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How does the US use water?

construction-physics.com

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Re: How does the US use water?

#61

Post by testing22321 »

newfocogi wrote: post #8

I found a lot of value in this article. Out of frustration with people who are alarmist over how much water a datacenter "consumes" compared to households, I've probably erred too often towards: 'People sometimes invoke the idea that water moves through a cycle and never really gets destroyed, in order to suggest that we don’t need to be concerned at all about water use. But while water may not get destroyed, it can…

It staggers me you’ve never wondered these things before.

You’re paying money and using resources and you’ve never looked into the details?

Living in Australia where both are expensive and very finite it’s a must.

Re: How does the US use water?

#62

Post by FredPret »

dpc050505 wrote: post #54
FredPret wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.

If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.

We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.

I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.

Re: How does the US use water?

#63

Post by guhidalg »

FredPret wrote: post #50
adrr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course. How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.

The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.

Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.

Re: How does the US use water?

#64

Post by cogman10 »

Aurornis wrote: post #36
bob1029 wrote: post #2

> Water in the US is generally both widely available and inexpensive: my monthly water bill is roughly 5% of the cost of my monthly electricity bill, and the service is far more reliable. In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. The sewage lift stations seem to have the highest quality generator arrangements.

> In my experience with municipal utility districts, the reliability of the water supply is typically not much better than the local power grid. Both of these services have been phenomenally reliable everywhere I’ve lived in the United States. The only exception was in a town where we’d get ice storms once a year that would bring trees down on top of power lines, but it was shocking how quickly a truck would show up…

In the small town I lived in, we'd pretty frequently get water boiling notifications with our old water tower. Once that was replaced we never got a water boiling notice.

Re: How does the US use water?

#65

Post by testing22321 »

lxe wrote: post #13

> Average per-capita domestic water use in the US is 82 gallons per day. By comparison, German homes use around 33 gallons per person per day, UK homes use around 37 gallons, and French homes use around 39 gallons. I want to know way more information about these figures... like, are there significant outliers? Drastically different usage profiles?

A pretty common stat is that the us is ~5% of the world’s population and uses up ~95% of the world’s resources that are used annually.

Re: How does the US use water?

#66

Post by Manuel_D »

rawgabbit wrote: post #11

It said 41% of the water used in the US is for thermo electric cooling. Albeit, it didn't break this down into saltwater vs freshwater. It also said the vast majority of this water usage is due to older plants that did not recirculate the water. The newer plants that recirculate the water only used a tiny fraction of water in comparison. So...if the US replaces all of its old nuclear power plants, we would free up al…

Note that water use is not the same as water consumption. If 100 gallons of water passes through a heat exchanger and 99 gallons go back into the river, only then 100 gallons were used but only 1 gallon was consumed. Thermoelectric cooling makes up a lot of water use, but on 1-2% of water consumption because most of the used water is returned: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/water-use-withdrawal-c...

Furthermore, heat exchangers can use wastewater. This is done at the Palo Verde nuclear plant, for example.

Re: How does the US use water?

#67

Post by watwut »

Aurornis wrote: post #27
azemetre wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government in The Dalles, Oregon were suing local newspapers that were questioning Google's water usage in the city: https://www.rcfp.org/dalles-google-oregonian-settlement/ Apparently Google uses nearly 30% of the city's water supply: https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa... I highly doubt any apartment block comes close to taking 30% of a city's water supply.

I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually. It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems. Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a…

The question was water spendinf per square meters compared to household. That question was answered and does not depend on proximity to river.

Re: How does the US use water?

#68

Post by xienze »

arp242 wrote: post #57

> We can also think about it in economic terms. The 2.5 billion gallons per day required to grow cotton in the US created about six billion pounds of cotton in 2023, worth around $4.5 billion. Data centers, by contrast, are critical infrastructure for technology companies worth many trillions of dollars. Anthropic alone, just one of many AI companies, is already making $5 billion dollars every year selling access to…

> A gallon of water used to cool a data center is creating thousands of times more value than if that gallon were used to water a cotton plant.

This completely neglects that the cotton is sold for a profit and Anthropic is doing the equivalent of selling $6B for $5B. Looking at it that way, the water used to grow cotton is producing a lot more value.

Re: How does the US use water?

#69

Post by hinkley »

guhidalg wrote: post #63
FredPret wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot…

You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong. The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management. Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores th…

And we couldn’t anyway because we’d bake the surface of the planet with all the waste heat from that free energy.

Re: How does the US use water?

#70

Post by jeffbee »

ryandrake wrote: post #58
jeffbee wrote: post #6

What a great article. Definitely bookmarking this for reference. People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. The last couple of charts really highlight that trend. Something else worth considering is that many uses…

> People who oppose housing construction often invoke "but what about the water??" as their argument, while the fact is that California cities use less water per capita and overall than they did 50 years ago, almost entirely because of better toilets. Those people aren't talking about water use, but all the infrastructure around water. If you take a plot of land that used to be occupied by a couple of single family h…

You, like them, are wrong, for reasons that I already explained. These urban systems were designed to deliver and were in fact delivering more water 50 years ago than they do currently. Much more. They are underutilized! Building the apartments only takes them marginally up in the direction of their design capacity.
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