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Data centers emitting more CO2 than thought: study (japantoday.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 4 points 3 months ago (6 children)

They usually do. They just do the same thing a lot of nuclear reactors do and also evaporatively cool one end of the heat exchange loop.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    As far as I can see they don't ever do it that way, that's the problem, if it was a closed loop they wouldn't be pulling water from the mains and causing water pressure issues for everybody else.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    They cool the hot side of the loop with running water, like reactors do, rather than using air.

    So the loop is closed, but they're using running water to cool it off faster, rather than needing a bigger radiator on the hot side.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    That's not what they're doing though. That would be fine that's just a heat exchanger.

    What they are doing is pulling water from the mains to cool the system either directly or to cool an internal system via heat exchanger and then are dumping hot water back into the environment. They're not pumping the water to cooling ponds and letting it cool back down and then pulling the water back out of the cooling ponds to use again.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I was thinking more along the lines of the big evaporative cooling towers you see with a lot of reactors, since they rely on vaporisation to cool off, most of that water can't be reused, short of getting picked up in the water cycle again.

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