If we were a smarter species, we’d consistently use further heat exchange to use that waste heat for something else, like heating homes. The Blue Lagoon in Iceland uses it to heat a massive outdoor spa.
Water desalinization projects sometimes do. Most of them use reverse osmosis because it’s less energy intensive, but boiling the water can work if you have something else that produces a lot of waste heat. Also, the water on the cooling side of the desalination path can help warm up the incoming water through a heat exchanger.
We do sometimes do that! The problem is the condenser water is usually in the mid 100Fs which by the time you pump that somewhere it cools even more and then most people don’t like living near power plants so the cost of running the pumps and the piping is generally more than the energy saved. Iceland has a lot of geothermal heat that people are much less opposed to living near vs O&G or nuclear
The heat of vaporization is also a huge negative of using water as you need to condense the water and then reboil it which wastes a bunch of energy
If we were a smarter species, we’d consistently use further heat exchange to use that waste heat for something else, like heating homes. The Blue Lagoon in Iceland uses it to heat a massive outdoor spa.
Water desalinization projects sometimes do. Most of them use reverse osmosis because it’s less energy intensive, but boiling the water can work if you have something else that produces a lot of waste heat. Also, the water on the cooling side of the desalination path can help warm up the incoming water through a heat exchanger.
We do sometimes do that! The problem is the condenser water is usually in the mid 100Fs which by the time you pump that somewhere it cools even more and then most people don’t like living near power plants so the cost of running the pumps and the piping is generally more than the energy saved. Iceland has a lot of geothermal heat that people are much less opposed to living near vs O&G or nuclear