AI boom means regulator cannot predict future water shortages in England

Comments

• Zip2@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  But it’s not like all the water just disappears after it enters the data centres. Surely what happens to it when it leaves is key. Can’t it be treated and returned?

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    But it’s not like all the water just disappears after it enters the data centres.

    It doesn’t disappear as such, but it won’t be in usable form.

    The reason they want to make use of the water isn’t as a heat transfer fluid to something else. The phase change from liquid water to water vapor consumes energy.

    Evaporative coolers work on this principle.

    So now you’ve got a bunch of water vapor blowing away in the wind, which you’re not going to be drinking.

    Same thing some thermal power plants do — you probably have seen images of those nuclear power plants with cooling towers, and other types of thermal power plants will do the same, coal, oil, gas.

    That being said, they don’t really need freshwater, as long as they can set up some sort of evaporation system that uses seawater for cooling, doesn’t clog up from salt or other stuff building up. The UK being an archipelago, seawater is not in terribly short supply.

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    • Zip2@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Thanks for the explanation.

      So this is effectively like half of a fridges coolant system, but they’re missing the bit where they condense the coolant back and reuse it?

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  • Denjin@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    They can’t even treat water with literal shit in it before dumping it back into rivers and the sea. Why would they be able to do any better with data centres.

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    • Zip2@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Well it doesn’t have literal shit in it for starters.

      If you have a water cooled pc, one end of it isn’t connected to the mains and the other end to the drain. It’s a loop. I can’t see why the same can’t be made true of data centres.

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• rayquetzalcoatl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I may be unable to shower and the Nation’s crops may be dying of drought but thank god we can use our Yankee chatbots as the good lord intended

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• waz@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  What’s fucking ridiculous, is that any industry could not have to report water usages. Let alone an environmental disaster area like AI.

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