Why Are Cooling Towers Shaped Like That?

[@PracticalEngineeringChannel]

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[@associatedblacksheepandmisfits]

Was Grady on the building an easter egg ?😊

[@marblemunkey]

Question, assuming that I am already subscribed to Nebula (I am), as a creator does it help you more to watch you videos on TY or nebula?

[@Vindortek]

I just saw you in Bloomington IL! Love the videos man and thanks for making the event free to the public!

[@michaelmayhem350]

Watched your video on nebula but came here to say when you said "I'm going to build one in my garage" I was all excited to get to see you build a miniature thermonuclear reactor in your garage and immediately had flash backs of the story of David Hahn. But your video didn't play out like that at all 😂🤣😂🤣

[@Lewis-kf2pj]

People say turbIne because there’s an I there, you bristol.

[@alicee2140]

Grady: "I'm going to build one in my garage!" Grady's wife: "Just the cooling tower, right?" Grady: 🙂

[@Hybris51129]

Later on... Grady: "Oh no. They found me. I don't know how, but they found me." Grady's wife: "Who are you talking about?" Grady: "The Libyans! They got me the Uranium for the reactor!" Grady's wife: "You told me you were just building a "cooling tower"!"

[@Rick1984FL]

Wait a minute Grady Are you telling me you built a power station… IN OUR GARAGE?

[@dieselhead24]

@@Hybris51129 Plutonium not uranium! C'mon Marty!

[@Hybris51129]

@@dieselhead24 I don't think Grady would be building a bomb though. The man does have some limits.

[@anotheruser9876]

David Hahn flashbacks.

[@RealityCheck6969]

We used to bathe in the "river" coming from the cooling towers when I was a child. :))) It was hot water. It was especially nice on winters.

[@dianapennepacker6854]

Yeah so much fun touching butts with dorks. Miss those days.

[@PhilsJunkDrawer]

Lake Anna in Virginia was built specifically for this purpose. Well, cooling a nuclear plant, not bathing. But it’s crazy warm, and lovely to swim/boat in.

[@veryboringname.]

I was already impressed by the models you build in your garage, but that hospital you built at 12:08 just to show us how cooling towers are used in HVAC really takes the cake!

[@michaelbrinks8089]

I bet he can explain how a fan blade moves air. Sound so complicated, that you can't understand it. Even though you already know how a fan blade moves air.

[@ZonamaPrime]

It wasn't just the model hospital, but the whole diorama was breathtaking. Did you see the mini-highway off in the distance, it looked so good.

[@WilhelmvonFahrvergnugen]

Grady, saw what you did there...

[@frostilver]

Holy! It has "Grady" written on the top!

[@bryan9931]

Its Not Cake.

[@peeberthreeber]

in my break from overconsumption of content, this is one of the few spare channels i consider worth watching. thank you for your stuff man

[@Lurkzz]

Well said!

[@manitoba-op4jx]

this channel is the kind of quality content you'd find on tv when i was a kid, and quite possibly even better.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

7:00 I'm an HVAC professional and I love seeing the psychrometric chart in a KZbin video! I design dehumidification systems for suspension bridge cables.

[@AxDhan]

just use paper towels

[@HomersIlliad]

That sounds like a pretty cool job.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

@@AxDhan You joke, but that's effectively how desiccant dehumidifiers work. They soak up the humidity from the air, then you blast them with heat to dry them back out so that you can reuse them. Then you pack them in a wheel and rotate it through an airstream that you want to dry, and a separate airstream that dries them back out.

[@stupid1557]

I had no idea dehumidification of suspension cables was a thing.

[@AlexWaardenburg]

@@stupid1557 it wasn't until they figured out packing the cables with lead paste was a no-no. There's just no better way to keep cables from corroding. The cables are made up of a ton of tiny wires, and there ends up being a lot of space between the wires in the cable for rain water to collect. But, if you seal the cable best you can and push dry air into the cable you can dry out the cable and prevent it from rusting.

[@kappagrapes]

"I know that's a little bit in the weeds" listen man, I will follow you into any patch of weeds you care to name. enthusiastic nerdy people telling me all about the stuff they love to study is the best thing on youtube.

