Europe Braces for Serious Crop Losses and Blackouts (heat and drought affects nuclear cooling water)

http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2006/update56

One of the problems then was the nukes had to be idled, lacking water to cool them, and brown-outs prevented people from using their air conditioning. What a terrible way to go...

20 GigaLiters of water stored in dams, about 5 billion gallons.

You know what's worse: Coal uses nearly as much water as a nuclear power plant many times its size, plus they push about 15% of their heat right out the smokestack (with all the Mercury, Lead, Cadmium, Cobalt, Uranium and Thorium that happens to spew out the smokestack with it).
I did the math: that's 109.5 Billion Gallons a Year for that one tiny little 500 MWe coal power plant -- since Americans average water consumption is 100 gallons per day, that single half-size coal plant uses as much water as 3 million Americans. So if the number of total coal plants in America is over 100 then that is more water than all American homes use combined.

But, unfortunately for us, Sourcewatch says there are 600 coal power plants in the US alone! Ruh-Roh!! (http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html)

They scale back or idle the plant. Happened last time, so it's historical record, not conjecture.

In the US this more often happens due to water temp, where we limit how much waste heat they can dump into the river, for fish/other wildlife.

If Hydroelectic is hit by drought AND the nuclear plants scale back, France is going to be a shitty place to live for a while.

Sure got zero mention in your post.

If those coal plants were unable to spew out 15% of their heat out the smokestack then the water usage of a 500MWe coal plant would equal that of a 1GWe Nuclear power plant twice its size.

Water consumption by coal plants isn't even on my radar of reasons to hate coal. I'll look into it.

seriously the threadjacking is getting tiresome, seems like every thread goes this "change the subject" from nuke to coal route.

As to the annoying posters who bring out truth when other posters are content to lie or blindly accept talking points as fact, there is nothing I can do to help you prefer truth to lies. Those are decisions you alone can make.

It identified coal and nuclear plants as the largest users of water in the world IIRC.

I've looked for the post, but haven't found it yet. The terms are a bit fuzzy but the article's statement related to power plants (other uses were included) was that their withdrawals (to change to a more accurate term) made them the largest users in the world. The amount they removed from the available water supply to other uses was far less, along the lines you posted.

The point IIRC was that there existed the requirement for maintaining the availability of such a large amount for power plant use; which of course has significant impact on public policy planning in many areas.

Yes, the water is mostly returned, but if it is not there in the first place thermoelectric plants (nuke, coal, gas, etc) can't run.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x295217

My thread title:
Thermoelectric power accounted for an estimated 49 percent of US water withdrawals in 2005

Article:
Energy Efficiency Absorbs Water
By Elisa Wood
May 13, 2011

Efforts have been underway for decades to conserve both energy and water, but never in concert. This is unfortunate because energy uses a lot of water and water uses a lot of energy.

Two leading conservation organizations have set out to bring the efforts together. This week, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Alliance for Water Efficiency published a white paper that describes the co-dependence of water and energy resources, and outlines strategies to use both more efficiently.

The paper brings to light some interesting – and rarely discussed – ways each resource heightens use of the other.
-Sourcing, moving, treating, heating, collecting, re-treating, and disposing of water consumes 19 percent of California’s electricity, 30 percent of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel annually, according to a 2005 California Energy Commission report.
-The River Network in 2009 found that energy use for water services accounts for 13 percent of US electricity consumption, at least 520 million megawatt-hours annually.
-Thermoelectric power accounted for an estimated 49 percent of US water withdrawals and 53 percent of fresh surface-water withdrawals in 2005.

ACEEE and AWE hope to...

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/05/energy-efficiency-absorbs-water?cmpid=WNL-Wednesday-May18-2011


This is good information, it shows an area where there is almost certainly a lot of room for improvement in both areas of infrastructure. The white paper the article is based on is available at the link.

Power plants may be very large individual users of water, but in in the big picture they're insignificant. Most power plant interruptions due to low water levels are temporary, with purely local effects. The effects of failed harvests can be felt for a full crop year, and can have global effects.

Indian farmers pump 250 cubic kilometers of water a year, of which only 150 is replaced by rainfall. The net loss of 100 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year from this one nation is about twice the impact of all the world's thermal power plants. The world's thermal plants probably use between 250 and 500 cubic kilometers of water in total, only a small fraction of which (10% to 20%) is consumed by evaporation. The world loses perhaps 50 cubic kilometers per year to evaporation from all its thermal power plants - half what India alone loses to agriculture.

I've noticed it is a rule you're very selective about applying.

The original post talked about water's impact on both energy and food. I feel that water's impact on food production is more significant for humanity in general than water's impact on energy production. My post above was one way to describe my priorities. YMMV.

Farming uses right around 70% of all fresh water, its runoff is filled with chemical pesticides, herbicides, and disease causing organisms and therefore should rightfully be considered toxic waste (but Big AG gets to dump in right back in your rivers and lakes).

hey - wait a minute!

:D

When correcting for that: Solar PV; Wind Turbines; and Concentrating Solar Thermal use very little water.

Technically, Solar PV and Concentrating Solar need to use water to wash off the panels/reflectors periodically but that's a drop in the bucket compared to fossil power plants.

Dry cooling is an improvement for solar thermal plants, is also in use in some nuclear power plants:

http://www.greentechmedia.com/green-light/post/solar-millennium-likes-dry-cooling-after-all/
http://solar.coolerplanet.com/News/11020902-dry-cooling-for-consentrated-solar-power-a-must-in-desert-climates.aspx
http://www.solarthermalmagazine.com/2010/07/12/dry-cooling-project-for-genesis-solar-solar-thermal-energy-plant-in-california/
http://social.csptoday.com/industry-insight/dry-cooling-slaking-thirst-concentrated-solar-power
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/cooling_power_plants_inf121.html

PS, the articles refer to concentrating solar thermal power plants as "concentrated solar power."