> Not to mention all the sea life that isn’t going to respond well to high temp water spewing out..
Ideally, you're not dumping the hot water back into the harbor. At least from a naive theory perspective, you could put huge cooling towers on deck and cool the reactor 100% through evaporative cooling. Bonus: the huge steam/mist cloud out of the cooling tower could help delay global warming through marine cloud brightening [0]. Whether the deck of a floating reactor has enough space and stability to support cooling towers of the appropriate size is a question for the engineers.
That's how most reactors in first world countries with temperate climates work anyway. Because it really messes up the biosphere of your river/coast, if you just dump 3GWh of thermal power straight into the water.
That's too native. Output is indeed cooled but only enough to be only fraction hotter then input. Then dumping is safe again.
This is also why most of those power plants have to shut down. It's not the physical lack of water, but instead input is already so hot that output would already be over the upper limit.
Nobody build enough cooling towers to cool with them "needlessly".
Which is also why global warming is disastrous to energy sector. Those older power plants just don't have enough cooling capacity for newer higher temperatures.
Ideally, you're not dumping the hot water back into the harbor. At least from a naive theory perspective, you could put huge cooling towers on deck and cool the reactor 100% through evaporative cooling. Bonus: the huge steam/mist cloud out of the cooling tower could help delay global warming through marine cloud brightening [0]. Whether the deck of a floating reactor has enough space and stability to support cooling towers of the appropriate size is a question for the engineers.
That's how most reactors in first world countries with temperate climates work anyway. Because it really messes up the biosphere of your river/coast, if you just dump 3GWh of thermal power straight into the water.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening