Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 02/02/2010 - 14:48.
I am a retired Nuclear power plant employee, and was implying that the cooling towers at the plant I worked at dumped an awful lot of water into the air, and that these numbers did not seem to provide a good estimation of the amount of water they evaporate. I do not remember the exact capacity of the cooling tower make-up pumps (I was an instrumentation engineer, not mechanical) however, I do remember that the makeup flow was greater than that of a typical fire hydrant. The supply pipe was at least 8 inches in diameter. When you shut down a make-up pump you could see the water level decrease. The evaporation was so high that about half of the make-up flow was used just to flush out the accumulation of salts of evaporation and contamination collected from the air (as I was told in my training classes.) The make-up rate was about 10% of the recirculation rate (again, as I was told in my training classes.) At times two of the three pumps were running. The reference to emissions from a home was not about homes, but, just to show how much a typical air-conditioning industrial cooler ALSO adds water to the atmosphere. When traveling by air I have seen the man-made clouds drifting downwind of cooling towers around power plants for more than a mile and clearly recall seeing one down-wind of the industrial cooler for the local mall. The clouds are often visible at Salem/Hope Creek as you fly into WashDC or Baltimore. These clouds must do something to the local temperature. Some people even claim that there is even higher snowfall downwind of cooling towers. All of that water put into the atmosphere also contains the latent heat of evaporation, which must also do something to the atmosphere. With lake/ocean evaporation, the suns heat is evaporating the water, which I see as a net-zero gain/loss. However, a 1,000 MWe power plant is actually (about) 3,000 MWt (t = thermal). That means that (about) 2,000 Mw of energy are being dumped into the atmosphere. It must do something! I would assume that these hot little H20 molecules (that are lighter than O2) would have more of an effect than cold CO2 molecules that sink to the ground.
![[SOHO Sun Spot Image]](http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/512/latest.jpg)
No disrepect intended.
I am a retired Nuclear power plant employee, and was implying that the cooling towers at the plant I worked at dumped an awful lot of water into the air, and that these numbers did not seem to provide a good estimation of the amount of water they evaporate. I do not remember the exact capacity of the cooling tower make-up pumps (I was an instrumentation engineer, not mechanical) however, I do remember that the makeup flow was greater than that of a typical fire hydrant. The supply pipe was at least 8 inches in diameter. When you shut down a make-up pump you could see the water level decrease. The evaporation was so high that about half of the make-up flow was used just to flush out the accumulation of salts of evaporation and contamination collected from the air (as I was told in my training classes.) The make-up rate was about 10% of the recirculation rate (again, as I was told in my training classes.) At times two of the three pumps were running. The reference to emissions from a home was not about homes, but, just to show how much a typical air-conditioning industrial cooler ALSO adds water to the atmosphere. When traveling by air I have seen the man-made clouds drifting downwind of cooling towers around power plants for more than a mile and clearly recall seeing one down-wind of the industrial cooler for the local mall. The clouds are often visible at Salem/Hope Creek as you fly into WashDC or Baltimore. These clouds must do something to the local temperature. Some people even claim that there is even higher snowfall downwind of cooling towers. All of that water put into the atmosphere also contains the latent heat of evaporation, which must also do something to the atmosphere. With lake/ocean evaporation, the suns heat is evaporating the water, which I see as a net-zero gain/loss. However, a 1,000 MWe power plant is actually (about) 3,000 MWt (t = thermal). That means that (about) 2,000 Mw of energy are being dumped into the atmosphere. It must do something! I would assume that these hot little H20 molecules (that are lighter than O2) would have more of an effect than cold CO2 molecules that sink to the ground.