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Collision Between Water and Energy Is Underway, and Worsening
An anonymous reader writes "This article is an eye opening perspective on another side effect of power generation — water usage: 'More than 40 percent of fresh water used in the United States is withdrawn to cool power plants. Renewable energy generally uses far less water, but there are glaring exceptions, such as geothermal and concentrating solar.' The article also mentions that power plants have to shut down if the incoming water is too warm to cool the plant. 'Also, even though some newer plants might use far less water, they could find that there’s far less water available as water temperatures go up and water flows go down. Another study found that nearly half of 423 U.S. plants were at risk of lower power output during droughts because their intake pipes for water were less than 3 meters below the surface.'"
More power plants = more greenhouse gases = global warming = higher seas
You know, assuming that all of these power plants output greenhouse gases. If not, someone needs to get on that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The fact that powerplants borrow water to cool themselves is no big deal. They give it all back.
"less than 3 meters below the surface.'" That can't be fixed, ever...[sarcasm]
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
That's probably even harder than trying to explain to what passes as an environmentalist these days that it's only steam rising out of nuclear power plants. They'll keep screaming that power plants burn babies to make energy and that they all need to shut down so we can go back to eating alongside sheep, which makes the whole cause look stupid.
Because, of course, planning for a few decades in the future costs money and requires political will. We'll let tomorrow worry about the problems we're creating! I'm so lucky to live in the Age of the Sociopath.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In the best of all possible worlds, it would be a closed-loop system where the steam powers the turbines and then flows back around to be re-heated. As it is now, the cooling water wastes the energy it took to heat it in the first place.
What is even more ridiculous is the 40% number. Come ON! What about Agriculture. In CA something like 90% or our H2O usage goes to growing things. The power generation is tiny. Then there is the little detail that many of our power plants use ocean water!
I'm calling BS on that number.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
I live close to the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah. Currently we are under a drought with widespread municipal water restrictions, yet the NSA surveillance center requires 1.7M gallons of water daily to operate.
The fact that powerplants borrow water to cool themselves is no big deal. They give it all back.
No, no, the article says "withdrawn" which means its not in the water bank anymore.
So at 40% per year, in two and a half years there will be no water left in the bank. We are Doomed.
To protect your future, you should run down and withdraw all your water from the bank today.
Horde it in your bed. (That's why water beds were invented).
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yup, because as soon as that water for cooling is all gone, there will be no more water.
40%!!! The greedy bastards. !!
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Water-cooled power plants take in water. And then they put it out again, warmer. They don't use it up. At worst some of it comes out as water vapor from cooling towers, which condenses out.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a good guide on this; also distinguishing between water withdrawal and water consumption.
Yes. I don't know why TFA is so hung up on the 40% since it's not like they boil it away of something.
The more significant issue of plants shutting down due to inadequate cooling water or the cooling water being too warm was crammed into the first two paragraphs and the map, then they went into the weeds.
Such a simple solution.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
Has passive safeties, does not use water to cool, heats up gas to generate power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFTR
http://energyfromthorium.com/
If a real issue with the use of fresh water for cooling develops, we will switch to another cooling liquid.
Good plan! Where are you going to get cold INSERT_COOLING_LIQUID_HERE and dump the hot INSERT_COOLING_LIQUID_HERE? Because right now, most of the water comes from the local lake or river, and either goes back into the local lake or river several degrees hotter, or else is boiled for steam.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
It doesn't seem entirely out of line. From my hydrology textbook last year: cooling edges out agriculture for water utilization nationally, and both are much higher than the third biggest, which I believe is landscaping use.
But hey, the textbook could be entirely wrong. I'm sure your 90% figure is well-sourced.
When you put generators down 5-6000 feet in deep fast ocean currents, which run virtually at constant speed year round, the amount of power available down there is staggering. Obviously it only works near coastline regions, but that is where the large populations tend to be, though not all coasts have deep water currents.
