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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2026
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Don't build a reactor in the first place maybe. We have better ways to produce power.
Citation needed
https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-shut-down-nuclear-power-plants-amid-scorching-heatwave
You cannot cool nuclear (and by extension most other nonrenewable power plants) in the summer. With heat rising, it will only get harder.
Plus nuclear is expensive as fuck, as you can see in the other comment
The fact that they shut down because of the water outlet temp is due to policy and procedure, not because of the engineering of the plants. We have many reactors in the US that sit on the great lakes and the ocean, both of which don't suffer this problem.
Nuclear is expensive for the same reason, politics, not engineering or the science behind it.
No, you just don't have environmental regulations in the US.
The reason those plants have been shut down wasn't because they can't technically operate in the summer heat (as any thermal power plant, they do operate on a temperature difference, so warmer cooling water will lower their efficiency, though), but because the temperature of the cooling water released would be high enough to endanger the ecosystem in the body of water they draw their cooling water from.
The nuclear industry is arguably the most regulated energy industry here in the US. The fact of the matter is that energy consumption isn't going to go down any time soon, and while solar and wind are great supplements, they are very diffuse and the capacity factor is quite low, requiring more just to overcome the uncertainty in the weather.
The discharge from Turkey point in Florida creates one of the largest protected sanctuaries for crocodiles in the state. So also not something we can't handle with proper engineering.
Procedure sounds an awful lot like a technical requirement ;)
Don't worry the reactors on the shore of greater bodies of water will surely come up to temps sooner or later.
The "politics" making this stuff expensive is mainly safety precautions, which I for one would like to have in place when we're talking about a nuclear fission reaction strapped to a water boiler.
This is why we should focus on less "aggressive' forms of powe generation. Especially if they are more independent.
Well when I operated reactors for the Navy, we procedurally couldn't exceed a certain outlet temp, but I was not only mechanically possible, but occasionally required when we were operating in very warm waters ;)
Nuclear in America is expensive because we stopped building reactors for 40+ years, so all of the supply chain and expertise atrophied.
France is doing just fine power wise and doesn't rely on Russian gas to do so. One could argue their actions in North Africa to secure their uranium reserve, are equivalently bad, but that goes for the minerals required for batteries/solar panels/wind turbines, all of which require a massive amount of material to be pulled out of the ground and be processed with chemicals.
It's unlikely for the lake cooled reactors like 9 mile point to suffer from high inlet temps because the bottom of the lake is a massive heatsink which is already used by some municipalities for cheap district cooling.
I think solar and wind are good for land that is developed but underutilized, like a rooftop, but bulldozing swaths of desert, which hosts its own unique ecosystem, just to coat it in silica and metal feels counterproductive.
Nuclear power is just so energy dense that it makes little sense not to use it. It could completely eliminate oil in heavy polluting industries like shipping. As well as still being able to tie into our current power grid, something that still isn't addressed in "green circles".
I'm a former Navy Nuclear Power Program Electronics Technician Instructor. I was at Nuke School from 2000-2006. Even back then I wouldn't have agreed with you. If, and only if, Admiral Rickover was in charge of civilian nuclear power I would agree that we should use it. As is, the lowest bidder is in charge. That's just needless disasters waiting to happen.
Oh, and even if Rickover was in charge, he and I would only approve molten salt reactors, not the light water reactors that we currently use. Molten salt reactors aren't used because you cannot make nuclear weapons with them, but they also physicsally cannot meltdown. Physicsally because physics won't allow it to happen.
I mean, I agree that the civilian side could use some more discipline, but the numbers don't lie, nuclear power has killed as many people as wind turbines, which is like 3 people in the last 30 years.
I'm all for molten salt reactors, I know Terrapower is building theirs out in Wyoming, but you are thinking of Thorium, because using Uranium 235 with any Uranium 238 mixed in is always going to result in atleast some plutonium. Thorium is fantastic, we just need a supply chain and reactors for it.
