• EatingOnions@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    AFAIK most datacenters use evaporative cooling so water simply evaporate and system has to be filled up again, other systems that are dumping water have issue with all kind of additives like anti corrosion, residual etc and water shouldn’t be just dumped but go through wastewater treatment

    • dan1101@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yeah and I have little confidence the proper treatment will happen always.

    • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      Depends on how you define a data center, but you mean the large single purpose data centers that have been hastily built investor bait over the last 5-8 years, then yes, most of those use the evaporative cooling towers that concentrate waste products either already in the water, or added to prevent corrosion because they cheaped out on the plumbing, and then dumps that back into the local water source.

    • FireflyDad@infosec.pub
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      1 day ago

      Fair. You are probably correct about dumping into waterways. But I know that a substantial amount of warm water is dumped into local wastewater processing.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        11 hours ago

        Is that supposed to be a positive? Those local plants have capacity, and they are meant to serve the needs of the community who finances said plants through their taxes.

        It’s not ok to just dump billions of additional gallons (for no real benefit) into those existing systems.

        They should be required to build and maintain their own treatment plants, at the very least.

      • EatingOnions@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yeah as far as I was able to find out even closed loop systems have to be regularly bleed out to control mineral buildup. People argue about closed loop systems as it’s some kind of perpetum moblie you fill it up and it lasts forever which is not true, that’s why they don’t use coolants either because none of that lasts forever, they’re just saving a lot of money by being able to dump toxic wastewater without immediate ecological disaster