Posted on 08/25/2006 11:58:08 AM PDT by blam
Cooling towers are a hotspot for evolving disease
25 August 2006
Cooling towers could be evolutionary hotspots for new respiratory diseases.
Many species of bacteria, including those that cause legionnaires' disease, are thought to have evolved in association with an amoebic host. Now it seems that the warm, wet conditions found in cooling towers at factories and oil refineries make them a perfect spot for amoebas and bacteria to thrive, increasing the chances of new strains of pathogenic bacteria emerging.
Sharon Berk of Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville and her colleagues have found that amoebas in cooling towers are about 16 times as likely to host bacteria as those in ponds and lakes.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Seems like a little bleach in the water should solve that problem.
Gee--another alarmist attempt to suck up some more grant money. The only problem with this rosy little scenario is that industries with cooling towers installed spend lots of bucks to add chemicals to KILL bacteria and other micro-organisms that might build up bio-films and reduce the efficiency of said cooling towers.
It's Bush's fault.
So the environmentalists are killing us again. We used to use rivers and lakes and the ocean for cooling water, but NOooooo the enviro dorks said no, so we built cooling towers.
Environemntalists and other liberal types are generally the problem with most of the solutions.
Stay away from cooling towers.
Cooling towers are maintained almost like you would a swimming pool. The chemical levels in the water are checked routinely. If you don't maintain them, they'll clog up and won't function. I know, I used to work in Maintenance at a large plant, and that was part of the daily rounds.
If this can apply to swamp coolers, look for the Albuquerque mayor to jump on this as another point to get people to switch to expensive air conditioning freon systems.
This has been know for decades.
If the Alien breeds there, who knows what else? Doomsday could come crawling out of that stack.
"Game over, man, Game over!"
I have to wonder how much money was on this research. One only has to google "cooling tower bacteria" and would find in minutes that the world has know about bacteria in cooling towers for many years and that there are numerous solutions to this problem.
That is making the radical assumption that the cheapskate Ivy League MBAs adequately fund an effective water treatment program.
Well, given the recent example of the Prudhoe Bay pipeline corrosion, you're probably more likely correct than not.
Hey bud.
I'm afraid I worked for an inbred lot of them at one time. Invented slick stuff for production processes, no patents done by the "management" and they let the Japanese take pics of it all. Finally, I grew tired of fighting the SOBs to make them money.
Did you ever get an answer on that vapor pressure question in my last PM to you?
Nope--haven't had a chance (the necessary thermo data is not part of my "standard reference library"--I'd need to make a trip to a university library to find it). BUT--you don't need to keep the temp NEARLY that high. Any temp > 65 C will do the trick (actually, a temp slightly below this will probably work, as you will actually be venting into the engine during the intake stroke, and thus under some degree of vacuum). You can do an "analogy estimate" from the steam tables in the CRC handbook (i.e. assume that methanol behaves similarly to water), which I did look up--as I recall, for a 10 degree C temp above the boiling point, you'd need about three atmospheres (45psi) to keep the methanol in the liquid phase.
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