Not just Thorium. Molten salt reactors can also run on all the nuclear waste that we don't have anywhere to stick the stuff, since Nevada won't allow the feds to use the Yucca Mountain storage site.
I was under the impression that the key advantage of molten salt reactors is that you don't have to use U235 or U238, hence no weapons.
Edit: nice username, lol
They would be breeder reactors then, using the fast neutron spectrum. Molten salt reactors don't necessarily mean no bomb material, its just that it's fuel is mixed into the coolant bound to salts. The upside is that they get much hotter, and are subsequently more efficient as a result. Couple that to a super critical CO2 turbine or 2 and you have a very small, extremely powerful zero carbon emissions power source.
By making smaller and easier to build in a factory, especially with the new additive manufacturing, reactors can benefit from the economy of scale. Something we didn't do building the fleet we have now. Every one is essentially custom made, which is a weird choice coming from the country that created the assembly line and the concept of economy of scale.
As for safety, new designs are eliminating the risk of meltdown with TRISO fuel and passive emergency cooling features. These aren't your grandpa's reactors.
It would be nice to close the fuel loop here in the US, but Uranium is just that cheap to pull out of the ground. It's about 4 times the cost to reprocess, but that can be a boon by just keeping it around. It means we have a known and easily accessable source of fuel that we know how to deal with just in case the uranium supply chain gets disrupted.
Fair enough, as I said I left the field two decades ago at this point. I just know that at this point, solar is so damn cheap and easy to deploy, I would still say that civvy power shouldn't be messing around with nuclear. Hell you can get 100 400-450 KW panels for $1000-$1500 these days. Even the batteries are cheap if you invest into sodium ion batteries, which is kinda the best choice for grid storage.
The scale is the problem. I'm all for solar and wind, stick them anywhere you can. It's just that based on the numbers, we need baseload power, and nuclear provides that. There is a lot of anti nuclear sentiment still left over from the 70s, but younger generations don't have that memory to be afraid of, nor should they. Nuclear power isn't a panacea, it won't solve every problem and it has its pains too, but it's certainly better than Fossil fuels, and fills the gap left by fossil fuels better than wind and solar can. It's matter of the right tool for the right job.
Would a town of 1000 need a nuclear plant? Probably not. They could get a grid scale battery and some panels to power their town. But a town of 100,000 with heavy industries like Arc furnaces, smelters, recycling facilities, data centers, etc would benefit from the massive amount of stable power that a reactor would provide.
Humanity has made advancements because we have a power surplus on average. Electricity is the currency of reality and it enables us to do the crazy shit we do, but eliminating fossil fuels is a shared goal of both the anti nuclear and pro nuclear sides.
Watch the recent video by Technology Connections on how fissile fuels are lying about green energy. Scale isn't an issue. We can literally produce 1.8 times the needed energy for the entire US just by replacing 25% of the corn we grow with solar panels. Just for reference, that 25% isn't being used as feed, human or animal, it's being fed to cars as ethanol. If we were really motivated about it, we could replace all energy production to green energy within 5 years. 10 at the outside.
I realize that nuclear doesn't produce much in the way of physical waste, but there's an awful lot of heat waste with any Rankine cycle, so I'm still not going to support nuclear at any scale. We are having some excess heat issues on Earth at the moment, if another Ice Age gets triggered we can talk, but until then, nuclear doesn't provide the benefits as cost efficient you think it does.
You won't hear any complains from me about getting rid of the asinine "green" fuel ethanol. It's just an excuse to funnel farm subsidies to monsanto.
The issue replacing all of those fields is the interconnecting wiring and the limitations of inverters with shifting loads.
You remember trying to start a pump of any meaningful size on the boat while on the diesel resulted in the shitty 100 year old governor shutting it down? Kinda the same with solar panels. When a massive load shift occurs, the resulting transient can force anything with an inverter to trip, since they take voltage from the utility side usually.
Big spinning machines with a lot of momentum smooth out that spike with their rotational interia. The SSTGs and SSMGs were that big rotating hunk of metal for the boat.