[@strangereyes9594]

Just to point it out, powerplants dont need to cool the water itself. They need to turn steam back into water, which needs a specific amount of energy like it did when it transitioned from water to vapor. Every joule more of cooling the water is energy lost you would have retained to turn it into electricity. The engineering is about to cool it exactly the right amount so it changes phases and not a joule more since no one wants to throw money out the chimney. Just in case it wasn't clear from the video.

[@tz8785]

You maybe don't have to, but you still very much want to. The lower you can get your condenser temperature, the lower the condenser pressure is and a lower condenser pressure increases efficiency.

[@gerrywalsh5766]

Just like in refrigeration... the saturation point. Anything more and you're dealing with subcooling or superheat.

[@MatthijsvanDuin]

he explained it just fine in the video

[@jollygiant]

A nice explanation of minimising sub-cooling 👍

[@domib2896]

I wouldn't mind them throwing money out of the chimney. I would travel to my nearest power plant just to watch that.

[@Andrew_Gregg]

As an operations supervisor at a thermal power plant this is awesome and will be referenced when training new employees and refreshing the senior operations employees. Thank you!

[@2Burgers_1Pizza]

In my region, this hot water is pumped through the city in winter for heating.

[@florahibernica]

Should happen everywhere, this is clever but still a terrible waste. I've seen distilleries using pipes to heat greenhouses, much smaller scale.

[@robertschnobert9090]

We should also replace cars with public transportation and walkable cities. Unfortunately that sounds like communism, so it's impossible. Being incredibly wasteful is better for the economy. Numbers have to go up hahaha 🌈 ​@@florahibernica

[@Alphacuremom55]

@@robertschnobert9090 Move to Europe then you clown

[@CATel_]

​@robertschnobert9090 How does not needing to look at the same terrain for 6 hours every time you want to visit your parents communism? In Europe a 3 hour dive can send you to a different country easily! Depending on your "luck" I'm sure it could lead you through at least 3, probably even 4 countries

[@eleycki]

@@robertschnobert9090not everyone lives in cities mate.

[@ETG168]

9:14 Latent heat: Mentioned Technology: Connected

[@vinnysworkshop]

Brilliant.

[@somedudesstuff801]

He should have bought 2 of them.

[@1224chrisng]

Brought to you by Menards! The Midwestern favourite

[@manitoba-op4jx]

@@somedudesstuff801 built!

[@empmachine]

Hands down my FAVOURITE THING about this channel is the models. They make it all sooooo real!

[@crackasaurus_rox9740]

I had to design one of these once. As far as engineering hours go, it was the most expensive piece of equipment in the plant.

[@andrewn7365]

I wouldn't have guessed that. What sort of problems do you need to solve when designing one and what information do you need? What makes it so particularly time consuming? In my ignorance, it'd seem like a few equations would spit out an optimal solution given the volume of water to cool, maximun footprint, and maybe the climate at the location.

[@picobyte]

PracticalEngineeringChannel Funfact, most of the white smoke from the coal/gas plant chimneys next to those cooling towers is also just water vapour. Burning natural gas produces lots of water and some invisible CO2. Coal plants produce lots of CO2 other stuff(depending on the sort of coal used) and less water. Proper filtering flue gasses has a step where water is used for cleaning those fumes and thus also producing white 'smoke'. You should do a video on how clean coal plants produce gypsum. It's very interesting.

[@MichaelSteeves]

13:37 CANDU plant! All of the plants in Canada use lake or ocean cooling rather than cooling towers, but cool to see a reactor that is so familiar to me.

[@theotheroneb1548]

I used to work at opg and now I'm at Bruce!!! Neat to hear someone working in the same group also watching :)

[@kevinyancey958]

In-land power plants will create their own ponds to cool the power plant. It's best to do this, than to heat a lake with fish in it.

[@theotheroneb1548]

@kevinyancey958 not if you have the largest lakes in the world. You only need to raise local temperatures by a few degrees and the fishing is great near the outlet due to the slightly warmer water keeping the big fish around.

