They use evaporative cooling because it's the cheapest way to vent the heat. Make it more expensive, and other cooling methods become more attractive - or better yet, innovation is incentivized. Government reluctance to tax and regulate hurts the market and the people. Unfortunately, it's business as usual.
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Notice you have to cool both in the power plant and the DC. And these DCs run up to a GW or more.
Closed loop cooling isn't that hard, just sone extra plumbing, pumps and fans.
IBM does 60 deg C watercooling which can be not a lot of thermal delta in nonarctic environments. It's a lot of km of infrastructure to vent directly if you want to dissipate a nuclear reactor's worth of power in a single site.
I don't see why cold side water temp isn't near room temperature.