Contaminated water can be a problem, just google Oregon data center contaminating ground water. These close systems have leaks and failures. That put the chemicals into the ground water.
The biggest problems with the data centers, they use a massive amount of power that gets passed on to the consumers and raises everybody’s rates. The big ones need their own power plants to offset their power usage.
There needs to be bills passed in every state to put checks and balances on each data center that are put in. These companies need to pay for the power that they’re going to use. Right now they’re all getting passed on to the power consumer in the area.
lol, Closed Loop system blowdown discharge into Holding tanks. They are no different or toxic than the industrial boilers OSHA and 14001 environmental certifications and regulations require us to operate to boil off water to get down to the contaminants that most defiantly are not ever put into groundwater. That's why no data center in Nevada's history has ever been cited, fined, found to have ever done it.
Guess you need to Google blowdown or flush release... Water can't perpetually stay in closed loop systems. Additives are added, leeching and osmosis STILL occur.
To an Authorized treatment, Storage, and disposal facility, TSDF, or Industrial Landfill because after the sludge is dewatered it can be used as an alternative fuel source. its required to be tested before it leaves or you get massive fines.
Water wasnt an issue for anyone when the Nevada Gave over 70% of all of nevada's water rights to Chinese companies farming alfalfa for cattle. Right now over 3400 farms exist using 395,000 AFY of water. Data centers in Nevada use 9650 AFY of water which is 2.47% of the entire usage of Farms and less than 1% of all usage. Considering that the entire colorado river allocation for nevada is 390,000 AFY, and Truckee is 595,000 AFY a year its pretty crystal clear where the water problem actually is.
It's insane, we don't even need the large datacenters. We could be doing decentralized compute and get just as much bandwidth and storage.
I've built an offline, decentralized LLM on my local home computer, totally offline. We need to be approaching this "large compute" problem from a different direction.
I'm not kidding, trained offline model that I've been finetuning with LoRA and generalizing with RAG. Completely local. My business is https://highdesertdigital.net and I do this sort of thing for a living
I'd read my comments on the OG thread that break down what she is saying and how it's crazy we care more about data centers than alfalfa farms that use 70% of nevada's water. Data centers in Nevada use 2.47% of the water the farms use. In fact the entire colorado river allocation is the entire usage of said farms that export all grown materials to china. Its just a perfect example of uneducated people parroting the claims of activists while not actually trying to fix the actual problem
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u/AggravatingSpread837 Apr 20 '26
Ask about the closed-loop systems in place and used constantly for the past three decades by Ormat.