undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdoublepg231y ago0 comments

That’s most places humans live isn’t it?

0 comments

If you ever done a tour on a nuclear facility you'd hear about how careful they need to be managing water temperatures in their discharge pools, you don't want a nuke frying off all wildlife on the rivers and/or lakes nearby. You don't want to create massive ponds of still water for cooling, and you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

This limits a lot nuclear facilities placement.

TobTobXX1y ago

Nuclear power plants only really have an effect on the water temperature if they do not have a cooling tower. This makes the plant considerably cheaper, but, as you mentioned, damages the ecosystem.

Only in rare cases, such as during revisions or emergencies, they might be unable to cool the condenser using the tower-coolant-loop. Then they might have to warm up the water temporarily.

> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres (in case something goes wrong and the discharge needs to happen).

There is no such failure case that a "discharge needs to happen" for the irradiated water. There is a comparatively tiny amount of deionized and supercleaned water in the reactor that is always cycled around. Even if such a case were to occur (how??), the amount of water would be easy to handle/store.

sgarland1y ago

I live a few miles from a nuclear plant. I am far more concerned about the coal plants that are also nearby.

chickenbig1y ago

> you definitely don't want to have a nuke potentially discharging contaminated water near population centres

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly...

And Brits are not exactly leaping into action about raw sewage discharges into rivers.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse