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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact - the exhaust cooling tubes at that old plant dump out into the ocean and create a really warm environment that is rich in sea life and a very popular diving/snorkeling spot. It's even called Electric Beach. https://www.snorkeling-report.com/spot/snorkeling-electric-b...

I lived there for a few years and tried to snorkel there - but my submechanophobia prevented me from getting more than a few feet into the water. Seeing those big spooky tubes scared the ever living shit out of me.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...

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The Kahe (oil powered) plant at electric beach is still operational. The coal fired power plant that shut down is a little further south of there, closer to Barbers point.

It also shut down over a year ago (9/1/22).

For those confused by this comment, "It" refers to the coal power plant from the article, not the Kahe powerplant in the parent comment. I definitely went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to confirm/deny that Kahe or Waiau shutfown before realizing my confusion.

I didn't know what submechanophobia was , Is it really common to have a word for itself ?

I hadn't heard of the word either but I sure do have the condition! I was a triathlete at one point, but I would take a very large swing around the marker buoys just in case one might touch me... and the grandparents comment of "big spooky tubes" sent a surge of adrenaline through my body. I feel so seen:)

Same.

I also have megalophobia specifically related to ducting and that picture set of my panic response. I hadn’t really thought too much of it, but I wonder if Thr Empire Strikes Back is to blame.

likewise, learning to sail as a kid and having to go around these large partially submerged objects just kicked off some irrational fear in me (and stil does today, though to a lesser degree).

There's a series of popular subreddits with similar names that I think made the terms more common.

https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/

https://www.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/

I don't suppose that too many people are terrified of these things, but many (including me) find them mildly unsettling. I imagine trypophobia is similar in that sense.

I agree with you, that would be the exact word I would've used to describe it. Also, since I was a child, I've been scared of pool drains for the treatment system.

Submechanophobia has a wikipedia page, which also indicates that there is some scientific research into this phobia (which does not have a good explanation). So it's not a one-person problem.

I have a theory that this, like fear of heights, claustrophobia, agoraphobia etc. are actually "extremely natural" because they're all good for survival ie. instincts unlearned somehow culturally, but would be the baseline if you teleported a Palaeolithic, Sumerian, Viking or whatever into our modern complex and somewhat claustrophobic technological life.

> like fear of heights, claustrophobia, agoraphobia etc. are actually "extremely natural"

That’s a lot of copium, frankly

I don't have any of those "irrational" fears so it's not a cope but a theory.

You should check out the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/

Google Maps location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d6AchooL8MFjxmoj6

I thought usually heat like this is regarded as "pollution" and will ruin environment somehow. I've heard something like that about nuclear plant. Although maybe it's a case by case basis

Quick chemistry lesson; when you dissolve a solid into liquid it becomes more soluble as the temperature increases. Temperature equates to the energy with which atoms move around, so the solid can sort of shake free of its pattern and fall into solution. Liquids and gases have the opposite relationship where higher temperatures means lower gas solubility. Gases are already free, so when the temperature is lower its more likely that the bonds of the liquid are stronger than the gases propensity to bounce around.

Which brings us to heat pollution; heating a river will cause the water to lose oxygen (which it already does not carry much of nor very well). Anything that depends on that oxygen will suffer as a consequence.

Minor technicality some solubility does decrease with increasing temperature.

There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.

Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.

The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.

In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.

“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”

Environmentalism will only matter once it’s not so profitable to ignore.

Is it good that this plant is dumping a bunch of heat into the ocean? Probably not, but it made some people’s lives better for some number of years. Hopefully the long term consequences don’t make some large number of people’s lives much worse for a longer number of years.

Environmentalism is a very good business for a lot of high class people right now.

Oh, is "environmentalism" how the Rockefellers became rich?

Destruction of the environment is the core business of all the super rich, to counter your point. Obtaining "alpha" or maximizing profit by externalizing pollution costs was and still is essential to manufacturing and resource extraction.

If you statement were true, there would have always been a carbon tax and we would have had wind power 70 years ago, battery and solar technologies would have been developed 30-40 years sooner.

Climate change is a legit issue.

There are some people that will manage to profit from the addressing of it. Others will profit from ignoring the issue or even outright refusing to admit it's an issue at all.

I know which side I'd rather be on.

This feels very cynical.

Grifters taking advantage of a problem for personal gain doesn't mean that the problem doesn't need to be addressed, does it?

It depends where you’re putting the waste heat. If it’s a small river or pond then it’ll heat the pond and meaningfully change the ecosystem. If you drop it into the ocean then nothing really happens because the ocean is pretty big. And a zero carbon source like nuclear will net reduce the temperature of the ocean if it replaces something like coal.

That’s not how it works though. The place where you release the water, a local hot spot is created and the heat takes a while to gradually dissipate. If you continuously release hot water, then a permanent localized hot spot is created.

This may work for some marine species, but will also be damaging to others. If it affects a keystone species negatively, like say corals, then a larger die off can happen.

This is the exact logic why desalination plants are widely considered bad. Yes, if you look at the entire ocean, you’re barely increasing the salinity of the water, but for the local neighborhood where the waste water is released, the salinity goes up to the point that even saltwater fish find it toxic.

It's usually a silly complaint, though. The change is to a small area, and small areas are naturally different temperatures for all sorts of different reasons. Dredging the beach and changing the water elevation will have similar temperature effects.

