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In Hot Water: The Effects of Even Modern Nuke Plants On Water
Harperdog writes "Dawn Stover has a fascinating article on the newest nuclear power plant to get approval: the Blue Castle Project on the Green River in Utah. Stover details the enormous damage done by nuke plants on local water systems, and points out that the 1-2 punch of climate change and cooling systems is already taking a toll on the ability of nuclear power plants to operate, because in summer the water they use to cool systems with is too hot even before they use it (Tennessee Valley Authority is the example). "
Point i) is a thermodynamics fail.
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
There are ways to cool without dumping heat into rivers and oceans or evaporating water. You could drive a bunch of Stirling Engines. You're not interested in the power from the Stirlings, just their use of the excess heat. How much would that cost though?
The need for "cooling" is a bit of a red herring. It's not strictly about keeping things from getting too hot, but about providing a sufficient temperature (and therefore pressure) differential. Such differentials would also be required to drive a Stirling Engine, and while they will function at a much smaller differential than a steam turbine, they will still have cooling requirements, otherwise they would achieve thermal equilibrium. And since Stirling engines are more useful for performing relatively slow mechanical work (you can gear them up, but gears have parasitic losses), you may well end up using more energy to create the same amount of electrical power as a steam turbine. That's just my armchair analysis, though I trust that the engineers who designed the plant have made optimal decisions in generator selection, so the fact that they're using steam turbines speaks for itself in that regard.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Water used in steam turbines is distilled water - as few particulates as possible at they will erode the turbine into junk.
The heat source heats water into steam to drive the turbines. That water is then cooled by external water before being returned to the heat source.
The external water may be pass through or recycled, but it never ever gets to the turbines.
And water really doesn't expand during heating (under 1%) until it boils and becomes vapor.
Keep in mind those same laws of thermodynamics dictate that the larger the temperature difference, the higher the efficiency. Now, temperature isn't the same thing as heat, so that doesn't automatically put limits on small-scale operations. However, in practice it tends to do so. Generating high temperatures in a huge furnace is a lot easier than doing it in a small one, which is why a coal plant is more efficient than a car engine.
The trouble is that dammed rivers are (at least in CA) generally warmer over all (due to lower flows and a larger heating surface on the surface of the lake). Then you do a release from the dam (bottom of the lake) and dump a bunch of frigid water into the stream. Huge temperature swings for the organisms to deal with.
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Yup, the French make prolific use of cooling towers in order to reduce thermal impact on rivers.
Also keep in mind that this affects coal plants just as much as nuke plants, and will also affect combined cycle natural gas plants that use steam for a bottom cycle.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Actually, it was an endangered tortoise, not a lizard. And it wasn't shut down, the company behind it had to acquire more land to manage habitat for displaced animals.
So really, nothing actually happened to that particular solar plant. I swear, sometimes I think environmentalists are the new all-powerful bogeyman. Everything goes wrong is their fault, even the stuff that doesn't go wrong.
One source: http://energy.gov/articles/department-announces-loan-guarantee-brightsource-energy-inc 2 minutes of googling finds you load more.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Uh, no. Even if I hadn't RTFA I'd know you are wrong. Cooling towers are built to cool the water through evaporation, and said evaporation (and blowdown) of the proposed "closed-loop" cooling system is what TFA was complaining about, since none of the water taken would be returned to the river.
Also, a lot of cooling towers are built precisely to cool the used river water before returning it to the river, so, because of evaporation, they not only return less water to the river than taken, because the river is lower temperature than the typical ambient wet bulb temperature, what they return is warmer than the river (unless you had a really unusually hot river).
Are you aware that agiculture is also a "consumptive" use of water, and to an enormously greater degree than nuclear power generation?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Yes, since they use exactly the same process at all points past the "fuel->heat" stage. But you get more attention if you say "nuke" in the headline.