Superconducting long distance transmission lines are improving in capability, so maybe distance is not so much a problem in the future.
It is not technically difficult or polluting. We already put complex anchors and devices at those depths for oil drilling.
No need for radioactive stuff, no cooling, no dead birds, no pulsing noise to humans, no polution.
It takes damn good engineering, but that is what we are damn good at.
Start now.
I mean really 2/3rds of the planet is covered in the stuff. You don't think you're going to run out of water. And then you do. Gasoline felt the same way in the 70's. Funnily enough, even though we haven't reached that point with water yet, a lot of people will pay more per gallon for it than for gasoline today, for bottled water that the grocery store filled from its taps.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
So if the greens can't shut down all fossil fuel/nuclear plants on the basis of carbon dioxide/nuclear waste, they will shut them down on the basis of OMG, we are are running out of water and will all die of thirst. If that angle to shut down the world's energy production doesn't work, then they will dream up of another scenario to give them the regulatory power to do so. In the environmentalists view, the only acceptable forms of energy generation are solar/wind, but only in somebody else's backyard. Never mind whether or not the technology is actually capable of producing the amounts of energy a society needs, on a reliable basis, and at a price that is competitive in the global economy.
If you would like to do a little further digging on unwise usage of water look into large scale ethanol production (not whiskey) http://www.swhydro.arizona.edu/archive/V6_N5/feature4.pdf sorry i don't know how to use html (I am a geek just not a good one!) My fancies lie in the chemistry and drug development distribution world....please forgive.
Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally wo
The study referenced in article says, "And in Texas, regulators denied developers of a proposed 1,320-megawatt coal plant a permit to with draw 8.3 billion gallons". Since USA has about 1100 GW of installed capacity (including hydro), this approximately translates into 7.5 trillion gallons or about 20 billion gallons a day. According to ucsusa, the total withdrawal by power plants is 200 billion gallons a day. So it looks like the old power plants are the main culprits.
Water circulates. It moves all over the place whether we like it or not. We should be more concerned about pollution than water. It doesn't truly get "used" as much as it gets moved from one place to another.
All that said, we continuously use increasingly more efficient things which use energy. It's important we continue doing that. We continually develop efficient energy production systems. It's important we continue doing that... and perhaps important that we do that even more. Efficiency is good for everyone except people who sell the resource at the core of this -- energy.
But to say "OMG! We're running out of water!?" Just not happening. We need better ways to manage water, but we're not exactly running out either.
...HHO engines instead where it turns back into clean water?
Stop using electricity, stop using energy, your contributing to the destruction of the planet.
The number seems fishy to me...because every power plant I've ever seen that was cooled with fresh water sits on a lake. The water enters the plant from the lake, cools the steam coming off of the turbine(s), and goes back to the lake. Some of it first goes through an osmosis filter for demineralization; that water becomes the steam that directly turns the turbine. But yeah...it's not like any of the water is destroyed or even vented as steam to the air. And the water they use isn't directly potable; they aren't drawing the water from the water mains. (Water mains don't supply enough water for it to even be feasible.) There is one exception, which is combustion turbine plants. But these are smaller, and use a very small amount of water for cooling in the same way our car radiators do; the consumption from these is almost negligible. (Come to think of it, has anyone checked out how much fresh drinking water gets used by all of our cars, in our radiators?)
Now, what they do say about how in heat waves some plants have to shut down or reduce their output because the water gets too warm...that fits. I've been on a lake attached to a fairly standard-sized coal-powered plant, and you could definitely feel the difference between where the intake of the plant was and where the output back into the lake was. It was that big of a difference; these plants put a LOT of heat into the water.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
From my hydrology textbook last year: cooling edges out agriculture for water utilization nationally ... But hey, the textbook could be entirely wrong.
Either your textbook is completely wrong, or you just misunderstood what it said. Cooling uses very little water. It is no where near either agriculture or household use. The main problem with power plants is not that they "use up" water, but that they warm it up, causing thermal pollution. But the water is still available for other uses downstream.
