Note that warm waters is a typical strawman argument against nuclear power.
These are rare anomalies and there's dry-cooling of nuclear power plants (although it's less efficient and costs more).
These are rare anomalies and there's dry-cooling of nuclear power plants (although it's less efficient and costs more).
Trying to brush aside legitimate engineering challenges as "not real" seems far too common among nuclear advocates. Which is my guess that their construction projects fail so often; the engineering and logistics and construction are significant challenges that are not taken seriously enough.
If the nuclear industry took engineering and problem solving as seriously as those in solar and wind, we would probably have a lot more nuclear around, a lot more successful construction projects, and nuclear that was cheap enough to build.
A strawman is a false opposition argument set up to argue against, so, no, its not. I am not even sure what you are trying to say, but “strawman” isn’t it.
Also, most proposed new reactors a aren’t dry-cooled and the arguments, which include cost, for nuclear don’t assume that higher cost option.
It's _designed_ to not work at full power at this heat, because that was thought to be the ideal trade-off.
Maybe it still is, maybe they underestimated the occurrence of high water temperature incidents, but in any case it's a consciously designed safe state.
It’s clearly possible to make a great deal of nuclear power safely, just not as cheaply as similarly environmentally friendly alternatives. Electric utilities prefer to spend less on battery backed Solar etc because of all the little details that aren’t obvious until you really study what’s involved.
Only when you think building them, maintaining them, mining Uran, shipping Uran and shipping and storing the radioactive waste has no CO2 footprint.
Now sure, we still might have been better off, if we would have replaced all the coal plants with nuclear by now. But we did not and now we have to work with what we have.
Now that we’ve mastered the technology to turn ambient energy directly into electricity, traditional nuclear reactors are an overly complex technological dead end.
Check out the interconnection queue for new generation where there's price competition, and you will see it completely dominated by non-thermal tech.
And the thermal tech that is there, natural gas, is partially combustion turbine driven, and without that combustion turbine component it would likely not be competitive at all. It's likely that within a decade a lot of those new natural gas CCGT assets will be completely stranded and uneconomical.
And as with any high-capital established industry, there are a lot of dinosaurs that will not move until they die off. They will be victims of creative destruction, rather than survive and pivot sooner.
Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/http://business.t...
And they affect a very small number of plants and energy output. The largest disruption so far has been when French government finally got its head out of its butt and stopped a few plants for long overdue maintenance
[1] https://www.cre.fr/actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels...
I used to read German online magazine Telepolis regularly. They've got a writer who advocates for renewable energy, hence I used to come across related articles every now and then.
This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.
During winter nuclear power plants already work at near 100% capacity. They can't give you more than 100%, other sources cannot meet demand, and somehow you blame nuclear.
It's not a lie, you just failed to get the point:
Assume, for the sake of the argument, that you have a power plant that always works at 100% capacity and cannot be shut off. To provide energy security, you would have to budget capacity to account for highest possible demand. But if you do so, you will over-produce electricity most of the time, and there are economic incentives against doing so.
> somehow you blame nuclear
I don't blame nuclear energy production, I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production.
This is the last I'm going to say on the matter:
1. "Nuclear power plants ... are bad at providing energy on-demand."
This is a lie. All nuclear plants, at least in Europe, are required to increase and decrease their power output on demand.
"according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr, with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute." [1]
Daily. Between 50% and 100% of its rated power.
The lie that nuclear power cannot provide energy on demand is a lie that people keep perpetuating.
2. "for the sake of the argument... a power plant that always works at 100% capacity... I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production."
If your power plants always work at 100% capacity, it's a failure of planning, not of the plants.
It's amazing that you brought up Germany in one of the comments. It just goes to show how biases make a person completely blind/oblivious.
Germany has shut down its nuclear power plants. Now it needs to burn ungodly amounts of fossil fuels and import ungodly amounts of electricity every time there's a windless night [2]. Because they decided that renewables are enough, are over-relying on them, and made no plans for when they are not enough.
This is colloquially known as "fuck around and find out". Aka "you can't attribute the failure in general planning to the performance of a single actor".
Yes, France relies on nuclear power. And yet, they have done fuck all: they have neglected maintenance of their nuclear plants for decades, they didn't plan for increased electricity demand etc. Much like Germany with shutting down their plants: they never calculated the actual electricity needs etc.
But people like you keep saying things like "nuclear is bad at providing energy on demand" etc.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
[2] On the week when they celebrated shutting down their last reactor, there was a night when they had 0% solar production, and 0.2% wind production, both of which could be covered by just a single reactor from theos they had shut down.
These rare anomalies could happen more often because of climate change and the existence of dry-cooling power plants doesn't help if yout already existing isn't
Will we call the rare anomalies rare until it they are the norm? And then?