92 comments on Why wind needs feed-in tariffs (and why it is not the enemy of nuclear)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
92 comments on Why wind needs feed-in tariffs (and why it is not the enemy of nuclear)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
I think the water is a bit of a nonissue; if you're sourcing it from the ocean it's effectively limitless and uses 2/3rds the surface of the Earth as the heatsink. Inland, build cooling towers, or larger artificial lakes, and run a closed loop.
You can't put seawater through a coal, nuclear etc plant, the salt stuffs everything up. You need fresh water.
You can of course use the plant's power to desalinate seawater to then use in the plant itself, but then you're getting less net energy from the thing.
Fresh water's a big issue for power plants. Here in Victoria we've had power prices rises largely because of that. Most of our power comes from hydroelectric and coal, both of which use a lot of water.
Actually it is possible to use seawater to cool nuclear powerplants (and I would assume other types as well).
I've visited Seabrook before - http://www.answers.com/topic/seabrook-station-nuclear-power-plant?cat=te...
So it can be done. It's not common, but Seabrook has a safe record now of 18 years of operation...
The Millstone nuclear powerplant in Waterford, CT, USA uses sea water as coolant. It's been in operation since 1970 without incident, although it was shut down for a year for a safety evaluation in the nineties. But the safety issues raised were not related to sea water as far as I know. My roommate in college worked there in the eighties and said that safety protocols were very lax (so he quit, returned to college, and became my roommate). It's currently in operation.
Here's an article in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millstone_Nuclear_Power_Plant
You can use seawater; it just doubles the investment because of the required materials. Also increases the required maintenance by a lot.
Cooling towers are not closed loop. A cooling tower system typically requires 5% of the water circulation as makeup. In a lot of areas even this amount of freshwater is unavailable; let alone a once-through system.
A true closed system is possible. Fin-fan units, ususally using a glycol mixture. It will cost a fortune though, which is why no one wants to do it.
Completely dry cooling systems that essentialy are large water to air heat exchangers are off-the-shelf systems and are for instance used for combined cycle gas turbine plants in deserts.