Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/07/13/france-shuts-do...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
We keep having folks here argue that nuclear, not renewables are the path to take to get rid of fossil fuels. I have strong doubts - it feels like that doesn't account for the sad realities of climate change.
We're building the factories to make them as fast as we can find investors with money to spend on them, because they're already cheaper than fossil fuels which are themselves cheaper than nuclear.
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.
Plus, it's not like north-south power lines are beyond the wit of mankind. The US western interconnection includes both Canada and Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NERC-map-en.svg
No, it's not. Decommissioned nuclear plant infrastructure used as massive battery storage.
https://gesi-deutschland.de/en/gesi-project-presented-in-gro...
The following table shows that in total 2264 installations have been identified in the EU ETS to be power plants, which have reported emissions in at least one year since 2005. The fuel of 1440 power plants have been identified. Of this there are 124 lignite power plants, 284 hard coal power plants and 2 power plants using blast furnace gas. There are 57 power plants using oil products. The majority of the plants uses natural gas (858 plants). About 824 plants have not been matched to a fuel yet.
Not for the combination of [continent-wide, offshore, the Atlantic coast].
The Atlantic continental shelf isn't correlated with the Baltic.
Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.
> Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
Also false. The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.
Also, independently of batteries, hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty, and just the currently and soon-to-be closed coal mines in the EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage: https://gfzpublic.gfz.de/rest/items/item_5038282_1/component...
And it's not like we can't dig more holes if we wanted to, we dig holes to get out rocks even though rocks are one of the cheapest things you can buy.
How do you transmit the power? Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it?
> Offshore Dunkelflaute is much shorter than on-shore.
That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore. And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors.
> The required quantities even of batteries is comparable to electrification of road transport.
That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities.
> hydro plants come in two flavours that people often mix up: generation, and storage
Hydro requires the right geography. Is there any potential for hydro left in central Europe?
> EU can be converted to around 13 TWh of pumped storage
That would be a good amount of storage. But has this ever been tried? I would guess that's quite dangerous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LseK5gp66u8
The usual way.
> Do the countries on the Atlantic even want wind power, set up the transmission lines, and pay for it?
They can sell the power, you know. This already happens.
> That reduces the storage requirements a bit, but there is not nearly enough offshore.
It more than covers it.
Even a Dunkelflaute period is reduced, not zero, output. Those seas are huge, and the normal wind there is fast; even on a continental-shelf-spanning Dunkelflaute (much rarer than "just Germany and Poland"), the capacity in those waters *even with that reduction* is more than EU demand just by itself, which in practice means "not building as much as possible".
> And offshore is expensive. That's why it's getting harder to find investors.
Compared to onshore wind. But even offshore wind is cheaper than new-build nuclear, coal, and has strong overlap with new CCGT.
Even then, it's not hard to find investors: the US went as far as banning it because the investors were actually happy to invest.
The limitation on investors right now is that we're transitioning faster than any previous energy transition before, while also having other things to also invest in. It's like how big tech in the US is running out of people to get money from to spend on data centres, the limit isn't actually building them, it's how fast they're getting built when your answer to "how many would you like to order?" is "yes".
> That doesn't prove it's possible, but makes it even harder to get the required quantities.
The fact that EVs are for sale, however, does.
> Hydro requires the right geography. Is there any potential for hydro left in central Europe?
I thought you might say something like that, *which is why I literally wrote what I wrote*:
people often mix up: generation, and storage. Of these, only generation requires an associated upstream supply and watershed; storage can be done with a hole in the ground, of which there are plenty
Also, I already saw all of Tom Scott's videos when they were new. As per the document:
Finally, the realisable potential includes projects that are not only technically and economically feasible but also aligned with regulatory, environmental, social and implementation timelines, facilitating their implementation within short to medium time frame. About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita.
What works for Iceland works in few other places to the same degree (New Zealand, Yellowstone, places with thin crust and feisty caldera's).
