Shape of Nuclear Facilities

[AK84]

@panache45

Possibly its resemblance to an incomplete mushroom cloud.

The Simpsons.

[Colophon]

Stock photos of clouds billowing from these towers always seem to get used to illustrate global warming stories. Never mind that the clouds are simply steam, and (if they are nuclear power stations) not contributing to global warming at all, bar a minuscule local heat effect.

[butler1850]

@Machine_Elf

Butler1850 has implied that nukes have a higher cooling requirement than coal-fired plants. This is in reference to the total thermal power that must be dissipated. You can have as high a temperature as you want, but if you aren’t flowing much fluid, the total thermal power will be low.

If a nuke is dumping a lot of thermal power in a cooling tower, then either it is much less efficient than a coal-fired plant, or it is much more powerful than a coal-fired plant (or both). So which is it?

Based on some other answers, Butler1850 implied incorrectly (won’t be the last time either… the bum ). I simply understood it as a capacity issue, but clearly as some nuke plants have them, and others do not this doesn’t tell the whole story. I had understood that nuke plants would generally be higher capacity due to the cost of the build and the inherent efficiency of nuclear power per unit of space compared to conventional plants.

I’m an IT guy with some EE knowledge, but not a power generation expert by any stretch of the imagination.

[commasense]

@Smeghead

I always find it faintly amusing that people have come to associate that shape with all things scary and nuclear, when it’s actually one of the most innocuous parts of the whole process. The cooling towers take hot water and turn it into cooler water.

@Machine_Elf

I don’t know why it’s become associated with nukes in the popular consciousness, but it has.

This is why(in the U.S., at least.) The first and most memorable nuclear power incident for most people older than about 40 was the partial meltdown at the Three-Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in March 1979. Americans were glued to their TV sets (no Internet back then, kiddies) which had nearly constant images of TMI’s cooling towers looming over the town. No one, including news crews, could get close to the site, so the towers were the only thing available to take pictures of. Their size and shape became synonymous with nuclear disaster, even though, as has been noted, they are not inherently connected with nuclear power.

In a really strange coincidence, The China Syndrome opened less than two weeks before the accident, and in one scene, Jack Lemon, playing a nuclear power plant operator, tells reporters Michael Douglas and Jane Fonda that if a plant had a meltdown, it would leave “an area the size of Pennsylvania” uninhabitable for thousands of years. I saw the movie in a theater the week after the accident, and the line caused gasps in the audience.

[LawMonkey]

Since the question’s been answered (and sort of hijacked) already: When this thread was first posted, I fsr read the topic as “Shape of Nuclear Families”. And I read the OP, and was really confused–how could a family have an hourglass shape? I clicked on the link, expecting, maybe, to see an Olan Mills-style family photo with the mom, dad, kids and dog arranged in an hourglass, maybe a little bit fatter on the bottom (dad’s been putting on a few pounds lately), and instead I get a picture of a nuclear power plant! My thought at this point is that the OP is using the cooling towers as an example of the configuration of nuclear families, and I was actually in the process of writing a reply to ask for an actual picture of the sort I’d assumed she was referring to before :smack: I finally got it.

That is all. Back to your regularly scheduled discussion of power plant technologies.