Here in Switzerland during some heatwaves they have to shut down nuclear plants too because the river water is too warm and adding warm water to it would kill the fish.
Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge into the river maybe mitigate this problem? One could also cycle the water from the cooling pond through the plant's cooling loop. The worse that could happen is evaporate the water from the cooling pond which is gets replaced with new water (sans fish) from the river.
The reactor absolutely is not going to care, it’s the tertiary cooling circuit cooling for the steam turbines, it will have cooked off everything downstream long before it’s an issue.
This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.
No that's never the problem, even 40°C intake is cool enough to cool a reactor, it's all just a question of returned water temperature that can be harmful to a river if too high (generally the limit in Europe is set to 30°C).
You can totally retrofit existing nuclear power plants for closed loop cooling. I'm not sure what the cost would be, though, but it might be worth doing.
Is it economically viable to run though? Natural draft towers or direct body of water cooling is used almost universally since it doesn't take any extra power. A large chunk of the powerplant's output would be running heat pump compressors to stop itself from exploding.
Fully closed loop is probably not viable. But I suspect that's not the extreme GP might have meant.
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
How do these things, whose sole purpose is to turn heat into electricity, end up with so much extra heat that it takes more energy than they produce to disperse it? Can't the excess heat in a closed loop system be captured and used to power the cooling? Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question.
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.
First of all you can't retrofit every npp with that, it's a lie. And eve; if you could, you are correct, it's financially not viable. Renewable energy is always the cheaper option by far.
Of course a 1960's design isn't adapted to current weather conditions. That doesn't mean the whole technology is useless, like so many commenters imply.
Any new build can and will include cooling adapted to hotter conditions.
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.
People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated. I feel like you are doing the same. Sometimes nuclear is a good fit, sometimes renewables is a good fit, sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit. Most of the time a mix is the best fit. It depends on what you are optimizing for and what is geographically, (geo)politically and economically possible. All these systems are then built using assumptions, sometimes those assumptions no longer make sense after a certain period of time and sometimes you just temporarily or permanently have to adapt to the changes in the environment. This is an unusual but expected scenario for the nuclear plants along the Danube.
> People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated.
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.
Disagree, it's just that the safe level is around 0.1% of current use (though I don't just mean use of fossil fuels for electricity, I mean *everything*).
The point they are making is that climate change will further push these conditions, so are we willing to build more nuclear power plants, knowing that by the time they are ready to go online this problem will be worse? Or better to invest in renewables which can be implemented today and will alleviate this problem? A mix of both with heavy majority of renewables and nuclear/fossil only to guarantee baseloads seems like the best idea to me.
Everyone is politically motivated on this subject, and that's a good thing, because this is a political decision by default, where the "political" is comprised of is, the voting citizens. We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.
I'm not filled with joy about my chav ("redneck") neighbours weighing in on nuclear vs solar and climate change and national and international energy markets and power distribution...
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
Very few things are purely technical decisions. In this case, it’s about centralized vs. distributed electricity generation (or freedom vs. dependence if you want to state it that way). One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
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.
> One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
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.
Agreed, whenever I hear someone say "we need more/less nuclear and less/more solar/wind", I hear "let's burn more fossil fuels while we uselessly split hairs".
I'm not really opposed to nuclear power politically. I just think it's a non-starter given the much higher cost, complexity of buildout and lack of reliability.
Iceland is a small area, small population outlier literally sitting on two plates rubbing up against each other and a relative excess of active volcanism and large lava fields.
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.
Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
Those places also have a huge wind resource in the form of the North Sea, for Ireland whatever the other bits of that submerged continental shelf are called, and for Poland the Baltic: https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.
Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
Storage of energy in the dimensions required for weeks with almost no wind is an unsolved problem. Right now, we can't store enough to make it through a single night without using fossil fuels. Most countries don't even have the capacity to store the energy for a single hour.
As we can store fossil fuels for weeks of demand, we can store the required energy in chemical form, no? Germany has huge natural gas storage, for ezample.
Geothermal and storage is worth investing in, investing in nuclear is not. NPPs are simply too expensive and you won't find investors unless you heavily subsidize it with tax money. Only compnies willing to invest in NPPs are those with virtually free money: the handful of AI big tech giants.
It can be, but you need water, just like for solar you need sunlight and storage and for wind power you need, well, wind. Coal and gas rely on natural resources, which can be disrupted through geopolitical tension, like Russia's gas supplies into Europe getting cut off / sanctioned.
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.
Not true at all. It's both in France and increasingly because the rivers run dry in the summer. Besides killing rivers for electricity and for "saving CO2" is as stupid as burning coal to keep HVACs running becauae the summers are getting hotter and hotter each year.
This is a technical problem with technical solutions. You can just fix things, you don't need to throw out 30% of your power generation to pay billions for climate change vagueposting.