[@kevinyancey958]

You can see the same effect in your shower, if you have a curtain. If you take a hot shower and have a fine mist sprayer, you see the curtain get pulled into the shower. That's all because the air current created by the warm, most air rising and the cooler, drier air being pulled in to replace the air that rose. Even with hot water, you can create currents. Some old hot water heating systems didn't use a pump. Instead, the hot water would rise and draw the cooler water into the boiler, to be heated. It took longer to heat up the whole system this way, but worked nevertheless.

[@JohanHultin]

All plants here in Sweden are cooled by seawater, and obviously built on the coast. I always thought these were super foreign as a kid, and turns out that I was pretty much right. Besides stuff like hydro and wind, I've never seen another type of powerstation in sweden, so I can't say for sure there are none but I can say I have never seen one.

[@jle2500]

"It's basically a cloud machine" I jokingly told my son when he was two the small power plant we drive past was Cloud Factory. He's 6 now he knows its a power plant but he still calls it the cloud factory.

[@mqb3gofjzkko7nzx38]

Now I want to see a cooling tower cooled gaming pc.

[@Corang98]

I think the channel called major hardware did this awhile back

[@Shredxcam22]

data centers. Where i work we use a cooling tower to chill water for a water chilled A/C which cools a computer room. Thus cooling tower cooled computers

[@Hybris51129]

I think over a decade ago LTT did a video on doing just that. Even before then I know in the early 2000's some guys were playing around with this system. Generally speaking it did work but it made the room very humid and eventually would stop working without another system in place to take out all the humidity and cool the room back down.

[@beehard44]

For a while, bong coolers were a thing lol. They're not shaped like nuclear plant towers, but they cool down water cooled PCs with a tall evaporative tower that showers water down and blows air up

[@fahim_19]

Good idea 😂

[@maverickhusky4165]

16:00 This is facinating, I live in Las Vegas and I always wondered why evaporative cooling like this wasn't super common for things here.

[@fitshamer]

I love that you used a video of Grady Hospital. The reference to your self did not go unnoticed! A+.

[@rupertaitken3114]

I like the way you got Grady into it 12:09 - smart filming!!! 😎

[@KevinT3141]

I was going to say "12:08, I see what you did there" but you beat me to it.

[@matthewgough9533]

Nuclear worker here - this was tremendously insightful. I'll be at Comanche Peak next spring and it's cool to go in knowing all this.

[@thedallastexan]

Welcome to Texas!!

[@pennernderpenner]

The steam is also not released into the atmosphere because the output pressure of the turbine is often way below atmospheric pressure to maximise efficiency.

[@andriypredmyrskyy7791]

Grady, you've GOT to introduce the axes of a graph before you start talking about it, and skipping over "the bottom axis is temperature (dry bulb) and the side axis is absolute humidity, that is the grammes of water in each kilogram of air" makes it REALLY hard for people not to gloss over the chart. IT'S GOT RELATIVE HUMIDITY AT THE TOP! IT CUTS OFF WITH INCREASING HUMIDITY! This is a complicated graph and it deserves the time to be understood :p

[@myself248]

Yeah, I'm gonna probably spend a whole afternoon watching other videos to understand that chart. I left this video baffled but intrigued.

[@Rich-on6fe]

Humidity is a difficult thing to understand and communicate. We as humans have no real 'sense' of it and it needs analysis and exploration in its own right. Found this out when making and selling equipment that measured it,(among other quantities), and realising that we could not adequately measure and explain it to ourselves.

[@IndyJay53]

As he said, you can spend an entire course studying this chart (a course I happen to be in right now😅). I don't think it was really the point of the video to teach a thorough understanding of humidity mechanics. Just a teaser and enough info to get the general idea. I will agree, though, that it was certainly an eyes-glazed-over moment with the amount of information shown.

[@carlsaganlives6086]

The disrespect shown to this graph is cause for concern, if not outright alarm, agree.

[@wk8219]

5:35 I love that you are using a water heater leakage pan for the bottom of your home made cooling tower.

[@takkjuvod]

0:22 Never thought I see the Nuclear Power Plant nearby (KKW Grafenrheinfeld, Germany) in a youtube video. that Power Plant was decomissioned in 2015 if I remember correctly, with the cooling towers being demolished a few weeks ago. I always wondered how they were working and in my childhood I always thought that those towers were responsible for making all the clouds (maintaining the power plant in the summer months when we don't get as much rain and therefor clouds didnt really help that thought of mine) Great Video, and after years I finally do understand how these things work!

