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'I can't drink the water' - life next to a US data centre

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    Both of my parents assisted the BBC with this article. Super proud of their ongoing efforts to fight against data centers.

    It's really sad how local town councils are selling out their citizens for perceived personal gain, capitulating to companies who could easily afford to create their own infrastructure to support these facilities, but refuse to do so because of greed. trump admin will only embolden them through easing regulations and removing all accountability for the impacts they have.

  • But combine that with someone dumping thousands of gallons of wastewater into the ground basically across the street and weirder things are going to happen.

    EDIT: Yeah, I don't think they are dumping water into the ground. Scratch that out. These datacenters DO use lots of water, as in millions of gallons per day, the concern there is more about how the public utilities and incentives were structured. [Quote for millions comes from Kate Crawford's Atlas of AI book, but the link was the the first data I could source, which looks less than that.]

    I'm now thinking this article may be more about the person not liking the datacenter than it specifically affecting the well. Could construction cause some extra sediment to clog up the well intake? Seems likely.

    I can’t find evidence that datacenters dump water into the ground.

  • In the article, this isn’t about pollution but sediment from very nearby construction. Yeah, that happens. Kind of why most decent municipal governments plan out stuff so you don’t have people on wells right next to giant buildings. The common exception being gravel quarries, they do regularly disrupt locals wells. This is on them. You should be building data centres in light industrial zones where everyone nearby is on city water.

    The article is also claiming humid areas are good for evaporative cooling, which is incorrect.

    Also that above ground runoff is affecting a well is hard to believe. Wells are deep enough that natural filtration removes any sediment.

    The whole article is questionable.

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    The article isn't clear about the mechanism by which the data center is supposedly affecting the woman's well. Is the data center using well water, depleting the supply of ground water in the area? Or is the claim that the construction disturbed the geology enough to cause problems with flow and sediment in a well 366 meters away? Does anyone know or have theories?

  • The article isn't clear about the mechanism by which the data center is supposedly affecting the woman's well. Is the data center using well water, depleting the supply of ground water in the area? Or is the claim that the construction disturbed the geology enough to cause problems with flow and sediment in a well 366 meters away? Does anyone know or have theories?

    It's unclear, because the relevant official bodies insist that things are fine

  • "Our goal is that by 2030, we'll be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we're operating data centres, than we're taking out," says Will Hewes, global water stewardship lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centres than any other company globally.

    How can this possibly make sense? Mine owner says, "by 2030 we'll be putting more gold into the ground than we're taking out!" I can only assume this is some carbon credits style of nonsense.

    I really hope what they mean is clean water.

    It can happen; there’s a paper mill by me that was actually an important part of the river cleanup process when the river was far worse than it is today. It takes water from the river, uses it for their needs, then treats it and returns it to the river far far cleaner than they took it out, which has been a net benefit for the entire downstream river ecosystem. That plan, and their follow-through, is the only reason that mill exists at all.

    Thing is, where are they going to find this not-particularly-clean water to treat and return? Are they going to need all new infrastructure built to accommodate this?

    And why is that cheaper/easier/whatever than just making a closed loop cooling system, which they could have done from the being..

  • I can’t find evidence that datacenters dump water into the ground.

    I thought I found something earlier that alluded to it, but Lemmys on my phone and doing any real research is always annoying on it. I can try to find something. I know they do release very significant amounts of wastewater though. But whether that’s all back on public utilities or how it’s but back in the ground is unclear. I’ll see I can find anything specific.

  • I can’t find evidence that datacenters dump water into the ground.

    https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-01/final-fonsi-ea-2251-rivian-stanton-springs-north-2024-12.pdf#page26

    Does mention it is passed to a treatment facility, some is treated on campus, and other is stored.

    So according to epa report it was not expected to affect local groundwater.

  • I really hope what they mean is clean water.

    It can happen; there’s a paper mill by me that was actually an important part of the river cleanup process when the river was far worse than it is today. It takes water from the river, uses it for their needs, then treats it and returns it to the river far far cleaner than they took it out, which has been a net benefit for the entire downstream river ecosystem. That plan, and their follow-through, is the only reason that mill exists at all.

    Thing is, where are they going to find this not-particularly-clean water to treat and return? Are they going to need all new infrastructure built to accommodate this?

    And why is that cheaper/easier/whatever than just making a closed loop cooling system, which they could have done from the being..

    Intel was lauded for this same thing in the early 2000s at the fab I worked at, since ultrapure water (literal H2O) was required to rinse the chip wafers the water going out was cleaner than going in.

    I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.

  • "Our goal is that by 2030, we'll be putting more water back into the watersheds and communities where we're operating data centres, than we're taking out," says Will Hewes, global water stewardship lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which runs more data centres than any other company globally.

    How can this possibly make sense? Mine owner says, "by 2030 we'll be putting more gold into the ground than we're taking out!" I can only assume this is some carbon credits style of nonsense.

    global water stewardship lead at Amazon

    How can this possibly make sense?

    No. Your expectation is wrong. You cannot expect him to make any sense.

