re what do nuclear site s cooling towers do in c l x kj vcd hp com john eaton writes during the nuclear fission reaction the uranium fuel can get hot enough to melt when this happens the liquid uranium is pumped to the cooling tower where it is sprayed into the air contact with the cool outside air will condense the mist and it will fall back to the cooling tower floor there it is collected by a cleaning crew using shop vacs and is then reformed into pellets for reactor use the next day cooling towers are a lot taller than they really need to be power companies are forced to make them that tall by some enviromental law that requires the raw uranium emisions to be held to under this law is now under attack by lawyers arguing that the should be measured at the edge of the property rather than the edge of the cooling tower eliminating this law will save power companies thousands of dollars in concrete costs for new nukes john eaton hp vcd johne i think you posted your article days too late april st is over i don t like nuclear powerplants but i think it s not fair to tell such storys about them ok let me try to explain what that tower is used to st even the modernst nuclear powerplant is only a simple steam engine it has an hightech boiler but the rest is still verry verry conventional and if you ve already visited any condensation powerstation you l have seen the cooling towers too if you look at any good book about thermophysics you ll find a chapter about the carnot process which describes how to get energy from a temperature difference and that is the reason for cooling towers too you only can get energy if you ve an temperature gradient that means that you have steam on the one side and need to cool down the steam till you get water again on the other side if you want to get aprox of the energy you or better the uranium brought into the water to let it boil if you only have hot steam on the one and cold steam on the other side you ll loose much more of the energy and so they cool down the steam to get at least the of energy that carnot will give them the cooling towers are for cooling the steam the vapor you ll see is not the steam of the main core circulation because that steam is radioactive the circulation is divided in at least circuits connected about heat exchangers to prevent radioactive pollution of the environment nd ok the main core is hot but even in the modernst hightemperature reactors htr they only run at deg celsius this is still verry far away from uraniums melting point which is somewhere around deg celsius but you ll have lot s of problems with the boiler s steel that s because at this temperature the metal is attacked by steam and will corrode verry fast this is only for bwr s the new he cooled reactors have temperatures up to deg celsius but this is only experimental rd i personaly think that nuclear waste should be as low as ever possible because the dose you get will accumulate about the years today mrem and next year mrem won t be mrem at all it accumulates and even in years you ll still have mrem and i m not interested in glowing in the night and getting children with heads this is my point of view only my christian reisel student of electronic sciences christian reisel goldammerweg w buebingen germany voice fax email