[@RB-bd5tz]

17:18 Even if "flue gas" is put into the tower, it's probably not "flue gas" per se; it's been heavily filtered to get rid of the harmful stuff, and it's no more than hot air and a little water vapor.

[@mikefochtman7164]

Great discussion. I worked at several plants in the northeast, and one thing you didn't quite touch on is water consumption. Yes, we use towers so we can 'recycle' the feedwater. But a large nuc plant might have to dissipate 2000 MW of thermal energy. That can mean evaporating water in the tower at rates like 13000 gallons / minute. Yes, over half a million gallons per hour. So having a source for that makeup water to the cooling system is a key to success.

[@spicemasterii6775]

6:15 Technology Connections: did someone say latent heat?

[@thomasmacdiarmid8251]

This explains something I had wondered about. The Browns Ferry nuclear plant in northeast Alabama has cooling towers, even though it is built on the Tennessee River. The Tennessee is a very reliable source of water (since TVA created the whole string of lakes) and makes an effective heat sink. But the usually humid air of Alabama makes the towers efficient, and avoids dumping so much boiling hot water into the Tennessee.

[@shemmo]

Waste heat can also be used for heating greenhouses, households

[@JohanHultin]

Yepp, I write this comment in the warmth of my home courtesy of a power station (and nearby paperpulp plant)

[@5th_decile]

In theory yes, but in practice it seems to be rare. Probably because of the safety/permanence requirement. But why don't they combine a heat grid with a cooling tower for backup?

[@Catman_CM]

Okay, I have to say that picture of the smoke stacks and cooling tower rising up out of the fog is absolutely beautiful.

[@typha]

I had heard that another reason for the shape is to save money on concrete, for that purpose a catenoid would be ideal (see minimal surfaces), but generally deemed too difficult to bother compared to the hyperboloid which is pretty close anyway.

[@yakacm]

Cooling towers of that type and shape were originally designed by a pair of Dutch engineers and 1st built in 1918. The 1st time they were used in the UK, just happened to be in a power station about a mile from where I used to live, Lister Drive power station in Liverpool. I can't remember exactly how I came about this information, but I know it was when I was in work doing a bit of internet browsing while we were slack. Funny what gems you can find online.

[@ianriggs]

I love when videos talking about pollution show cooling towers like they are giving off pollution lol. Someone needs to teach them that its just steam coming out

[@jamesisaac7684]

Yeah it portrays as something bad. When is the opposite of that. It helps in reducing pollution and helping the environment.

[@shadowgolem9158]

The thing to remember is that extra moisture in the atmosphere has significant environmental impact too. This is the cleanest energy currently available but we can still do better. Using the heat for things that need heating makes more sense but takes much more planning for co-locating industry.

[@ianriggs]

@shadowgolem9158 ya releasing a whole lot of extra heat and steam into the atmosphere I'm sure isn't harmless but it's gotta beat pollutants and greenhouse gasses 🤷

[@OutbackCatgirl]

​@@shadowgolem9158it's literally orders of magnitude better, yeah it isn't completely harmless but it's still nearly the best we have

[@pcenero]

coal dust emits more deadly radiation than steam clouds.

[@PushyPawn]

The most wholesome channel on YT.

[@qu3nt0r]

Funny rocks and boiling water.

[@ExtraAmateur]

I work at a powerplant and have been inside while its working. Steamy like a spa inside. It was like a very foggy day. The updraft was amazing!

[@ponyote]

Yay, Grady clears this up.

[@realvanman1]

Another excellent explanation. I too didn’t realize that a higher wet bulb temperature can actually work better. Physics can be complicated and reveal unexpected results. One thing that should be pointed out is that the efficiency of a heat engine- such as a thermal power plant- is directly related to the difference in temperature between the heat input and the waste heat output. So power plants operate the condenser considerably below atmospheric pressure, ie considerably lower than the 212 degrees of just letting the steam exhaust to atmosphere as a steam locomotive does.

