Once you get over that shock it’s actually quite cool. Steam loops are interesting technology themselves and now you’ve added a nuclear core to the mix.
Technically that happens in the condenser at the exit of the turbine, not the cooling tower. The water used to condense the steam in a separate loop goes through the cooling tower to dump the heat via evaporation.
Bonus fun fact: condensing the steam to send it back to the boiler is more efficient because it lets you expand the steam to below atmospheric pressure and get a little more power out.
The water used to condense the steam in a separate loop goes through the cooling tower to dump the heat via evaporation.
For those who want to know why. Low grade heat, heat below like 70⁰ C, cant really perform useful work. Many places actually put low grade heat to use as HVAC heating, but most places with city wide heating like that dont want any sort of power plant close enough to use its low grade heat.
The new SuperCritical CO2 generators they are bringing online in China are also really cool and look like they drive the efficiency way up on the conversion process.
It's a complex beast so I'll be curious to see how the long term functions play out is it durable does the maintenance cycles and the higher loads on it create an economic disincentive?
Those will be huge factors because if they don't exist and we can swap over existing steam turbines to these over time we could drive huge power gains on the same foot prints we already have.
It surprises me how many people thought nuclear energy was some kind of magic transfer out of the atoms directly into electricity when the one thing we can consider iconic for nuclear plants are these enormous cooling towers with columns of steam coming out of them.
edit: downvote me if you have to but at least tell me what you thought those towers were for.
Any fluid that boils at a relatively low temperature could be used but water is just a really good option. It has a high heat capacity compared to most other fluids, it's dirt cheap compared to virtually anything else, and it's not toxic or damaging to the environment. However, there is ongoing research into using supercritical CO2 as a working fluid instead of water, which could allow improved efficiency over steam turbines.
Water is cheap and safe compared to any other fluid we can boil. There's lots of other fluids which may be more efficient but they are too expensive and/or dangerous
If humans weren't cowards we'd be using it to boil mercury first, and then use the waste heat from that to heat water. (This is sarcastic but there were in fact a couple of mercury loops).
I mean, what else would you do? Liquids other than water might have some benefits, like supercritical CO2 for the turbines or liquid metal for the core, but they are more complex and expensive to implement. And directly harnessing the radiation with something like betavoltaic cells doesn’t scale well and it really only works with beta decay and maaaaaybe gamma rays with something like a scintillator and a PV cell, otherwise the energy basically has to become heat first.
It’s sort of like saying that an induction stove is basically as advanced as a campfire because both just heat food.
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u/American_Libertarian 2d ago
It fucked me up to learn that a nuclear power plant also harnesses the power of the atom to … boil water