Perhaps your textbook was talking about hydro-electric power plants (dams). But those don't use the water for cooling.
In power plants, water is kind of being used as a cheap waste heat reservior. We are just too cheap to use other heat exchange techiques since water is cheap and available, other exchangers/reservior techniques are less economically viable.
Most folks realize that opening your fridge to cool your house probably isn't a long term solution.
That's when they install AC where at least the heat reseviour is outside the house.
But of course if you were to scale your AC unit past a certain point, it's kind of like your fridge situation all over again...
The end solution of course is to: stop warming up the local environment and use less energy.
The Numbers 96% of corn used for ethanol production is not irrigated 785 gallons water per gallon of ethanol (average crop irrigation) 3-4 gallons water per gallon ethanol (dry grind production) 1.9-6 gallons water per gallon ethanol (conceptual cellulosic production) 2-2.5 gallons water per gallon gasoline (petroleum refining) 0.6 gallons water per kilowatt-hour (coal-fired power plant) ds
Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally wo
There are closed loop systems, but you still need to cool and condense the steam back to water just to pipe it around, and re-heat it. Pushing spent (low pressure) steam back into your heating plant is no where near as efficient as sending water in. Condensing to water and pumping that is actually more efficient.
Most electrical generation plants have two or three stages of generation, where the steam exiting the high pressure turbines is re-heated with with flue gases and
sent through the medium and low pressure turbines. At the end of the line they have extracted just about all the heat they can from it.
The problem is we have no really good use for the remaining heat of spent steam. And no way to extract the remaining heat into a useful form, or
recycle it back into the plant or any other economical use.
So we essentially heat the atmosphere, by venting it into cooling towers.
But the water? It all gets returned to the cooling pond, except that bit that you see rising as vapor (its not steam) above the cooling towers.
.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Then there is the little detail that many of our power plants use ocean water!
Well, they WERE designed to use ocean water. But California's State Water Resources Control Board has ordered them to stop using ocean water, in a phased plan starting soon and finishing by 2024.
Last I checked, California was REALLY broke, and this will cost billions, so I question whether this is really the time. But the costs will simply be passed along to the people of California who will just have to pay more for power.
Also, the power plant operators prefer to mitigate the harm to fish by just putting screens over the water intakes, rather than by scrapping the ocean cooling and switching to fresh water. This was not permitted.
http://www.calwatchdog.com/2011/03/23/ca-water-boards-%E2%80%98animal-farm%E2%80%99-policy/
http://www.americanwaterintel.com/archive/1/11/general/california-orders-plants-cut-intake-flow-93.html
Most of the water used for cooling goes back into the lake or river since it's being used to take heat somewhere else instead of being consumed.
Warm water can have a non-trivial environmental impact but newer plants can reduce this to trivial by having a lot of small outlets instead of one large one.
Well, it is true that we use 40% of our water for cooling energy plants, but that is kind of small in comparison with the fact that we use 10 million percent of our water, and growing by the second.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The study is more about the risks that power plants may not have enough water available, not that they are using it up. The plants are competing for the water with those that do consume it, such as agriculture and residential, exacerbated by long term drought cycles in some areas, and climate change.
There are some uses for spent steam and even warmed water from the condensers but they are somewhat limited. My brother was involved with designing a combination generating set fuelled by natural gas which also produced process steam for sugar refining. Previously the sugar company had bought in electricity and produced low-pressure steam separately in gas-fired boilers. Afterwards they sold excess generating capacity to the grid and improved their financial bottom line by a healthy chunk.
Total water withdrawals in the United States for 2005 were estimated for eight categories of use: public supply, domestic, irrigation, livestock, aquaculture, industrial, mining, and thermoelectric-power generation (fig. 1). Thermoelectric power was the largest category of water use, followed by irrigation and public supply
Page 5 has pictures and data, you might like that.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Burn more of that Coal baby, we'll beat the Chinese yet!