There are some interesting spots here but it's generally enough through the country to do it everywhere.
Munich gets quite a lot of it's energy from geothermal sources
If someone is getting wiped from the mix because of renewables, it is coal and fuel, not nuclear.
A lot like how when I'm starving to death I'm not really interested in a debate on whether I should have ice cream or cake.
I don't have a clue either. Don't ask for my vote on how to power a country. Take my taxes and use them to listen to experts
Why is it a good thing that everyone and their brother seeks to apply state violence to micromanage what should be a fairly arcane technical issue?
>We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.
Do you feel the same way about topics where your opinion differs substantially from the local majority?
Edit: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals, from your dinner table and your company Slack to democratic institutions.
I almost hesitate to ask, do you think that is the centralised or decentralised option?
And, more directly, that is a bad theory. The billionaires will make money either way. It doesn't make a lot of difference to them as a class. They'll have an inclination to the cheaper form of energy because more energy -> more economy -> more money for them.
The venn diagram between people who act like renewables are "freeing" (which make no mistake, they absolutely could be) and the people who advocate nonstop for government management of how they are deployed is too close to a circle for me to take such commentary seriously.
>One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
Ah, yes, billionares. Famous for not getting a cut when I buy a plug in solar panel from my preferred e-commerce site or big box store. /s
The billionares have their money in everything. They get a cut of everything. You're just changing who gets the cut. And even if no billionaire is getting a cut, a publicly traded/owned investment bank or other corporate interest that would replace them is not really any less evil.
>: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals,
By not gaslighting myself into thinking politics is anything other than the process of deciding where, when and how state violence is applied.
What backs up all those decisions other than credible threat of violence?
Where did the person you are replying to even hint at that? I think this may be your own prejudice spilling out here.
> The billionares have their money in everything. They get a cut of everything. You're just changing who gets the cut.
Oh ok, I guess let's just accept this as is forever. Any attempt to try to improve this situation is futile and stupid (for example, as said, making it more difficult for them)
>What backs up all those decisions other than credible threat of violence?
I don't know, do you only act in fear of the threat of violence from the state? In democracies politicians are legitimized by their voters, what you are describing sounds more like an autocracy.
Oh come on.
The hut point peninsula is consistently windy though and the turbines are pretty! https://photos.app.goo.gl/goDVb7KuiKr6soHT6
but it's somewhat risky, since if the power goes out in winter, to first order, everyone dies. I think you'd always keep the generator on at low load, just in case.
Note that wind turbines at pole have not historically been very successful, maybe that will improve.
There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.
Not fossil hydrocarbons forever, of course, but synthetic kerosene might be a thing soon enough.
That doesn't make them safe. Eventually there situations will have to find a way to do without fossil fuels if we want to keep this planet habitable.
If you can spend a Dollar only once, you might end up with renewables. People can be economically motivated too. No reason to draw politics in an already heated discussion.
I mentioned all of this in my message. What was unclear about it or did you perhaps not read past the first sentence?
Restoring river water levels can't be done through technical solutions though, they rely on the weather and we can't control that. The European river levels are largely influenced by inland rain, snowfall, and glacier forming/melting; snowfall and rain has been meagre this year, glaciers have been melting and receding for decades now.
At some point it will be the new normal.
Every power source has their tradeoffs, and I don't think anyone is denying that.
What I do think is that people are making up arguments or statements that Other People have and call them out on it.
That’s the underlying problem: it’s not a question of whether nuclear can work at all ever but rather that for any given point since the early 2010s it’s been very hard to justify nuclear because you need to spend billions of dollars more than renewables upfront and accept higher CO₂ emissions for 1-2 decades before it makes any reduction in emissions. If we’d invested half a century ago like France it might’ve been very different but the cost and time differential now is so stark.
Oh yes, let’s just deregulate nuclear power, why not? There’s no strong enough way to describe the stupidity of this.
This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.