[@RJ9mech]

Really neat! This begs the question about commercial smokestacks and residential chimneys and the physics and engineering considerations for these. Maybe a video or series of videos on this might be feasible?

[@jergarmar]

This was entertaining, but the technical details you went through in this one were GREAT. In fact, the wet bulb temperature stuff -- specifically why hot and dry air doesn't work well with these cooling towers -- was so tricky, I would LOVE to have another video on it.

[@chadb9270]

6:39 it’s super easy to test. Most people probably have done this by accident. Fill a cup of water and leave it on the counter for a few hours. It will be colder than room temperature when you return.

[@qlue7881]

Thanks to my eldest brother working for Eskom in the late eighties, I had the privilege of getting a private tour of the, then newly completed, Kendal power station in Mpumalanga, South Africa Unit six hadn't been put into service yet and the tour included an inside look of unit six cooling tower That power station uses dry cooling rather than the wet cooling you describe so well in this video Kendal also has the largest cooling towers in South Africa (I think they're the largest in the Southern Hemisphere) They also have the the only trig beacon mounted on a man made structure in South Africa Their huge size is partly due to using dry cooling which requires a larger tower for the same level of cooling as a wet cooling tower, but requires less water

[@gordonrichardson2972]

I live near the old Athlone power station in Cape Town. The cooling towers had to be demolished because they were structurally unstable.

[@t1mmy13]

Oh! I thought the water was pumped to the top and flowed down on the sides for the cooling effect. You learn something new every day!

[@Kwarduk]

Being a fan of British power stations, I immediately recognised Drax, Ratcliffe-on-Soar and Fiddlers Ferry out of the stock footage, Ratcliffe got shut down recently, Fiddlers Ferry is being torn down (as well as all the other coal-burning power stations), Drax is the only one left standing since it converted to biomass, if you want to see cooling towers in action when it comes to electrical generation in Britain, that's the only place left in the country now.

[@e4t662]

I also built a cooling tower using your method. It came out well. I modified it into a huge Bong though.

[@stealthypope]

A Real Man of Genius

[@yavanna578]

a truly generational mind

[@LordDragox412]

Did your other comment get deleted? Because if so, that would be funny.

[@michaelbrinks8089]

I built a cooling tower to cool the water 🌊 💦 in my giant hydroponic tanks.

[@ZA-mb5di]

I want to try that

[@pipergohl962]

I laughed out loud at the shot at 12:12 featuring Grady Hospital. What a silly little easter egg haha!

[@firefox5926]

1:00 i have always wondered why they cant just re heat the steam after the turbines and just skip the condensing phase altogether i mean at the end of the day its just a working fluid

[@pbflo6559]

My undersatnding is that condensing steam creates a vacuum improving efficiency and maximizing power output of low pressure steam turbine.

[@nirodper]

If you just heat the steam there won't be a pressure differential to drive it

[@twizylemoon8718]

I'm wondering that too. Maybe it has to do with expansion when transitioning from water to stam, because you need flow to enter turbine. I hope we get the answer. My first question was why even cool the steam if its on the edge of liquid. But then i figure it out that they heat steam a lot becasue it looses temperature in exchange for velocity when going through turbine.

[@ratvomit874]

You can. A good number of plants actually do exactly that, but after around 3 passes the diminishing returns make it infeasible to go further. Basically you can bring the steam back to the same temperature, but it'll still be at a lower pressure than when it first boiled, so your turbine needs to get bigger. And then you need to duplicate all the associated infrastructure and sync both stages of turbines and stuff. At some point it becomes so expensive and complex you might as well just condense the steam and start over. Also you don't actually need to kick out all the latent heat, you can actually use the steam to preheat the feedwater and hence recycle some of that heat. In fact your dinosaur car might already have such a device, it's called an intercooler.

[@hugh_jasso]

The energy output from steamed water comes from the temperature difference from input to boiling. The hotter the water, the less energy the system outputs

[@jackrhodes6811]

I live in South Africa which is considered a dry hot country. We predominantly have cooling towers.

[@davedujour1]

If it's above the boiling point of water outside you may have moved to Venus.

[@ratvomit874]

You don't need to. The moon's surface already goes above 100°C during lunar day.

