> The rollingstone article is crazy, because it's actually just about agricultural runoff which is poisoning a well Amazon uses for cooling.
Did you actually read that article? The issue isn't that amazon is the source of the nitrates, the problem is that the data center is concentrating them and pushing them into the aquifer. Saying that the data center isn't responsible is like arguing that desalination plants don't cause pollution because the brine came from the ocean.
When the Port sprays that water back over the farms, some of the nitrates are absorbed by the crops, but there’s a limit to how much the sandy soil and shallow-root plants can hold before it leaks all the way through the dirt, polluting the aquifer below. “The aquifer is basically one giant sandbox, and the water flows through there very quickly,” says Chad Gubala, a hydrologist who managed Oregon DEQ’s oversight of the Port of Morrow’s wastewater permit from 2018 to 2022. Once the crops have absorbed what they can, the rest of the nitrates “get flushed right through [to the basin].”
Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.”
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As the underground aquifer became tainted with more nitrates, even the ostensibly clean water that the Port pulled from the aquifer’s deepest wells — which it used to service its large industrial customers like Amazon — became polluted. Soon, Amazon was using water to cool its data warehouses with nitrates as high as 13 ppm — above the federal and state limits.
When that tainted water moves through the data centers to absorb heat from the server systems, some of the water is evaporated, but the nitrates remain, increasing the concentration. That means that when the polluted water has moved through the data centers and back into the wastewater system, it’s even more contaminated, sometimes averaging as high as 56 ppm, eight times Oregon’s safety limit.