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Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

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And during that time France was net exporting 14GW to neighbors at dirt cheap prices. There's no reason to fix this. It's a nothing burger pushed by 'concerned' people

All thermal plants have this same issue, not just nuclear. And if you lose the natural gas peakers (which are also thermal and thus has this issue), you lose your baseload renewables too. Not that it matters, renewables used for baseload make more CO2 than just using FFs. Variability is a terrible quality in an energy source.

Right, so rather than "We should have more thermal plants" what you want is a non-thermal electrical generator, and what do you know all the major renewable sources qualify, whether that's a wind turbine, hydro-electric or PV.

Do you know what else you'd get a lot of if it's so hot in the summer that you can't use lake and river water for cooling? Sunlight to run your PV. Because that's exactly why the water was heating up.

you can in fact use water for cooling. It's that sometimes you may be concerned about fish and not hurt it, esp with passthrough systems. But there are even more adv solutions (wastewater, dry cooling combo)

No, natural gas _peakers_ don't need water for cooling, since they don't have steam turbines like combined cycle gas plants. Cooling is only necessary in thermal plants to condense the steam on the low-pressure side of the steam turbine.

And excessive stability is also a terrible quality in an energy source. The only reason we used to put up with base-load power plants was because they were cheap; if they weren't we might as well have used peaker plants all the time.

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