[@domib2896]

I'm not a HVAC technician. I consider myself a sewage engineer. But I will still watch all your videos because I like to have a look at all the other topics connected to public infrastructure. In Germany we call it "to have a look over the rim of ones plate." It helps you to get a better overall picture if you don't limit yourself to your own specific topic but look at your surroundings.

[@steamnstuff]

How those giant nozzles spraying the water inside the towers look like would be interesting. Also: I know from smaller forced EVAP coolers that the "Rain" is quite loud. These huge ones must be extremely loud nearby...

[@V__7741]

8:47 "its not smoke its STEAM from from the STEAMED clams we're having, mmm steamed clams."

[@SeanA099]

That isn’t smoke. It’s steam. Steam from the steamed clams we’re having. Mmm. Steamed clams.

[@RyanTenney]

I didn't say steamed clams, I said steamed hams!

[@michaelmoorrees3585]

@@RyanTenney -Either way, you're just making me hungry. Didn't know this was a food channel !?

[@definitelynotacrab7651]

I'm glad someone made this joke

[@edspy1418]

I'm a firefighter and I just ran a medical call at my local coal fired power plant last shift. My partner and I were in shock at the scale of the place and had so many questions about, of all things, the cooling tower! Thank you so much for putting this amazing content together!

[@Obu2who]

Great video! In engineering school I never put it together that humid air would be less dense than dry air, you learn something new every day.

[@michaelbrinks8089]

I would assume the humid air is more dense since it's holding more moisture & water is pretty heavy? Since dry air has less moisture, you would think it would be lighter/less dense. High humidity air contains less oxygen. While dry air contains more oxygen. So I guess that's in part why dry air is more dense.

[@Obu2who]

@@michaelbrinks8089 Water has a lower molecular weight (18) than O2 (32) or N2 (28), meaning that increasing the molar proportion/partial pressure of water vapor in air will decrease the average molecular weight of the mixture, decreasing the density for a given temperature and pressure. Since we mostly interact with water as a liquid it's easy to forget it's a lighter molecule than O2 or N2!

[@michaelbrinks8089]

@Obu2who Oh yeah it's 1 part oxygen 2 parts hydrogen. With hydrogen being the lightest element.....So it makes sense. Forget solar panels, I want a mini nuclear reactor to power my home. A piece of uranium the size of a golf ball outta do the trick. For 25 yrs of nonstop power 😂 The government bunkers might have nuclear power. Or giant propane tanks to run generators since it can be stored indefinitely.

[@somedudesstuff801]

I was confused for a minute, not sure if you say it in the video, but I guess only part of the cooling water evaporates, but it still takes the heat with it, so some of the water goes back in to the cycle. So not all of the water is retained, but also not all the water is expended.

[@vincentgrinn2665]

seperate loops of water all the expensive sterile water that runs through the reactor and steam turbine are a closed loop, but after the turbine it goes through a heat exchanger and passes some of its heat to another loop of water, which is what gets expended to cool down the closed loop

[@Tommygunn776]

That isn't smoke, it's steam. Steam from the steamed uranium we're having. Mmmm, steamed uranium.

[@rredeyee2460]

Sounds delightful

[@Psikeomega]

Albany style steamed uranium

[@smow7422]

Good lord what is happening in there *points at melting down reactor*

[@ThunderWorkStudioAMGE]

*looks at cherenkov radiation Uh, Arora Borealis

[@Alphacuremom55]

Incredibly high in calories!

[@tomasletal257]

I've read a paper from 1940s about structural integrity of these things, where the authors complained that the required thickness from calculations is so small, that would be technologically difficult to build the tower with such thickness. Another complaint was that the tower is hard to demolish :D

[@depressedyouth]

I never guessed that dry hair would be more dense than humid air

[@kenbrown2808]

when you think about it, it kind of has to be, or clouds wouldn't stay airborne.

[@critiqueofthegothgf]

what about wet hair?

[@vincentgrinn2665]

i barely even understand how "water molecules weigh less than the nitrogen or oxygen in the air" ok then why is water denser than the air? why dont oceans float ontop of air

[@kenbrown2808]

@vincentgrinn2665 because the water molecules in question are in gaseous form. So my understanding would be that gaseous water molecules demand more personal space than gaseous air molecules.

