I see all these pictures where the steam seemingly just escapes into the atmosphere.
Are there any designs where the cooling steam condenses and then pools and falls back down as liquid to turn even more turbines via gravity like hydroelectrics dams and then returns to the source pool to be reheated by the nuclear materials?
That’s not how modern power plants work. It’s not an open loop to the cooling tower, instead you have a closed loop that gets superheated under high pressure and runs the turbines, but needs to get cooled down before the loop can start over. You cool it down by running the pipes through other water, which evaporated in a cooling tower. The evaporated water takes the heat out of the system, if you returned it to the loop, the system would overheat
I see all these pictures where the steam seemingly just escapes into the atmosphere.
Are there any designs where the cooling steam condenses and then pools and falls back down as liquid to turn even more turbines via gravity like hydroelectrics dams and then returns to the source pool to be reheated by the nuclear materials?
Ooooo That’s a neat concept
That’s not how modern power plants work. It’s not an open loop to the cooling tower, instead you have a closed loop that gets superheated under high pressure and runs the turbines, but needs to get cooled down before the loop can start over. You cool it down by running the pipes through other water, which evaporated in a cooling tower. The evaporated water takes the heat out of the system, if you returned it to the loop, the system would overheat