Our waterways are becoming more and more polluted due to PFAS, plastics, medicines, drugs, and new chemicals made by companies that just hand over the responsibility of cleaning to plants paid for by public moneys. Detecting the different chemicals and filtering them out if getting harder and harder. Could the simple solution of heating up past a point where even PFAS/forever chemicals decomposes (400C for PFAS, 500C to be more sure about other stuff) be alright?
Golly gee, if only there were some form of energy generation that required boiling vast amounts of water to turn into steam. But no, that would be silly.
You definitely wouldn’t want to drink the water from any of those systems you’re describing though :)
The steam you see coming off a cooling tower is not the water than went through the reactor or turbine, a secondary cooling loop is used specifically cause the plants are not allowed to release radioactive material in any form, including the cooling processes.
The real reason this idea would not work is the same problem desalination has, making clean and safe drinking water is the easy part, it’s what are you doing with all the contaminants and water products left behind that quickly becoming a concentrated pool of filth and toxins at the bottom of your heat exchanger.