Seawater cooling for atomic power plants

During the last years increasingly thought has been given to the siting of new power stations, either fossile or nuclear ones, at the shoreline of the ocean. Because of the steadily rising demand for electric power and limited cooling capacity of the existing rivers the usage of seawater for cooling purposes seems to be a promising alternative. On the other hand this new and fairly unknown medium seawater puts new problems on the design and lay-out of the seawater-inlet and discharge systems. Besides corrosion of the piping the problem of bio-fouling especially in the biological highly active coastal waters is not all well handled or at least completely understood. So in the past some seawater cooled power stations had to shut down temporarily because of blocked cooling circuits. The paper discusses these problems of intake conduits of coastal power stations and deals with several methods of avoiding or at least reducing the amount of marine fouling. (orig./RW)