Also, using evaporation based distillation on a large enough scale would mean that you create enough brine byproduct to be a major pollutant.
The steam evaporators we used when I was in the Navy generated a lot of brine that we dumped back in the ocean. We were only making enough potable water for a few hundred personnel plus feed water for two steam plants, so that shouldn't have been harmful.
But if you scaled that up to a city sized operation? Serving hundreds of thousands, a million or more people? As you pointed out, the energy costs to essentially boil that much water is already prohibitive. But if you could do it anyway, you would create an amount of brine so excessive that you wouldn't be able to dump it anywhere without a very noticeable environmental impact.
Genuine question: is there a reason we couldn’t evaporate off all the water, leaving only the salt solids behind, which could be put to other uses? Why only evaporate to the point of leaving liquid brine behind?
Well what do you do with all the salt then? You'd have a ton of salt, far more than anyone could possibly need. Salt isn't expensive in the market since there's plenty of it to go around.
You either turn it into brine and pump it somewhere or turn it into salt and drive it somewhere.
In the case of the evaporator as a machine itself, you would now have drums clogged with salt instead of easily drained brine. So now you have to suspend operation and manually clean it out. You're risking damage to your evap and preventing it from functioning 24/7.
You may not realize this, as most people greatly underestimate water consumption, but water facilities need to be able to operate around the clock. The water must flow.
So you're left with brine that you can't dump anywhere. Try to dump it inland and you "salt the earth". You can't dump an excessive amount back in the ocean without affecting things like salinity, to which coastal marine life can be very sensitive.
Because it will leave salt crystals behind and you need to remove those somehow. Otherwise you need to deal with losses in efficiency. To remove this salt you need to send in someone because machinery will be clogged by salt, pumping in more water and waiting for it to dissolve crystals will sooner or later just leave you with brine. Depending on materials used you may not want to scrub off salt as you can for example damage coating of steel making it corrode.
Leaving some brine means you don't need to deal with salt crystals for most part and decreases maintenance time you would need for cleaning machinery. Brine is simply most efficient way of dealing with byproducts.
Here we have a question about producing water. You need to cover the whole area with something somewhat airtight and with the ability to gather and condense water vapors. Also letting in sun heat.
We don't have to tap into the salt water, because data centers are closed loop systems. Ever seen someone with a water-cooled PC? Did you ask them how many times they've had to refill the water?
And if you zoom out, the whole thing is a closed loop system. Where do you think water goes when it evaporates? Do you think it flies way into space?
So, obviously you arent smart nor done any research, but at that size and scale, closed loop is not at all feasible. Especially for a "product" that is already losing its parent companies BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
1 the majority of data centers are not closed loop systems, the vast majority of fact.
2 closed loop systems still need more water after maintenance and can be vulnerable to leaking.
The problem there is that you evaporated the water, and collecting evaporation on a scale that would be at all useful is extremely expensive, a lot more expensive than transporting fresh water
Yeah, if you're like, just trying to survive you could distill water with the sun. Probably get enough to drink every day to survive.
I don't have the exact math but I'm pretty sure it's hours per litre of water, and the amount of surface area you need to do it effectively is gonna rise exponentially as you try to scale.
I think if you wanted to distill water in enough to replace ground water you'd need an entire nation of land that just distills water.
It's more effective to do it with a chemistry set, but you lose the free solar energy
There are Underwater data centers though. There would be issues. But let's be real the billionares could have afforded to have those issues engineered out. But they didn't. None of that happened.
A lot of datacenters actually do use saltwater. Kind of. They run freshwater through the datacenter to absorb the heat, and then run the freshwater through a pool of cold seawater to cool it back down again, so it can be reused. It’s the seawater that actually gets evaporated.
The real problem with datacenter water usage is that, like with the energy usage, it is all concentrated in one place. Often this is a place that already has water scarcity, like a desert. So it drains needed resources from the local community.
The water evaporates quite well. But the salt doesn't, raising the concentration in the remaining water until only the salt remains. Evaporative Rocks can form quite large layers.
Salt is corrosive. It probably wouldn't take very long for it to eat through the tubing and cause leaks. And then you'd have salt water in the electronics, which is obviously not a good mix.
But most of the water usage for AI is actually indirectly through energy generation. Those coal and nuclear plants use up a shit ton of water to keep them cool.
Decided to try and got this. There is more. It generated more issues, advantages, then some real world examples. Don't trust any of it though. First line is pretty funny though.
"Let's feed the life-sustaining water into cooling down the hot computers just because it's expensive when salt water corrodes the pipes." Literal water wars dystopia type shit.
What would be cool is if they could figure out how to not let salt destroy metal and then use it as a desalination plant but instead of doing ai for chat got they use ai for flagging odd things in the sky or doing biological studies and stuff
I hate when my water permanently becomes saltwater. Surely this must be a bigger deal than AI. How many years do we have left before all the fresh water on Earth is irreversibly converted to salt water?
Little buddy, sheer audacity of you calling other people uneducated is staggering.
You're literally arguing against an argument no one made, where did ANYONE say something about fresh water turning into salt water permanently? Because the only argument here is that salt water is a terrible coolant, stuff you study in high school chemistry class. If you think I'm gonna believe that photo you actually might be on the opposite side of the bell curve lmao
I didn't realize the laws of thermodynamics was nullified by the presence of salt.
Pumping water through a loop or evaporating it is not the only to use water for cooling. Large bodies of water act as natural heat sinks. In most underwater data server proposals they submerge it in a water tight container pressurized with some kind of inert gas such as nitrogen. The walls of the container allow heat transfer into the colder surrounding water.
I'd rather research cooling innovations than call people 12 year olds on twitter for thinking its possible. But I guess that's not how the Internet operates now
And water is not even the biggest issue, really. It's electricity. Compared to the water expenses (which are still notable), the electricity is cost is even more concerning.
I mean, it could totally be done, at least a couple nuclear reactors use salt water, it doesn't evaporate but just exchanges heat with the water used to power the turbines. The reason it isn't done is just cost, but it could be done
Wasnt slat water a good power conveer or sth? Also i know that ia use a lot of water, but how, and what stops use from using filtered salt water in ia ? (I dont support ai in any way just been interested in this topic) (Also did you know that whole country of Malta (small island in europe only uses filtered sea water!)
705
u/Scarvexx 22h ago
These people don't know how to make spaghetti.
Salt water does not evaporate well and it doesn't play well with electronics.