11–20 of 60 posts
I’m a dummy: why do data centers have to consume water again? I have both computers and air conditioning and neither consume water. I’m assuming of course that evaporation cooling is cheaper and consumes less energy than closed cycle cooling with a forced air heat sink.
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-remove-n...
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
Not sure, but we know that it is definitely not AWS’ job to pollute it
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
Not sure, but we know that it is definitely not AWS’ job to pollute it
The increase is estimated to be around .1% with reasonable assumptions.
The primary driver of pollution was agriculture but the data centers can be attributed to .1% at most. Is it a big deal? Not in my opinion.
I’m a dummy: why do data centers have to consume water again? I have both computers and air conditioning and neither consume water. I’m assuming of course that evaporation cooling is cheaper and consumes less energy than closed cycle cooling with a forced air heat sink.
Air cooling doesn’t scale. Try having thousands of computers all in your room.
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
It's reasonable to treat the aquifer home wells draw from as a public good and prevent contamination of it. Whether Amazon has particular responsibility in this case is a different question than that.
This article states that wastewater from the center contains nitrates at 56 ppm, but the local wells are testing above 70 ppm. It also targets the vector of contamination as being from percolation to groundwater from water treatment plants, which I'm guessing only a fraction of wastewater has the ability to leak through. This feels incredibly disingenuous, or at the least, incredibly poor journalism.
The original piece by rolling stone describes Amazon's role: - 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 m…
I’m a dummy: why do data centers have to consume water again? I have both computers and air conditioning and neither consume water. I’m assuming of course that evaporation cooling is cheaper and consumes less energy than closed cycle cooling with a forced air heat sink.
Today's supercomputers (AI or not) can't cool themselves off with air. Too much heat in a too confined space. Direct Liquid Cooling is a must.
However, you can use closed-loop liquid cooling (like Europe), but open-loop is cheaper since it skips the "pump the heat out from water to atmosphere" part and "who cares about the water anyway, there's monies to be made".
Putting money above the environment always makes me angry though. It's like burning the walls of your house to stay warm.
Ok I don’t know a lot about water purification, but playing the devil’s advocate: isn’t it the responsibility of the water purifiers to get rid of nitrates and ensure the drinking water stays within legal limits? Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
Apparently, none of the methods used in normal water purification remove nitrates: https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-remove-n...
It's not unlike brewing beer in that you need to adapt your recipe constantly to account for variations in inputs in order to get a consistent product out the other end.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-08/documents/de...