Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don’t understand though is where the water goes that it can’t be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what’s going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I’m confident that I’m missing something.
Thanks for your time!
The 264 billion gallons absorb enough energy from the data center to evaporate. They turn into a gaseous form and rise into the sky where they become clouds. The clouds will eventually precipitate and turn into rain, but it might take months and months, and it probably won’t happen in dry areas with low rainfall. It might even happen over the ocean, turning the clouds into undrinkable salty seawater.
Well, I mean, doesn’t water evaporate from the ocean constantly and then also become rain?
To be clear it’s still a huge problem due to redistribution issues especially in drought stricken areas, but I feel like the ocean is actually like the main source of freshwater precipitation globally, right?
Sure, but we don’t usually use rain for drinking. It first has to pass through the ground and be pumped up.
The problem is that data centers are basically skipping the one step where humans have access to the water.
I think they’re using potable drinking water too. So we pay for it to be treated before data centers use it.
Why.
Edit: yes I know, the reason is that it costs more money
If you want to have water evaporated, you want it to not contain too much gunk otherwise your “evaporation pot” will get muddy real quick (not defending ai, just giving their rational)
Water has to be balanced before being pumped through the facility, or it will corrode or calcify the piping. DCs use municipal water so they don’t have to cover the cost of balancing themselves.
I don’t think the amount of evaporation from the ocean increases based on how much water is in the ocean at a proportional rate.
Probably not, but we’re in luck! As data centers accelerate climate change we’ll get more evaporation as the average ocean temperature continues to climb
Not to mention the oceans cover 2/3 the surface of Earth, so any precipitation only has a 1/3 chance of being on land. And then of course as others have mentioned that doesn’t mean it will rain in an accessible area or where it is most needed.
You want a hurricane? That’s how you get hurricanes
plus whatever anti-corosives and other [[accumulating] forever[?]] chemicals added that remain
I always assumed that distilled water (water turned to vapour, and re-condensed) is purified in the process.
The issue is that even when data centers don’t evaporate the water completely, their waste water has a much higher concentration of contaminants (because a bunch of the water evaporated out, concentrating everything that doesn’t evaporate). This makes it undrinkable.
That depends on how it’s recondensed. For distilled water you need a sterile collector.
Fine, I’ll do it.
I’m a bit uneducated on this, so maybe its a dumb question… But couldn’t saltwater be used for cooling as well? We have desalination plants, I’m sure there has gotta be a way to use the water for cooling and eliminate the freshwater problem completely, right? I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
Salt water is really hard on plumbing. At best it could be used as a secondary cooling loop.
Even plastic or PVC plumbing?
Plastic plumbing is only useful a) up to a certain size since it’s not strong enough to support the weight and pressure beyond, and b) terrible at moving heat across, so it can’t be used in radiators and definitely not in on-die cooling blocks.
Metal pipes can be coated on the inside to prevent corrosion, but that coating also reduces the amount of heat that transfers out - basically a layer of insulation. This is a big issue that had to be overcome for liquid sodium cooling in reactors, but those don’t need to have a super thin copper plenum on a processor chip, it’s larger pipes moving a larger volume of liquid through a significantly higher temperature difference.
However, salt water in a secondary, or even tertiary, loop could be used. It would be a similar concept to reactors, where the primary loop is 100% closed and uses a coolant designed for the task, and that then transfers heat through a reverse-flow chiller that’s fed on the other side with salt water. The coolant pipes can be bare copper/aluminum/alloy for better heat transfer and the salt water side can be coated, and the surface area or flow volume just increased to compensate.
The downside though that can’t be avoided is that your data center now has to be very close to an ocean, and the salt in the air could also cause problems.
Very useful answer, thank you. I guess we need to invent some sort of vibranium pipes which have all the good properties.
It’s always this.
Saltwater is corrosive so it would cost more to maintain.
Desalinization is a very costly process, so you would do it only if there are really no other alternatives. If if you can’t get cheaper in other ways
Desalination takes a lot of energy. In order to use seawater without rusting the pipes, they’d need to make even more CO2.