Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).
Datacenter waste heat even a problem? I only ever heard of nuclear power plants waste heat being a problem when the cooling water is dumped directly into rivers (instead of the ocean).
In the most nuclear country, France, power plants can't rise the river temperature by too much legally and yes it is an issue in summer with less water flowing.
Waste heat is a problem for cities, why not a large DC?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
Even the largest DC doesn't have anywhere near the waste heat of a city.
One of the larger DCs is 7.65 GW on 8000 acres in Texas. It will radiate around 236.3 W/m^2 (compare vs 1000 W/m^2 solar irradiation). This emission continues 24/7/365, while the sun doesn't. So yes, the UHI is real.
That plus all the gas turbines powering it which release many tons of gasses.
And finally all the infrasound from the DC and its generators have impacts on humans and all creatures for many miles away.
Oh and the water consumption.
> One of the larger DCs is 7.65 GW
"is" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The data centre doesn't exist.
Yes. The hot water the datacenters dump destroys local ecosystems.
Citation?
https://fieldreport.caes.uga.edu/publications/TP121/how-data...
Why would a citation be needed?
Because we want to understand what impact it is?
Residential house emit heat too, but - most of the time - we don't consider them "destroys local ecosystems".. Maybe they do, but we don't treat them as a boolean thing, we try to understand the impact...
> Residential house emit heat too
You are missing the context of the ecosystem - the topic is water ways. Homes aren't raising the temperature of local waterways which can wipe out entire fish and other aquatic populations while encouraging growth of oxygen depleting organisms and algae. Instead of a river or stream you have a dead stinking waterway.
> You are missing the context of the ecosystem
That's one of several reasons why a citation is warranted.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, TFA is talking about a closed loop system and uses a coolant mix, so yeah I think a citation is needed.
I guess parent means the heat has to somewhere, closed system or not.
Some nuclear power plants use rivers and lakes, that’s bad for their ecosystems if it’s too much but this system uses dry coolers so the extra heat should be negligible
It goes to space like all the other heat does otherwise we'd be living on a ball of gently rotating lava.
The question is, where does it go before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
Do you also demand a citation when someone says dogs have four legs instead of realizing you know nothing about the subject at hand and quietly looking it up yourself, and then maybe asking more questions?
The burden on proof should be on "dumping hot water to a river doesn't damage its ecosystem" rather than the opposite...
That’s not what they are doing
> capture heat directly at the source and transport it to outdoor dry coolers, essentially large radiator coils positioned outside the building.
The heat goes into the air
The correct place to bring that up is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672306
Dumping hot water into rivers harms ecosystems regardless of whether anyone happens to do it right now, and asking for a citation for that is such a WTF in and of itself we really shouldn't gloss over it.
>The heat goes into the air
Can confirm : I'm reading this from France, we're in the 8th day of the meanest heatwave the country has known since records exist, and it's expected to last two more.
Never really like this because it feels some arbitrary as to what counts as making a claim. Human language is filled with implications, and those implications are filled with implied claims. Yet burden or proof seems mostly used when someone makes one of those implied claims explicit, say by explicitly rejecting one.
"We should do X."
"X is not possible."
There was an implied claim that X is possible and an explicit claim that X is not possible, but often it feels that in such a scenario, it is the second individual who is deemed having a burden of proof.
This is made all the worse that there is rarely a single implied claim, but more a group of related implied claims that are also weighted. Like some combination of "data centers don't destroy the environment" and "or maybe they do, but only in amounts of destruction that are tolerable compared to human behaviors and worth the outputs gained" and even "they modify the environment, but it doesn't count as destruction, just change". And even worse (yet again), different readers of the conversation will find themselves placing different weights on these different interpretations making it near impossible to agree on what the original claim is. Thus the first person who makes an explicit claim gets all the attention which ignores all the messy implied human communications preceding it.
Actually yeah, data centers using evaporative cooling shouldn't be causing more waste heat problems than most types of heavy industry. Heck, I would guess that even if datacenters dumping hot water on rivers it shouldn't have much of an impact unless the river is very small.
Shouldn't spread misinformation when there are plenty of other valid points about datacenters.
There aren't many heavy industries that dissipate 100MW of thermal energy, never mind a GW.
Those that do - power generating facilities, large smelters, etc. - have very significant environmental footprints.
>I would guess that even if datacenters dumping hot water on rivers it shouldn't have much of an impact unless the river is very small.
That's the extraordinary claim. That is what should need citation, not the other way around.
That's interesting...I don't think I've seen the data to support this
Probably not an accident; see Kim. Data Center Cooling Water Discharge: Assessing Environmental Transparency and Information Gaps, 32 Hastings Envt'l L.J. 177 (2026)
But the work is out there, for instance Miara et al. Thermal pollution impacts on rivers and power supply in the Mississippi River watershed, Environ. Res. Lett. 13 034033 (2018)
Worthington et al. The effects of a thermal discharge on the macroinvertebrate community of a large British river: implications for climate change. Hydrobiologia 753, 81–95 (2015)
Lukšienė, Sandström, Lounasheimo, and Andersson. The effects of thermal effluent exposure on the gametogenesis of female fish. Journal of Fish Biology, 56: 37-50 (2000)
Penk and Williams. Thermal Effluents from Power Plants Boost Performance of the Invasive Clam Corbicula Fluminea in Ireland's Largest River. Science of The Total Environment, vol. 693 (2019)
Mmm yeah...just straight releasing the water isn't ideal. But of course, it's free! And that's what society optimizes for, sadly.