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Comment by strainer | Hacker News Reader

> Reactors do not "consume" freshwater, primary and secondary coolants runs in a closed loop, water never "leaves" or runs out.

That is untrue. They have the same cooling requirements as all thermoelectric power plants do, and some like eg. Diablo Canyon do straight up boil water away. Others heat up lakes or coastlines - which costs (more plant, land and maintenance) and can only be done in some places [1]. Plants cooling requirements are a big part of their overall cost, even with the legacy environmental protection which has led to our current crises.

[1] - https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/energy-and-water-use/wat... Types of cooling

( https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/045... )

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The part you are quoting as 'not true' talks about primary coolant, which is radioactive as that's the water flowing thought the reactor core. I assure you it never leaves the station.

I think the overall thrust of your post is in general agreement with mine - reactors have to discharge heat into seawater, or use cooling towers which evaporate water. This the issue is of correctly designing the cooling of, and sighting of, the powerplant.

Furthermore, this is not an inherent quality of nuclear power, it's a product of deploying it in the form of >3000 MWt power-plants.

If we adopted the approach of small module reactors, they can be passively cooled.

Sorry I was a bit short to simply say "untrue" but I had not raised the prospect of radioactive release and am aware of closed layers of cooling. I pointed out all thermoeletric plants consume significant amounts of increasingly scarce water resources and it seems only misleading to reply "Reactors don't consume water...". Its like saying people don't consume gasoline (their machinery does) Reactors don't consume water (their electrical generation systems do)

> Furthermore, this is not an inherent quality of nuclear power

I never suggested it was - although nuclear plants due to having more complicated safety requirements than other thermoelectrics, do tend to have lower thermal efficiencies and higher cooling costs per energy unit produced.

My point was those costs are significant at any practical scale of generation. The heat output itself of thermoelectric plants can be environmentally significant, so the idea of reactor breakthroughs promising "unlimited" generation is, well, its basically a marketing line, for research funding.

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