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Comment by plumeria | Hacker News Reader

What I don’t understand is why they need to be placed so close to a water body?

Free cooling. And it needs to be a sea, and not a river. France's nuclear power stations have had problems during the recent hot European summers because the river water warms up too much.

Note that the problem was that there are legal limits on how much a nuclear plant can warm up the river.

The nuclear plants themselves had no issue and could have continued to operate.

These legal limits are not 'the problem' but there for exactly this reason: operating the plant at full power would start killing aquatic creatures living downstream by excessively increasing water temperature.

My point is that this is not a problem for the nuclear plants. The recent heatwaves did not create a technical problem for the nuclear plants (well for cooling droughts may have but the high temperatures did not).

Just because the nuclear plants didn't plan for extreme temperatures they should be allowed to kill off life in the river? That's absurd.

Who said that?

Sheesh, I am just clarifying that the plants did not shut because of operational reasons. Nothing controversial I would have thought, just a statement of fact...

Why bother with radiation protection, just run the cooling open cycle with the river water and pollute downstream. It wouldn’t need closing for operational reasons. Just stating a fact.

I see- sure the plant could have safely (as in not melt down and cause a disaster) kept going. But real world requirements forced them to turn it down not to heat up the river too much.

I think the offense that people (including myself) took with it is that it conveys the idea that technical reasons are the only reasons that limit the operation of a power plant and that other, in this case environmental, reasons are second-class reasons that can or can not be taken into account.

Environmental impacts are externalities (i.e. positive or negative effects on others (or something, in the case of nature) who are not directly involved and have no influence over them) and basically all environmental problems are negative externalities. Ignoring externalities is how we got our current environmental problems in first place which is why the argument rubbed me the wrong way.

That's putting words into others' mouths instead of sticking to what is actually expressed.

I simply thought useful to highlight the reason the plants had to shut in order to avoid misunderstandings and because it is always important to understand causes. It was not a technical issue and nuclear plants have no problems functioning in an European heat wave (again...). It is quite obvious why limits are put on how much rivers' water may be warmed but that was not the point.

There is no offense to be taken and I am quite disappointed by the aggressive reactions. This argument is pointless.

They're water-cooled.

They need large amounts of cooling water in order to function. Thats what the huge cooling towards are for.

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