That essentially is what they're doing. But it still has to go through the civilian approval process.
www.urenco.com
What damage do you imagine cooling water discharge will do to our rivers?
Raise the temperature, potentially upsetting the ecological balance. France has had to reduce the output of some nuclear stations at times as mitigation.
they are too warm for adequate oxygen levels already, hot water is one of the worst pollutants for driving the last remaining dissolved oxygen off, killing the shrimps and caddis-fly things and the baby fish ...
Could the heat be extracted from the hot water and put to some use. Such as warming nearby buildings
Why are they too warm already?
There are lots of disused sites for old coal fired power stations. Perhaps the cooling towers might not be able to be reused, but they’d seem like good candidates.
No. Nuclear submarines use sea water to cool the steam generated by the reactor.
See the diagram on https://www.navsup.navy.mil/Viper-Home/NNPO/ which also has an explanation of the various loops involved.
Yes and that diagram clearly shows seawater being used to condense the steam back into water in the secondary loop like I said.
which I read as saying the secondary circuit is also a closed loop but can be ‘topped up’ with desalinated sea water.
sewage works outfalls (see https://www.aquatechtrade.com/news/wastewater/heat-from-sewage,) rain off the sun-warmed ever-bigger areas of roofs and tarmac all around the country, plain direct solar gain into streams which are now just trickles...
A non-issue. For one thing SMRs are small, meaning that the heat output is correspondingly small. And there's no reason why they can't use a mix of once through and recirculating cooling to reduce the temperature of the water being returned to the enviroment.
I thought all heat engines relied on a gradient, and turbines (especially) must have a condensor at the back end... if you recirculate the coolant it will rapidly stop doing that job because it is too warm.
99.9% of nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers are PWR reactors. They use the ocean as their cooling towers. The Primary and Secondary loops are closed.
That's why you have a cooling tower or large reservoir of water to allow it to cool naturally. As opposed to pulling in water from the river/ocean and returning it after one pass through the system.
and how many "large reservoirs of water" are lying round the country in populated areas waiting to receive the heat input from these reactors? We can't even build the one for desperately-needed water supply! Water isn't unlimited for feeding once-through cooling towers either.
Not in my backyard
The water doesn't go once through a cooling tower that is the whole point, the heat is dissipated into the air not the water. For a typical 750MW power station you only need 3,600 cubic metres of water (5%) from the river per hour to replace the water evaporating in the cooling tower compared to the 70,000 odd cubic metres circulating around the cooling circuit. If it was once through you would need 100,000 cubic metres 27 times more water being extracted and then dumped back in the river.
The problem with building reservoirs for potable water isn't the reservoir - digging big holes in the ground is a solved problem. The issue is that it's an open system: you have to have a supply of water to go into it, and a way to get the water out of it and to the people that need it.
Global warming isn't about the heat we put into the system. Global energy usage is on the order of 650EJ. Let's assume that all of that was dumped into the atmosphere as heat (it's not).
Why not, specifically?
which is actually 86 Tonnes per day (for each reactor.) It will be yet more abstraction and there is no evidence that our rivers can supply it.
So then don't take it from rivers. This really is a non-issue.
Yes there is evidence that rivers can supply it, the decades they supplied all the now closed coal\oil fired stations.
There is a VERY large reservoir of water surrounding the country which can be used as well.