These heatwaves reduce the margin from both directions, a hotter intake means you have less margin on the outflow, and the lower flow rate means there’s less water to dilute that outflow. And apparently for that specific plant there’s also the water level not even reaching the intake.
Just imagine what it would spell for your car otherwise.
That is after all why they bring in water or air to car radiators, to cool them.
Probably only a single percent or so for a few degrees change though.
Even using industrial air-cooling design you'd need on the order of a million sqm or two (for reference a good quality computer heatsink is about a third of a square meter worth of fins)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300
But it was admittedly a huge cooling system for a reactor that only produced 750 megawatts of thermal energy.
https://www.seas.sk/wp-content/uploads/a3/b4/2023_SE_NPP_ENG...
Or, if that's too much effort for them, use e.g. LiBr or other such atmospherically-stable salt that can maintain humdity equilibrium with dry ambient air.
The reason for even involving a water-based solution at all is because you can spray it or at least run it over dense corrugation (sheets alternating orientation, but overall with the channels roughly pointed upwards) "packed beds" with free contact between the coolant and the air, instead of having to maintain a barrier layer between the two (typical car/computer radiators, but also AC coils), which notably saves you from even a potential for a there-required barrier layer to leak and from having to clean such a barrier layer. If you make the corrugations large enough and have some simple mesh filters in the intake path that you just roughly shake/rinse/blow/brush off every once in a while, you can prevent particles larger than a rice grain from getting to the coolant in the first place and wash/rinse all the sand grain and smaller dust particles down into the coolant sump where their densities are far better matched (than air vs. dust) and volume flow is much easier to handle/filter.
The big part of these is still that they don't require active fan ventilation to cool radiators, which would be a substantial increase in critical electrical power needed after a SCRAM to keep the core from melting down; vs. the passive evaporative cooling towers and the KOH/LiBr non-humidifying variant I mentioned.
For your car, coolant temperature is typically in the 80-90C range. So the same change in external temperature would be a loss of ~10% of cooling efficiency. Still, cars have no issue running in 30C temps, and IME you have to go up to 45 to really need specialized cars.
So if you car can swallow 40C and >10% efficiency loss without a sweat, a NPP will have 0 issue using 30C water to cool their cores.
The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1]
That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin).
Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degrees, would only reduce the cooling factor by less than 2%.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Which is why live steam is so dangerous. Steam condensing will release a huge amount of thermal energy, making steam burns especially harmful.
Once you get into closed loop PWRs the numbers get crazy. Actual figures for Naval Nuclear plants are classified, but as a nice round number example if you pressurize the secondary loop to 250psi you end up with about 1,725 kJ/kilogram to boil it.
Absolutely terrifying stuff.
1,725 kJ/kg is 1,725 J/g, which is less than the enthalpy of vapourisation I'd quoted.
(Though yes, I understand your point: pressurisation raises boiling point, and so far as I'm aware, vapourisation energy.)
The pressure of a condenser at 90F (hot summer day) is about 1/20th of an atmosphere and ... pretty obviously the pressure of a condenser at 212F is about one atmosphere. You can't just arbitrarily decide to change the low pressure side of a turbine like that, its not going to turn out well. You could, in theory, design an entire thermal plant coolant loop to deal with the condenser running at 1 atm instead of 1/20th atm but most will not.
There are also heat flow rate issues where the higher the delta V the higher the watts. Regardless of condenser pressure issue above, if a heat exchanger can pull 1 MW across a 150 degree delta-V then if you run the cold side much warmer at only 15 degrees delta V it can only "pull" 0.1 MW of heat. Its surface area doesn't magically get bigger LOL. Remember that for every watt of electricity you get to dump around three watts of thermal heat. If you lose 9 MW of cooling power you lose 3 MW of output electrical power. You have to move more heat than non-engineers expect, to generate electricity.
Its a simplification, but for various reasons they like to design the hot side as hot as possible, so if you lose 100F of cooling you can't keep the same power output and simply run the hot side 100F hotter than normal and keep the same flow rate. Absolutely nothing good will come from overheating it like that.
