Environment & Energy

hatrack

(63,729 posts) Sat Oct 4, 2025, 09:44 AM Saturday

"Forever Chemicals" - PFAS Gas - Routinely Used At Data/AI Centers. No Testing Or Use Data Required

Datacenters’ electricity demands have been accused of delaying the US’s transition to clean energy and requiring fossil fuel plants to stay online, while their high level of water consumption has also raised alarm. Now public health advocates fear another environmental problem could be linked to them – Pfas “forever chemical” pollution.

EDIT

Advocates’ concern increased in mid-September when the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would fast-track review of new Pfas and other chemicals used by datacenters. The datacenter industry has said the Pfas it uses causes minimal pollution, but advocates disagree. “We know there are Pfas in these centers and all of that has to go somewhere,” said Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, an attorney with the Earthjustice non-profit, which is monitoring Pfas use in datacenters. “This issue has been dangerously understudied as we have been building out datacenters, and there’s not adequate information on what the long term impacts will be.”

Pfas are a class of about 16,000 chemicals most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. The compounds have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down in the environment.

Environmental advocates say the datacenters increase Pfas pollution directly and indirectly. The chemicals are needed in the centers’ operations – such as its cooling equipment – which almost certainly leads to some on-site pollution. Meanwhile, Pfas used in the equipment housed in the centers must be disposed of, which is difficult because the chemicals cannot be fully destroyed. Meanwhile, a large quantity of Pfas are used to produce the semiconductors housed in datacenters, which will increase pollution around supporting manufacturing plants.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/04/pfas-pollution-data-centers-ai

1 replies

= new reply since forum marked as read

Highlight:

"Forever Chemicals" - PFAS Gas - Routinely Used At Data/AI Centers. No Testing Or Use Data Required (Original Post) hatrack Saturday OP

No offense but this article is fairly typical of journalistic mangling of science. NNadir Yesterday #1

NNadir

(36,713 posts)

1. No offense but this article is fairly typical of journalistic mangling of science.

Reply to hatrack (Original post)

Thu Oct 9, 2025, 05:06 PM

Yesterday

It is a fact the fluorocarbons are a major problem but this article is all over the place and is misleading.

Pretty much every refrigerator on Earth has what the journalist calls "f gases" and I note that while it is true that the semiconductor industry is a major player in this area (which includes solar cells) their chief environmental risk is associated with their role as greenhouse gases. There is a serious scientific distinction been gaseous fluorocarbons which are generally inert and not carcinogenic and what are generally discussed as "PFAS" found in liquid and solid matrices which have known biological effects, of which cancers are a subset. The latter represent the bulk of the wide array of compounds numbering in the thousands, although many of these thousands are metabolites of parent compounds or represent other types of degradation generated by radiolysis.

It is true that the most common degradation is trifluoroacetic acid, TFA, but while anthropomorphic sources overwhelm its presence, it has been claimed to occur from some natural sources. Monofluoroacetic acid is produced by some plants in the southern hemisphere to protect again predation. It's far more toxic than TFA.

I have acquainted son with the idea of using gamma radiation from fission products to mineralize water soluble fluorocarbons and have been working on and off to prepare some documents describing the approach to do so.

The article for what it's worth is poorly written and I'll add to the list of cases in which I consider my oft stated less than half serious joke that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

Reply to this discussion