why do chimneys of atomic plants have so wide openings?
In: Physics
They are not chimneys but cooling towers.
They are not for releasing smoke of something you burned into the atmosphere. Chimneys are narrow and tall to ensure that the smoke gets away and doesn’t stink up and the neighborhood and cover everything in gunk.
Cooling towers are to cool down water used to cool down nuclear reactors in turn.
They are open at the bottom to let air in and rise up in the very thick tower to cool water through convection without needing any big fans to blow air over the water to cool it down. The design means that the air will rise by itself and suck in new air in the process without needing and power.
Because they’re cooling towers rather than chimneys, they need to be big and wide so that huge amounts of water can evaporate and take the heat with them.
It’s a cooling tower not a chimney. Cold water is sprayed on pipes circulating warm water. The cold water evaporates and sucks heat out of the warm water.
Cooling towers have the hour glass shape because they need a large base to increase the surface area, wide base means lots of room for pipes and water spray.
They narrow at the top because of something called the venturi principle. As diameter of the pipe gets smaller the velocity increases. This helps suck out the steam to make room for more steam without having to pay for (as many) fans.
It’s also just a structurally strong shape
Correct explanations have been given to your question, so I’ll give an alternative answer.
The chimneys are made large so that Santa can easily scurry down but have enough space to dodge all the atomic radiation.
They’re wide because the bottoms need to be wide.
The bottom is a pool of hot water evaporating/cooling off. It’s not a chimney forcing out smoke.
The water needs to cool so it can go back into the water loop and get heated back up by the nuclear reactor to drive the turbine which generates electricity.
The towers could be perfectly cylindrical but are instead hyperboloid. I’m not going to guess if that does something special to the air currents but I do know that it is easy and strong to build a hyperboloid with just straight beams: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:3D_dual_use.jpg
Those beams are straight. They form a curved surface though. When scaled up you can build curved cooling towers using strong simple straight steel beams as a skeleton.
As others have mentioned, what you see at nuclear facilities are cooling towers. My father was a control room supervisor for a nuke plant. Something I always found interesting was… The water they pumped from the nearby river to cool things off, had to be the same temperature going back into the river as it was when they took it out. Can’t be fudging up ecosystems and what not.
While commonly associated with nuclear power plants, some coal-fired power plants also use them. Also some industries (refineries, processing plants, etc) may use this design but I’m not sure if any of those are ever so large as the ones at power plants.
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