Typical AC, the U.S. is between two of the largest bodies of water on this planet which is grinningly ignored.
Most power plants built the lake in the first place. And they don't discharge into the lake; they discharge at or downstream of the dam -- so they aren't pulling in their own hot water. Next to none (read: NONE) of the intake water is used in the turbine steam loops -- those are 100% closed loops, if you're losing water you have a problem. (a serious problem for nuke plants.) [note: steam loops use distilled water -- ZERO minerals, RO reduces the mineral/particle volume, but it's not zero.]
That said, there are still numerous plants that use evaporative cooling towers. And they do, indeed, require a significant volume of water that is "consumed" -- it goes up as vapor. While it isn't "drinking water", it's water that's not available to the filter plant that feeds your taps. In a drought, you have a choice... cool the power plant, or have water to drink.
Ever seen a "cooling tower" (common for nuclear plants and coal plants)? Water disappears into thin air, not into the ground.
That's the problem that TFA was discussing.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
What about using nuclear (reduced life cycle greenhouse gasses, yes, we need diesel to mine uranium/thorium) with a closed loop system through the heat exchangers? The problem is plants that tap well, river or ocean water, and run it through evaporative cooling towers. This problem is created by the economic advantage granted to building gignormous plants that can't dispose of heat easily to their cool heatsink (thermodynamics baby) in order to do work. Now about a small nuke plant like the naval reactors that doesn't generate the enormous amounts of waste heat?
"Strong like bear, smart like rock."
Because, of course, planning for a few decades in the future costs money and requires political will.
I refuse to consider this chicken little bullshit as "planning" for anything.
Last time I checked the US has "only" a little over 300M people. The article is about the US. Cooling water availability is a local issue - on the coasts you can always use seawater. The oceans are pretty big.
Good to know the solutions are trivial.
I wasn't talking about environmental impact. I was talking about water usage. Water pumped into a cooling tower is no longer available for use, as the point is to have it evaporate. (1000 gals go to the top of the tower, way less than that makes it to the bottom.) Thus, they USE water; it ceases to be available for any other use. In a drought, that's a real problem. Water drawn out of a lake for a heat exchanger, gets returned to the lake (or downstream of it); it's immediately available for other uses -- a bit hotter, but it's all still there. In a drought, that's a non-problem. (it's a problem for the power plant when the water level gets too low, or the intact water gets too hot.)
They're both "bad for the environment" in that sense. One is a source of heat pollution, and the other takes water away from other uses. Yes, where one has plentiful water, a tower has the least impact. (aside from the acreage required to build it. :-))
(Of course, we're ignoring the water used by office HVAC systems. And that is not pumped out of a lake.)
"Water disappears into thin air, [...]"
And then it goes...where exactly? Oh, wait a sec - there was something I read back in grade school, the "water cycle", I think the called it? Some mumbo-jumbo about water in the air turning into clouds and falling as rain/snow.
Cutting the sarcasm for a moment, that's my biggest gripe with all of these "OMG WE'RE USING UP ALL OUR WATER! TURN OFF YOUR SPRINKLERS!!!" types. The water doesn't just disappear or fly off into space - it goes right back into the environment. As long as the returned water isn't being polluted, there simply is not a real problem here.
Most power plants built the lake in the first place. And they don't discharge into the lake; they discharge at or downstream of the dam -- so they aren't pulling in their own hot water. Next to none (read: NONE) of the intake water is used in the turbine steam loops -- those are 100% closed loops, if you're losing water you have a problem. (a serious problem for nuke plants.) [note: steam loops use distilled water -- ZERO minerals, RO reduces the mineral/particle volume, but it's not zero.]
That said, there are still numerous plants that use evaporative cooling towers. And they do, indeed, require a significant volume of water that is "consumed" -- it goes up as vapor. While it isn't "drinking water", it's water that's not available to the filter plant that feeds your taps. In a drought, you have a choice... cool the power plant, or have water to drink.
