Comment by adrr 3 days ago
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.
1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...
2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
Absolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
Always use the same unit in comparisons.
Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!
I've remembered the fact that a million seconds is ~11 days and a billion seconds is ~32 years since I was a kid. Still feels pretty ridiculous as an adult, no-one who didn't know it has even guessed close (and some who try to work it out were way off).
I just had to google what a trillion is in years, and the answer made me realise I don't instinctively understand the relationship between a billion and a trillion either!
Each "-illion" is 1000x bigger than the previous one.
If you have some cubes 1 cm on a side (about the size of a sugar cube), you can make a bigger cube out of them with 10 little cubes along each edge. Now you have 1 big cube made from 1000 smaller cubes.
Your bigger cube is now 10cm x 10cm x 10 cm. Easy enough to pick up in one hand.
Now do it again. Make a bigger cube with 10 of those cubes along each edge. Now you have a cube 1 meter on each side. Too big to pick up by hand but it would still fit in the back of a pickup truck.
This 1-meter cube contains 1 million sugar cubes.
Do it again: With 1000 of the previous cubes, make a cube 10 meters on a side. This cube is the size of a 3-story house, and it contains 1 billion sugar cubes.
Now do it once more: With the house-sized cubes, make a 10x10x10. Now the cube is about the size of a football stadium. It contains 1 trillion sugar cubes.
Take 4 of these stadiums, call each sugar cube $1, and you have the market cap of Nvidia.
[Note: This is US usage. In older UK English, some of the "-illion" words mean different things than they do here.]
What’s the difference between a million and a billion? A billion.
That's right, and it takes ~600 gallons of water to make one hamburger.
1: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-the-water-foot...
2: https://www.almonds.com/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
You pay for fuel for your car => Saudi monarchy gets it share because they supply it => while they completely waste 20% for “supercars” and vanity, they still have enough money to do whatever they want including => they grow alfalfa next to you to feed their local cattle
You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.
My comment was just focused on total water use. I agree that location does matter, and that data centers should be placed where water is abundant.
It still doesn't change my concern about how unsustainable growing alfalfa is. Trillions of gallons to grow an inefficient animal feed crop while we're told by the evening news to take shorter showers (8 minute shower is ~16 gallons of water) and let our lawns die.
Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.
Desalination can be ecologically disastrous. You have to put all that salt somewhere (and it's a lot).
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
There are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.
nit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1]
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
That could be used as potable water again. Orange county,CA injects treated waste water back into the aquifer then pumps back out for water.
The issue with Nestle is that they are paying pennies on the dollar compared to the public because "muh job creation" or something to that effect.
> How much water is wasted on golf courses...
Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
I mean unless you transport it off-planet.
You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that.
In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater.
You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical.
For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation.
A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else.
Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down.
Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.
You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.
The water cycle _could_ require spending grid energy to filter/pump water into an economically usable state. Instead if water was better managed, we would not need to build additional grid capacity for water management.
Your argument basically boils down to "If energy was unlimited, we could be wasteful!", which, again, is technically true, but ignores the economic reality.
Doesn't pass the sniff test:
From what I can glean from Google, the sun moves 1500 cubic kilometers of water from the ocean into the air every day, around 500,000 cubic kilometers a year (ie, a stupendous amount).
Apparently around 10% of that makes it up the various mountains and comes back down as rivers - that's 50,000 cubic kilometers.
And for scale, human "consumption" is 5000 cubic kilometers.
I agree we should be careful and intelligent about how we use water and where we get it from, but I fail to be alarmed.
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.
During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.
And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.
If it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again.
We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars.
I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
That's like saying fossil fuels don't actually pollute or emit greenhouse cases, because we're just X joules away from sequestering it back from the atmosphere.
Desalination, and pumping water over thousands of miles is extremely expensive. Sure, you're not wrong, but the values of X and Y are uneconomical.
There’s nothing wrong with frugality as an end-goal as long as it’s not coerced.
Yep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2].
People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture.
1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w...
2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...