Conditioning of cooling water in power stations. Feedback from twenty years of experience with acid feeding

In the late 1970's and early 1980's, with the development of the nuclear programme in many European countries, the recirculation of cooling water in power stations became an issue which required urgent attention. The concentration of several plants of 1000 MW or more on sites along inland waterways actually made simple once-through cooling impossible, owing to the risk of an unacceptable rise in the river's water temperature. The chemical composition of natural freshwater in western European waterways is such that when it becomes slightly concentrated, scale is rapidly formed. The relatively low solubility of calcium carbonate and the degassing of the carbon dioxide during close contact between the water and air in the heat exchangers of the cooling tower explain this precipitation tendency. Fairly soon, experts in the electricity power generation companies highlighted the need for on-site, pilot loop simulations, in order to foresee the physico-chemical phenomena that could arise in industrial installations. The number of financially justifiable processing possibilities could be briefly summarised by the following three solutions: to adapt the concentration factor in order to be under the calcium carbonate solubility limit and thereby avoid the need for any water conditioning; to accept concentration factors of between 1.4 and 1.9 and control the calcium carbonate precipitation through controlled acid injection in the circulation water; to raise the concentration factor over 5 and soften the makeup water through the addition of lime and flocculant. The last of these solutions was rarely ever used in Belgium and France. It was however widely used in Germany. Its application requires a greater investment and leads to higher operating costs than acid injection. Furthermore, it leads to the problem of daily drying and disposal of several dozen tonnes of sludge, which have to be recycled or dumped. In an increasingly stringent environmental context, this solution is no longer easily justifiable. The research efforts undertaken to better understand and control calcium carbonate precipitation and scale formation have paid off and have resulted in the standardisation of the treatment process and the control procedure of the cooling circuits by ELECTRABEL. The initial experience gained in the fossil power plants of AMERCOEUR (2 x 125 MW units) was finally successfully applied to plants 2 and 3 at TIHANGE. Since then, all of the conventional or combined cycle power plants have adopted the same treatment philosophy. Six units of between 125 and 1000 MW have been treated in this manner, some of them for over twenty years, without showing any signs of scale deposits. It is true that adaptations have had to be made in the control recommendations defined during the pilot trials, in order to allow for the impact of cathodic protections and certain cooling tower fills. (authors)