With Joy Noval
From Bethesda Today, Proposed data center in Dickerson would use Potomac River water for cooling
Dickerson was the site of a large coal burning power plant that used Potomac water for cooling. I can't imagine a data center would produce worse water.
The Wombat has Rule 5 Sunday: But First, Coffee awaiting your digital amusement at The Other McCain.
I keep reading about data centers and AI using water for cooling, other than getting warmer what happens to the water? Is a foreign substance added to the water while it cools?
ReplyDeleteIt always sounds like the water has been spoiled for any other use by using it to carry away the heat.
Am I missing something here?
I'm not intimately familiar with the way water is used at data centers (and I suspect it varies from site to site), but I know how water is used at the local nuke plant pretty well. Water from the bay is pumped in and screened to about a quarter inch, to remove animals and debris. When you pump millions of gallons, that's an issue. The bay water is used to cool the water that circulates through the reactor, turned to pressurized steam and drives the power generating turbines. The bay water is returned to the Bay about 10 F warmer. Because "stuff" grows in the bay water (you'd be amazed how fast in summer), they run little foam and abrasive balls though the cooling tubes, to clear them, (they try to collect and reuse them, but they miss a few and they end up on the beach). They also periodically treat the water with a growth inhibiting agent "Clamtrol". The internal loop is well water (fresh) , deionized, and kept very low in salts. It's mostly recycled, but some has to be removed, cleaned and released, and replaced.
ReplyDeleteI expect data centers will have a similar two-loop system, to keep the cleaner water near the electronics. Some metal will leach into to the outer loop, and some treatment will probably be necessary to inhibit growth in the cooling tubes.
I wouldn't think that pressurized steam will be an issue for data center cooling but I never thought about things used to keep the cooling machinery clean because of what the water carries.
DeleteI was picturing stream/river water (not pumped from the ground). run thru a system to gather heat then back into to the original water source (downstream).
A nuke plant I’m familiar with that used lake water for cooling was permitted (in the legal sense) to discharge back into the lake after it was shown the warmer water discharged was both better for the local fish and actually lower in environmental contaminants. This was long before the zebra mussel started making inroads on cooling systems, though.
ReplyDelete