I'm not talking about dumping the warm water downstream, but using evaporative cooling as an alternative solution. Cooling towers don't recirculate the drawn w

I'm not talking about dumping the warm water downstream, but using evaporative cooling as an alternative solution. Cooling towers don't recirculate the drawn water back to the river as far as I'm aware. They only draw the water in the basin depletes. Looking at the sources, 2% of it is lost to evaporation, the rest condenses back on the bottom. So it doesn't actually draw that much water, and it doesn't dump the warm water downstream.