Setting aside a small patch of ocean for the task seems like a much better plan than the current practice. Provided you dump it in a place with a decent current any adversely affected area should be exceedingly small.
Keep in mind that the sun is constantly dumping energy on us. Absorption averaged across the entire earth is ~200 W/m^2. Assuming I didn't misplace some zeros somewhere then a gigawatt corresponds to ~5 km^2 of ocean surface. That's the daily flux. Penetration falls off exponentially so 75% of that only ever makes it ~10 m down.
I think the takeaway here is the utterly incomprehensible scale of the ocean.
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Setting aside a small patch of ocean for the task seems like a much better plan than the current practice. Provided you dump it in a place with a decent current any adversely affected area should be exceedingly small.
Keep in mind that the sun is constantly dumping energy on us. Absorption averaged across the entire earth is ~200 W/m^2. Assuming I didn't misplace some zeros somewhere then a gigawatt corresponds to ~5 km^2 of ocean surface. That's the daily flux. Penetration falls off exponentially so 75% of that only ever makes it ~10 m down.
I think the takeaway here is the utterly incomprehensible scale of the ocean.