You could engineer a thermal plant (thermal as in coal, nuclear, burning recyclables and biowaste, anything to make steam) that runs at an ideal hot side of 212F and let the hot side literally boil water in a pool. However, they don't make plants like that IRL and trying to force it under those conditions would turn out very bad... The first thing that comes to mind is gunk buildup and higher corrosion rates. Steel (generically speaking) corrodes in water about twice as fast per every 20C increase, so turning a cold water plant into a water boiler would to first approximation cause about a year's worth extra corrosion per month. Could be designed around, but I would not want to cowboy a nuke and just try it. Some of those parts are very expensive; even if you can safely run the plant and replace the corroded parts at a substantially accelerated rate, the cost of power due to corroding the cold side parts might make the power too expensive even if its "safe enough", making it cheaper to just shut down. Moving large amounts of water (or air) is extremely expensive, both capex and opex, so an additional 10x higher once in awhile here and there could be a lot of money...
Nuclear discharges more like 2kWh of heat per kWh of electricity produced.
Perhaps slightly more, but its in that ballpark. Seems like a small difference but you are overstating the waste by near 50%.
Source: Degree in Nuclear Engineering, previous life was a Reactor Operator. Also, just look up thermal efficiency of currently operating reactors.
2:1 implies 33% thermal efficiency to the grid which is commonly achieved in normal operations.
Unfortunately engineering means you can’t work with such overly simplified models. Many ways of dumping heat run into issues from solar gain prevents dumping significant heat under the employe parking lot etc.
In my experience we saw some losses when taken as a system that prevented us from hitting 2:1, but they weren't anywhere near 50%. We also ran closer to 40% than 33% thermal efficiency in the power generating loop, so many of the system thermal costs are baked into that 33% efficiency to the grid.
Basically, each reactor install will have it's own minor issues. Overall they should be hitting around 2:1 as an entire system. If they aren't there is something going on that I haven't come into contact with (which is quite a lot, I'm sure).
I’ll put it as a spherical cow engineering problem. Let’s suppose the temperature is 30C and you want to dissipate 2GW of heat across a 1kmx1km flat plate, what temperature will it get? That’s a relatively straightforward calculation if you don’t need high precision.
However in the real world it wouldn’t have a single equilibrium temperature. 30C at night the heatsink would be one temperature and in the daytime it would be a different temperature due to sunlight.
Evaporative cooling largely sidesteps this issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind why that’s chosen over other seemingly cheaper options.
I thought the cooling tower design helped maximize cooling and minimize loss as steam.
Short introduction into cooling towers:
There are any number of methods of dealing with this. Using natural bodies of water is a lower cost (thus highly popular) method of sinking heat. Palo Verde has been operating 3 large reactors in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona since the 1970s. There is no reason in engineering or physics that a power reactor must be highly sensitive to any particular lake, river or ocean's temperature. This is strictly about money, being cheaper to rely on a big "free" heatsink, and leaving too little margin for changing conditions.
Edit: add source [ger] https://science.orf.at/stories/3236752/
Any new build can and will include cooling adapted to hotter conditions.
They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.
Beyond that, those resources are also the lifeline for a dictatorship in the east causing increase defense spending.
There definitely is no such thing as cheap gas, oil or coal for Europeans, all things considered
Starting this year, in Romania you cannot put new PV capacity online without the storage for it, is mandatory. Possibly for existing ones, but I am not sure.
You either have to significantly oversize the PV (easier said than done, when its energy density is already not that high per m2), or have enough batteries to last for multiple days of full load. If you do the maths that’s a lot of batteries
The main idea is to then import power from somewhere sunny and/or windy or mountainous, using money you saved when they had the rain and you had the sun.
Batteries and other storage mechanisms will gradually reduce the need for doing so, but aiming to entirely eliminate all need for cooperation with others seems a bit paranoid.
So you can have storage, but not too much, only as much to still be dependant on the grid.