[@LookToWindward]

This should have been called "how cooling towers actually work." Way more info than just the shape, and very interesting. Before watching this I thought they were just for venting steam from the reactor!

[@viveksingh9223]

You should give us a tour of your garage. I bet there are lots of cool things in there.

[@tonytins]

A real Dexter's Lab.

[@Everywhere2]

Car in driveway scratches at garage door to be let in on cold nights

[@CSDragon]

1:00 RIP the bitrate

[@flyingfree333]

Couldn't nuclear plants desalinate sea water and harvest salt in those evaporative cooling towers?

[@powercage]

Might be too corrosive.

[@vincentgrinn2665]

itd be a collossal mess nuclear desalination is a thing, but im pretty sure theres better ways to do it

[@mkegadgets4380]

As always a very informative video. I like to see you explain how a swamp cooler works. Look forward to your next video.

[@BarredCoast0]

12:07 WOW Grady! You have your own health care center? That's impressive!

[@HomersIlliad]

His whole engineering career was a side gig.

[@neils5539]

Our company had a contract to make precast concrete beams and columns for the cooling towers at the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois. They were changing the insides to hang a plastic media off the beams to improve this cooling process. So we had a nice look around inside the towers during construction. Basically a giant shaft just like the model.

[@pastymansixtynine]

Creates a updraft for cooling purposes

[@marshallbanana819]

Wrong. You should have watched the video instead of instantly commenting on it.

[@WanderingExistence]

I've never liked a drafty room, so I suspect I probably wouldn't like to hang out in a cooling tower.

[@markstott6689]

The coal fired power station @ 33 seconds appears to be Drax in my beloved Yorkshire. Although these days, bio mass has replaced coal. 😊❤❤❤😊

[@RFC3514]

7:40 - Yes, that is a detail a lot of people don't know (and I'd say it's pretty unintuitive). The density of "pure" steam is about half the density of air. So it's not just that hot air can contain more moisture _and_ will rise due to being less dense than the cooler air surrounding it, but _the steam itself_ also "rises" (again, due to being pushed up by denser air around it). I always avoid saying "hot air rises" because that's a bit misleading. It's not the hot air that's "rising", as such, it's just that the _denser_ air around it *pushes* it up, due to being pulled down by gravity. So it was nice of you to reword that as "more buoyant" on the next sentence, which I think gets the point across that the rise is caused by what's _around_ it.

[@Alphacuremom55]

This also ties itself very well to meteorology 🌦️

[@vincentgrinn2665]

what is it about humid air that makes it bouyant in air humid air is just air with water in it isnt it? and water isnt bouyant in air

[@danielhale1]

That's not in the weeds, that's core to understanding the concept and I love that you included it!

[@Riomojo]

Yeah, but why is my wife cheating on me?

[@InfaredK]

Next video, just wait

[@angelg5817]

Because you’re not shaped like a smokestack and can’t drive her generator

[@Azukaae]

Have you tried to turn her off and on?

[@ianriggs]

Omg awesome ​@@angelg5817

[@Droningonuk]

Chimney isn't big enough

[@carlosrgns]

you can actually cool water below ambient temperature in cooling towers if the air is dry enough, this is due to the enthalpy change of the phase shift of the cooling water, peak is about 4 ºc bellow ambient

[@Pyrobob4]

3:27 For now

[@Ariccio123]

I hate that I'm entertained by this because it's accurate

[@foxrunnergaming6573]

Yep at our current trajectory. Earth will be at 100° c in 3700 ad. We have no time to avert.

[@jensintaipei]

Another great video, thank you so much! This one reminded me of my early days as an engineer, where about 20 years ago me and a team went inside a nuclear plant cooling tower in Switzerland to inspect the support bracket structures for the 'fill' material. Good memories

[@jessepower]

All I know, is they’re a great location for a fight with Wolverine.

[@leonardtreadway7082]

Worst version of Deadpool but well said.👍🤟✌️

[@Uchqunbekuz]

I have thought about this

[@jamesisaac7684]

I loved the movie. I didn't know it was hated by everyone.

