The cooling towers are used to cool waste water before discharging back to rivers/lakes, if I am not mistaken. Too bad there's not a practical way to put that heat to better use.
Those giant cooling towers are pretty expensive and the water to run them can cause significant damage to the local ecosystem if it raises the temperature of whatever water body they draw from. It's a lot easier to just turn off the energy sources (such as solar) that can be turned off without ill effect.
I'm not talking about dumping the warm water downstream, but using evaporative cooling as an alternative solution.
Cooling towers don't recirculate the drawn water back to the river as far as I'm aware. They only draw the water in the basin depletes. Looking at the sources, 2% of it is lost to evaporation, the rest condenses back on the bottom.
So it doesn't actually draw that much water, and it doesn't dump the warm water downstream.
They could evaporate some of the water to cool the rest. This is why many nuclear plants in the US have cooling towers. But cooling towers consume water, and are fairly expensive.
No it's an engineering problem, these plants were designed without cooling towers because it was assumed the direct cooling using river water would be sufficient in all but the rarest cases.
I was under the impression that any power plant that uses a source of high temperatures to operate would also benefit from a water cooling system with a hyperbolic cooling tower. It improves the efficiency for whatever it is you're doing on the hot end.
They're just iconic for nuclear power plants for some reason, to the point where some people mistake the cooling tower for a building containing a nuclear reactor. And this discourages their construction at other types of power plant, because people freak out about nuclear plants in their backyard. And obviously they aren't used where water cooling would be prohibitively expensive.
More cooling towers would mean more water needed, since they rely on evaporating water. With river levels already low, I bet they're cautious about using more water.
I wonder if they're considering refrigeration, or if that's even feasible. Conceivably, you could use the power from the nuclear plant to cool itself, since refrigeration has a higher-than-1 coefficient of performance.
So if I understand this correctly you are adding this tech to existing cooling towers?
I don't see this answered on the page, but: what cooling towers do you have in mind? I don't have any statistics at hand, but my guess would be most cooling towers are coal power plants and other fossil fuel infrastructure. This seems problematic as you're creating an incentive to keep fossil fuel infrastructure.
Also industrial heat and heat in general is in itself something that needs to be decarbonized and one of the best options here is to re-use "waste heat". So ideally even if you have non-fossil processes with cooling towers you'll likely want to change that.
(Also from what I'm aware of carbon capture itself is something that needs a lot of heat and existing projects tend to want to use waste heat.)
They are, but not all nuke plant feature cooling towers. The problem here is for those without: they use water as a cooling fluid, but then just pour it back into the river instead of evaporating it. The advantage is that they don't consume/move the water, the inconvenient is that they can't spit out 40C water without hurting the river's ecosystem.
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