See the hypocrisy here?
Not in Poland, because you are too independent.
"According to the adopted act, devices with a capacity of up to 30 kWh are exempt from any construction procedures; only reporting to the grid operator (OSD) is mandatory. Those between 30 kWh and 300 kWh in a building and 30 kWh and 2000 kWh freestanding are obliged to prepare a land development plan and make fire safety arrangements."
https://renewablesnow.com/news/poland-adopts-rules-to-ease-e...
Batteries (or pumped storage hydro, which is more like a gravity-driven capacitor)
But yeah batteries would be nice.
It's a meaningful contribution I would have thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
Large lake means more losses, mainly due to evaporation, but seepage is also to be expected. Now put this fact in the thread's context: water shortage/stress...
But doesn't adding a large reservoir mitigate both? You're not pumping the entire reservoir up and down hill every day.
"Most of the country has an elevation of less than 200 m. Although Hungary has several moderately high ranges of mountains, those reaching heights of 300 m or more cover less than 2% of the country."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Hungary
"Hydroelectricity is not prevalent in Hungary due to unsuitable geographical conditions and civil resentment. The country's capacity of hydroelectricity was 57 MWs in 2015."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power_transfer#Microw...
> let's just use that
Also, let’s use both?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country
Hungary had the highest share of produced solar electricity of all the countries in the world 27.3%. And even with this results nuclear energy is usefull for them and plan to build new reactors. (with help from Russia, so there may be same changes in this plan)
And then you habe the whole Russian drone war thing, where concentrating so much energy production on one point maybe be a bad idea
And a closed water loop. China builds them on a desert and we cannot build them anywere in Europe due to plain stupidity.
Economics I think. Nuclear power has gone bankrupt in France already (arguably more than once) and gotten bailed out. Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price, with losses covered by the taxpayers.
This despite relying on cheap cooling from rivers. Adding more expensive cooling won't help.
We've quite recently reached mass production economies of scale for both solar panels and batteries. The implications are that the price of electricity is set to drop even more in the years to come.
(Do you know what else reduces costs? Apparently, putting a foot of graphite at the bottom of your control rods and not paying close attention to a dangerously unstable reactor during an unusual experiment. These aren't official American policy yet.)
Also, the USA's recent ban on solar electricity equipment should help make other forms more competitive.
Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.
Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.
It costed NuScale $500+ Million just to write the documents required for regulatory approval for a new reactor design.
Microsoft is spending $60 Million a year to build an LLM whose only purpose is to automate writing nuclear regulatory documents.
I don't support the Trump admin one iota, but I'm also saddened that democrats tend to be too safetyist to do an honest cost benefit evaluation of some of these insane regulations.
>Nobody from the Fukushima accident died from radiation sickness or radiation syndrome, and so far there's been no evidence of long term elevated cancer rates either.
You say these two things as if the second statement supports the first, but it doesn't.
The dangers of radiation are very well known and don't change at all based on what happened at Fukushima. If you fire a gun and miss, the gun is still dangerous.
>Meanwhile the nuclear industry has been drowning for 50+ years from egregious layers of overregulation.
Here's an account of two gruesome deaths caused by poor regulation of nuclear materials in Japan. It happened 12 years before Fukushima.
Very few other industrial accidents cause effects that have to be dealt with for decades over 1000 miles away, even across oceans.
Nuclear power really is in a league of its own when it comes to risk. I am not aware of anything that comes close. Dam accidents have killed many more people and devastated towns, but the day after that happens, the area can be reused and the risk is entirely gone. The risks of nuclear power remain for decades or even centuries.
Finding ways to deal with that risk is fine, arguing that it can be managed is fine, but pretending that the risk is exaggerated based on the accidents that have happened so far is a mistake.
The risk is things that could happen, not what has actually happened.
There are estimates that pollution from European coal power plants cause more deaths EACH year in Europe, than the total estimated deaths from Chernobyl accidents (most pessimistic estimate 4000-8000 deaths).