Kind of? I'm sure you can change a nuclear power plant so it doesn't rely on river or sea water but that's not something that can be done overnight.
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.
Electricity costs by nuclear power is heavily subsidized by tax money in France, so the French are paying the higher costs anyway. Just saying. Maybe there's a technical solution involving nuclear but it's really expensive compared to the much cheaper technical solution: renewable energy.
They also constantly criticise Germany and its nuclear power plant closures, linking almost every negative news story about the country to this issue. It seems they’re completely unaware of the potential consequences of operating a nuclear power plant.
Every power source has trade offs, bud. They call solar renewable, but in fact panels have a shelf life, and take valuable finite resources and energy to manufacture. This is what climate change activists like to ignore /s
Here in Switzerland during some heatwaves they have to shut down nuclear plants too because the river water is too warm and adding warm water to it would kill the fish.
Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge into the river maybe mitigate this problem? One could also cycle the water from the cooling pond through the plant's cooling loop. The worse that could happen is evaporate the water from the cooling pond which is gets replaced with new water (sans fish) from the river.
And it's not cold enough to cool the reactor
The reactor absolutely is not going to care, it’s the tertiary cooling circuit cooling for the steam turbines, it will have cooked off everything downstream long before it’s an issue.
This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.
No that's never the problem, even 40°C intake is cool enough to cool a reactor, it's all just a question of returned water temperature that can be harmful to a river if too high (generally the limit in Europe is set to 30°C).
Absolutely wrong. A difference of a couple degrees is not going to hamper cooling a reactor that is running at many hundred degrees.
Just imagine what it would spell for your car otherwise.
You can totally retrofit existing nuclear power plants for closed loop cooling. I'm not sure what the cost would be, though, but it might be worth doing.
I've read that in the case of Paks a retrofit doesn't make sense because the entire thing is so old and needs to be rebuilt anyway.
However, hopefully, they change the plans for (stalled project) Paks 2, because that would've used the same cooling system as the first one.
Is it economically viable to run though? Natural draft towers or direct body of water cooling is used almost universally since it doesn't take any extra power. A large chunk of the powerplant's output would be running heat pump compressors to stop itself from exploding.
Fully closed loop is probably not viable. But I suspect that's not the extreme GP might have meant.
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
How do these things, whose sole purpose is to turn heat into electricity, end up with so much extra heat that it takes more energy than they produce to disperse it? Can't the excess heat in a closed loop system be captured and used to power the cooling? Sorry, maybe this is a stupid question.
The heat is spread out to a much larger volume.
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.
5. scrap 1..4 and build a gas cooled reactor instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTR-PM
First of all you can't retrofit every npp with that, it's a lie. And eve; if you could, you are correct, it's financially not viable. Renewable energy is always the cheaper option by far.
Of course a 1960's design isn't adapted to current weather conditions. That doesn't mean the whole technology is useless, like so many commenters imply.
Any new build can and will include cooling adapted to hotter conditions.
It's not matter of "can", it's a matter of "how much does it cost?" and "who pays for that?".
Precisely why the Netherlands does not have nuclear power plants. Cheap coal. Cheap oil. Cheap gas. And now cheap wind and solar.
They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.
This is happening all across Europe right now - Romania, France too.
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.
People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated. I feel like you are doing the same. Sometimes nuclear is a good fit, sometimes renewables is a good fit, sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit. Most of the time a mix is the best fit. It depends on what you are optimizing for and what is geographically, (geo)politically and economically possible. All these systems are then built using assumptions, sometimes those assumptions no longer make sense after a certain period of time and sometimes you just temporarily or permanently have to adapt to the changes in the environment. This is an unusual but expected scenario for the nuclear plants along the Danube.
> People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated.
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.
> sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit
There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.
There’s applications that we still have no alternative for though - e.g. aviation - so we’ll have to accept the burning of hydrocarbons there.
Not fossil hydrocarbons forever, of course, but synthetic kerosene might be a thing soon enough.
I don't know what you mean with "no safe level of fossil fuel use". It doesn't mean anything without contextualizing that statement.
Disagree, it's just that the safe level is around 0.1% of current use (though I don't just mean use of fossil fuels for electricity, I mean *everything*).
The point they are making is that climate change will further push these conditions, so are we willing to build more nuclear power plants, knowing that by the time they are ready to go online this problem will be worse? Or better to invest in renewables which can be implemented today and will alleviate this problem? A mix of both with heavy majority of renewables and nuclear/fossil only to guarantee baseloads seems like the best idea to me.
Everyone is politically motivated on this subject, and that's a good thing, because this is a political decision by default, where the "political" is comprised of is, the voting citizens. We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.
I'm not filled with joy about my chav ("redneck") neighbours weighing in on nuclear vs solar and climate change and national and international energy markets and power distribution...
