A Different Kind of Nuclear Winter: Steam From Cooling Towers Spawns Snowfall
It sounds a lot worse than it is. Happily, this isn't some science fiction movie about a post-apocalyptic Mad Max future, or even about radioactive rain. It's just a simple atmospheric interaction thanks to the water vapor coming out of nuclear plant cooling towers. If you live near a nuclear plant, maybe you've already noticed that the the weather is different downwind of it.
The National Weather Service posted a radar image on Tuesday of a single band of snow falling on Western Pennsylvania, straight downwind from the Beaver Valley Nuclear Power Station in Shippingport. A band of cold air moving across the eastern United States slammed into the very hot steam directly above the plant's cooling towers, creating clouds and precipitation that otherwise wouldn't have been there. Nuclear snow!http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/a-different-kind-of-nuclear-winter-steam-from-cooling-towers-spawns-snowfall?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IeeeSpectrumEnergywiseBlog+%28Energywise+-+IEEE+Spectrum%29
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