For example, just the Great Smog event that affected London, England, in December 1952 caused by modern estimate 10,000–12,000 deaths.
First and foremost - coal sucks. Secondly - the choice isn't between nuclear or coal.
That said, the estimates you mention are not believable. Pollution as a whole causes lots of premature deaths, but coal burned in electricity plants are a very small part of total pollution.
Especially in Europe, where most countries no longer operate coal power plants. Not even the UK.
People die from the operation & externalities of every energy source, it's just that Nuclear power has orders of magnitude fewer deaths per kilowatt-hour than the dirtier energy sources these regulations have pushed energy production towards.
I'm sure some lives would be lost if Nuclear Power faced the same regulatory costs that other energy sources do, rather than the egregious and absurd costs they face today.
But many many more lives would be saved by deregulating nuclear energy and making it more cost competitive with coal and natural gas.
Many children wouldn't contract asthma & the other respiratory illnesses they do today if nuclear energy hadn't been killed via overregulation and replaced by coal and natural gas.
Even if deregulation increased nuclear deaths per watt by two orders of magnitude (which I strongly doubt!), nuclear would still be orders of magnitude safer than the fossil fuels that have replaced it across the western world.
Why doubt it?
Chernobyl alone was very close to causing millions of deaths. The actual accident released only about 5% of the core, but had the graphite fire not been extinguished, places as far away as Scotland and Scandinavia would not be able to grow enough edible food within their borders for decades. Europe would starve. Leukemia cases would be in the millions.
The exclusion zone around Chernobyl would be hundreds of kilometers instead of 30.
If the ground water barrier had been broken - which was likely - the ground water for tens of millions of people would be poisoned for centuries.
The only reason to doubt it is that two orders of magnitude is probably not enough.
Without a source, I decided to ask chatgpt. Its assessment is that essentially every claim in this comment is false. If you think chatgpt is wrong can you explain why?
Try asking chatGPT something like:
"just a simple yes or no - Could the Chernobyl accident in theory under worst case conditions have developed to a disaster causing local food shortages in western europe and affect the water supply for millions of people in the Ukraine and neighboring countries?"
For me, I get "Yes" from ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude Opus.
You may argue that Chernobyl was a hunk of junk plant and that it can't happen anywhere else, so ask ChatGPT this as well:
"just a simple yes or no - is there any scenario where fuel stored in ponds at US nuclear plants could ever release pollution like Chernobyl?"
Yes.
It really is in a class of its own when it comes to risk.
By this logic the minuteman missile is harmless. It hasn’t killed anyone, right?
Nuclear power has the potential to cause orders of magnitude more damage than any other power plant.
Again, what has happened is irrelevant, the risk is all about what could happen.
I didn't post aggregate deaths from different power sources, I posted deaths per terawatt-hour of energy produced!
This figure includes deaths from every nuclear accident, and yet it shows getting energy from nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than getting the same energy from the fossil fuels that have replaced nuclear power in countries that have phased them out. (like germany)
Not at all, i am very familiar with this argument, but it’s flawed.
It doesn’t matter at all how many people have died so far. It is entirely irrelevant for determining the risk.
Most of the nuclear plants that make up that base rate were built when nuclear regulations were much much more lax than they are now, and yet Nuclear ends up with the safest track record out of all energy sources.
Because it only looks at what has happened, not what could happen. And what could happen is the interesting thing.
Before Chernobyl happened, the statistics didn't tell us it could happen. Before Fukushima happened, the statistics didn't tell is it could happen.
They happened anyway. The next thing that happens will similarly be completely independent from anything that happened before.
So - what happened before is irrelevant. What COULD happen is relevant.
There has actually been 1 radiation death
"NuScale spent over $500 million, with the backing of Fluor, and over 2 million labor hours to develop the information needed to prepare its DCA application. The company also submitted 14 separate Topical Reports in addition to the over 12,000 pages for its DCA application and provided more than 2 million pages of supporting information for NRC audits."
