It doesn’t just disappear. If falls back to he ground.
Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
I can’t touch on all of them, but a lot of them do actually just make it disappear.
A lot of the large data centers use evaporative cooling. The water basically boils off as vapor they just pump into the sky. This is cheaper in many places than the electricity needed for condenser cooling or other methods as it requires less electricity. (Which at the scale of these data centers they literally are unable to get enough electricity). That water vapor can drift off as clouds and come down somewhere, but no guarantee where or when.
Some data centers also introduce more runoff of pollutants from their methane generators and such that can make the water unusable. If they do capture the vapor and reintroduce into the water table it isn’t always cooled down and the heat can cause major problems in the environment by raising temperatures. This can sometimes lead to the only thing surviving around the data centers being toxic algae or something.
There are so many more ways they can be problematic. That’s just scratching the surface
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
BussyCat@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
The problem is the rate that it leaves the local system is faster than the rate it returns so in the long term the local systems lose water. If you want to look at it even deeper it’s actually sooo much worse as it also causes local droughts which kill flora which then cause less water to be stored in the local system which then kills more flora and so on as you get desertification and then by pumping down aquifers those aquifers can collapse and never hold the same water that they used to hold
So yes it does fall back to the ground but that’s an explanation for a 10 year old learning about the water cycle. An adult should be aware of how much more damaging it is
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Clouds can move at up to 100 miles an hour if they’re high altitude, average closer to 25 miles an hour for regular cumulus clouds. You pump that vapor into the air and it’s off to the races. If it forms a cumulonimbus cloud those last. What, 5 days? (Can fact check me here, I’m going off my memory of facts from a weather obsessed kid I knew).
5 days x 24 hours in a day x 20 miles per hour = 3000 miles.
So vapor from a datacenter in California might potentially come down in North Carolina or something. For the sake of those Californians, that’s gone.
Sure maybe not all hits high enough in the atmosphere, and some might travel in a circle and fall back around the datacenter, but not all. I guarantee not all.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I mean sure, but that’s an argument against where you locate data centres, not necessarily to stop them entirely. i.e. evaporating that water is a problem in a region that’s already over populated and doesn’t have enough water
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Not really, because you also start depleting the readily available potable water and increasing toxin concentration in remaining sources. See other comments for just how much these things suck up. It’s truly mind staggering amounts of water. There’s very few areas that can handle that amount of water with no issue for extended periods of time. For some reason (read money) the politicians in charge of approving these things are turning a blind eye to those problems.
Low population areas with high amounts of water are usually nature preserves and things we don’t want these data centers anywhere near. If you do chance into finding a low population center with high water that isn’t a needed nature preserve, odds are you won’t have all the infrastructure you need to build the thing and you’ll run into other issues that might have an equally large but different impact. You can’t just plop these anywhere and run a power line and call it good.
That’s why in other sane countries outside the US you see a large number of proposed data centers get blocked during the environmental impact assessment stages.
Dave@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
Can this steam be used to turn turbines to make power? Or is it not hot enough to generate the required pressure?
Surely it could at least be fed into a power station that now only needs half the fuel to get it up to temperature?
mushroommunk@lemmy.today 1 day ago
It’s definitely not able to run a turbine as is but either way it doesn’t really solve the problem. My understanding is steam turbines don’t actually condense or cool the water all that much. You still have hot water, maybe not fully boiling but still hot enough you’ll have a not insignificant amount of evaporation and environmental damage if you just dump it. There’s condensing and non condensing designs but the condensing design requires massive cooking towers and more water draw from a heat exchanger.
I’m not a systems engineer so calculating potential cost savings of adding the remaining heat to capture power vs just letting it evaporate vs using a closed loop system is outside my wheelhouse.
Bazoogle@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
It wouldn’t solve the evaporation problem, but you could get some extra electricity from the steam. Makes the creation of said steam slightly less wasteful