Comment on What's the deal with AI datacenters using water for cooling?
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 2 weeks ago
This is the sort of critical thinking that gets u in trouble with the hive mind. Yeah its water. About 2-5% of the water evaporates the rest is just some slightly warmer water.
Fondots@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Alright, so what do we do with that “slightly” (infact quite a bit) warmer water?
Can’t just discharge it into a river. That hot water is gonna cause all kinds of havoc on the environment. Even if the temperature doesn’t outright kill things, warm water holds less oxygen so that’s going to harm fish, it’s probably gonna fuck up their spawning cycles because suddenly they have warm water in the middle of winter, it might cause algae blooms, etc.
So we have to cool that water down. How are we gonna do that? We can spend even more money and energy to refrigerate it I suppose, but of course that would be stupid since these data centers are already using ridiculous amounts of energy.
So most likely we’d just put it in some giant holding tanks and wait for it to cool off or maybe run it through a massive radiator to cool off. That’s even more land being taken up by these monstrosities, more maintenance needed, and at the end of the day, that’s still water sitting around somewhere besides in our aquifers and waterways where it’s needed, and we’re probably going to be losing even more to evaporation in the process.
And while it’s being pumped around in those data centers, I’ll bet you it’s being run though all kinds of plastic pipes and such, maybe coming into contact with lead solder and such because these aren’t potable water systems, sounds like a great way to introduce more heavy metals and microplastics into the environment to me.
And that 2% or so that’s being lost to evaporation? Some of these large data centers are using well in excess of a million gallons a day, so that’s 20,000 gallons a day lost to evaporation, so roughly every month you’re losing an entire Olympic sized swimming pool to evaporation. Again, that’s water that’s supposed to be in rivers and aquifers that’s now not.
And what doesn’t evaporate? Well now any minerals, heavy metals, etc. that were in the water are now concentrated by that much. Hope your water treatment is prepared to handle that.