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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). "
Considering that we're finally seeing liquid fueled molten salt reactors built (in China) based on cutting edge state-of-the-1960s technology can we stop calling pressurized water and boiling water reactors "modern"?
Point i) is a thermodynamics fail.
According to TFA: "more than one billion aquatic organisms" are killed annually by NY's Indian Point plant.
No definition of what they mean by "aquatic organism" is given. Blue whales? Minnows? Paramecium?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Her suggestion that water is *never* returned to the river seems wrong. Or is the word "evaporation" in "evaporation basin" a misnomer?
All modern power generating plants that use fuel (as opposed to hydro, wind, etc.) work basically the same way. They use a fuel to generate heat (burn coal or gas, create nuclear fission), heat water to steam, and use steam to turn turbines. The water is then cooled and returned to its source, usually a river or lake. All such power plants have problems when the incoming water is too warm or they cannot cool it sufficiently before discharging it.
The only difference between a nuclear plant and a coal/gas plant is that a nuclear plant can concentrate more generating capacity at a single location, which then can require more water.
Point i) is a thermodynamics fail.
Only in the American South. Seriously. Not even a weird anti-science joke.
You blow water thru the air or air thru the water and the water temp, air temp, and dew point of the air all eventually converge to the same number, usually dropping the temp of the water considerably. Works really well in a low dew point area like a desert. Of course low dew point areas usually don't have the spare water to waste evaporating it away. So the cost is a lot of extra water evaporation and quite a bit of electricity to run the pumps. You don't have to get all aquarium tube-y, this can be as simple as an artificial pumped waterfall or a really elaborate water fountain appearing thing. Oxygenates the water too.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Being from Maine, I used to do a lot of fishing with my Dad, and we always used to catch good fish many years ago. Lately we catch nothing, or small yellow perch if we’re lucky. These companies have been telling us for years how they are environmentally friendly, or how they care so much about the environment. They will tell you whatever it takes to shut you up! It’s business as usual, as always!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Any energy you expend to refrigerate the cooling water will exceed the benefit you get.
We had a big solar power plant shut down in california because it infringed on the habitat of a local lizard. It was in the middle of the desert... nothing around it for miles.
They always have a reason not to build something or shut something down. I don't care what it is or how you build it. They have a reason for shutting it down.
What they'll say is you can't build it right there. Then you say okay, how about over there? Nope that won't work either. Then you say, okay how about this other place? Nope.
After awhile the only place you can build something is some place where they don't have authority. If they can stop you they'll try.
Call that cynical but that's what we've seen. We can't build anything. Try it. Ask them where you can build something. They'll promise to get back to you with an answer. Twenty years later you'll ask them if they've made progress and they'll respond "what are you talking about?"... the point is to do nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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
The aren't worried about water being removed from the environment, they're worried about it being removed from the ecosystem (or changing the ecosystem by heating the water around the plant). It's great that the water doesn't disappear and re-enters the water cycle, but that isn't any consolation to the people and creatures who were relying on that water downstream.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The point is that the river downstream from where you pump the water to the plant has less water.
When a city pumps the water from a river, the water also ends up eventually in the clouds, but that doesn't fill the river downstream from the pump.
Maybe it is because most rain falls in the ocean... but even if all rain ended up back in the same river, downstream of the pump you'd have less water than without any pump.
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.
Well, they require a cold-sink to operate. It's the temperature difference (gas laws, etc) that enables them to generate so much electricity. If the conventional wisdom about this is like the conventional wisdom about other electric technologies (e.g. server rooms), it's likely that a reactor could be designed that does not require as much of a cold sink or temperature differential to operate (e.g. air cooling, or converting more heat into power). The issue of course is that even the smallest chain reaction events generate such a huge amount of energy that you have to have the scales we've seen to harness even a percentage. I've always thought some type of sub-critical or even better a semi-critical (pulse modulated) reactor with lower heats and smaller footprints would be the way to go long term. There are a lot of these safe by default reactors that use some of the energy generated to maintain the reaction through an active feedback system rather than passive. So instead of having a giant atom bomb that's kept from exploding with a barrier, you have a non-atom bomb that's made into an atom bomb by a barrier that has to be actively held up. Then you just pulse the barrier to modulate the reaction and achieve whatever power output you want. It won't change needing a cold sink, but it could be a lot smaller since you aren't having as much waste.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
The Nuke Haters will always hate.
There will always be something that damages some part of the environment.
There will always be some scenario that could possibly result in the end of us all.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There is no difference between a nuclear station and a coal station with respect to limits on outlet temperature: generally about 30C is the upper limit. Coal units squeeze out a little more thermal efficiency because they can operate at higher temperatures, but more or less the issue is the same.
Not a thermodynamics fail in Utah. The Palo Verde nuke plant in Arizona does OK in a desert climate. The Utah plant would be no different. Desert climate usually equates to low relative humidity, which means the evaporative cooling used in the condensers will still work, even in the peak of summer there.
