Nuclear power plant drops output by half: River too hot.

[Sea Skimmer]

Very true, and I suppose I got carried away and wasn't really talking about anything applicable to this plant. Skimmer's co-location of a chemical refinery however, is an eminently practical idea... if the appropriate investors could just be sold on it. It would certainly be a very competitive facility as the heat available would be quite cheap as it would be wasted (and potentially cause these sorts of reductions in energy generation potential) otherwise.

You know I looked around, and right across the reservoir to the south west of the power plant is an existing oil refinery and some kind of chemical plant. However neither is all that big, so it’d probably be more trouble then its worth to lay insulated pipe under the water just for those guys. But if we add another chemical plant… then this idea is much more economical and avoids the need for an eight mile long rail spur to the nuclear site.

Chemical plants are better then oil refineries, because while oil refineries need even greater hoards of process heat they make a lot of it burning off waste. Some of that waste could be otherwise disposed of, but a lot is gases which just have to be burned. Course it might help if more then a handful of the process units inside existing US refineries were remotely modern. I'm sure we could make much cleaner burning refineries if we built them new from the ground up today. Upgrading existing ones, all we've done in over 30 years in the US, means are are still stuck reusing lots of old auxiliary equipment and heat boilers and all the stuff that goes with that.

[Mr. Coffee]

Very true, and I suppose I got carried away and wasn't really talking about anything applicable to this plant. Skimmer's co-location of a chemical refinery however, is an eminently practical idea... if the appropriate investors could just be sold on it. It would certainly be a very competitive facility as the heat available would be quite cheap as it would be wasted (and potentially cause these sorts of reductions in energy generation potential) otherwise.

The problem with building any new large scale industry around that area is downstream you've got Wheeler National Wild Life Refuge and a couple of marinas. In the last decade or so we've had three different petro-chems want to build along thats tretch of the Tennessee because of the convenient access to power, rail, and river barges. Every single time the treehuggers, sport fishermen, hunters, and other assorted groups bitched, whined, and complained at their congress critters enough to get the proposed plants shot down before they could even think about breaking ground.

[His Divine Shadow]

That doesn't seem unreasonable.