3 ms·
>it was a little dishonest of you to link to the one photo with cooling towers It's the first picture on the page "Fossil fuel power station", which is the red
by mrob 7y ago
>it was a little dishonest of you to link to the one photo with cooling towers
It's the first picture on the page "Fossil fuel power station", which is the redirect for "coal power plant".
The second photograph is Currant Creek Power Plant, which is a relatively modern (2005) gas-fired plant, which does indeed use air cooling.
The third photograph is the decommissioned coal-fired Carbon Power Plant. Although not clear from the photo, this uses water cooling. The cooling towers are visible here:
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/705396191/New-mercury-standards-could-speed-up-closure-of-Utah-power-plant.html https://www.deseretnews.com/article/705396191/New-mercury-st...
The fourth photograph is the decommissioned coal-fired Mohave Power Station. This also uses water cooling, although its cooling towers are shorter and wider than the classic hyperboloid design.
Fifth is the active Taichung Power Plant, coal-fired, also water cooled according to its Wikipedia page.
100% of the photographs of coal power plants on the page reached by searching Wikipedia for "coal power plant" show water-cooled plants. How is my example dishonest?
- ars 7y agoI see the problem. We are confusing cooling towers with river water cooling, also called "once-through cooling". Cooling towers are specifically when you don't use river water for cooling. Your first photo has a large lake in front of it, so clearly they will use that, but the rest don't, they only have the towers. Nuclear plants almost always use once-through cooling or cooling ponds, but coal plants typically don't, and are unaffected by the heat limits (which are environmental for fish, not technical for power generation). Edit: Notice how in the diagram you linked there is a river for cooling, but there is no tower? Coal plants will have one or the other, but nuclear uses both, and that's because most of the waste heat from coal goes up the chimney.
- mrob 7y agoI am not confusing anything. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532446 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532446 you said "Coal plants are air cooled, not water cooled". I simply posted a counterexample. The coal plant is water cooled, and all the other coal plants pictured in the Wikipedia article are also water cooled. You still haven't justified your accusation of this being "dishonest". >but nuclear uses both People have already posted multiple examples of nuclear plants that use only one, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20532670