Is there any reason the water can’t be safely consumed later? It’s not toxic or nuclear is it? The cooling water didn’t just up and disappear did it?
Edit: Links provided in the comments…
- https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc&t=1264
- https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/06/how-much-water-do-the-data-centres-use-its-a-secret/
- https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025EcInd.17012986J/abstract
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_cooling_towers
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niederaussem_Power_Station
Notable comments:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/23672269
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25288634
- https://lemmy.cafe/comment/16350045
- https://sh.itjust.works/comment/25294655
Edit addendum: I’d like to thank everyone that’s participated in this question thread, sorry if I missed any good relevant links in the comments.
To be clear, I still loathe the whole AI datacenter era, it really is heavily wasteful of resources, notably energy, but I wanted to better understand the water usage situation.
Can this steam be used to turn turbines to make power? Or is it not hot enough to generate the required pressure?
Surely it could at least be fed into a power station that now only needs half the fuel to get it up to temperature?
It’s definitely not able to run a turbine as is but either way it doesn’t really solve the problem. My understanding is steam turbines don’t actually condense or cool the water all that much. You still have hot water, maybe not fully boiling but still hot enough you’ll have a not insignificant amount of evaporation and environmental damage if you just dump it. There’s condensing and non condensing designs but the condensing design requires massive cooking towers and more water draw from a heat exchanger.
I’m not a systems engineer so calculating potential cost savings of adding the remaining heat to capture power vs just letting it evaporate vs using a closed loop system is outside my wheelhouse.
It wouldn’t solve the evaporation problem, but you could get some extra electricity from the steam. Makes the creation of said steam slightly less wasteful