Talking about wasteful. There 16,000 golf courses that use 312,000 gallons a day[1]. Thats 1.82 trillion gallons annually. Only 28 million people play golf course on a course. Google's MAU is 90%+ of US population, beef or milk consumptions i would guess that 90% of population consumes it at least once a month. We're focusing on things that everyone uses but the things that less than 10% of the populations partake in. Why do we have golf courses in arid regions that have severe water shortages? Before places like LA county spends $8 billion on a toilet to tap system[2], maybe shut down the golf courses first.

1. https://www.npr.org/2008/06/11/91363837/water-thirsty-golf-c...

2. https://www.mwdh2o.com/building-local-supplies/pure-water-so...

It’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people.

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.

And most of that alfalfa is owned by a Saudi conglomerate that then exports it to the other side of the planet to feed its dairy cattle

You are overlooking location. The ideal place to grow crops is a place with great soil, good weather, a long growing season, and abundant water, but there aren't a lot of those. Of those four things, water is the only one that can be reasonably transported.

Data centers have fewer constraints. It should be possible to place more or all of them in places where water is abundant.

Water is not evenly distributed.aData centers are not bieng located where there is excess water, they are bieng located in areas where they have access to the critical infrastucture they need,and the use of domestic potable water supplys to cool there operations is done as it reduces there land and infrastructure requirements, is quick, and they care nothing about the costs of electricity and water, while they drive up costs for the people who live in the surounding areas. People NEED water, data does not. People NEED agriculture, they do not NEED data. conflating the water uses of things to people is false.

Solar powered desalination seems like a no brainer in places like California.

It's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.

That could be used as potable water again. Orange county,CA injects treated waste water back into the aquifer then pumps back out for water.

https://www.ocwd.com/gwrs

From an utilitarian point of view golf courses use a lot of water per person playing.

the parent poster's using a sort of morality argument to call water usage they dont/cant benefit from as wastage.

> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle.

You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.

You are not technically wrong, but you are economically wrong.

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.

Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.

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.

Fresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.

True. However, substitution of one good for another, or bringing online another source, won’t be instantaneous and thus otherwise needless human suffering will occur. The raw numbers don’t capture that.

I’ve driven through The Dalles. It’s a very small town. A search shows a population of 15,000 and declining annually.

It’s also right on a big river. The article you linked said that Google was spending nearly $30 million to improve the city’s water infrastructure so there are no problems.

Talking about this in terms of percentages of a small town’s water supply while ignoring the fact that the city is literally on a giant river and Google is paying for the water infrastructure is misleading.

That's because it's a large industry and nobody lives there. This pattern appears all over the place. The paper mills in the pacific northwest consume large multiples of the water used by their little towns.

Yes they are. Both can be built in areas with abundant water supply.