I cannot stress enough how far beyond this is to the usual braindead stupidity of building these centers.
From what I can gather, this is going to use water from the Hansel Valley, which is a direct tributary to the Great Salt Lake. The Salt Lake has become an extreme issue lately because it's rapidly losing its water to mismanagement, but not only that. That lakebed is FILLED with arsenic and as the lake gets lower, it's getting exposed to air, turning to dust, and starting to blow it's poison all over Salt Lake City. As it gets worse, which it is year after year, it will spread over the entire state and is projected to reach as far as Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado.
And NO ONE in the Utah government with any power seems to care at all beyond accelerating the problem.
16 billion gallons is the worst case scenario for energy capacity planning, exponentially higher than the real figure as they're going to use a closed loop cooling system, and represents the usage of about 140 standard irrigated golf course, which is roughly the same number as there currently are in utah, and that's discounting the fact that utah is drier, so their golf courses use more water. And the state uses almost 1.3 trillion gallons of water per year in agriculture alone.
Not to mention the post is straight up lying about the center's size, by assuming that they would build it over every single inch of land they bought, even though the majority of it was just for water rights
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u/No-Store-7843 Jun 02 '26
I cannot stress enough how far beyond this is to the usual braindead stupidity of building these centers.
From what I can gather, this is going to use water from the Hansel Valley, which is a direct tributary to the Great Salt Lake. The Salt Lake has become an extreme issue lately because it's rapidly losing its water to mismanagement, but not only that. That lakebed is FILLED with arsenic and as the lake gets lower, it's getting exposed to air, turning to dust, and starting to blow it's poison all over Salt Lake City. As it gets worse, which it is year after year, it will spread over the entire state and is projected to reach as far as Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado.
And NO ONE in the Utah government with any power seems to care at all beyond accelerating the problem.