Hi there everyone,
Let me start this by saying that this is an honest question. I figure nobody would be better suited to answer my question than a group laser-focused on the negatives of the technology.
I see these types of memes a lot and see statistics of gallons consumed in a lot of articles I read. What I don't understand though is where the water goes that it can't be reclaimed or naturally return from a gas to a liquid.
As a kid(long ago), I was taught of the cycle of rain and the conversion between gases and liquid. It's my understanding that when a liquid is used to cool something, it also follows the same conversion process as it cools.
Could someone explain to me what's going on in this process where the 264 billion gallons of water used in the meme do not return to a liquid state?
I would appreciate any insight into the process that seems to defy this cycle that I am missing. Like I said prior, my knowledge of this process ended in middle school science class so I'm confident that I'm missing something.
Thanks for your time!
There's ones that use evaporative cooling, meaning they draw water off of a river/lake/creek (or domestic water supply) and cool through putting that water into the air. Lots of power plants do this exact thing, especially nuclear power plants.
There's ones that use closed cycle cooling, like a bigass water cooled PC. The water generally stays inside. It periodically needs to be cycled.
There's also measures out there that account for all of the water needed to produce all of the components. The water used for that is one time usage.
Are these things "using up" water? Sure, some of them are in the sense they are accelerating evaporation. Some are using very little water.
Some datacenters use no water because they're thousands of times smaller than these new ones.