    Such people do not get paid for making sense, but for creating lies. Dreamy, foggy, false images to distract you, to make you forget about asking for the truth.

  • Intel was lauded for this same thing in the early 2000s at the fab I worked at, since ultrapure water (literal H2O) was required to rinse the chip wafers the water going out was cleaner than going in.

    I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.

    I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.

    Because many are running evaporative cooling.

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    He takes us to a creek downhill from a new construction site for a data centre being built by US firm Quality Technology Services (QTS).

    George Dietz, a local volunteer, scoops up a sample of the water into a clear plastic bag. It's cloudy and brown.

    Well, maybe they didn't have proper sediment control but a creek is a lot different than well water. Most people don't drink out of creeks, sediment control is done more for the purpose of protecting fish habitat.

    Hauls buckets of water to flush her toilet

    What? You're concern is sediment in your well water and then go haul dirty brown sediment filled water from the creek to flush your toilet instead?

    Buy a sediment filter for your well water. Even people not beside giant data centres should have one just because it keeps the system functional and running better. It is practically a requirement to have one.

  • Intel was lauded for this same thing in the early 2000s at the fab I worked at, since ultrapure water (literal H2O) was required to rinse the chip wafers the water going out was cleaner than going in.

    I’m still not entirely sure why these data centers require such massive amounts of water when we’ve been running heat exchange loops in nuclear plants for decades.

    They use adiabatic coolers to minimize electrical cost for cooling and maximize cooling capacity. The water isn't directly used as the cooling fluid. It's just used to provide evaporative cooling to boost the efficiency of a conventional refrigeration system. I also suspect that many of them are starting to switch to CO2 based refrigeration systems which heavily benefit from adiabatic gas coolers due to the low critical temp of CO2. Without an adiabatic cooler the efficiency of a CO2 based system starts dropping heavily when the ambient temp gets much above 80F.

    They could acheive the same results without using water, however their refrigeration systems would need larger gas coolers which would increase their electricity usage.

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    jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.worldJ
    I wonder! They may be labeled as contractors or similar to a merc. Third-party contractors that don't have to follow the same 'rules' as government or military personnel. Edit: Word, merchs to merc, meaning mercenary
  • Remote MCP servers for VSCode

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    Niemand hat geantwortet
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    L
    Okay, I'd be interested to hear what you think is wrong with this, because I'm pretty sure it's more or less correct. Some sources for you to help you understand these concepts a bit better: What DLSS is and how it works as a starter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_Super_Sampling Issues with modern "optimization", including DLSS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJu_DgCHfx4 TAA comparisons (yes, biased, but accurate): https://old.reddit.com/r/FuckTAA/comments/1e7ozv0/rfucktaa_resource/
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    heythisisnttheymca@lemmy.worldH
    Worked with the US federal government for much of my professional career, mostly in an adversarial role. "reliable federal data sources" do not exist
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    T
    In those situations I usually enable 1.5x.
  • Is Washington state falling out of love with Tesla?

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    B
    These Tesla owners who love their cars but hate his involvement with government are a bit ridiculous because one of the biggest reasons he got in loved with shilling for the right is that the government was looking into regulations and investigations concerning how unsafe Tesla cars are.
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    I think the principle could be applied to scan outside of the machine. It is making requests to 127.0.0.1:{port} - effectively using your computer as a "server" in a sort of reverse-SSRF attack. There's no reason it can't make requests to 10.10.10.1:{port} as well. Of course you'd need to guess the netmask of the network address range first, but this isn't that hard. In fact, if you consider that at least as far as the desktop site goes, most people will be browsing the web behind a standard consumer router left on defaults where it will be the first device in the DHCP range (e.g. 192.168.0.1 or 10.10.10.1), which tends to have a web UI on the LAN interface (port 8080, 80 or 443), then you'd only realistically need to scan a few addresses to determine the network address range. If you want to keep noise even lower, using just 192.168.0.1:80 and 192.168.1.1:80 I'd wager would cover 99% of consumer routers. From there you could assume that it's a /24 netmask and scan IPs to your heart's content. You could do top 10 most common ports type scans and go in-depth on anything you get a result on. I haven't tested this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work, when I was testing 13ft.io - a self-hosted 12ft.io paywall remover, an SSRF flaw like this absolutely let you perform any network request to any LAN address in range.
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    Sure thing! So glad I could be helpful! I don't blame you. It's the only thing I'm keeping a Win10 dual-boot for right now, and to their credit, it does work quite well in Windows. We've had a ton of fun with our set. In the meantime, I'm keeping up with the project but not actively tinkering with it myself, because it's exciting but also not quite there yet. It's at least given me hope that it can be done though! I'm confident we'll see significant gains sooner rather than later. Hats off to them. (Once my income stabilizes I'll gotta pitch them some funds...) Envision has made it VERY convenient to get set up, but the whole process still saps more time than "Fire it up and play." So maybe play with it at some point, but either way definitely keep your ear to the ground. I'm hoping in the future we'll get to use it for things like Godot XR or Blender integration.