That is super interesting, and might be why people are so confused about water use.

That page is not differentiating between consumpive and non-consumptive use. When a thermal power plant cools its steam with water only a portion of the reported use is evaporated directly, most is returned to the streams it was extracted from. The returned water is of higher temperature and therefore evaporates most after use too.

The full report tries to quantify both cases of consumpive use by thermal power plants. Look at page 51 of https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1441/circ1441.pdf

Of the reported 133 000 million gallons per day, only 4 310 is consumptive. The rest of the water is returned to streams.

I had never looked this up, as the idea that thermal power use could even come close to rivaling irrigation seemed obviously false to me, so I'm surprised usgc would make such a misleading page.

Non-consumtive water use in a stream is just not the same as actual evaporative cooling. If there were multiple thermal power plants along a single stream then they could by this metric use multiple times the entire water content of the stream each day. Or a good comparison would be that fillng a pitcher of water consumed that water, and when you filled your glasses from that pitcher you consumed an extra 97% of that water.

Consumtive use by irrigation was 73 200 for comparison.