Increasing environmental concern and steadily diminishing water availability have introduced the need for improved and more comprehensive cooling system evaluation capabilities in planning for plant and siting alternatives. Adequate procedures for evaluating and optimizing power plant cooling systems have not been readily available to industry and regulatory agencies because most procedures have required substantial simplifying assumptions in their analytical techniques, and these assumptions may be questionable. To improve the state of the art, Kaiser Engineers, in close association with General Atomic Company, have developed a circulating water system optimization program that includes a procedure to: (1) optimize wet-dry operation, (2) provide accurate estimates of water consumption over a year's operation, and (3) identify the wet-dry cooling tower combination yielding minimum total evaluated cost for a given water consumption. The paper outlines the procedures developed in implementing this program and, in general, the overall features of the program, including example results obtained.