Contrast that with the southeast US, where high temps *and* high humidity reign in the summer. During the drought, water levels were way lower than they were. Shallower bodies of water tend to be warmer than deeper bodies of water. The condensers there have a much harder time using evaporative cooling, if they do at all, so they try to pull in cool enough water from a big body of water next to the plant, whether it is a significant river or a large lake. Except in this case, due to the drought, high temps and low water levels, the water being pulled in simply wasn't cool enough.
When you dam up a river, the water that flows through tends to be much colder than in the undammed river. For example, the Colorado river in the Grand Canyon is only 47F due to the Hoover Dam/Lake Mead. Maybe the local flora and fauna would actually benefit if we built some powerplants there and in the summer we heated it back up to the pre-dam summer temperatures, which were as high as 80F.
Nuclear power plants tend to be much larger so they have a lot more waste heat to dump. In addition, some forms of fossil fuel plants dump their waste heat directly into the air without using water cooling. This works because the combustion temperature inside a fossil-fuel power plant is much higher than the fuel plate temperatures in a water-cooled nuclear power plant so they can still be efficient overall even with using the atmosphere as a heat sink.
One interesting article I read said that power generation accounts for about half the water usage in the USA:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-saving-energy-means-conserving-water
Good idea. We can start with anonymous cowards.
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.
That would be true if you were trying to cool the water with the energy you extracted *from the water*. But a nuclear reactor does not conserve energy, it has input from the nuclear fuel. The only reason you need to cool the water at all is because the fuel is generating more heat than you can extract in your turbines, either because of their design or because of the limited electricity demand. If you have a place to dump the extra heat, using some of that electricity to get it from point A to point B is not thermodynamically implausible.
The reason this is a stupid idea is completely unrelated, though. If the reactor design requires active refrigeration, this is even more likely to fail than simple pumps, and you run a much higher risk of melting down. And if it is not required, no one would want to pay extra for a redundant overly-complicated system unless there are other reasons not to use the passive system in normal operation.
Linked article does not substantiate your claim that Aaron Tilton and his gang of eco-thugs have LDS Church endorsement.
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
None of the water withdrawn from the Green River will ever be returned to the river.
If you mean deliberately, sure, it isn't dumped back into the river. But it isn't like the reactor destroys the water. It evaporates and then falls back as rain, a lot of which ends up back in the river again.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
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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I believe you have this backwards; not sure why you got all the positive mods.
I can trivially generate a 1000 F temperature on the end of a cigarette, but I sure can't do that to a football field.
Similarly, I can reduce the size of the chamber in my foundry and it will heat up faster, easier, and cheaper.
Could you not stick stirling engine after the steam part, when the cooled down steam returns to pretty warm water. As you said, the stirling engines require less heat difference to run. This would be a way to recover some of the heat in the water as energy. Thus helping to cool the water a bit more.
You COULD. It would be prohibitively expensive due to the poor Carnot efficiency at that point. But you could do it. You could also make a radiative system that was 600 stories high - it will work but make the plant cost prohibitive. Just like any engineering project, you have to balance a whole bunch of things.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I believe you have this backwards; not sure why you got all the positive mods.
I can trivially generate a 1000 F temperature on the end of a cigarette, but I sure can't do that to a football field.
Similarly, I can reduce the size of the chamber in my foundry and it will heat up faster, easier, and cheaper.
If you dumped a huge pile of cigarettes onto your football field, you'd find that it takes far fewer of them with less ventilation per cubic inch to heat them up to 1000F, compared to what you have to do with a single one. Sure, it does require more heat, but not more heat per unit of volume.
Heat is lost through the surface of an object - the larger an object is, the less heat it loses per unit of volume through its surface, since the former increases with the cube of size, and the latter increases with the square.
All that said, it is true that it takes a smaller heater to heat an oven than a foundry. It just takes a bigger heater per unit of volume to heat a kitchen oven.
As long as they get to vote, and building nuclear plants is subject to permission from politicians, and politicians are more interested in getting re-elected than worrying about long-term consequences, it matters.
"Right" by what criteria? It is entirely rational to oppose nuclear power if one places the potential risks as higher priority as pollution-free and fossile fuel independent electricity generated by it. As is, people seem to think that it's either nuclear power or magical maintenance-free reliable windmills, rather than either coal power or de-industrialization.
It's rational to chose opposing nuclear energy over modern comforts like electric lights, but it's not rational to oppose nuclear power and fossil fuels yet insist on having reliable electricity available. So no, I'd say that most people who oppose nuclear energy are not "right", in the sense that they're fooling themselves about what they're actually choosing and what it implies.
Cooling towers work by evaporating water. While they don't warm rivers, they do consume the supply.
Attitudes like what? You aren't seriously suggesting that engineers purposefully pick the most enviromentally destructive option while twirling their mustaches and cackling villainously, are you?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
As is, people seem to think that it's either nuclear power or magical maintenance-free reliable windmills, rather than either coal power or de-industrialization.
I think you'd be shocked and disheartened by how many would prefer de-industrialization.
+1 Disagree
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.