Cooling pond

A cooling pond, depending on the type and size also known as cooling water, cooling or Kühlsee, reservoir, basin or weiher, is a standing water, is cooled again in the heated cooling water from thermal power plants and thermal industrial equipment. The waste heat is in this case through convection and evaporation at the water surface to the surrounding atmosphere.

Use

The advantage over the cooling tower is primarily in far less water loss through clouds of steam that the chemical composition of the cooling water hardly changed in lower pressure loss and thus lower energy consumption for pumping the cooling water and in the fact. Therefore, cooling ponds are used as the last stage of wastewater treatment plants.

The nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe use the there many hundreds of acres of typically 2 m deep cooling ponds still for a very different reason: In a nuclear accident there store several million cubic meters of water that can be used for cooling a runaway nuclear fission process without this cooling water should be taken from a watercourse. A possible radioactive contamination of the cooling water could be to restrict the area of ​​the cooling pond and the immediate area, but has long-term groundwater problems result.

Cooling ponds usually act as fire water pond and sometimes as fire water retention basins.

Ecological consequences

In cooling ponds are mostly to artificial waters, because the heat input leads to a significant warming of the water, resulting in a natural water to a massive change in the ecosystem. Since this contradicts the water protection, the use of natural standing water for cooling purposes in most countries is not permitted; only running water may be used, but the allowable warming is limited in the permit.

On the other hand, long-term form in cooling ponds that are created close to nature, often valuable secondary biotopes with a unique, adapted to the elevated temperature or bound fauna and flora.