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Comment by mcmoor | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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