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.
Presumably untreated irrigation water is the primary use in the county, but it's pretty hard to find numbers on it.
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...