lol that is the single most "Californian" response to an easily-solved problem I've ever fucking heard.
Can someone remind me again why people are acting like water can only ever be used for evaporative cooling once? Does it not condense, fall elsewhere and get reabsorbed into the environment again (suitable for reuse) once it "escapes" the tower?
Do american garage doors not have the safety where you can pull a lever or push or squish a latch to disconnect the door from the motor's chain and manually open the door?
Probably a lot of them live around there.
It's fossil water that's been in underground aquifers for possibly millions of years and can't be replenished. Arguably this water has better uses than cooling machines used to generate pictures of Mickey Mouse kissing Obama.
Oh yeah? Name 50!
The proper thing to do would be, and it pains me to say this, case by case environmental (including the human environment) studies which would consider how much water local communities are using, rainfall patterns, how much water a data center would use, and looking at how it would effect aquifer depletion. But that would require sane governments and corporations staffed with competent people who you can trust to use actual numbers to argue their cases instead of bending to grift, corruption, and exterior influence that would seek to use grift and corruption to prevent these things getting built in useful places.
... So if it's currently all trapped in aquifiers, where it's been trapped for millions of years, isn't pulling it up and evaporating it going to increase the amount of water in the atmosphere or whatever you call the cycle of groundwater -> clouds -> rain?
It's like watering your lawn. The water doesn't literally disappear but it's taken out of the clean water->sewage->clean water loop that residential water typically goes through. It does condense and get reused to the extent that it's possible but it's not 100% efficient. Depending on the climate/season you lose anywhere from 50-20% of the water used and that needs to be continuously topped up. A chatGPT prompt of modest complexity can vaporize up to 16oz of water, meaning you lose anywhere from 3-8oz. For desert climates and areas under drought conditions that water is effectively permanently lost and has to be replaced in the system
They do, which is what makes this doubly hilarious. Californian politicians are uniquely retarded.
"lose"
The odds of it flowing back into where it came from isnt great. Water you drink and piss out circulates back into the same area. Evaporated water goes into clouds which move quite a bit.
The area above the aquifer literally sinks, leading to increased risk of flooding and potential collapse. They're structural and the size of cities
It turns to green algae and becomes useless.lol that is the single most "Californian" response to an easily-solved problem I've ever fucking heard.
Can someone remind me again why people are acting like water can only ever be used for evaporative cooling once? Does it not condense, fall elsewhere and get reabsorbed into the environment again (suitable for reuse) once it "escapes" the tower?
Or am I just fucking retarded and water just literally stops existing once it's been used once and that's why this hyper-terror campaign is now being waged against anything that uses water for cooling under any circumstances?
Got it. So really we're looking at a transportation issue, not a "the resource magically stops existing" issue. Very disingenuous of the anti-data-center crowd to fail to make that distinction. Glad I asked, just to make sure they don't forget it.
Well likewise won't taking the water out of the ground mean there's less ground? What if we get sinkholes?
At this point both sides support censorship. No amount of deflecting will change that.
No. This cycle is mainly driven by the surface area of the ocean, which isn't measurably affected. Also, the rain falls where it always falls, and drains where it always drains. So if you're not close to a major river, there's probably nowhere close to all that much water nearby, which is the whole reason you drill the aquifer to begin with. If you deplete an aquifer fast enough, you just run out of water. Some aquifers naturally replenish, but we increasingly have decided that responsibly managing water is for retards. It's not just a datacenter problem; we also pump far too much water to irrigate cash crops.
It's lost in the sense of "it's elsewhere," mainly the ocean. Like if I steal your cell phone, grind it into power, and send it to China, the material still exists, but it's not doing you much good there. Or more concretely, not much rain falls in California. Draining California water doesn't increase California rain.
The resource is fresh, locally accessible water. Once it's in the sea, it's no longer fresh nor locally accessible. The concerning problem isn't that the total H2O on the earth is less; it's that the community that depended on the aquifer to survive will no longer have water and therefore no longer be able to live there.