[@jamieclarke321]

Love all the nuances. Very cool video

[@GetSmartish]

You let your "Texan" out in this video. referring to the seltzer water can as a "Coke" can. As a tEx-Pat, I'm feeling the rush of nostalgia.

[@warwickrigby6894]

Briliant explaination. Just to provide an alternative to Cooling Towers and discharging warm water into the environment, there are methods of extracting the low grade heat by making it do work. I worked for a company in the 1970's that was working on that.

[@dr.trebuchet3836]

Least surprising part of the video is that you have a beer brewing pump.

[@jollyroger6258]

Love all your stuff. Thanks, Dave

[@pittyman]

0:15 The smoke stakes are not designed to disperse smoke far away from the cities and just to use the difference in the air pressure to not use ventilation hardware. 8-)

[@adammcaughey4044]

It's actually both.

[@tooloosemcfloof7143]

But they still do...

[@kilsya1392]

Actually no, it still is in fact one of the design purposes..

[@pyramidsinegypt]

FYI, while gallon and cubic meter are both measures of volume, and while liters can be expressed in cubic meter, 1000 liters is colloquially only rarely references as 1 cubic meter. Especially where exact numbers are not needed to make a point, gallon are best 'translated' to liters so make it easier for even the layman to understand :)

[@legendleopard7125]

Last

[@NovemberDelta]

Yes!!! Clear 3d garage models are back!!!

[@FuncleChuck]

Oh god I had a miniature panic when the Psychometric Chart entered the screen. I don’t want to look at those ever again.

[@rasmustapper9994]

Your shooting voice, the really interesting brakedowns and the practical side, are such a good mix ! Awesomen work, hope you are doing fine, and greetings from finland (:

[@quartzofcourse]

You can also see the power of water cooling moving down through the air in the shower, notice the temp is much warmer at the top of the shower and cooler near the bottom as the droplets separate and lose heat to the ambient air

[@Brian-Mondeau37]

What an insane amount of design and engineering I had no idea went into cooling towers... way cool! Thanks for the video Grady!

[@swelch2661]

Great Video! Im an Ex-navy nuke and I have an application into Palisades for their important restart! The industry is looking healthy for the first time in years!!

[@ericreese7792]

Not far from me, the Brayton Point Power Station, the largest coal-fired plant in New England, built a pair of 500' cooling towers in 2008-11 because of long-running concerns about the plant's effect on water temperatures in Mt. Hope Bay. They only got six years of use out of them, though, because no sooner had they been finished than the plant was sold and its new owners soon decided to decommission the plant, so practically as soon as they went up, they came down.

[@erichodge567]

I didn't come to this video with very high expectations, but I absolutely loved it! There were things in it that really surprised me. It's great to feel that you really learned something new!

[@mrkarajan4152]

Awesome video and great work! I would love to see you analyze how the system failed in Valencia last week and how the flash floods managed to be so devastating

[@notsonominal]

Thanks for some sensible content on this day of days!!

[@DB-thats-me]

Wow. I always thought there was an aerodynamic reason for the cooling towers shape. It’s simply strength. Cool. The lack of bouncy to make the towers work on hot areas makes sense too. You get a kadiabatic effect with the colder air sinking rather than rising.

[@ripplerxeon]

Great Video, I was thinking about searching how does cooling tower works, but saw you uploaded a new video with same topic. Loved it

[@pavelslama5543]

I think that it would make sense to build cooling towers (thus whole power plants) close to really high mountains. That way you are more likely to see the rest of the escaping steam condensate in a close vicinity of the power plant, flowing back as a potential cold water stream, that can be put into the cooling tower again. The only downside is that the mountain glaciers would likely not like that.

[@chrisegallagher]

Seeing some up close local to me, It's a significant, surprising volume of water. I've always wondered why the cooled, dropped water (i.e. shown flowing from the white spout in your model at 9:30) isn't collected and channelled into a hydroelectric generator before being returned.

[@longlakeshore]

Active cooling towers at Palo Verde NPP west of Phoenix AZ at 2:55 because passive cooling towers don't work well in dry desert air.

[@mcbeenb]

10/10 Grady. You cleared up a lot of misconceptions for me today.