this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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This article is two years old.
Here is a newer article.
How did I completely miss that date. Oh my gosh. Good catch!
That's interesting, I've never thought of data centers using water before, but it sounds like they use it for evaporative cooling. Wouldn't that mean the water's not really "lost" so much as it's returned to the environment?
I saw a video recently about the trouble with desalination (turning salt water to fresh water) is that it takes a lot of energy to evaporate the water. Sounds like some smart people need to get together and start cooling data centers with salt water and turning it into fresh water as a byproduct.
Running salt water through any kind of cooling system is going to cause huge problems.
Salt is corrosive. Metal will degrade rapidly from salt water running through it.
Screw data centers, I want to see desalination combined with nuclear power plants. They literally generate power by boiling water, it's a match made in heaven.
We just need a few more advances in technology to remove impurities from brine and we'd also corner the table salt market.
Reactors that can do that have existed since the 70s and maybe even earlier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-350_reactor
The only reason there aren't more reactors like that is because most governments have barely been allowing the construction of new reactors period.