Linear no-threshold being false doesn't necessarily mean a little bit of radiation is good for you, though there is some shaky data to suggest that might be true, just that small amounts of radiation are not as proportionally bad as large amounts.
Do you have any source? I'm not french and all I can hear from the news is that France's nuclear electricity is cheap, for example:
https://thenextweb.com/news/france-energy-advantage-ai-data-...
Now I'm curious what the truth is. Are these articles just fake-news trying to ride the AI wave? (not suggesting, just asking)
French nuclear electricity is cheap because the government subsidizes it to keep it afloat. And because continental European electricity is generally expensive. It probably wouldn't survive in a free market.
There are many sources and it's of course complicated, but around 6 eurocents per kWh seems to be an accepted semi-official figure.
"The full cost of existing nuclear power calculated by the CRE amounts to respectively €60.7/MWh"
(https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/fran...)
One can also deduce that it's somewhere between the old ARENH price of 4 cents (which is known to be unsustainable) and the new price of 7 cents.
Prices for wholesale electricity in the FR region have dipped below 5 cents (monthly average) several times in recent years. (Source: Nordpool).
1. Cost overruns in construction of the new EPR reactors. The EPR is a extremely safe and as a result extremely overengineered and expensive design. The aim was to merge the French N4 design and German Konvoi design and have a standard design which would satisfy nuclear regulators in all countries. France wants now to simplify EPR and build cheaper and simpler EPR2.
2. EDF was mandated to sell large part of it's electricity production at bellow the market value. The ARENH mechanism.
"The ARENH (which in French means “regulated access to historic nuclear energy”) was created in 2011 in the context of the opening of the electricity market to competition. The law that provided a framework for this opening-up had the main objective of enabling all consumers to benefit from the competitiveness of the French nuclear fleet. Before the ARENH, EDF was the main electricity supplier, covering 95% of the French territory (the rest being covered by local distribution companies). Under the ARENH, so-called alternative suppliers (i.e. other than EDF) obtained access to a regulated price (€42/MWh) for the electricity produced by EDF’s historic nuclear fleet within a volume limit of 100 TWh per year. This is equivalent to almost a third (27.64%) of 2024 French nuclear production (361.7 TWh)."
https://hayaenergy.com/blog-end-of-french-nuclear-procuremen...
The desert one you refer to is an experimental prototype I think:
When your solar panels are hot is noon in the summertime which is when you have way more solar power than you need anyway. Most grids that have substantial solar power are getting saturated with solar power at that time and running everything else at minimum capacity.
If for the sake or discussion we simplify cooling to four options:
1: just passing river water through a heat exchanger for cooling
2: ingesting river water, using it for cooling, then passing it through a cooling tower before returning it to the river
3: pass the water output from the cooling tower directly back in the cooling loop, only ingest enough water to replace evaporation
4: fully closed loop via direct heat exchange with air
Then 4 is not very viable. But a lot of nuclear plants are stuck at 1 or 2, and each step up the ladder would allow them to operate in worse conditions. This one seems to be at version one
Heat engines are most efficient when the temperature difference between the hot and cold side is high, so you need to keep it that way to extract energy.
A nuclear power plant achieves this by converting extreme heat from a small, but very angry rock to a huge lake of slightly warmer water.
There exist reactor designs which operate at higher temperatures, thus increasing efficiency, but they're complicated as everything needs to be more heat-resistant.
Heat engines do turn heat into mechanical energy (motion).
What they don't do is do this with infinite efficiency.
In practice, Carnot engines (heat engines) tend to operate at efficiencies between about 20 to 50%, with an average close to 30% percent. This means that most thermal electrical generation produces roughly three times as much heat as it does electricity. This applies across thermal mechanisms: diesel generators, gas turbines, coal-fired steam, and nuclear-powered steam plants.
There's some room for increased efficiencies, and multi-pass systems, or systems with incorporated thermal applications (district space heat, industrial heat, food preparation) can achieve higher net efficiencies, though I believe the peak is around 60%, and that is rarely achieved.
