Relatively easy, but expensive, problem to solve. We have all the salt water you need. Build nuclear plants and desalinate.
Stop allowing them to use the Colorado River.
I’m pretty sure desalinization doesn’t scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.
And it takes a lot of energy
deleted by creator
it scales fine (roughly linear at large scale), people just don’t want to pay the energy cost because they think farms need cheap water.
Where would the salt go?
brine evaporation ponds
Where does the salt go after the water evaporates from the brine? You can’t just dump it back in the ocean, the concentration destroys wildlife.
Landfill? Salt deserts? It’s gotta go somewhere.
Sea salt as a food additive would get cheaper probably.
Sell it for cheap to barbecue houses
last I checked salt mining is still an industry
deleted by creator
Because that’s kills fish
deleted by creator
You’re taking salt from a large volume and putting it in a small area all at once. It kills the fish
I guess if the plan was to sprinkle the salt over miles and miles of ocean, that could work. But that’s ridiculous to implement.
deleted by creator
Take a bunch of salty water
Remove most of the water for other purposes
You now have to dispose of the same amount of salt, but less water. It’s hypersalinated, and toxic as fuck.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately not. It’s actually a real problem
seawater is not all saltwater, its a bunch of other chemicals in it too.
Sparking concerns. A-ha. Right. I could have asked why this shit is not banned for this reason alone, but sadly I know the answer
I hope you’re all morally consistent and don’t eat beef, which requires 15,000 litres of fresh water per kilo.
threeduck, you should stop eating beef.
For all the harm that this current AI craze has caused with its excessive power usage, I don’t get how water usage is a thing. I’ve been in many data centers with water cooled systems and they were all closed loop systems. The water was a heat transport mechanism. The weren’t using fresh water to gather the heat and then just dumping it on the ground. So how is this a problem?
They pump it out of aquifers then when done it goes down the drain to be processed and inevitably evaporated. The problem is we are pumping it out faster than it can naturally the aquifers. This causes long term environmental damage and at some point the aquifer will fail and no longer regenerate.
Welcome to the water wars.
Many of the AI/LLM focused DCs are using open loop systems. It’s stupid as fuck but, it’s cheap (as a large corporation).
Yeah I’ve been reading up on this and it’s just stupidly wasteful.
Had to check image was not AI
deleted by creator
Because it’s expensive to do that at scale. I’m sure we’ll get to a point where it’s necessary to do that, but the capitalist machine doesn’t want to “waste money” on that.
Capitalism is a fucking disease.
deleted by creator
Um… nobody brought up communism? Just because I said one thing is bad does not mean that I’m advocating for something else.
Capitalism and Communism are not the only two options for a functional society (and I’d argue that neither of them are healthy long term solutions).
deleted by creator
The real shortage is the shortage of usable energy.
Entropy is what makes you able to use energy, but also what makes you lose energy.
on a more positive note, I like the article thumbnail and how its not flat corporate artstyle art and reminds me of the designs of yesteryear
Loss? They consume it?
https://tube.blahaj.zone/w/qEcczobJGVGmBe2rbWJkMN
There is air cooled water chillers and water cooled water chillers. Depending on what the companies go with they could have water cooled chillers causing the water loss. Air cooled chillers don’t really have that problem because they don’t have the same cooling situation. I attached a video of a water cooled chiller
Don’t worry, I’ll stop using my swamp cooler this summer
… 71% of the earth’s surface is covered in water.
Any water a data center uses comes out the other side as… Warm water and evaporation. It’s not lost to the world or anything. It’s just moving rain elsewhere.
AI datacenters are not latency sensitive so they can easily be built in optimal energy/water locations going forward. Just regulate them like we do other industries.
Seawater cannot be used for cooling, salt buildup will kill the system. Water involved in human activity is 100% freshwater, which is the the most scarce resource as in the article (human accessible is 1% of whole water). Desallination is energy intense process too.
seawater is also corrosive and it will kill wildlife around it, that is not the ocean.
pretty sure technetium is more scarce
Did you just wrote that AI is increasing size of El Nino because of increased evaporation ? We can sue technological companies for hurricane damages ? Great !
They’re trying to get ahead of those pesky regulations right now. That’s the problem.
Can we stop using religious terms to describe the real world, please?
I think you’re maybe confusing scarce with sacred?
rereads the title
Yes, that would be accurate.
Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for letting me know.
It’s all good. My fiancé misreads things all the time. I’m a writer and she has dyslexia so it’s essentially a reflex of mine to help out when this happens 😂
