Live data from Hacker News

Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

tomshardware.com

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#31

[fnord]

You're describing a shift from a decentralized system with autonomy and competition everywhere to a centralized system where a few tech billionaires control everything. All of these guys benefited from owning computers and using the computers owned by universities and now they're trying to convince us we should pay them for every bit that gets processed. No thanks. I don't want that. I'd rather see the tech industry…

Found a good phrase to describe the situation:

> "I'm all right, Jack" is a British expression used to describe people who act only in their own best interests, even if providing assistance to others would take minimal to no effort on their part.

> The phrase is believed to have originated among Royal Navy sailors: when a ladder was slung over the side of a ship, the last sailor to climb on board would say, "I'm all right Jack; pull up the ladder."

> The latter half of the phrase has been used to call out unfairness and hypocrisy on the part of those who are seen to have benefited from opportunities handed out to them, only to deny such opportunities to others.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#32

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

This is one of the data centres that went to the extra expense of building a closed loop cooling system that would, supposedly, not waste water on a continuous basis. Apparently, even these are not so clean to set up. Governments are going to need to start paying more attention to the commissioning process apparently.

--------

"Meta said that it's supporting its general contractor, Fortis, which stopped discharging and began hauling wastewater offsite"

--------

Governments should also watch where this wastewater is being hauled to, and likely just dumped.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't make any sense. You asked this > How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centres? And I gave the answer. How do you think you can eliminate the middleman? > Enterprise Zone Tax abatement program The amount I showed was after accounting for the Tax abatement program. And its almost as if there's a reason the state wants to have this program in the first place. Almost as if it helps broad…

My city has bonds for all sorts of projects & it is financed by the people & federal grants. No corporations are involved in the process. It's not complicated: https://www.epa.gov/waterfinancecenter/effective-funding-fra...

You asked how data centres help you personally, I answered that it was taxes.

Your response is that - no you don't need the money, you can get it elsewhere.

This is a kind of senseless argument, I'll let you decide whether that's the case.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#34

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

By definition, externalizing a cost is less expensive than internalizing it; the only recourse for the rest of us is forcing them to properly internalize their costs.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen a cent go to any service in my local municipality from Meta's taxes & whatever does end up in the city coffers is not big enough to have any real effect b/c those services could just as easily be financed by direct payments instead of some circuitous route of federal, state, & sales taxes from transactions enabled by corporations like Meta. If I was in SF & working for Google or Meta then maybe you mi…

Those workers pay quite a lot of federal taxes

Meta takes more in than whatever it pays back¹

> Meta Platforms reported annual income taxes of $25.474 billion for 2025, driven by massive profit margins and a major one-time tax charge stemming from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Despite massive recorded U.S. income, Meta's effective federal tax cash rate dropped to just over 3.5% due to extensive research and development (R&D) credits, stock option tax breaks, and bonus depreciation.

https://share.google/aimode/INoZEto9gPbRPilrV

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#36
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article this is a closed loop cooling system, once it’s up and running it doesn’t use any water. They run water through it during installation and that’s the discharge that they found bacteria in.

You can have a “closed loop system” but you need to shed heat somewhere and that is either by air cooling drawing tons of electricity, or evaporation that draws tons of water.

I’m pretty sure that “closed loop” in this context would mean that the water is recirculated and not evaporated.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'regular people' use YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc. Even you use HN. Not everything can be local. My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house (where I pay $0.35/kWh).

> Even you use HN. A website that runs on an infra that could sit in a cupboard under the stairs serving hundreds of thousands of users with very small loading time. > My friends and family aren't going to be convinced to use a Jitsi instance running in my house > (where I pay $0.35/kWh). Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that.

Does dang run HN on a single server? Why does HN use Algolia for search and Firebase for its API?

"Using an old phone or laptop as server means you'll end up with a single digit annual electricity bill for that."

The largest possible single digit annual electricity bill would be $9. That's almost enough to run a 3W device 24x7 for a year. Do you know any old phone or laptop that can serve as a reliable Jitsi server yet draws an average of 3W or less?

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#38

Is it really that expensive to not do stuff like this? I guess 'turning the entirety of the American public against data centers' is not something they factor into the cost analysis.

Move fast and break things isn't a mantra that arose from first principles, it's literally all they know how to do

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#39
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I, as an ordinary person, benefit from Meta's data centers? I don't have any presence on Meta's platforms & the only time I even notice their existence is when someone sends me a text message via signal for some viral link on one of the social networks. I think you're overestimating the relevance of these data centers for regular people. They can get by just fine w/ local¹ & a lot less environmentally destruct…

People in London buy Instagram ads to sell products to people in Birmingham and that money comes into the US. There are plenty of ways for you to catch some of it.

This is downvoted but factually correct way of looking at it. The benefits of Meta are convoluted and hard to state in ways that are quantified to simple numbers. (Well you can - Meta contributes ~0.25% of USA's GDP which is enormous)

For example, what is the benefit of google existing? Sure you can do google searches. You can use maps. But can you quantify it?

The benefits of living in a society that respects pluralist values is that even if you personally have never used Instagram ever, you still respect what it provides for broader society.

Its easy to give a popularist argument against anything you don't like - "how does it benefit me?!". Well it need not, but others use the products.

On a side note: I'm glad to live during times where we respect pluralist values. I hate football and find it mind numbing. But its great that those people can have their fun and joy without having to convince me. And I can have mine with League of Legends.

Re: Meta data center water discharges suspended for contaminating water supply

#40
Since the article doesn't make this clear, let me explain.

The cheapest (and worst) option is to take in water, use it for cooling and then dixcharge it. Why is this bad? Because DCs don't want to corrode their pipes with untreated water so they add coolant and additives to it, which pollute the water. This is bad. But nobody really does this because you don't want to keep adding additives to water you're constantly discharging.

The next step up are varying degrees of what's called "closed loop" cooling. That is, the DC has treated water in a closed loop that isn't discharged. There's a heat exchange system with external water. This btw is the system that's used in nuclear reactors although nuclear reactors will be far more stringent than DCs are. Best practice for this is one of Google's DCs in Scandanavia that uses ocean water for heat exchange. There are limits to this but there's only so much Arctic Ocean water a DC can meaningfully heat. It is potentially disruptive though and that needs to be considered.

Even so pipes will need to be cleaned. There is debris that builds up and in cases like this you can still get bacterial outbreaks. This is another reason to use additives like chlorine. But again, you don't want to discharge chlorine into bodies of water.

I'm reminded of water management in the Yukon. The Yukon for over a century have been gold fields. If you look at the tech required to extract a tiny amount of gold from a large amount of earth, it's kind of fascinating but it boils down to using a lot of water and having the denser gold sink and get trapped.

So gold miners take in water from rivers, wash rocks with it and then have historically just discharged it back into the rivers. This tended to be heavy in silt that would go into waterways and could create problems. The water was also dirty. So the Yukon authorities have gotten increasingly stricter with water management. Now water has to go through a series of settling ponds so the discharged water is clean/clear.

I kinda think we need similar levels of strict water management for DCs. No discharged coolants and clean water. Figure out how to get that. If that makes your DC more expensive then that's a "you" problem.

Post reply on HN