A version of this article was originally published in 2014.
While on a trip to do some bird watching, I saw two cooling towers off in the distance shrouded in mist. I realized that they belonged to the unfinished Satsop nuclear power station and decided to have a closer look. I took the above photo of one of the towers. Click here with your left mouse button to see a higher resolution image and then left click once again on that image to see it at an even higher resolution. Note the stairs zigzagging along the side to get a sense of scale.
Many people associate this type of large cooling tower with nuclear power plants, I’m guessing, because they make dramatic copy. But this type of cooling tower can, in theory, be used with any thermal power plant regardless of energy source: solar, coal, biomass, natural gas, oil etc. From the Wikipedia article on cooling towers:
Cooling Towers
While on a trip to do some bird watching, I saw two cooling towers off in the distance shrouded in mist. I realized that they belonged to the unfinished Satsop nuclear power station and decided to have a closer look. I took the above photo of one of the towers. Click here with your left mouse button to see a higher resolution image and then left click once again on that image to see it at an even higher resolution. Note the stairs zigzagging along the side to get a sense of scale.
Many people associate this type of large cooling tower with nuclear power plants, I’m guessing, because they make dramatic copy. But this type of cooling tower can, in theory, be used with any thermal power plant regardless of energy source: solar, coal, biomass, natural gas, oil etc. From the Wikipedia article on cooling towers:
"These designs are popularly associated with nuclear power plants. However, this association is misleading, as the same kind of cooling towers are often used at large coal-fired power plants as well."
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| Six cooling towers at the Didcot Power Station (Source: Wikipedia Commons) |
The Didcot power station pictured above burns a combination of coal, natural gas, and oil. Note the use of six hyperboloid cooling towers. Cooling towers are used to condense the steam exiting the steam turbines back into liquid water to be converted into steam again and sent back through the turbines. This greatly reduces the amount of water lost as steam.
A 2015 article titled "Shh! Secrets of the Cooling Towers" in the All Things Nuclear antinuclear energy blog (which deliberately conflates nuclear energy with nuclear power) of the Union of Concerned
It is odd that cooling towers that are widely used at all types of power plants and that have no safety function have become iconic nuclear plant symbols.
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| Antinuclear UCS Publications Featuring Cooling Towers on Covers |
Yes, odd indeed. It would appear that the "experts" at the UCS writing these antinuclear articles (subsequently converting them into official looking PDFs) were unaware that cooling towers are not unique to nuclear power stations.
How do they work? Essentially the rising steam
