albeit simplest, reactor systems that can be operated safely). Numerous countries, most notably France, also have dedicated sites for chemical reprocessing of transuranic wastes, to then be reused into fuel.

 

Heck just moving to Th-232/U-233 cycle reduces the transuranic waste levels by 10,000 fold due to the 6 lower nucleon count. And thorium is not actually this newfangled technology like people talk about. A LWR thorium pebble bed fuel load was used in 1977 at the world's first commerical nuclear powerplant, Shippingport, (though it was the third core used).

 

Fast Burner reactors are likewise designed to actually take the waste from LWR fuel systems and generate power from them, though generally speaking this is treated as sufficient expensive to be not worth doing in the US, ABR, S-PRISM etc.

 

Some final waste is still left over, but that waste, being nearly completely devoid of trans-uranic actinides requires far less storage volume and duration. (Estimates from LFTR are 83% is stable in 10 years, last 17% reaches the radioactivity of natural ore in just 300 years.)

 

 

Additionally it is worth noting that the starting fuel is toxic. Chemically and radiologically, the process of running them in a reactor actually lowers the overall radioactivity and chemical toxicity as a collective sum relative to their initial earthbound sources. Now the big difference is that while in an earthbound source the same material might be spread out over a huge area, it is instead concentrated geographically which makes it appear more dangerous (which it is in some respects and less in others).

 

[Mister Woof]

1 minute ago, poochyena said:

Then why do they focus exclusively on alienware/dell? The articles are explicitly about dell's inability to ship to those states. The articles aren't general information regarding the regulations. This, for example, is that https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-computer-efficiency-regulation-2016aug03-story.html

And yet, being the only SI to have a problem with this "issue" that's been in the works for 5 years, they still aren't blasting Alienware specifically being at fault, but the states' regulations.

 

Interesting.

[Mister Woof]

Like, you can't read these sentences and believe they are blaming Alienware instead of the states' with a straight face:

 

"Sometimes the fight for energy efficiency and low power consumption takes rather ugly forms."
 

"Alienware Aurora PCs are officially too powerful for six U.S. states"

 

"Facepalm: Interested in a new gaming PC from Dell’s Alienware brand but happen to reside in one of half a dozen states with strict energy efficiency rules? Well, you’re out of luck, as recently adopted laws are now preventing the company from shipping select configurations to customers in six states."

 

"Dell Alienware Aurora PCs Considered A Eco-Hazard In 6 US States, Unable To Fulfill Ryzen Edition Orders"

 

There's no way anyone would take away from this that Dell is the failure here. They are absolutely painting Dell as the victim.

[MageTank]

22 hours ago, jonnyGURU said:

Yep.  New power efficiency requirements.

 

It's not that Dell can't/won't sell in California and these other states that have adopted this new requirement.  It's just that they'll have to actually build PCs with a better, more efficient power supply.

 

If Corsair/Origin, Digital Storm, iBuyPower/CyberPowerPC, etc. can do it, so can Dell/Alienware.  They just don't want to suck it up and use a PSU that's going to cost them $1.50 more.

 

Sadly it's not always about using a better PSU though. We use gold-rated ChannelWell PSU's in our integration systems but still fail title 20 requirements on some of our models. The trick to gaming the system? Use a board with a metric-ton of PCIe x16 slots because it's weighted differently in the requirements:

https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/B550M-C/index.us.asp (I assume the C in the name stands for CEC, hats off to ASRock for being self-aware of their manipulation, lol)

 

https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-t20/index.html#!Documents/section1604testmethodsforspecificappliances.htm

 

Title 20 has been an absolute pain and honestly it makes little sense. The scoring seems so arbitrary and can be easily gamed so I honestly don't understand the enforcement of it. I get the necessity to curb our power consumption but Title 20 has no say in how customers change their power configurations or hardware configurations anyways. Customers can still overclock, mine cryptocurrency and fold to their hearts content, so making a PC more efficient out of the box means nothing when that gets thrown away the moment someone decides they want to fiddle with voltage and leave it running 24/7. 

 

Honestly, I can't say I blame Dell here for deciding not to sell systems here when the requirements are far too complicated to understand and make little sense when it comes to scoring and enforcement.

[Mister Woof]

1 minute ago, MageTank said:

Sadly it's not always about using a better PSU though. We use gold-rated ChannelWell PSU's in our integration systems but still fail title 20 requirements on some of our models. The trick to gaming the system? Use a board with a metric-ton of PCIe x16 slots because it's weighted differently in the requirements:

https://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/B550M-C/index.us.asp (I assume the C in the name stands for CEC, hats off to ASRock for being self-aware of their manipulation, lol)

 

https://energycodeace.com/site/custom/public/reference-ace-t20/index.html#!Documents/section1604testmethodsforspecificappliances.htm

 

Title 20 has been an absolute pain and honestly it makes little sense. The scoring seems so arbitrary and can be easily gamed so I honestly don't understand the enforcement of it. I get the necessity to curb our power consumption but Title 20 has no say in how customers change their power configurations or hardware configurations anyways. Customers can still overclock, mine cryptocurrency and fold to their hearts content, so making a PC more efficient out of the box means nothing when that gets thrown away the moment someone decides they want to fiddle with voltage and leave it running 24/7. 

 

Honestly, I can't say I blame Dell here for deciding not to sell systems here when the requirements are far too complicated to understand and make little sense when it comes to scoring and enforcement.

Well that's definitely a different conversation compared to the one I was having about articles and their negative clickbait strategies.

 

Coming from someone who lives in California and has to struggle by hard to understand regulations and codes, I definitely understand. 

 

If I had to guess, it is to do two things:

 

1. Improve OEM systems, which is the largest number of users, on a relatively small individual unit power savings but a large one as a whole.

2. Deter OEMs from even bothering in some market segments (seems to be working on Dell)

 

Ultimately I believe still that gamers, miners, folders, etc., are still miniscule compared to the overall general user.

 

So even if they manage to skate by them with work arounds, your regular folks combined are going to still have a greater net benefit than focusing on those other guys.