DEAR News of the Area,
THE letter to the paper from Kenneth Higgs (‘Climate change defeats Europe’s nuclear plants, Port Macquarie News Of The Area, 7/8/2026) may be somewhat misleading.
The generation of reliable electrical power from fossil fuels in Australia does use a lot of water.
This water is super-heated by coal or, in some cases gas, to produce high-pressure steam which drives turbine blades connected to electrical generators.
The steam is then condensed back to water in those big ‘eggcup’ shaped cooling towers with steam coming out of the top, and reused/recycled again.
You can see on Google maps the large reservoirs close to every power station in the Hunter Valley, for example.
Nuclear power stations work in roughly the same way coal fired power stations do, but instead they use clean nuclear fuel to super-heat water to high-pressure steam that spins turbine blades, which then drive electrical generators. Water used for this process is condensed and reused as before.
So nuclear reactor power stations do use a lot of water, as Mr Higgs suggests.
Some water is used to control the nuclear reaction, some to produce steam, but it’s just about all recycled, and doesn’t disappear into thin air as the letter might suggest.
Regards,
Eddy Crook,
Port Macquarie.
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