At electric beach it creates a nice, unique ecosystem and there's nothing wrong with that.

I wouldn't consider the entirety of Gulf of California a small place. They're staring down environmental impacts from desalination plants.

Desalination is a different process to heating though, for instance the sea won't lose excess salt to the atmosphere.

The sea does lose salt to the atmosphere, just less than it does of water, so it doesn’t reduce salinity. Wave action releases enough salt to smell salt in the air, and a bit makes it up higher to provide cloud condensation nuclei.

Wow! I didn't know that.

I think the issue is that location matters. What can be a huge problem in one location, might not be a problem in another location.

It's a good thing the problem we're talking about doesn't exist there

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07900627.2023.2...

Yes, as your article clearly explains the problem we are discussing - heat pollution - does not exist there. The article is talking about salinity, not heat.

There is nothing inherent with desalination that requires releasing the salt back into the ocean.

There is a big difference between separating sea water into fresh water and a concentrated brine against separating sea water into fresh water and solid salts. If you could do the latter efficiently then it would be easy, put it back under ground or sell it to people as sea salt, use it to salt the roads etc.

Is it that big of a difference?

So just dump the hot water a few kilometers out, where there's a desert.

Ironically some power plants in Florida are now critical to the survival of manatees there. Winters are becoming more varied in temperature and with many natural hot springs now unavailable, manatees have found shelter near waste water outlets from these plants.

This topic is interesting especially in the context of beaches and coastal areas.

At least in Australia, a lot of beaches are eroding. Fast. Like, the Gold Coast is basically completely artificial at this point, they truck the sand in from somewhere else on a regular basis to keep the tourism and Schoolies dickheads constantly flowing through: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/the-gold-coast-ever-d...

In that very same Gold Coast (and in many beaches in Australia, and I believe other parts of the world), they erect literal "shark nets" to fence off the parts of the coast that people frequently swim in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_net

So my point is, we already engage in a terrific amount of ... I kinda wanna call it "shitty terraforming" ... in our coastal areas. Turning a few kilometer stretch of beach into a jacuzzi doesn't sound so bad to me when framed in that context :)

depends on if it pales in comparison to the volcano vent heat output.

It is a great spot. Can be a tough entry when the surf is up. But overall I would say it is certainly among the best spots on Oahu for shore snorkeling. And it is just a 5 minute drive if you are staying at any of the condos or hotels at Ko Olina.

If you are worried water will get cooler, let me tell you about global boiling…

Cynical joke aside, renewable electrical systems also need cooling: heat pumps for AC, but also cooling batteries, solar panels if you want them to perform well, etc. I feel like it’s best if that heat is used in heat pumps to warm up water for showers, but there might be some waste left for Electric Beach.

I've snorkeled at Electric Beach -- underwater you could hear the buzzing from the powerplant. Somewhat surreal and I'm surprised it didn't bother the marine life.

On the flipside, its not as obvious what coal burning exhaust has done to other parts of the biome. I imagine its extremely damaging. Not to mention, what it does to human lungs.

Evolution didn't create all this life with the assumption there would be electric beaches. I suspect the loss of this warmth will be a small price to pay to reduce emissions and that other parts of the biome will flourish in-line with how evolution developed life in that regions for billions of years.

For me it would be less about spooky and more that I don't want to swim anywhere near whatever they are pumping out.

It's clean water. They circulate ocean water through a heat exchanger to cool the steam condenser.

Nuclear plants do the same thing.

The water can be clear to begin with, but I assume some chemicals are leaching into it from the entire apparatus that the water cycles through. Just like clean water was cycling through lead pipes in Flint and eventually became toxic.

Well, it would be an invalid assumption. The pipes are just pipes. There are no chemicals.

Do you also avoid touching water from your kitchen sink? Your bathroom shower?

You think there's no chemicals in your tap water? You think nothing leaches from your plumbing into the water either?

I think you are probably shower and bathe in water that flows through pipes, so it seems absurd to be concerned about the same water/pipe combination used elsewhere.

If you don't shower or bathe or use modern plumbing infrastructure then please, by all means correct my mistaken assumption.

I believe in normal circumstances its neglegible and not worth worrying about.

This response seems silly. Do you not take shower or baths in tap water? The issue is the same.

Ostensibly it is just warm water from a cooling system. Like a PC watercooling system, except the reservoir is literally the Pacific Ocean.

How do they deal with the corrosive effects of salt water? Or do they remove most of the salt before using?

Every large ship engine is cooled by raw ocean water, mostly through a heat exchanger system. Basically instead of cooling the engine coolant with air like on your car, they cool it with ocean water.

In my experience in smaller boats using the same system (100-150 feet) corrosion is less of a problem than growth and calcification. Mostly we just dissolve everything with acid every once in a while on those systems.

And sacrificial zinc anodes that get replaced regularly.

True. That covers galvanic corrosion, but not other corrosive effects.

Probably just using stainless steel or similar material for the pipes. It would be too energy intensive to desalinate the cooling water. It is an open system that pumps water in and back out again. It is not a closed system.

A phobia or just really disconcerting? I guess it just depends.

I've swam with dolphins there. It's really beautiful for how accessible it is as a snorkeling spot

I probably stared at the picture a little too long.

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