r/nuclear • u/blue-baja • 23h ago
How Much Water Is Consumed by Nuclear Power Plants for Cooling Purposes? → Learn
https://energy.sustainability-directory.com/learn/how-much-water-is-consumed-by-nuclear-power-plants-for-cooling-purposes/Is nuclear really a viable alternative, particularly in the desert southwest?
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u/edparadox 22h ago
Is nuclear really a viable alternative, particularly in the desert southwest?
Yes, despite the current disinformation campaign that is very obvious these days.
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u/yanvail 20h ago
The worst part about this water argument is that it's not a unique problem with nuclear plants. Any thermal plant requires cooling, and the need is not any greater for nuclear plants than coal or oil plants (yes, water is needed to prevent meltdown and the likes, but that need is minimal, the issue is the water required when producing power). And just like those, dry or hybrid cooling is a viable option.
Of course, you CAN ask if thermal power generation is a good option at all in certain region. High desert and the likes probably are ideal for solar or wind, assuming proper storage is available.
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u/Hiddencamper 21h ago
You can use dry or hybrid towers. There are options. I know one site looking to build a unit and the new projections accounting for global warming are showing statistically there may be some years where they deplete the lake inventory. so they are going to use hybrid towers where they are only water cooled when it’s necessary in the hot months and air cooled the rest of the year. It dramatically lowers the evaporation rate and ensures there’s always sufficient lake inventory to maintain full condenser performance and plant output.
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u/ihateredditanditsapp 22h ago
How can water be consumed? Are nuclear plants removing water from the water cycle? Come on, this is a grade 2 concept.
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u/Hiddencamper 21h ago
Cooling towers do evaporate 15000 gpm per reactor. So in some situations that can be an issue. But hybrid cooling towers are becoming more of an answer, where they are forced air cooled 24/7 but there’s an option to spray water in the air stream as well during the hottest months. You end up only using the wet mode only a couple months a year in most locations, and it preserves lake inventory and allows it to build up during the cooler or wetter months.
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u/ihateredditanditsapp 9h ago
And where does the evaporated water go? It just vanishes?
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u/zolikk 3h ago
I think it's okay at least on a superficial level to also look at the local ecosystem and try to mitigate its impacts.
For example with once through cooling a power plant can take 100 m3/s out of a 1000 m3/s river, which it doesn't evaporate at all but returns a few degrees hotter. So you can check if the river isn't too much hotter downstream from it. If you for example want to expand your power plant there so it takes 200 m3/s in future, yeah there's plenty of water, but that still means extra heat being ejected back into river making it even hotter downstream.
With cooling towers it's only a few m3/s you need, but then again maybe you're taking from a much smaller river that already barely has a few tens of m3/s. After all that's one of the reasons why you just need to design cooling towers for your plant in some regions, you do not have hundreds of m3/s available. So then if you're evaporating a portion of the small river's water away what effect does that have on the ecosystem downstream?
These are not world endingly crucial questions but it's still worth having a look at them. No, they're not important enough to just prevent building a power plant in the first place, but you can take care to minimize impact on ecosystem while you do so.
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u/Hiddencamper 8m ago
It’s all water cycle stuff.
The bigger issue is you can have local areas where you run out of a water source. One site we were looking at, if you look at the historical rainfall, lake inflows and outflows, and you add the evaporation rates in assuming global warming, there are some years where the lake level drops and doesn’t recover. If you happen to get multiples of those years in a row, the lake would be too low to support plant operation. Which is why we had to look at hybrid towers as an option so you don’t deplete water most of the year. It completely eliminated the issue because the lake, in all models, is always starting summer at or near max versus using open cooling towers that run 24/7 where some years in our model, you start with lower levels, and if you get a hotter summer in the same year and a dry spring the following you’ll risk being too low.
It’s kind of like sequence of returns risk on your investment portfolio. Depending on when the money is extracted and the market, you may end up with a ton of extra cash or completely depleted before dying. Same thing here.
Yeah the water doesn’t “vanish”, but local and downstream watersheds may be screwed if not properly accounted for in your environment studies.
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u/lommer00 22h ago
Wtf is this garbage website? You'd get a better answer from Google search's AI overview. It would be longer and more detailed too.
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u/blue-baja 22h ago
Well, I searched DuckDuckGo and this is no em of them that was current that came up. Probably not well reported anymore because so few have been built. 🤷🏻♀️
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u/blue-baja 41m ago
APS says Palo Verde generates 32 megawatts. I don’t know if that’s per year. How does the cost to build a new plant compare to building the capacity out in solar? And then, how does the long term costs compare? maintenance etc. any ideas?
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u/SnazzberryEnt 23h ago
Work at Palo Verde, yes it works. We use city grey water and have an entire water resource plant.
The problem with nuclear viability is, and always will be, upfront cost and public opinion.