AWS data centers' water use tied to spike in cancer and miscarriages in Oregon
techoreon.com
techoreon.com
That said, this is masterful scapegoating. The ag lobby must be gleeful if they're not directly responsible for this narrative.
In 2003 my middle school in Central Pennsylvania had this exact same problem. All our water fountains had to have signs posted stating that the water was not safe to drink. Many of my classmates had the purple-tinged skintone that is characteristic symptom of consuming the polluted water.
The issue stems from high input, fossil-fuel based farming, and most of society simply looks the other way because no one has figured out a cheaper way to produce enough food. Data centers are just a red herring.
From the article:
> Morrow County, Oregon, has recorded nitrate readings as high as 73 parts per million (ppm) in household wells—more than ten times the state’s legal ceiling of 7ppm—following reports that local data centres are intensifying aquifer contamination.
From the CDC:
> The first reported case of fatal acquired methemoglobinemia in an infant due to ingestion of nitrate contaminated well water in the United States occurred in 1945 [Comly 1945]. This condition is also termed “Blue Baby Syndrome”.
https://archive.cdc.gov/www_atsdr_cdc_gov/csem/nitrate-nitri...
A thing kids would do at my school is stick their hand out the window of the bus in the fall/winter and then compare whose hand is "more purple". Dumb kid stuff. I still remember a single person I knew whose cheeks would be super purple every time we came inside from playing in the winter. Almost like the character in the willy wonka movies.
So like its well known the color is simply more noticeable when you are being constantly exposed to nitrates. The person I am thinking of -- he was almost certainly drinking bad well water at home, perhaps for his whole life. I can't imagine that was only from the fountains at school. As far as I know its not a huge deal but like the article is saying... it quite obviously has knock on health effects.
The increase is estimated to be around .1% with reasonable assumptions.
The primary driver of pollution was agriculture but the data centers can be attributed to .1% at most. Is it a big deal? Not in my opinion.
Depends. .1% increase in the number of calories going into my body? Not a big deal.
.1% increase in the number of radioactive particulates going into my body? Big deal.
Maybe they're (ab)using the findings of the data centers to get better water treatment, maybe they could have done more effort themselves?
But of course money and laws are far more important than healthy citizens, so why do anything about it when you don't have to?
Companies kinda tend to forget that if there is nobody left to consume stuff, you're also out of business. Governments kinda tend to forget that if there is nobody left to pay the taxes, they're also out of business.
Who's to blame? Tricky legal question. My personal opinion is everybody involved should take their percentage of the blame, but i doubt they're willing to pay or act upon it.
The polluters.
Datacenters didn't put the pollutants in the water. Datacenters used water, but as their process does not use the pollutants the concentration of pollutants in water increased very slightly.
So... a short flight? There's background radiation everywhere, and less radiation protection higher up.
Background radiation is 10msv per day, so 3650 in a year. A cross country flight (6hrs according to google flights) is 40msv, so 1% of yearly background exposure. However I did mention a "short" flight, so if you scale it down for a 2 hr flight, you get 0.3%, which is admittedly higher than 0.1%, but not too far off.
Why would that be a big deal? It is a .1% increase.
Let’s say you have a hypothetical 25 nanograms of radioactive particulates in your body. Now we add 0.1%, and you have 25.025 nanograms of radioactive particulates in your body.
This is not a meaningful difference at all.
Ignoring the major issue that the location dependent variance is orders of magnitude more significant than 0.1% we can reason that 0.1% is an extra 2.5 uSv over an entire year.
Thats like a 20 minute flight... or half a dental xray, or if you planned to eat like 20 bananas this year you better cut them out.
Now the fact that there are all these other obvious ways to cut down your radiation before you even begin to think about datacenters, isn't unique for this radiation dose thing. It's true for the water consumption as well. Your Chatbots are not the cause of your water usage its your diet and material goods.
[0] https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/fact-sheets/natura...
Presumably untreated irrigation water is the primary use in the county, but it's pretty hard to find numbers on it.
Or is it somehow a very difficult / impossible process to do this?
https://www.freshwatersystems.com/blogs/blog/how-to-remove-n...
It's not unlike brewing beer in that you need to adapt your recipe constantly to account for variations in inputs in order to get a consistent product out the other end.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2019-08/documents/de...
Plants also use nitrates as a nutrient.
It's reasonable to treat the aquifer home wells draw from as a public good and prevent contamination of it. Whether Amazon has particular responsibility in this case is a different question than that.
The rich should be forced to suffer the consequences of their actions, otherwise they have no incentive to respect the health or even life of the rest of citizens.
I have both computers and air conditioning and neither consume water.
I’m assuming of course that evaporation cooling is cheaper and consumes less energy than closed cycle cooling with a forced air heat sink.
Today's supercomputers (AI or not) can't cool themselves off with air. Too much heat in a too confined space. Direct Liquid Cooling is a must.
However, you can use closed-loop liquid cooling (like Europe), but open-loop is cheaper since it skips the "pump the heat out from water to atmosphere" part and "who cares about the water anyway, there's monies to be made".
Putting money above the environment always makes me angry though. It's like burning the walls of your house to stay warm.
Yet look at the prices on e.g. Hetzner and how profitable US cloud is. They can easily afford to do closed loop.
Whenever there’s a real environmental problem the answer is usually “there’s a right way to do it that lacks these issues but it’s slightly more expensive.”
Much of the day/season, evaporative cooling is not needed and data centers can pull in outside air. Ultimately you state the main reason in your comment: using outside air + evaporative cooling is cheaper and consumes less power than any other approach.
In a lot of cases, even if the server chips themselves are liquid cooled (for example, in an NVIDIA GB200 rack), then liquid is then air cooled through a cooling distribution unit (basically a giant radiator.
This feels incredibly disingenuous, or at the least, incredibly poor journalism.
- Experts say Amazon’s arrival supercharged this process. The data centers suck up tens of millions of gallons of water from the aquifer each year to cool their computer equipment, which then gets funneled to the Port’s wastewater system. All of the data center water gets mixed into the dirty lagoon wastewater, which only increases how much water the Port must then discard over the fields. As Greg Pettit, who served at the DEQ for 38 years and led the development of Oregon’s Groundwater Quality, explains, “the more water you put on, the faster you’re going to drive the nitrogen through the soil and down into the aquifer.” -