Refrigeration is pointless if your hot source is 100C. And you'll still need a new cold source to dump the heat into (and now there's 30% more).

You could recondense the steam by dumping the heat into the atmosphere, but that's bigger and more expensive.

You could also store it in thermochemical batteries and save it for winter. The logistics of moving 1t of NaOH every few seconds sound difficult.

You might be able to export it via steam pipe and charge thermochemical batteries on site. That requires logistics that don't exist.

It's not an issue of river water levels. It's an issue of permissible river temperatures. They should rethink the impact of heating a river versus increasing fossil fuel emissions that heat the whole world.

Cooling towers don't recirculate the drawn water back to the river as far as I'm aware. They only draw the water in the basin depletes. Looking at the sources, 2% of it is lost to evaporation, the rest condenses back on the bottom.

If they weren't recirculating water downstream the river wouldn't be heating up at all. In France it's due to limits on river temperature: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/warming-rivers-threa...

Because apparently letting a river get above 28 degrees for a few kilometers is worth pumping more carbon dioxide into the air.