[ELI5] If water is incompressible, how do we have things like power washers and (nuclear) PRWs?

Question

[ELI5] If water is incompressible, how do we have things like power washers and (nuclear) PRWs?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

I think you’re mixing up a couple concepts.

First as the other comment says, most of the time incompressible just means very hard to compress.

Second, power washers and nuclear prw uses PRESSURIZED water, which is essentially much force is applied on the water. The pressure has the side effect of compression but not very much. For reference, Google says PWR reactors sit around 15 Megapascals, at that pressure, 1L of water gets compressed 0.00725L. Basically not at all.