The other parts of the generating cycle are far more efficient. Generators typically operate well above 90% efficiency (mechanical energy in to electrical energy out), and distribution typically sees about 6% losses.
But that first thermal step costs a lot. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
If you look at real-world numbers, you're generally going to see 3x the thermal output as electrical output from any thermal energy plant. Two-thirds of that thermal output is wasted, and you'd see your 2x figure there. But the useful electrical output eventually ends up as heat as well, whether in direct thermal applications, from mechanical applications, lighting, refrigeration, audio equipment, or electronics.
The (admittedly theoretical) numbers in this example show that:
<https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Megawatts_thermal>
Incidentally: this all-but-inevitably leads to an online hand-wringing about the inefficiency of energy systems when an energy flow chart (Sankey diagram) is released, showing a 2:1 "rejected energy" ratio. It turns out that that's not a measured quantity but a modeled quantity, if you read the fine print. The 2/3 loss is just physics, thermdynamics and Carnot as noted previously.
See for example the LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Labs) energy flow chart diagrams, here for 2023: <https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-12/e...>
Some of those qualifications are more legible in the fine print of the PDF: <https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2024-10/e...> (PDF).
This is true whether you use an engine, a river, or a solid-state fully electronic device. Even humans must obey this law, and indeed there has to be some air movement for us to cool down using our sweat, and interrupting or changing that air movement costs energy and therefore increases entropy somewhere.
However, hopefully, they change the plans for (stalled project) Paks 2, because that would've used the same cooling system as the first one.
True there is a small different in NPSH pump limit of hot summer water vs cold winter water, but not as much as you'd think.
Its not that the intake pipes are hanging out in the breeze above water; most pumps are designed not to cavitate at a certain input pressure (often pretty low) and I was bored enough to look it up and when the river is 134 cm below reference at this site, the pumps will be very unhappy long term if you keep sucking water in. They'll keep running, at a reduced rate, but cavitation will cause serious issues. At some sites, perhaps not this site, filtration systems (grates and stuff) on the input are designed for a certain ideal pressure and ideal flow rate, so that can also be a problem.
Thermal limits are also very arbitrary and designed to a financial limit. Most plants worldwide are limited to a delta V, I suppose there could exist an environmental law that limits to an arbitrary fixed temp. Normally if 10 gallons/sec heats up 10 degrees, then 100 gallons/sec would only heat 1 degree. But it would cost 10x as much and only be needed a couple days/year in the driest summers, so a tradeoff point, well chosen or not, was selected. Most absolute limits are utterly ridiculous like 90F. The only long term way to maintain a river at or above 90F is an air dew point of 90F and most people will be dead by then. I find it improbable the water temp is too high, everyone without air conditioning would already be dead if the dew point were substantially over 90F. You could probably "cook" a small lake or dam area with a nuclear plant into something like a giant hot tub, but not a free flowing river.
Looking at the mass media coverage, its mostly pictures and discussion of low water levels (the true cause) followed by journalist and consumer discussion about water temps, there is no meeting of the minds between the engineers and the general public and AI and journalists.
If for whatever weird reason, river levels were low in the winter, low NPSH at the pumps would shut it down just as effectively at a water temperature of 1 C. Large industrial water pumps react extremely poorly to low input pressure.
Did a double take at measuring water flow in cm per second. At least it isn’t in busses or Eiffel or something.
Its only where shortcuts have been taken with cooling that there will be issues.
BBC can't even check Wikipedia.
Then we could stop the nuclear plants when needed for cooling and maintenance
Well that's exactly what they did thanks to solar power provided by the rest of the grid, so your snark seems rather unwarranted.
The problem is we don't have enough storage to use it after dark.
they also can "burn" nuclear waste (spent fuel from water reactors)
https://www.dert.hu/hu/sajtoszoba/0/141 (in Hungarian, couldn't find an English source)