A seawater cooling tower 718 feet tall has gone up on the Guangdong coast, and the plant behind it is built to return about one fortieth of the water a conventional coastal reactor pushes back into the sea

Stand at the foot of the shell at Lianjiang and the thing above you does not read as a building.

It reads as a horizon that somebody tipped on its end.

The wall flares outward at the bottom, wider than two football fields end to end, then draws in and flares again at the lip.

Roughly 180,000 cubic yards of concrete went into the shell, on a ring foundation of another 20,800 that runs more than 33 feet wide and over 6 feet thick.

Nothing is bolted to it. No fan sits in the throat and no pump feeds it.

So what actually moves the air through a structure that size?

How a chimney full of warm air does the work

The shell is a chimney, and the fuel is temperature difference.

Warm moist air inside weighs less per cubic foot than the cooler air outside it.

That difference in density is a pressure head. The light column rises, and as it goes it drags fresh air in through the open ring at the base.

The taller the column, the larger the head and the harder the pull, which is the whole reason the wall goes up 718 feet instead of 300.

Inside, hot water from the condenser is sprayed across a fill and falls through that rising airstream.

A small fraction of it evaporates, and evaporation is what carries the heat away, straight up and out of the lip.

The rest lands in the basin already cooled and goes back to the condenser, and the loop closes.

A conventional coastal plant does none of this. It pumps cold seawater in, runs it through once and puts it back warmer, which is where the discharge comes from.

A shell bigger than anything nuclear has attempted

The tower stands 718 feet with a base diameter around 574 feet.

Roughly 180,000 cubic yards of concrete went into the shell, on a ring foundation of another 20,800 that runs more than 33 feet wide and over 6 feet thick.

The water spraying area inside covers about 215,000 square feet.

Inclined pillars carry the base, and a central shaft feeds a distribution system, a heat exchange fill and a drift eliminator, all with the same job.

Pull as much heat as possible out of the circulating water before it goes back down.

For scale, the natural draft towers at the newest American nuclear station run about 60 stories. This one clears 718 feet.

What the record says about dates and output

China’s State Council approved the project in September 2022 and excavation began the same month.

First concrete for unit 1 went down at the end of September 2023, and the ring foundation was closed on 12 November that year.

The completed shell was announced in September 2025 by the operator, which called it the world’s first ultra large high level seawater cooling tower for nuclear power and a new technological breakthrough.

Unit 1 is due to enter operation in 2028.

The reactors are CAP1000 units rated at 1,250 megawatts each. Two are under construction and six are planned, together good for around 70 terawatt hours a year.

The operator also puts the tower at 4 to 8 decibels quieter than a conventional one.

Where the design reaches its limits

Natural draft lives on the gap between inside and outside air.

In a hot humid coastal summer that gap narrows, the column gets lazier and the draft weakens at exactly the hour demand peaks.

River cooled plants in France have cut output in heatwaves for a related but different reason, which is discharge temperature limits and low flow rather than a failing draft.

The bigger caveat is evidence. The one fortieth figure and the claim about drawing in fewer marine organisms both come from the operator and the designer.

No independent operating record exists yet, because the plant has not run.

Evaporative cooling also consumes fresh water rather than returning it, a trade every closed loop makes, and the same arithmetic shapes the nuclear buildout everywhere else.

The completion notice is where every figure here starts.

What this signals for the next coastal reactors

Once through cooling is under pressure in most jurisdictions, for the heat it adds and for what the intake screens pull in with the water.

The alternative has always been a tower, and until now nobody had built one this large for seawater at a nuclear station.

If 2028 holds, unit 1 gives the industry its first extended record for the type on a live coast.

That record does not exist today, which is why regulators reviewing new coastal proposals are watching this site rather than a datasheet.

China meanwhile keeps approving reactors, including ten more units across five projects.

The engineering detail behind the shell sits in the technical write up.

The honest measurement is not the concrete. It is the fish, the crabs and the larvae in the water off Guangdong, counted over years.

No instrument reads that faster than the coast does, one tide at a time.