Regardless of who built it, a lake is a closed body of water, period. And yes, they DO discharge into the lake, typically; if you take water out of a lake and release it into a river, you drain the lake. I'm not guessing at this; I work for the very large civil engineering company that is mentioned in the article; not only do we do a huge amount of work in the power gen world (we're building the second-largest power plant in the world in South Africa right now), but 30% of the world's drinking water comes from water purification or desalinization plants that we built. I've been doing NERC CIP compliance work since before the auditing deadlines for the first 18 requirements (NERC CIP was implemented in stages at first), so I've spent about 6 years in the power industry by now, at about two dozen utilities in total.
And you're right, next to no water is used in the steam loops, but some is...as I said. Enough is important that the demin plant is considered a critical asset if the plant itself is considered critical, and there's a large storage tank of demineralized water to give some cushion in case there's a problem with the RO filters. And you are right about the zero minerals, but every plant I've ever seen...CT or ST...used RO filters. They use a lot of them, in series.
But to get back on point...if you take water from a river and put it back in a river...or from a lake to a river downstream...you're still not using up that water. You're just moving it from one point to another. Again, neither is potable water, and it's not causing a net loss.
Evaporative cooling towers...also called passive cooling towers...are extremely rare outside of nuclear installations. They're very expensive to build in comparison. Even among energy engineers, they're something of a curiosity for the fossil generation world. So that won't add up to the 40% cited.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I suggest you recheck your assumption that the evaporated water will return to the same locale from which it was drawn.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In South Africa, most coal power plants are air cooled. If water use really becomes a problem in the USA, they will change too. In the mean time, this is just a normal 'Oh no the sky is falling' story.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Once-through (also known as open-loop) cooling refers to cooling systems in which water is withdrawn from a source, circulated through heat exchangers, and then returned to a surface-water body. Large amounts of water are needed for once-through cooling, but consumptive use is a small percentage of the total withdrawn (Solley and others, 1998).
and a little later:
The Eastern States (see division line in figure 12) accounted for 84 percent of total thermoelectric withdrawals.
So, in essence, the areas that have water issues uses water more wisely. The ones that have more water than they know what to do with, splurges. Yet another "problem" that doesn't really exist.
So even the power companies have shills here. We should feel special, I suppose.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
There's no mention about how much water fracking a well can use. It's going to take 4-8M gallons to frack a single well. It's ridiculous that they think they can frack in the western states. Our forests are on fire. We're having THE worst fires, year after year, and it's only projected to get worse. Maybe they can use 8.5M gallons to frack a single well in Canada when they have the water resources of Michigan, but not in the west. That project is slated to expand to 500 wells that will use 4B gallons of water. Crazy.
The company’s plan to drill several new gas wells near Kalkaska will entail pumping about 300 million gallons of water out of the ground, injecting that water into several gas well bores and then leaving nearly all of the contaminated water in the ground when the fracking is completed, according to state records.
The result: A net loss of up to 300 million gallons of groundwater to the North Branch of the Manistee River, a blue-ribbon trout stream fed almost entirely by groundwater. One of Encana’s drilling sites is a half-mile from the Manistee River’s North Branch, according to company records.
“If the citizens of Michigan knew corporations were destroying hundreds of millions of gallons of Michigan water – water that is supposedly protected by government for use by all of us – they would be opposing this new kind of completion (fracking) technique,” said Paul Brady, a fracking watchdog who lives near Kalkaska. “These deep shale, unconventional wells are using massive amounts of water without adequate testing and solid data on aquifer capacity.”
Encana spokesman Doug Hock, however, is optimistic: “Can we access the (deep shale gas) and still protect the environment? Absolutely.”
And down a bit further...
Encana officials said the oil and gas industry wants to export natural gas extracted from shale formations in Michigan and other states to consumers in Asia. Demand for natural gas in China is strong and prices are double the cost of natural gas in the U.S., industry, watchdogs said.
