Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don’t understand though is where the water goes that it can’t be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It’s my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what’s going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I’m confident that I’m missing something.
Thanks for your time!
I’m a bit uneducated on this, so maybe its a dumb question… But couldn’t saltwater be used for cooling as well? We have desalination plants, I’m sure there has gotta be a way to use the water for cooling and eliminate the freshwater problem completely, right? I’m assuming it is just that they don’t want to spend more money?
Salt water is really hard on plumbing. At best it could be used as a secondary cooling loop.
Even plastic or PVC plumbing?
Plastic plumbing is only useful a) up to a certain size since it’s not strong enough to support the weight and pressure beyond, and b) terrible at moving heat across, so it can’t be used in radiators and definitely not in on-die cooling blocks.
Metal pipes can be coated on the inside to prevent corrosion, but that coating also reduces the amount of heat that transfers out - basically a layer of insulation. This is a big issue that had to be overcome for liquid sodium cooling in reactors, but those don’t need to have a super thin copper plenum on a processor chip, it’s larger pipes moving a larger volume of liquid through a significantly higher temperature difference.
However, salt water in a secondary, or even tertiary, loop could be used. It would be a similar concept to reactors, where the primary loop is 100% closed and uses a coolant designed for the task, and that then transfers heat through a reverse-flow chiller that’s fed on the other side with salt water. The coolant pipes can be bare copper/aluminum/alloy for better heat transfer and the salt water side can be coated, and the surface area or flow volume just increased to compensate.
The downside though that can’t be avoided is that your data center now has to be very close to an ocean, and the salt in the air could also cause problems.
Very useful answer, thank you. I guess we need to invent some sort of vibranium pipes which have all the good properties.
It’s always this.
Saltwater is corrosive so it would cost more to maintain.
Desalinization is a very costly process, so you would do it only if there are really no other alternatives. If if you can’t get cheaper in other ways
Desalination takes a lot of energy. In order to use seawater without rusting the pipes, they’d need to make even more CO2.