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
Plot twist, the experts are lobbyists and they convince our politicians to start fracking and massively increase the use of "clean coal"
>and that's a good thing, because this is a political decision by default,
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?
Very few things are purely technical decisions. In this case, it’s about centralized vs. distributed electricity generation (or freedom vs. dependence if you want to state it that way). One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
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.
> One of these options makes it much easier for the billionaire class to continue extracting money out of the people.
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.
Agreed, whenever I hear someone say "we need more/less nuclear and less/more solar/wind", I hear "let's burn more fossil fuels while we uselessly split hairs".
I'm not really opposed to nuclear power politically. I just think it's a non-starter given the much higher cost, complexity of buildout and lack of reliability.
In countries with dark winters and without enough hydro power, the only reliable alternative are fossil fuels...
Iceland has no nuclear power plants.
Iceland is a small area, small population outlier literally sitting on two plates rubbing up against each other and a relative excess of active volcanism and large lava fields.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IcelandWhat works for Iceland works in few other places to the same degree (New Zealand, Yellowstone, places with thin crust and feisty caldera's).
Germany also has potential for 85% geothermal energy.
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
Countries like UK, Ireland, Germany, Danmark, Netherland, Poland also have dark winters. Solar in winter is only about a fifth of production in summer months.
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
Those places also have a huge wind resource in the form of the North Sea, for Ireland whatever the other bits of that submerged continental shelf are called, and for Poland the Baltic: https://globalwindatlas.info/en/
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
Yet there are whole weeks practically without wind in winter. And most climate models estimate that global warming reduces wind further. Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
Storage in the required dimensions is an unsolved problem.
No, it's not. Decommissioned nuclear plant infrastructure used as massive battery storage.
https://gesi-deutschland.de/en/gesi-project-presented-in-gro...
Wind + storage, geothermal.
Storage of energy in the dimensions required for weeks with almost no wind is an unsolved problem. Right now, we can't store enough to make it through a single night without using fossil fuels. Most countries don't even have the capacity to store the energy for a single hour.
As we can store fossil fuels for weeks of demand, we can store the required energy in chemical form, no? Germany has huge natural gas storage, for ezample.
If you mean hydrogen, this video explains the issues better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE
Doesn't need to be hydrogen - plenty of possible substances that could be used as storage (might not even need to be gaseous for some applications).
Geothermal and storage is worth investing in, investing in nuclear is not. NPPs are simply too expensive and you won't find investors unless you heavily subsidize it with tax money. Only compnies willing to invest in NPPs are those with virtually free money: the handful of AI big tech giants.
How can you be sure of that before even having a practical and proven solution for the required scale of storage?
>sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit.
Oh come on.
High temperatures also severely affect solar panel efficiency.
It’s the second of third year in a row that this happens.
At some point it will be the new normal.
https://telex.hu/belfold/2026/07/31/energia-krizishelyzet-ho...
It can be, but you need water, just like for solar you need sunlight and storage and for wind power you need, well, wind. Coal and gas rely on natural resources, which can be disrupted through geopolitical tension, like Russia's gas supplies into Europe getting cut off / sanctioned.
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.
Different reasons though, France has nothing to do with water level or availability. It's for environment protection.
Not true at all. It's both in France and increasingly because the rivers run dry in the summer. Besides killing rivers for electricity and for "saving CO2" is as stupid as burning coal to keep HVACs running becauae the summers are getting hotter and hotter each year.
This is a technical problem with technical solutions. You can just fix things, you don't need to throw out 30% of your power generation to pay billions for climate change vagueposting.
Kind of? I'm sure you can change a nuclear power plant so it doesn't rely on river or sea water but that's not something that can be done overnight.
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.
Electricity costs by nuclear power is heavily subsidized by tax money in France, so the French are paying the higher costs anyway. Just saying. Maybe there's a technical solution involving nuclear but it's really expensive compared to the much cheaper technical solution: renewable energy.
If only there was a power source that would excel during sunny and warm days, huh
Then we could stop the nuclear plants when needed for cooling and maintenance
> we could stop the nuclear plants when needed for cooling
Well that's exactly what they did thanks to solar power provided by the rest of the grid, so your snark seems rather unwarranted.
This is what nuclear power enthusists like to ignore when they talk about nuclear power being a solution to energy and climate change.
Worth mentioning we also had to shut down the largest block in our largest gas power plant on the exact same day due to an unrelated error.
https://www.dert.hu/hu/sajtoszoba/0/141 (in Hungarian, couldn't find an English source)
Is that a fact or are you just trying to spark a debate?
They also constantly criticise Germany and its nuclear power plant closures, linking almost every negative news story about the country to this issue. It seems they’re completely unaware of the potential consequences of operating a nuclear power plant.
Every power source has trade offs, bud. They call solar renewable, but in fact panels have a shelf life, and take valuable finite resources and energy to manufacture. This is what climate change activists like to ignore /s