POWER November 2012 - 55

WATER & POWER
■ Human health
■ Terrestrial resources
■ Water resources
■ Solid waste
■ Public safety and security
■ Quality of life
■ Greenhouse gases
■ Permitting issues
The overall significance of environmental
impacts varies on a site-specific basis. Facilities
located in urban and suburban areas tend
to have more social impacts due to exposure to
noise, drift, fogging, and visible vapor plumes;
rural facilities tend to have greater impacts on
agriculture and wildlife, depending on proximity
to farmland, state parks, wetlands, or
other wildlife habitat. Table 3 provides a summary
of some of the quantified impacts.
Even with drift elimination, an estimated
29,000 tons/year of particulate matter (PM2.5
and PM10) would be generated. However, no
studies on the potential human health impacts
of cooling tower particulate matter have been
conducted, and the impact likely varies depending
on the composition of solids in the
cooling water.
It was estimated that about 25,000 metric
tons/year of biocides would be required to mainTable
3. Some quantified impacts of a closed-cycle cooling retrofit requirement.
Source: EPRI
Impact type
PM (tpy)
Chlorine use (mt/yr)
Evaporative water loss (billion gal/yr)
Debris removal (tpy)
CO2 (tpy); 6-month nuclear unit outage
Freshwater
facilities Great Lakes
2,000
18,000
372
328
74
Notes: tpy = tons per year, mt/yr = metric tons/year.
tain cooling tower operations and that approximately
500 billion gallons/year of freshwater
would be lost to evaporation, roughly double the
loss from once-through cooling. This volume of
freshwater is sufficient to meet the potable water
needs of the state of Illinois.
The 39 once-through-cooled, baseloaded
nuclear facilities do not emit carbon dioxide
(CO2
). However, it would take an estimated
six months on average to retrofit these facilities
with closed-cycle cooling and likely
would require replacement power generation
from fossil facilities, resulting in an estimated
163 tons of CO2
emissions.
The total " willingness to pay " to avoid the
social and environmental impacts resulting
from closed-cycle cooling retrofits was estimated
to be $33 million nationally-in other
words, what ratepayers would be willing
to pay to maintain the status quo. What the
study did not consider was the economic impact
to ratepayers for the cost of closed-cycle
cooling retrofits. The social and environmental
costs break down as follows:
■ $13,000,000 for CO2
emissions, estimated
from voluntary carbon credit prices
■ $16,000,000 for noise, estimated from
noise impact studies on housing prices
■ $2,400,000 for aesthetic impact, estimated
from studies of viewshed impact on housing
prices
■ $970,000 for debris removal, estimated
from water cleanup event costs.
800
7,000
128
241
22
Oceans, estuaries
and tidal rivers
27,100
NA
NA
281
67
Total
29,800
25,000
500
861
163
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