Truth is, Americans are getting screwed in every way till Sunday and don't know it (or care) and we're ultimately getting left with higher prices, poisoned water and land that will remain for generations, and politicians that promise they will do better next time. You can't have clean food without clean water and air. I think we're screwed with this path to 'Energy Independence'.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Last time I checked the 300M people are insignificant compared to the world population, but they use 25% of the energy. And since "we" includes the whole world "we the superior people" are also part of the problem.
Sure "we the superior people" can buy whatever the "we the superior people" want, but not caring about the sustainability rest of the world is.. quite ignorant.
Every nation has their own arguments to justify their action, but no government wants to look an the bigger picture because that is painful. It does require less consumption. It's about everybody and the long term and not only the US. If we're out of resources, we're out of resources. Game over.
Privacy is terrorism.
So at 40% per year, in two and a half years there will be no water left in the bank. We are Doomed.
You my friend need to learn about exponential growth and, as in this case, decay. At 40% withdrawals each year there'll be water for ... somewhat more than a hundred years. By then we'll have the technology to give each citizen the correct number of water molecules they're allowed to withdraw from the bank.
Sadly, the H2O molecule is finite, however small - were water infinitely divisible we'd have had water forever AND test Planck scale effects in the not too distant future. Provided we also developed suitably small spoons, of course.
Seriously. You have a problem in which our power plants make heavy use of cooling. IOW, it has to dump that 'waste' heat somewhere. Yet, it is only 'waste' in the same sense that 'spent' fuel is stored at nuke plants.
That heat can either heat buildings, OR COOL them. What is needed is to simply pipe the heat to larger buildings and For the most part, most of our power plants are located close to businesses. With this being used to heat/cool buildings, it becomes a nice way to 'dump' that heat.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Fewer ppl? Oh, that is why we have so many wars going on around the world.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
That was part of the joke with smaller toilets and limit discs in California. Home use was something like 11% (the vast majority is watering a desert so we elsewhere can have winter vegetables -- have we said thanks?), and toilets only a part of that.
So you save maybe 2% a year. But if demand goes up 1% a year, you've only put off the need for more water by 2 years. Meanwhile people live like shit.
Best to ignore 1970s era stupidities and just get on with developing more sources.
For example, let people remove limit discs and have big honking toilets if they get their water from some alternate source, like seawater.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Both use a large amount of water, esp. when you factor in the water needed to transport the tar sands via pipeline. And a fair amount of tar sands are in desert areas, where water is scarce.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
An impoundment does result in a surprising increasing of evaporative loss compared to the free-river run. So a nominally non-consumptive water use such as hydroelectric generation or river cooling of the condenser can involve considerable fresh water loss, usually only important to downstream consumers.
Cooling towers are by definition totally consumptive and are also comparatively expensive so they are mostly used for nuclear plants which make steam at a much lower temperature than coal plants. Thus the small reduction in enthalpy at the top of a cooling tower translates into a couple per cent increase in thermodynamic efficiency and a significant ~5 increase in profit.
Nuclear plants *could* be run at a much higher temperature, but only the French have the guts to do that :)
Actually, "bear" and "bare" are homophones, by definition, when the local accent pronounces them exactly the same. Remember, It's not the written words that are homophones, but the spoken words.
Just because you pronounce them differently, or because they historically have been pronounced differently, does not mean that they are not homophones where I live, now.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Excuse me? You're the one who started with the mischaracterisations, not I.
You were also the one to bring up standard of living.
As a matter of fact, I think too many people in too many Western countries, especially the US, have too many shiny toys and creature comforts. What's more, they tend to confuse their sense of entitlement to these things with the actual requirements for having a good and productive life.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
As a group? No, you haven't. As a Northern Californian am glad to finally hear it from someone. I doubt our farmers would accept it as sufficient, though.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.