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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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