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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Also the water doesn’t disappear from the universe. It either evaporates or is pumped back out. People who lose their minds over water have been saying for 50 years we were about to enter a desert world

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Clean water does disappear. Not from universe bit from places you need it most. That there's plenty of it in the air or sea or Saturn rings, is little consolation.

These fabs don’t evaporate the water though, they use it as process water, and then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system.

Assuming the municipality recycles their wastewater, which they would do in any drought prone region, this water will become clean water again.

It’s essentially a closed system.

> It’s essentially a closed system.

Source? Especially the claim that they are using external municipal wastewater treatment seems highly implausible, they are using nasty chemicals.

I read they either dump it into a local river while monitoring it or back to water treatment plant. Some datacenters have started reusing water but for some reason using it more than once is not appealing. Definitely the biggest problem is it’s not always a closed system and dumping it into a river potentially damages the river and makes the area lose their water. A percentage of the water is also lost via evaporation.

Source: https://dgtlinfra.com/data-center-water-usage/

Datacenters and fabs are different things.

It’s definitely not a closed system unless the water from the waste water treatment plant is pumped back upstream of the source of the municipal water which is not how most of these work.

> then treat it to wastewater standards before discharging to the municipal wastewater system.

Are there PFAS chemicals in the semiconductor photoresist and then in the water?

Do municipal wastewater standards require removal of PFAS?

Similarly, they're all okay with dumping water used to wash out coal plants into the rivers: https://www.google.com/search?q=trump+10%25+coal+plant+wash+...

guy has never seen 'Waterworld'

You should definitely bring this attitude into the housing affordability discussion - remind people that they indeed can find cheap housing in rural Africa.

The Aral Sea says otherwise.

Do you really think that that's what the authors were thinking? You can't accuse people of not using their brains when you haven't engaged yours.

Also you seem to be unaware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrafting

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