Aspects of Thermal Pollution.

Thermal pollution, the addition of heated water to the environment, is one of the many types of pollution which only recently has come to the forefront of public attention. Cairns 1956 states that in England the largest single industrial use of water is for cooling purposes, while in the U.S. in 1964, 49,000 billion gallons of water was used by industrial manufacturing plants and investor-owned thermal electric utilities. Ninety percent or 44,000 billion gallons of this amount was used for cooling or condensing purposes primarily by the electric utilities. With the increased demand for greater volumes and less expensive electric power, the power companies are rapidly expanding the number of generating plants, especially nuclear powered plants. Nuclear plants offer many advantages over conventional plants, but have one major drawback seriously affecting the environment, excess heat losses. These plants are only 40 as efficient as conventional plants in converting fuel to electricity and loss of efficiency manifests itself as waste heat. As the number of nuclear power plants and other industrial plants increase, an estimated ninefold increase in waste heat output by the year 2000 will result Kolflat 1968, Remirez 1968.