Post AztJvbWxnPusfBM0Aq by Cdespinosa@mastodon.social
(DIR) More posts by Cdespinosa@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AzsuyoTtbZlaqLLuUq by brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org
2025-11-03T06:09:00Z
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Datacenter cooling uses so much water because it is "evaporative cooling"-- it is actually boiling water. transition water to steam takes energy-- energy from the machines. This can use up alot of fresh water (it is), or... it could desalinate water at a huge scale. boiling seawater allows fresh water to be separated from salt.so we could have datacenters boil seawater to create fresh water to water plants. why not? (am I wrong about this?)1/2
(DIR) Post #AzsuypqyVFp16D9r6m by brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org
2025-11-03T06:10:27Z
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2/21GWh = would take 1.7M Liters of water = 85 water trucks. ok, that is alot of trucks, but it is also alot of groundwater. so worth it? maybe a pipeline from the sea. maybe build midcoast california-- dry but next to the sea. and we could use the fresh water for farming.
(DIR) Post #AzsuyrLqvw7DkGc1sO by david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
2025-11-03T08:48:56Z
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@brewsterkahle I’m not saying it couldn’t work, but a few problems to consider:Salt water is corrosive. Piping it anywhere around expensive electronics is usually a bad idea.The heat for datacenters is concentrated on top of chips. The biggest problem is moving this heat away from the chips quickly. The second problem is getting it outside. You don’t want to be evaporating salt water on the chip, because you will instantly get a layer of salt forming as an insulator and cooking the chips. You would want to do this on the secondary circuit, but then the temperatures are lower.Sea water is not just salt water, it is full of alive things (from single-celled up). All of these also residue when you boil the water. But a lot of seaweed has evolved to latch onto areas near fast-moving currants so that it can extract nutrients as the water goes past. So have a lot of molluscs. Basically, anything that has sea water flowing through it rapidly fills up with nature.Take a look at the published results from the MS undersea data centre experiments for some of the problems in this space.
(DIR) Post #AzsuyrwiirbdabrTLE by ricci@discuss.systems
2025-11-04T00:13:43Z
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@david_chisnall @brewsterkahle one note, generally these cooling systems are not taking the water for evaporation directly to the chip, they are using some fluid (not even necessarily water) to move the heat from the chip to a heat exchanger via a closed loop. The heat exchanger is where you'd interact with saltwater, and it can be in a different building than the computer equipment This doesn't of course change any of the other downsides you point out
(DIR) Post #AzsuyvjOeLKDKRet84 by brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org
2025-11-03T16:35:33Z
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Gosh, this proposals has several issues (that you all pointed out). two possible killers:Seawater has contaminates that make it difficult to use directly for evaporation. Capturing the fresh water from the outgoing humid air would be difficult. (a big tent that would condense? if this worked, we could capture the fresh water to go back into the coolers)and other issues-- thank you for thinking this through.
(DIR) Post #AztJvbWxnPusfBM0Aq by Cdespinosa@mastodon.social
2025-11-04T04:53:16Z
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@ricci @david_chisnall @brewsterkahle There was a nuclear power plant in Kazakhstan that used the coolant waste heat to desalinate water. It ran for more than 20 years. But the irony is that thermal desalinization is very inefficient; it’s actually more efficient to dump the waste heat and use the generated electricity to run a reverse osmosis plant. Data centers would have the same issue.https://engineerfix.com/how-nuclear-desalination-works-and-its-safety/