People mentioned corrosion which is true of all sea water systems but in evaporative systems you also have the addition of salt forming on all the evaporative surfaces which can drastically increase corrosion more than normal seawater and cause fouling
So to do this properly you would want an RO system making freshwater before the cooler which at that point it would make more sense to just have a separate company doing desalination.
SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Salt water is a huge pain to work with. The salt would quickly corrode any cooling systems.
morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
And even for fresh water, you have biofouling to worry about and what to do with the water after you’ve used it, can’t just dump it into the environment untreated.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
There are already heat exchanging systems that do this with brackish water already; you don’t need to treat water if all you ate doing to the water is making the water hotter or colder.
litchralee@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
While not strictly biofouling, the marine environment can definitely be affected by introducing hotter water where it didn’t exist prior, in and around the outflow pipe. Seaside nuclear power stations that use seawater cooling need to be mindful to diffuse the heated water over a large area, to minimize the ecological impact. Citation: ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/…/abstract