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>Cooling towers (evaporative chilling) use far less water than cooling directly with river water and returning hot water to the river. Still uses a shitload. A
by joecool1029 4y ago
>Cooling towers (evaporative chilling) use far less water than cooling directly with river water and returning hot water to the river.
Still uses a shitload. A coalition of states around me had the power generation companies install a reservoir so that in summer and drought they could keep the lower Delaware River navigable since so much was evaporated off in the cooling towers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Creek_Reservoir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrill_Creek_Reservoir
- londons_explore 4y agoa typical old 1 Gigawatt power station (ie. a big one) will produce about 2 gigawatts of waste heat. More modern tech could ~halve that. In an evaporative cooler, thats 800 liters of water evaporated every second. The Amazon river has 209,000,000 liters per second, so it wouldn't be an issue there. But in smaller streams, I could totally imagine there not being enough water even for evaporative cooling.