Machete Landing

The people who want nuclear energy really don’t understand we don’t have time for a “temporary power source” we need to go green now the world is dying

Nuclear power IS the greenest source we have. Solar and Wind rely on mining huge quantities of lithium, which is a non-renewable source. Your idea of renewable energy is based purely on the end product, not on all the steps we need to take to make the damn thing in the first place.

Please send asks about why nuclear is the safest, cleanest, and most sustainable energy source available today.

>tfw that’s steam

Those are cooling towers. Water leaving the generators at a power plant is still pretty hot, and it would majorly decrease the efficiency of the plant to send it back to the reactor/boiler/what have you. So they have to cool it down before it can be sent back through the system.

A lot of power plants take care of this by being situated near a source of water - a river, a lake, a bay. They take in cool water from the source and run it through a heat exchanger to cool the water already in the system, and then dump the now-warm cooling water back out into the source.

However, some power plants don’t have that option. Nuclear plants, for example, are frequently built away from natural bodies of water to prevent a release of radiation from becoming an ecological catastrophe. So instead they use cooling towers.

These towers use air instead of water to bring things back to a reasonable temperature. Their shape is intended to take in cool air at the bottom and accelerate it upwards as it heats, producing a constant draft. Inside, the water is sprayed over a special mesh or sponge-like structure designed to keep the draft in contact with the water as long as possible, thus increasing the amount of heat transferred. A small amount of the water also boils away, taking more heat with it and causing the plume of condensation you see rising above the tower.

Another point about nuclear plants specifically: the cooling water being run through those towers is kept radiologically isolated from the water that runs through the core. So the water that’s evaporating is only about as radioactive as wherever it was sourced from. No radiation escapes during normal operation.

So yeah. Next time someone shows you a picture like this and whines about how we’re polluting, now you can kindly point out that it’s merely steam rising from those stacks and they need to take their bullshit elsewhere.