Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?

• BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨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

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• 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.

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  • 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

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    • mushroommunk@lemmy.today ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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