Manufactured landscapes: Largest cooling towers

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Largest cooling towers

Largest cooling towers:
Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere. These cooling towers are found at really big dimensions at most power plants. The primary use of large, industrial cooling towers is to remove the heat absorbed in the circulating cooling water systems used in power plants. These things have to be so big to be able to cool the water in a constant rate. If these things are not used you need an enormeous amount of cooling canals which for example can be seen at the Turkey point power plant in Florida.

The world's tallest cooling tower is the 200 meter tall cooling tower of Niederaussem Power Station in Germany. The skyline of the villages nearby are all dominated by this thing:

The cooling towers of the Belleville nuclear power plant in Billeville sur Loire in France are also giants. These cooling towers are 150 meters in diameter at the base, and are about 170 meters high:

These things were climbed by Greenpeace activists in 2007 as you can see in the pictures below. This way you can easily estimate how big these structures are:

Even the open structure at the base is taller then you would think:

Other huge cooling towers can be seen (not yet visible in google maps) at the new expansion of the Neurath Power station in Germany which was recently completed. The 2 cooling towers here are each 170 meters tall:

The cooling towers during construction:

Comments (16)

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les · 832 weeks ago

there's your global warming right there! You see .. it's not cow farts!

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pcgladiator85 19p · 832 weeks ago

Cooling towers are frequently exploited publicly to suggest, wrongly, that they play a part in global warming. But this is not true, the only thing that comes out of these cooling towers is water vapor. So it is climate neutral. But maybe you mean the power plants as a whole? Because they indeed bring 40% of al carbon dioxide pollution in the air worldwide.

And yeah livestock contributes even more to it, it seems. It would be better if people stop with eating meat. That saves a lot of animal cruelty and is good for the environment!

1 reply · active 832 weeks ago

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TheNamesIsJames 36p · 752 weeks ago

For the record:
Nuke plants (generally the ones with cooling towers) do not contribute to co2 pollution.

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les · 832 weeks ago

Yeah, I knew it was water vapor ... I was just being full of sh#t as usual.

I agree with you on the animal eating thing. Imagine if everyone at plant food, not only would it eliminate the problems with the cows but all that plant life would actually HELP the environment.

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pradeep kumar · 760 weeks ago

Top 10 Cooling Tower Manufacturers India (Cooling Towers)– ABR Cooling, one of the leading cooling tower manufacturers in Delhi/NCR offers all type of cooling towers with mechanical & structural Spares.

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pradeep kumar · 756 weeks ago

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pradeep kumar · 748 weeks ago

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pradeep · 747 weeks ago

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rohith · 682 weeks ago

One of the world's tallest cooling towers 200 M is being constructed by BGR ENERGY SYSTEMS LIMITED

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ASHOK · 646 weeks ago

one of the world's tallest cooling tower 200m is being constructed by SANGEETHA ENGINEERING PVT. LTD. THROUGH BGR.

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Cooling towers · 641 weeks ago

Usually cooling towers are gigantic water circulatory systems in parabolic and conical shapes that transfer heat from the process by using thin film technology. Cooling Tower is a heat rejection device, which extracts waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a water stream to a lower temperature.

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