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.
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-...
Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
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!
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.]
Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!
1: https://watercalculator.org/footprint/what-is-the-water-foot...
2: https://www.almonds.com/why-almonds/growing-good/water-wise
Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places 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.
1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...
2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...
Edit: adding a reference for nestle on the topic. https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant...
Formula is fine. How do I know that? If it weren't, if there were any evidence it was bad, the FDA would not allow it to be sold in the US. But there's a wide variety of such formulas here.
Perhaps you think formula is fine for we smart first worlders, but poor dumb third world mothers have to have their agency removed and us determine what they can choose? Strong pass on that; this is no longer the age of European colonialism.
Terminator crops... oh boy. This one is hilariously ridiculous. Their sin is that they don't allow the farmer to retain seeds and plant them again. You know what else has that property? All hybrid seeds! These have been around for nearly a century. No hybrids breed true if you try to replant them; the uniform combinations of genes in the first generation hybrid becomes randomized in the second generation.
You aren't complaining about terminator seeds, you are complaining about modern agriculture.
0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
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.
You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
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.
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.
Just charge people what the water is worth and they'll stop, or water companies will be able to afford much more treatment capacity.
You have a point about sequestering CO2 molecules, but:
a) I'm sure this will get cheaper over time, just like every other technology
b) we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Because you can find it in "concentrated" form (think entropy), all in an aquifer or a river, and these are everywhere. But these dry up because of our usage and the climate, and when they do you still have the same amount of water on the planet, it's just not as easily accessible. It's super spread out, it's too far away, it needs a lot of expensive processing to make usable, or all of the above.
What's cheaper and easier for you, to condense a cup of water from the air or to just turn on the faucet?
> we should be using solar and nuclear for everything
Why solar? Energy is not lost/consumed in the universe, so why not collect it from anywhere else. Energy is astonishingly cheap, that's why we use so much of it. If you know what I mean...
The water rights can be clawed back a couple ways: if they're unused for X years, or in times of drought.
There's an exception for droughts though: farmers with trees (that would die if unwatered) still get priority, while people that grow crops that replenish each season (like wheat) don't.
So this leads to perverse incentives where these farmers need to find a way to use ALL of their water, every year, or they'll lose access to their absurd water rights from the 1800s, and they need to use it on trees so it doesn't get clawed back during a multi year drought.
So, they end up planting the most water-hungry trees they can grow on their land (almonds), then they get to sell them to the world at artificially low prices because the water that was used to grow them is almost free.
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.
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.
Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.
What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
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.
Temperature controls gate returning to env.