• sparkyshocks@lemmy.zip
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    2 hours ago

    The plants on the lakes so monitor the water temp so they don’t affect the ecosystem during the warmer seasons still.

    Yeah, but look at the magnitudes of the heat units involved. Modern nuclear plants generate 0.6-4.5 GW at around 30% thermal efficiency (so they generate between 2-15GW of heat). These underwater data centers are looking at 25 MW (0.025 GW) while surrounded by water in 5 of the 6 3-dimensional directions.

    There is some risk to local ecosystems, but we’re literally talking 2 or more orders of magnitude difference compared to nuclear plants or other thermal plants.