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How does the US use water?

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Re: How does the US use water?

#71

Post by Manuel_D »

FredPret wrote: post #62
dpc050505 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere.

Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.

Re: How does the US use water?

#72

Post by hinkley »

testing22321 wrote: post #61
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.

We have the fourth largest river basin in the world. And four mountain ranges.

Re: How does the US use water?

#73

Post by delichon »

testing22321 wrote: post #65
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.

In terms of energy use it's more like 4% of the population uses 16% of the resources. Still 4 to 1, but not 19 to 1.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=87

Per capita, that rate puts the US in 10th place.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use

Re: How does the US use water?

#74

Post by dexterdog »

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…

The water that cools the datacenter is one minor ingredient in the process. For the cotton plant it is one of the few, critical ingredients.

Re: How does the US use water?

#75

Post by gonzalohm »

RandallBrown wrote: post #48
gonzalohm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that shocks me as an immigrant from Europe to the US is toilets. I have not seen a single one that has the two buttons, one for pee and one for the other stuff. Every time I use the toilet it uses 1.6 gallons. 6 liters... I think in my home country more than 90% of home toilets are the "low water usage one" (with 3 and 6 liters buttons) And that's only the start, I noticed that people just don't care about…

Interesting. I feel like the majority of toilets (in my US city) have both buttons and it's been that way for almost a decade. The only time they don't is when it's a toilet that's over 10 years old. I could be wrong, especially since I mostly just use my own toilet (has two buttons, is 6 years old) or a urinal.

Maybe it's because in the northeast rains so much that people here think water is unlimited

Re: How does the US use water?

#76

Post by jcranmer »

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?

When I worked at a water treatment plant, we produced about 160 million gallons/day of water in the summer time, and only about 80 million gallons/day in the winter time. Now ask yourself what water-consuming activities happen in summer that don't happen in winter.

Primarily, lawns. It's lawns. Most of the international difference in water consumption I would chalk up to lawns, given that the US has much larger average lot sizes and a much larger proportion of detached single-family houses (i.e., houses sitting in the middle of a lawn) than European countries have.

Re: How does the US use water?

#77

Post by azemetre »

jeffbee wrote: post #29
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.

That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.

That's not the point, the question was whether an apartment building would use the same amount of water and clearly an apartment would consume substantially less water.

Re: How does the US use water?

#78

Post by FredPret »

Manuel_D wrote: post #71
FredPret wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere. Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.

I don't think they're uneconomical. Fresh, clean water is astonishingly cheap; of course people are using it to grow almonds and alfalfa in the desert.

Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity.

You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but:

a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology

b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything

Re: How does the US use water?

#79

Post by xienze »

xyst wrote: post #25

With the rise in climate change and _collective inaction_. We are in a trajectory for mass extinction [1]. With the second AI gold rush coming to a near abrupt stop, political climates worsening, billionaires continuing to loot the collective populace through their pawns in the kakistocracy (USA) and kleptocracy (Russia). We are absolutely cooked. What’s the point anymore? What are we even solving? Being a _good_ per…

> We are in a trajectory for mass extinction

Birth rates are below replacement nearly everywhere. That’s going to cause extinction far sooner than climate change will.

Re: How does the US use water?

#80

Post by gpm »

rawgabbit wrote: post #59
gpm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you go from "thermoelectric" to "nuclear"? The US has nearly as much coal power as nuclear power, and significantly more natural gas than nuclear.

I assumed only nuclear power plants need that much water for cooling. It is only an assumption. If I am wrong I am happy to be corrected.

I don't have numbers to quote at you, but I would assume not. Fundamentally coal, nuclear, and gas-boiler (but not gas-turbine) power plants work the same way - you heat up water until it boils, and run the steam through a turbine to turn that heat into mechanical energy. I.e. the "cooling" is also the electricity generation mechanism. As a result same amount of heat should result in the basically same amount of electricity for each process, and since the water is being used in the same way they should be pretty much equal in water (use or consumption)/electricity output efficiency assuming they were built with the same era of technology...
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