The NEI News Notes regularly is asked to discuss the issue of water use and nuclear power plants because anti-nuclear activists can not help but manipulate or obscure the facts when it comes to explaining how much water is used to cool an operating reactor. The latest example comes from the Huffington Post where Kyle Rabin of the Grace Communications Foundation writes that thermoelectric power plants account for 45 per cent of water withdrawals in the U.S.
The discussion of electricity generation water use contains some misleading statements that mask the truth. Power plant water use consists of consumption, when water is evaporated and thus lost, and withdrawal, where water is removed from a water body but can be returned, totally or partially. The outdated cooling technology often cited is a once-through cooling system, which cools by the coldness of the withdrawn water and returns 99 percent of that water back to the water body. The so-called up-to-date cooling system, cooling towers, cools by evaporation and thus consumes twice as much water as the once-through cooling system.
It is not surprising, then, that the Electric Power Research Institute, in a 2002 study, found that 98 percent of water withdrawn by the electric power sector in total is returned to the source water bodies.This is just the sort of sleight of hand that anti-nukes regularly fall back on when presenting their arguments to a general audience. Please keep it in mind the next time you see a claim like Rabin.
Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 1995, the last USGS study to consider water consumption nationwide -
1. Electric power sector water consumption represents only 3.3 per cent of the national water consumption.
2. Residential water consumption, at 6.7 per cent, is more than twice power sector consumption.
3. Agricultural water consumption is 81.3 per cent, 17 per cent of which is water lost during conveyance that never reaches the crops it is intended to irrigate.
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