I agree with your first point, salt water is bloody annoying to work with. That and performing maintenance on a nuclear reactor to replace corroded elements would probably involve shutting the reactor down.
However, they should both cool equally well. When cooling hot objects with a cold fluid, the important characteristic of the fluid is heat capacity (how much heat the liquid has to absorb before raising in temperature), not freezing point. The addition of salts to water lowers the freezing temperature of the solution and thus takes longer to freeze. Adding small concentrations of salt shouldn't have a big impact on the heat capacity of your coolant.
Good point and while it wouldn't be impossibly hard to sabotage them if you really felt like it, there are so many towers these days it would require a really major effort to make any kind of dent in the local power production.
Also, regarding the reason why off-shore towers are more popular. Yes they are much more expensive, and yes the salt water is a very corrosive environment to work on but there are benefits. First of all, the wind speeds are higher in general (you get gusts coming off the warmer land during the day and vice versa at night) and they're more consistent. Land based windmills have to deal with vegetation and hill that can slow the wind down and if you don't put the turbines far enough apart they actually interfere with one another. Another nice thing about the ocean is that there's a *lot* of space out there you can take advantage of without worrying about the placements of farmhouses and roads.
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I agree with your first point, salt water is bloody annoying to work with. That and performing maintenance on a nuclear reactor to replace corroded elements would probably involve shutting the reactor down.
However, they should both cool equally well. When cooling hot objects with a cold fluid, the important characteristic of the fluid is heat capacity (how much heat the liquid has to absorb before raising in temperature), not freezing point. The addition of salts to water lowers the freezing temperature of the solution and thus takes longer to freeze. Adding small concentrations of salt shouldn't have a big impact on the heat capacity of your coolant.
Good point and while it wouldn't be impossibly hard to sabotage them if you really felt like it, there are so many towers these days it would require a really major effort to make any kind of dent in the local power production.
Also, regarding the reason why off-shore towers are more popular. Yes they are much more expensive, and yes the salt water is a very corrosive environment to work on but there are benefits. First of all, the wind speeds are higher in general (you get gusts coming off the warmer land during the day and vice versa at night) and they're more consistent. Land based windmills have to deal with vegetation and hill that can slow the wind down and if you don't put the turbines far enough apart they actually interfere with one another. Another nice thing about the ocean is that there's a *lot* of space out there you can take advantage of without worrying about the placements of farmhouses and roads.