Steam Rises From Cooling Towers At Coal Fired Power Plant

Neurath, Germany

At this lignite (brown coal)-fired power plant, exhaust flue gases from the furnaces have been ducted away from the old, retired smokestacks visible at bottom and into the rectangular scrubber structures left and right of the cooling towers. In the scrubbers a flue-gas desulphurization process removes sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain, but does not remove other pollutants like mercury and lead.

This facility is also one of the most toxic in Europen and in 2016 released to the air 31,300,000,000 tons of Greenhouse gases, 576 kilo of Mercury, and 483,000 tons of Inorganic Particulate matter (PM10).