A Very Inconvenient Truth
Copyright 2009, John Cronin
Producing energy without causing negative impacts to water has been a thorny environmental issue for decades. In the 1970s, fish killed by the cooling water intakes of power plants, and heated water from the plants' discharge pipes were icons of American environmental degradation.
The effects of cooling water use by conventional and nuclear plants are not due to the consumption of water but the cycling of water through the plants and its heated return to the originating water body. But the impacts of this very large water flow though a power plant's machinery can be devastating. In a paper for the Harvard Environmental Law Review in 1992, Karl Rabago made a conservative estimate that the number of fish that die in these "once-through" cooling systems nationally is a half-trillion per year, based on government and industry data.
Recent stories on the growing controversy over the proposed use of water by alternative energy developers, reminds us that the laws of physics and thermodynamics don't take a rest just because harnessing the sun is a good idea.
Continue reading "The Water It Takes 2: Alternative Energy" »

















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