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Comment by briffle | Hacker News Reader

Google in The Dalles, OR site also uses much less water than the Aluminum smelter that used to be at their current location.

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That's like saying they're lighter than the moon. Your fact is more about how unbelievably resource-intensive aluminum smelters are.

But it also a reduction from peak water use in that location. That location is used to that level of resource consumption.

You could of course argue it is still too high, but it is also within the current status quo.

And what does “too high” mean, anyway? Using water in The Dallas is a totally different story than using it in Death Valley. Part of the reason the data center is there is the abundance of water.

The fact also makes you notice that no one is writing articles about how much water smelters use...

Because we have recycling centers, which reclaim aluminum using 95% less energy than smelting the raw material.

No, because journalists love writing articles critical of tech companies, some fair some not.

Journalists love writing articles people want to read. People like crapping on tech companies because they look at them everyday in their phones so it rings a bell. The average person rarely thinks of smelters or is confronted with one.

Publishers publish clickbait. Editors and journalists do as they're told.

You can't reclaim aluminum without first smelting it from raw.

But you can then recycle it an unlimited number of times. A large majority of all aluminum in use is recycled.

True but chances are our use of aluminum is not static and is always increasing. That new aluminum needs to be smelted at some point.

I'm just shocked your even smelting in the US still, surely that's done in the near east where power + labour is far, far cheaper.

I feel like _some_ domestic aluminum refining capability has to be a national security requirement, though no idea if we do treat it that way.

Yep that's true, fully accept that.

Alcoa had a pretty large aluminum smelter on the west coast in Ferndale WA, but it shut down near the beginning of covid. The bonneville power contracts with Alcoa were pretty generous, somewhere around $0.035/kWh for ~300MW, and even then, they couldn't make it work.

A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.

We do it in New Zealand. The power source is renewable and dirt cheap thanks to the games Rio Tinto play, which have resulted in the population subsidising them.

Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.

Quebec too. And Quebec is far from landlocked, so an abundance of hydroelectricity has alternative markets.

The subsidies are staggering:

> The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864

And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages.

> It is far more profitable to export electricity directly through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots.

https://www.iedm.org/files/avril07_en.pdf

That’s a really fixed way of looking at the subsidies. Thanks.

Cheap power requires good infrastructure which countries with cheap labor generally dont have. There are locales in US with pretty good electricity rates

Does anyone know if that steel recycling plant is still operating below the west Seattle bridge?

The point is that water supply is a non issue because it needs 20x less than before.

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