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

• morbidcactus@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And even for fresh water, you have biofouling to worry about and what to do with the water after you’ve used it, can’t just dump it into the environment untreated.

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  • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There are already heat exchanging systems that do this with brackish water already; you don’t need to treat water if all you ate doing to the water is making the water hotter or colder.

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    • litchralee@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While not strictly biofouling, the marine environment can definitely be affected by introducing hotter water where it didn’t exist prior, in and around the outflow pipe. Seaside nuclear power stations that use seawater cooling need to be mindful to diffuse the heated water over a large area, to minimize the ecological impact. Citation: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/…/abstract

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      • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I agree that pumping in water at a different temperature can affect the environment. It is just that a lot of people tend to conflate the effluent coming from plants like this as something which needs chemical or other treatment when the issue is thermal only.

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