It can happen; there’s a paper mill by me that was actually an important part of the river cleanup process when the river was far worse than it is today. It takes water from the river, uses it for their needs, then treats it and returns it to the river far far cleaner than they took it out, which has been a net benefit for the entire downstream river ecosystem. That plan, and their follow-through, is the only reason that mill exists at all.
Thing is, where are they going to find this not-particularly-clean water to treat and return? Are they going to need all new infrastructure built to accommodate this?
And why is that cheaper/easier/whatever than just making a closed loop cooling system, which they could have done from the being…
Intel was lauded for this same thing in the early 2000s at the fab I worked at, since ultrapure water (literal H2O) was required to rinse the chip wafers the water going out was cleaner than going in.
I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.
They use adiabatic coolers to minimize electrical cost for cooling and maximize cooling capacity. The water isn’t directly used as the cooling fluid. It’s just used to provide evaporative cooling to boost the efficiency of a conventional refrigeration system. I also suspect that many of them are starting to switch to CO2 based refrigeration systems which heavily benefit from adiabatic gas coolers due to the low critical temp of CO2. Without an adiabatic cooler the efficiency of a CO2 based system starts dropping heavily when the ambient temp gets much above 80F.
They could acheive the same results without using water, however their refrigeration systems would need larger gas coolers which would increase their electricity usage.
I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.
I really hope what they mean is clean water.
It can happen; there’s a paper mill by me that was actually an important part of the river cleanup process when the river was far worse than it is today. It takes water from the river, uses it for their needs, then treats it and returns it to the river far far cleaner than they took it out, which has been a net benefit for the entire downstream river ecosystem. That plan, and their follow-through, is the only reason that mill exists at all.
Thing is, where are they going to find this not-particularly-clean water to treat and return? Are they going to need all new infrastructure built to accommodate this?
And why is that cheaper/easier/whatever than just making a closed loop cooling system, which they could have done from the being…
Intel was lauded for this same thing in the early 2000s at the fab I worked at, since ultrapure water (literal H2O) was required to rinse the chip wafers the water going out was cleaner than going in.
I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.
They use adiabatic coolers to minimize electrical cost for cooling and maximize cooling capacity. The water isn’t directly used as the cooling fluid. It’s just used to provide evaporative cooling to boost the efficiency of a conventional refrigeration system. I also suspect that many of them are starting to switch to CO2 based refrigeration systems which heavily benefit from adiabatic gas coolers due to the low critical temp of CO2. Without an adiabatic cooler the efficiency of a CO2 based system starts dropping heavily when the ambient temp gets much above 80F.
They could acheive the same results without using water, however their refrigeration systems would need larger gas coolers which would increase their electricity usage.
Because many are running evaporative cooling.