Shut down the newspaper and there will not be a need for electricity. This article sounds like a bunch of falsehoods as the steam is put back into the air and falls back as rain in some location so the water is recycled as is ALL water except for the 20 to 40 tons per minute, of new water, that arrives from outer space.
The real question here is not water use but waste heat, and how to make a profit from it.
Most of the energy from fossil and nuclear ends up as waste heat before its end use..
Turn out the lights, the party’s over.
IIRC, Georgia only has one nuclear reactor for electricity production and that is Plant Hatch in Baxley. Whatever Georgia Power doesn't get from it's own generation facilities they probably buy from TVA, Carolina Power and others.
One thing that is never mentioned in these sorts of articles is the fact that the primary uses for Lakes Lanier and Lake Alatoona were for power generation and flood control. Water supply and recreation were secondary and the local state, county and municiple leaders in 1957 fully agreed to those terms with the Corps of Engineers. The powers that be following them allowed unbridled building for over 25 years in and around Atlanta without any concern as to adding additional water reservoir supply to ease the burdon on the existing supply sources.
Although this water shortage was initially caused by the drought, it has been made far worse because the "planners" in the Atlanta Regional Planning Commission sat back and did nothing for 25 years while 5 million people moved into the area. Now, gooberner Perdue acts like divine intervention is the only way to solve the crisis. Funny, I didn't hear any politco's clamoring for new reservoirs to be built 3 years ago when Georgia was receiving record rainfall. Ya get what's ya pays for, gooberner Sonny.....
A heat exchanger is a heat exchanger. A nuke plant, a coal plant, or a natural gas plant operating at the same temperature all require the same cooling.
But the whole premise of the article is BS, as all that water IS returned to the local watershed. The ANSWER to the problem (which the eco-fanatics probably won't let happen), is to build more and larger reservoirs.
It seems to me that simply running the vented steam through X length of pipe with a heat sink will return it immediately to water. What a dumb waste when there is a shortage.
Cooling water used by nuclear power plants goes back into the cooling water source (like lakes). The water isn’t sucked up and vaporized like this article implies.
If utilities were using up (and not able to reuse) this much water, there would have been a lot of screaming a lot sooner.
Go shut down the hydroelectric dams in GA, to keep the water from just flowing downstream. It would have more impact on their water supply.
Instead of putting it back into the Chattahoochee River, why don't they just route it back through Atlanta or Montgomery or Mobile or Tallahassee or whatever?
And if they've got a nuclear plant in Alabama, why can't they make electricity from uranium or something like that, and why do they need all that water?
Maybe they could collect the steam in a gigantic distiller. That would purify the water too.
These policymakers would exhibit a stroke of genius if they would abolish Georgia's absurd "Department of Natural Resources" (wasn't that established by Jimmy Carter? That speaks volumes right there) and use the money saved to discover and establish new sources of power and useful water.
The Chattahoochee River’s western bank is the Alabama/Georgia border. Alabama has three or four nuclear power plants that need cooling. Point, none.
Blah blah blah,,, we need rain!
Build the desal plants.
Build another desal plant.
Put the same restrictions on the protected “mussels” that humans have! Which is ‘No Outside Watering’!
Where are mussels? OUTSIDE! :-)
Seed the clouds!
Take a sponge bath in the washing machine that you filled with dish washing rinse water.
Rinse off the sponge, wash clothes.
Collect rinse water to flush toilets.
In the dark. (hydro-electric too) :-)
Per unit of energy output, yes, a nuclear plant uses more water than a coal plant.
The same idiots don’t mention that without the dams there would be no power and the people would just watch the streams dry up as they carry their buckets back and forth to the muddy creek.
They can’t make it rain.