I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don’t most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That’s why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It’s possible but it’s not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you’re done with it with cheap cold water.
Evaporative cooling.
Can’t they recycle it.
Technically it gets recycled, by falling down in some other place.
Yes but that’s expensive. It’s a lot cheaper to just draw from the municipal supply and discharge it.
I know politicians are spineless but the obvious solution seems to be to keep increasing the cost of using water until the data centers switched to a closed system. Don’t most nuclear power plants recycle most of the water they use?
Charging the data centers more would also be a nice increase in revenue for the local municipal area
In regards to nuclear power plants, the first and second loops are recycled constantly but the third loop can either be recycled or open loop. That’s why most nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water. They use the water from a lake, ocean, or whatever to do the last cooling step. It’s possible but it’s not as cheap as throwing away the warm water once you’re done with it with cheap cold water.
By cooling it down? With what, water?
You can use water in a closed loop with air cooling.
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Evaporative cooling is one option, yes, but not the only one. Do we know what method these data centers are actually using?