21 ms·

You could use it to boil some of the water away? A win/win if you're not a civilian relying on the power that is.

• Filligree 10y ago
  Well, on the assumption that it'd work... Now you've got a dam full of boiling water. And as you'll know from cleaning dishes, boiling water is far better at dissolving minerals than is cold water.
  • VLM 10y ago
    I'm curious why you guys want to boil the upstream water instead of the downstream water.
    • hvidgaard 10y ago
      To reduce the amount of water behind the dam. I'm sure using the power to power pumps would be a better at that task though.
  • avar 10y ago
    How are you calculating that entire reservoir would boil? It's filled with 8B m^3 of water. I couldn't find the formulas to calculate this myself, but given Tuna-Fish's comment above that it's enough to boil a kiloton of water (1000 m^3) ever hour that's 1K/8B =~ 0.00001%. So it's going to be more on the order of dropping a single drop of boiling water into a backyard pool every hour, is it not? I.e. something that wouldn't change the overall temperature of the reservoir to any significant degree. This is all assuming that you'd have to use the energy to heat the reservoir itself, you could just as easily use it to pump out some water and boil it until it evaporates, not impacting the temperature of the reservoir at all, just emitting a lot of steam into the air.
  • hvidgaard 10y ago
    You pump water into a boiler, not just submerging a giant heater into the dam.