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To correct a possible misconception--those big cooling lakes and/or cooling towers you see at a nuke (or for that matter, any other power plant) are there to provide a source of cool condenser water for the steam cycle to run the turbine. All of these plants, regardless of whether they are coal, oil, gas or nuke use a recirculating closed loop for the steam, where it is preheated, heated and superheated in the boiler, piped to and then expanded in a multistage turbine, exhausted at low pressure and condensed in a shell-and-tube heat exchanger which is cooled by the outside water, and then piped as liquid water back up to the boiler. This minimizes the makeup water requirement. A modern power plant of any type must have some source of cooling water for the condenser--a river, cooling lake, cooling tower, etc.--or it will not operate. All but a very few steam locomotives did not use this type of closed system, instead employing an open system where the spent steam was exhausted up the stack and you had to refill the tender every 30 miles or so in some cases. While a cooling lake is a great potential source for reactor emergency flood water, that's not what it's there for. And despite the images on The Simpsons, those big cooling towers don't necessarily mean there's a nuke around, nor are they radioactive or contain the reactor. But I do enjoy the image of a nukey loco dragging a lake around, or maybe a hundred or so tank cars full of cooling and make-up water, in addition to all that shielding. Where's the freight?? Definitely impractical. And imagine the havoc wreaked if they'd had them on the old L&N Gulf Coast line, for example, where trains routinely ran aground and dumped hazmat all over the place. Glow-in-the-dark train, anyone?
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