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submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 28 points 4 days ago

Relatively easy, but expensive, problem to solve. We have all the salt water you need. Build nuclear plants and desalinate.

Stop allowing them to use the Colorado River.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

seawater is not all saltwater, its a bunch of other chemicals in it too.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

I'm pretty sure desalinization doesn't scale. The salt needs to go somewhere.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

we can use them for some sort of project like building a pyramid out of salt, and it will become the perfect venue to host league of legends tournaments.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

I feel like those tournaments usually have more salt than they can handle already...

[-] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago

And it takes a lot of energy

[-] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

which may not be an issue since companies running AI stuff are planning to deploy civilian mini nuclear reactors around the country

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Why not just put it back in the fucking ocean?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago
[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

You're taking salt from a large volume and putting it in a small area all at once. It kills the fish

I guess if the plan was to sprinkle the salt over miles and miles of ocean, that could work. But that's ridiculous to implement.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Well yeah I imagine airplanes would be used

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Take a bunch of salty water

Remove most of the water for other purposes

You now have to dispose of the same amount of salt, but less water. It's hypersalinated, and toxic as fuck.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yes but rain fall would mitigate this would it not?

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago
[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Fuck. Maybe we could just eat the salt...

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

it scales fine (roughly linear at large scale), people just don't want to pay the energy cost because they think farms need cheap water.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago
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[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

I hope you're all morally consistent and don't eat beef, which requires 15,000 litres of fresh water per kilo.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 3 days ago

threeduck, you should stop eating beef.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago

Sparking concerns. A-ha. Right. I could have asked why this shit is not banned for this reason alone, but sadly I know the answer

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

For all the harm that this current AI craze has caused with its excessive power usage, I don’t get how water usage is a thing. I’ve been in many data centers with water cooled systems and they were all closed loop systems. The water was a heat transport mechanism. The weren’t using fresh water to gather the heat and then just dumping it on the ground. So how is this a problem?

[-] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago

They pump it out of aquifers then when done it goes down the drain to be processed and inevitably evaporated. The problem is we are pumping it out faster than it can naturally the aquifers. This causes long term environmental damage and at some point the aquifer will fail and no longer regenerate.

Welcome to the water wars.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Many of the AI/LLM focused DCs are using open loop systems. It's stupid as fuck but, it's cheap (as a large corporation).

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yeah I’ve been reading up on this and it’s just stupidly wasteful.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

I'm no expert by any means but why not just filter the salt out of fucking sea water?

[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

Because it’s expensive to do that at scale. I’m sure we’ll get to a point where it’s necessary to do that, but the capitalist machine doesn’t want to “waste money” on that.

Capitalism is a fucking disease.

[-] [email protected] -5 points 3 days ago

Capitalism is annoying yes but it's leaps and bounds better than communism

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

Um… nobody brought up communism? Just because I said one thing is bad does not mean that I’m advocating for something else.

Capitalism and Communism are not the only two options for a functional society (and I’d argue that neither of them are healthy long term solutions).

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I've been having a heated argument with another gentleman about the subject of communism on a separate subLemmy, I clearly carried over the attitude and I apologize.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The real shortage is the shortage of usable energy.
Entropy is what makes you able to use energy, but also what makes you lose energy.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Had to check image was not AI

[-] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago
[-] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

No, they don't consume. Instead, they use it for cooling their servers. You might have heard of a way to cool a computer that is more effective than a fan called water cooling. It basically uses water to absorb the hot air from the GPU/CPU to be sent to the radiator where the water is cooled and sent back to be pumped and continue the cycle. This is called a closed-loop water cooling system. These big "AI" databases are also using water to cool the components like how they're being used in the computer, but unlike the example, it's not a closed-loop water cooling system, meaning that instead of the water being reused, it instead gets evaporated and participates in the water cycle. The problem with this is that water used in these open-loop systems is evaporated, meaning it is remove from the local water cycles, making fresh water less accessible in areas that already face shortages, so while the amount of fresh water on Earth stays the same, it becomes inaccessible to the people, which leads to the current situation where more than a billion people don't have enough access to fresh water while big "AI" databases are using over 100 million liters daily. This is only one of the alarming consequences of "AI". This however could be easily fixed by using a closed-loop water cooling systems that use renuable energy sources for the energy required to pump and cool the system. However, sadly, in our current capitalist society, the rich are too greedy and corrupt to save lives and actually help the people.

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

https://tube.blahaj.zone/w/qEcczobJGVGmBe2rbWJkMN

There is air cooled water chillers and water cooled water chillers. Depending on what the companies go with they could have water cooled chillers causing the water loss. Air cooled chillers don't really have that problem because they don't have the same cooling situation. I attached a video of a water cooled chiller

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this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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