exempting nuclear cooling tower used to mitigate heat from water before discharge into the environment
How later courts described this case
- exempting nuclear cooling tower used to mitigate heat from water before discharge into the environment
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
George Rose Smith, Justice, dissenting. I find it little short of astonishing that a majority of this court can describe Nuclear One as a machine, especially when the opinion recognizes that the taxpayer has the burden of clearly showing its right to the exemption (“To doubt is to deny,” as we have said), and when the taxpayer is a foreign corporation having little claim to a free ride at the expense of our taxpaying citizens.
Nuclear One is essentially an enormous cooling tower made of steel, concrete, and stone — all immovable components in its construction. True, it houses machinery which lifts the hot water to the top of the tower, so that it can be cooled by falling back to earth by gravity. But the point at issue is not the exemption of the machinery contained within the tower; certainly that is exempt. The question is the right of the tower itself to the exemption, as a machine.
The majority quote the testimony of one of the appellee’s employees, who presumably put the matter in the light most favorable to his employer:
An evaporative cooling tower is really quite a simple machine that uses the laws of nature to do its work for it. It consists of a device which raises water to some elevation, allows it to fall back to the ground, thereby engaging with air which is moving in the other direction and allowing the transfer of energy from the water to the air, and heat in the form of energy is being transferred.
According to that definition of a machine, there are many machines that have not been recognized as such, with an attendant tax exemption. In a concrete rice-mill the rough rice is carried by machinery to the top level, so that it can be economically processed by machinery as it descends by gravity to ground level. But we don’t think of the rice mill as a machine. In a tower for the manufacture of leaden shot the lead is carried to the top of the tower and dropped through the air in a molten state, so that it forms into spheres before it hits the cooling water at the bottom. But we don’t think of the tower as a machine. In the Washington Monument people are carried to the top in elevators and brought back down by gravity. But we don’t think of the monument as a machine. On Arkansas farms fodder is lifted to the top of a silo so that it can settle to the bottom by gravity and be consumed by cattle. But we don’t call the silo a machine. By a coincidence, however, Nuclear One is popularly called a silo. I think the popular view to be right; Nuclear One is a silo, not a machine.
Jones, J., joins in this dissent.