Hacker News Reader

Comment by rascul | Hacker News Reader

Here is the article linked to by Slashdot: https://gizmodo.com/foxconn-will-drain-7-million-gallons-of-...

The article by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources: https://dnr.wi.gov/news/releases/article/?id=4513

According to the DNR article, the non consumed water will be returned:

> As part of the diversion approval, the city of Racine must ensure that the diverted water is returned to Lake Michigan minus consumptive use such as evaporation. The water returned to Lake Michigan will be treated at the Racine Wastewater Treatment Plant to meet all applicable state and federal water quality discharge standards. Any industrial customers, such as Foxconn, will work with the City of Racine to meet pretreatment requirements for wastewater.

It's not immediately clear how much of that water will be returned, but at least it won't be consuming 7M gallons daily. I'm not sure what impacts this might have, and neither article really goes into it.

View on HN

> It's not immediately clear how much of that water will be returned, but at least it won't be consuming 7M gallons daily.

Even if they did, Lake Michigan is estimated to contain one quadrillion gallons of water. Foxconn will have long ceased to exist by the time anyone even notices the water is missing.

How long would it take to notice, say, an inch decrease? Or whatever other small unit if it's not measurable to an inch.

Consumption: 7M Gallons/day = 26.5E3 m^3 / day (fed to foxconn's personal black hole)

Area of Lake Michigan: 58000 km^2 = 58E9 m^2

Corresponds to 4.6E-7 m/day or about 6 years for one millimeter or about 150 years for the oddly specific 25.4mm you were asking for.

If we take the 39% loss figure from the article, we get 15 years/1mm and 390 years/25.4mm.

Thanks.

So does that mean it takes just 390 Foxconns to have the lake drop an inch each year?

The surface area of Lake Michigan is 22394 square miles according to Google, which converts to 8.99e13 square inches. If you're only looking for one inch of depth, that is 8.99e13 cubic inches. Each cubic inch is 0.00433 gallons, so the first inch of Lake Michigan is 389,267,000,000 gallons. Divide by the loss per day, in this case assuming they're consuming the entire 7 million gallons, and it will take 55609.6 days, or 152 years and change for Lake Michigan to lose 1 inch excluding other sources of loss or addition and so on.

The problem is not so much foxconn or one entity. The problem is everyone wants that water, everyone... If you open the floodgates to using that for industrial purposes the largest supply of freshwater in the world will be drained and/or polluted within a few decades.

An interesting use case is a suburb of Milwaukee called Waukesha which happens to be out of clean drinking water they are reduced to using radon laced wells. The problem pronounces itself when they can’t take water from Lake Michigan because Waukesha is over the Mississippi water basin. Spoiler: they got permission to use the water

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2016/06/21/w...

Not only that but literally everyone in that region is already using that water.

Somehow this is punishment for the iphone. You can't just casually cause hundreds or thousands of suicides or whatever it was, for your stupid first world luxury toys, and not expect to suffer some kind of karma backlash.

Not to mention Lake Michigan is connected to all the other Great Lakes.

I’ve always thought we Midwesterners should be shipping trains of freshwater tanks to the 40 million lemmings who decided to move to a natural desert on the left coast.

We’ll only charge the same price per gallon as Evian or Pelligrino. It could solve the Illinois budget crisis quickly.

Permanently removing water in those quantities is basically impossible. The energy costs from electrolysis or evaporation would be staggering.

Consuming is what I meant. I have edited the post to make that correction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com