Collision Between Water and Energy Is Underway, and Worsening 189
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side effect of power generation — water usage: 'More than 40 percent of fresh water used in the United States is withdrawn to cool power plants.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.'"
Self-correcting problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Funny)
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Humans will eventually learn to drink sea-water or die, just the way Darwin intended. Deal with it.
I know you're being facetious, but FTFY.
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Why not? Why not use turd-water to cool plants?
It don't got to be clean drinking water for their purposes. We can send 'em water after it passes through sheep and people, and their toilets.
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People -> Sewer -> AIWPS [sdsu.edu] -> Power Plant
This does produce some byproducts... namely methane and algae. Which are both useful.
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"Why not? Why not use turd-water to cool plants?"
We tend to build large power plants far from large groups of people. High-tension wires are much, much less expensive than plumbing water back the same distance. Where we do build them, the amount of grey water tends to be tiny.
I should note the NG peakers, which are rapidly replacing a significant portion of North America's generation mix, do not have to use cooling water, or at least nowhere near the same amount.
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I'm pretty sure that you're being facetious to some degree, but you do have a point. You certainly don't need drinking grade water to cool power plant, but there are limits nonetheless. Not just on total suspended solids, but also on dissolved salts, dissolved oxygen and a variety of other factors. The details change from plant to plant, and sometimes don't get found out until after the plant is built. Most people get the bulk chemistry issues more or less righ
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maybe i am missing the sarcasm, but i believe fresh water availabilty is the concern (for power plants).however,higher seas, coastal flooding, massive civilization downgrades and shifts....maybe that IS the answer!!
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No, no. More salt water = more desalinization plants = more power plants = more salt water.
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You're missing the moral problem. Technically, yes, civilization will adapt. But it won't be equitable. Those in poor nations will bare the brunt of it; the poor in this country will bare the brunt of it. Tens of millions will die horrible deaths, while your children will simply pay higher electricity bills.
It's the inequality of needlessly impose suffering that is fundamentally immoral, disregarding various ecological arguments.
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Homophones (Score:2)
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.
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All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish [bbc.co.uk] which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site a
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All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish [bbc.co.uk] which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
I have noticed that direct cooling (seawater/riverwater/lakewater) is popular in Europe. It fell out of favor in the US a while ago because the permitting was too troublesome. I haven't heard of a direct cooling water plant in the US built in the last 20 years. The US uses mostly air cooling or cooling towers. Air cooling is ideal environmentally, but is not nearly as efficient- thermodynamially it is worse and dozens of fans cost more to operate compared to pumps. Cooling towers are nearly as good as
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All of the UK's current nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling. Many coal-fired power stations (but not all of them) are also on the coast or estuaries and similarly use seawater for their cooling loops.
Corrosion is not a problem, just use marine-rated stainless steel pumps and piping for the loops and carry out preventative maintenance every now and then. Odd problems with seawater cooling do occur, such as a plague of jellyfish [bbc.co.uk] which threatened to block the seawater intakes at a Scottish reactor site and they were shut down for a time as a precaution.
I have noticed that direct cooling (seawater/riverwater/lakewater) is popular in Europe. It fell out of favor in the US a while ago because the permitting was too troublesome. I haven't heard of a direct cooling water plant in the US built in the last 20 years. The US uses mostly air cooling or cooling towers. Air cooling is ideal environmentally, but is not nearly as efficient- thermodynamially it is worse and dozens of fans cost more to operate compared to pumps. Cooling towers are nearly as good as direct cooling and can be made to be relatively water-efficient.
It is a complete mystery to me why direct cooling is still used in environmentally-liberal Europe but is practically outlawed in the global-warming-denying USA.
Direct cooling is apparently popular in Florida - Manatees famously like to hang around power plants in cold weather.
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Even using seawater is not without issues in hot weather though. The water coming in is at a higher temperature, meaning it is less efficient at carrying excess heat away from the reactor. It then has to be pumped out again somewhere, and when it is too warm it can cause quite a lot of environmental damage.
Nuclear plants in France have to shut down regularly during heat waves to avoid killing fish and other wildlife like they have done in the past. Fortunately on those days Germany usually has quite a bit o
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More power plants = more greenhouse gases
How exactly is that true for nuclear power plants?
You're right that it's true for all other forms of energy production.
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Nuclear, wind and solar don't generate greenhouse gasses during operation. (They all generate some greenhouse gasses during construction.)
Nuclear uses lots of water to cool the plant. Wind and solar photovoltaic don't use water during operation.
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Nuclear, probably generates quite a bit of carbon durning constructions because so much concrete is used, which is very very carbon intensive to produce.
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It's not waste, it's fuel that isn't allowed to be burnt because of stupid regulations.
As soon as reprocessing is allowed none of this becomes an issue any more, if it's radioactive enough to be a problem it's radioactive enough to be used as fuel.
related link from a nasa engineer, full talk is an hour but here's the five minute version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uK367T7h6ZY [youtube.com]
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More power plants = more greenhouse gases = global warming = higher seas
Except if the higher seas are too hot for cooling the plant, also due to global warming....
Nuclear Closed Loop (Score:2)
This is more sensationalism than any real threat (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that powerplants borrow water to cool themselves is no big deal. They give it all back.
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Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
California water (Score:2)
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.
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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; th
Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 sm
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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/ [calwatchdog.com]
http://www.americanwaterintel.com/archive/1/11/general/california-orders-plants-cut-intake-flow-93.html [americanwaterintel.com]
Wow, I'm pretty strongly pro-environmental and I think that's nuts. I've heard of requiring things like mile(?) long inlet/outlet pipes to avoid thermal pollution near the shoreline, but requiring them to switch to fresh water (in dry-as-a-bone California no less)? That's crazy.
Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:5, Funny)
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).
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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 suita
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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.
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Re:This is more sensationalism than any real threa (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 [bridgemi.com] 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 o
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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.
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"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
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I suggest you recheck your assumption that the evaporated water will return to the same locale from which it was drawn.
hmm... (Score:2)
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Studying and pointing out the risks increases the chances it will be fixed before it becomes an issue.
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NSA Datacenter (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:NSA Datacenter (Score:5, Funny)
the NSA surveillance center requires 1.7M gallons of water daily [ksl.com] to operate.
How else do expect them to get all that water-boarding done . . . ?
Tip the veal, try the waitress . . .
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I live close to the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah [wired.com]. Currently we are under a drought with widespread municipal water restrictions, yet the NSA surveillance center requires 1.7M gallons of water daily [ksl.com] to operate.
Water rationing guarantees more cheap water for big industry. Power rationing guarantees that big industry does not need to produce more energy for the same rates. Let's not get into recycling. All these things are taken to the extreme, making normal people's lives harder, and rich people's easier. Don't take more than you need, but never feel guilted into taking less.
And then they give it back. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Unless you are shipping your water off planet, none of our water gets "used up." Water that comes out of a power plant doesn't go directly into the city water, it has to be collected and treated first. That collection and treatment costs money, time and energy.
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They should follow the approach Google is using in some datacenters, and use the recycled/treated gray water for the power plant.
The power plants need not take in potable water; they could largely take in the sewer water, before using it to cool the plant, treat it a bit further, and then dump that back out into the rivers....
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The net sum of water available on earth fluctuates greatly from day to day.
No, it doesn't. For if that were true, we'd see large scale changes in sea level from day to day. We don't because there is vastly more water on Earth than is created or destroyed by these little processes.
LFTR (Score:1, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
http://energyfromthorium.com/ [energyfromthorium.com]
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No nuclear reactor is directly cooled with river water.
The GP didn't say it was directly cooled with river water.
All nuclear power plants however are just fancy ways of creating lots of steam to drive a turbine, and your beloved Thorium Reactor is no exception.
Wrong. An LFTR can operate at much higher temperatures than a conventional reactor, making the Brayton cycle practical.
That part of the power plant is roughly 40 percent efficient due to thermodynamic limits.
Wrong again. A conventional reactor is maybe 33% efficient, but due to the higher operating temperature an LFTR could be over 50% efficient. It would also make air cooling practical, which is what the GP was saying.
P.S. I admit to cheating - I read the links the GP provided.
Alternative Deep Ocean Power is Feasible (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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If I learned anything from the stellar season finale of Sea Quest: DSV, it's that your plan will result in devastating, apocalyptic seismic events that will prove, conclusively, that there is no free energy on this planet. Which in retrospect actually makes Captain Planet's byline, "The power is yours", seem a little ironic.
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This sounds great until you think about the communication lines that get cut by an anchor every so often.
...and you realise that the Internet still works, and you're still able to post to Slashdot about it when it happens.
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You're just trying to fuck up the planet...again. We don't need more power, we need to use less power.
How about you show us how wonderful your ideas are by not doing anything to "try to fuck up" the planet?Say starting by using that resource intensive internet?
Yeah, It Seemed Like An Infinite Resource (Score:2)
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2.5% of the water on earth is freshwater.
Of that, 1.5% is in liquid surface water (30.1% of that 2.5% is groundwater).
So... 0.0325% of earth's water is easily human usable, and another 0.775% is usable with some effort (drilling).
Not as much as people think.
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html [usgs.gov]
The demonization of conventional sources of energy (Score:1)
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. Ne
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So even the power companies have shills here. We should feel special, I suppose.
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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.
This makes ethanol that much worse.. (Score:2)
Some math about water usage by power plant? (Score:3)
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 [usgs.gov], the total withdrawal by power plants is 200 billion gallons a day. So it looks like the old power plants are the main culprits.
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Just not as big a problem as people think (Score:2, Insightful)
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 f
Well then shouldn't we be using water in... (Score:2)
...HHO engines instead where it turns back into clean water?
like opening your fridge to cool you house (Score:2)
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 y
What isn't mentioned in the summary ... (Score:2)
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.
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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.
They can construct an artificial body of water, and mix the output water with fresh water, before releasing it back into the sea.
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Pollution dilution... it's been around for a long time... still not a solution.
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Nobody needs hot water? Not for laundry or dishwashing or anything?
Build plants near cities and pipe the warm water in.
AC's Conclusion? (Score:2)
Typical AC, the U.S. is between two of the largest bodies of water on this planet which is grinningly ignored.
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Air Cooling (Score:2)
The problem is the lack of immigination (Score:2)
That heat can either heat buildings, OR COOL them. [wikipedia.org] 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.
Tar sands and fracking (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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Yup, because as soon as that water for cooling is all gone, there will be no more water.
40%!!! The greedy bastards. !!
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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.
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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.
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Re:wait (Score:4, Informative)
There are closed loop systems [wikipedia.org], 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.
.
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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.
waste entropy is waste (Score:3)
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The fact that they aren't mindless fanbois of your pet technology does not make them Luddites.
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That is a complete mischaracterisation.
Their mindset seems to be that we abuse many agricultural technologies, usually to the benefit of agribusinesses like Monsanto and Cargill.
Decrying the abuse or overuse of something is not the same as calling for its removal from use altogether.
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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.
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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 painfu
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Good to know the solutions are trivial.
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