this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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They usually do. They just do the same thing a lot of nuclear reactors do and also evaporatively cool one end of the heat exchange loop.
Hmmm can they … add a turbine?
Unfortunately not. Computing hardware doesn't get that hot.
The chips would be fried if you had them at the temperatures where they were generating enough steam to run a turbine.
As far as I can see they don't ever do it that way, that's the problem, if it was a closed loop they wouldn't be pulling water from the mains and causing water pressure issues for everybody else.
They cool the hot side of the loop with running water, like reactors do, rather than using air.
So the loop is closed, but they're using running water to cool it off faster, rather than needing a bigger radiator on the hot side.
That's not what they're doing though. That would be fine that's just a heat exchanger.
What they are doing is pulling water from the mains to cool the system either directly or to cool an internal system via heat exchanger and then are dumping hot water back into the environment. They're not pumping the water to cooling ponds and letting it cool back down and then pulling the water back out of the cooling ponds to use again.