When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in Poor Richard’s Almanac (1746). Power plant owners are becoming very familiar with that economic lesson. The…
Water
Technical, legal, and regulatory articles on water-related topics for power plants: cooling, wastewater, intake, chemistry, purge water, and once-through systems
Even utilities that are very diligent about treating and monitoring their boiler water, demineralized water makeup, and cooling water may know little about treating one of the most critical water…
ASSET MANAGEMENT Replace pumps, cut repair bills The original design of Progress Energy's Lee Plant in Goldsboro, N.C., enlisted nine vertical sump pumps within the plant yard as drain pumps. In…
The typical multi-plant utility spends millions of dollars a year on bleach, bromide, and other biocides to keep heat-exchange surfaces clean and to control biofouling in cooling systems. Proper use…
Water hammer—or hydraulic shock —is an apt description of the sudden impact of a mass of fast-moving water on a piping component such as a valve or an elbow. It…
Two hundred years after Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, "Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink" in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," power plants in many regions of the…
Since the early 1970s, water-cooled power plants have installed fish protection technologies largely on a case-by-case basis with limited guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 2004, the…
Inspection and monitoring of underwater structures has always been a challenge for power plants with submerged cooling system structures, mainly due to those structures' inherent inaccessibility. Commercial divers and remotely…
Organic compounds pioneered boiler water chemical treatment when lignosulfonates derived from oak bark were used to minimize calcium carbonate scaling. Today's organic boiler treatment methods include the addition of neutralizing…
Desalination, Italian style Reverse osmosis (RO) technology has been available for all aspects of water treatment for the past 40 years. The use of RO desalination systems grew rapidly following…