Water storage would be a safer and cheaper option. Basically build two reservoirs at different elevations. Stick a hydroelectric plant in the middle. During low demand an electric pump pumps the water back up to the high reservoir, and when demand spikes you open the spillway and turn on the hydroelectric plant. We've done this before.
Edit: oh and while I do know what you're talking about, I never actually experienced it. I joined the Navy to see the world and they said "you're going to South Carolina, and staying there!" I was born on a carrier, and toured a few while I was in, but I've never been on a boat.
Pumped hydro is alright where you can build it. We have some out here in Washington. It has the same hazards as dams, but you can float out solar panels on top to reduce evaporation.
Like I said, right tool for the right job. Southern California could benefit significantly from nuclear powered desalination. Very High Temperature gas cooled reactors can desalinate without even the need for all the Reverse osmosis infrastructure, by splitting the water into H2 and O2 directly and recombining it, doubling as green Hydrogen production.
I studied them a bit on college before joining the Navy about 10 years ago now.
I also see Navy nuke and assume submarines, but I was also an RC instructor up at NPTU ballston, so I ran into the surface nukes too. It's odd how the experiences are so vastly different despite being the same job.
Funny you should mention SoCal. I live in Imperial Beach. Nuclear is pretty much a non-starter in this area after what we've dealt with with Diablo Canyon and San Onofre. GE fucked up good with those reactors. Especially since Fukushima happened, even uttering the phrase "nuclear power" down here will get a pack of rabid locals on you.
I mean, Diablo Canyon powers like 10% of California's grid alone. I am aware of the fault line issue, but it seems a little odd to propagate a very situational problem to every reactor that could be built. I also know that area is quite wealthy, and the wealthy are really good at being NIMBYs but still want the benefits. See the high speed rail project for further details.
It's kind of our thing here in the US to try literally everything except the right answer, but still get to the right answer. I suspect anti nuclear sentiment will continue to fall the further we get from Fukushima.
Yeah NIMBYS are the rabid locals. As you said even the widely popular HSR has been delayed for a couple decades because of them.
I'm aware that DC still operates, but there's a huge contingent of people that want it offline just like San Onofre.
Yeah I remember when DCs license was up for renewal and despite all the backlash they had to approve it because there wasn't anywhere else to get that amount of power.
It's funny because California buys nuclear (and solar) power from Nevada anyway, so their choices are build nuclear power or buy it.
Cool cool, still at some point you cannot cool that shit anymore. This is true for any form of technology, to be honest, but I'd rather have a burning solar panel, than a runaway nuclear reaction.
Nuclear plants are better than coal or gas, but. They are far outperformed by solar/wind plus batteries. We haven't even begun tapping into the full potential of this form of power generation and already nuclear is not financially viable anymore. Your point with coating deserts in Solar is obviously valid, but we have soo much underutilized / stupidly utilized land, that can be filled with solar and batteries.
Yes they require minerals that need to be mined, but so does a nuclear reactor which then consumes mined and processed uranium, while in the stuff thats built into a solar cell is needed once and then generates power for free for decades.
Imo this is the way we need to go, given that its not only more environmentally friend but also sooo fucking cheap, that anything else doesn't even begin to make sense. But given the way the world works, we will build coal/gas/nuclear plants that need to be subsidized heavily and then disassembled using public funds, like we're doing in Germany.
The thing is, solar and wind are not out producing a nuclear plant. We see this expressed in a power sources capacity factor. Or what their actual output is in comparison to their theoretical output.
Solar sits at about 25% right now, meaning, if you wanted your "output" to be 1 MW, then you will need to find out how many solar panels makes that output and multiply it by 4. Then you have to consider the storage aspect, since it isn't on demand.
As a submariner and somebody that currently working on industrial uninterruptible power supplies, you are not as afraid of batteries as you should be. They are far scarier than the reactor. If it shorts to ground, there is nothing you can do to stop the reaction or subsequent fire. If our ships battery shorted to our hull, it would melt the hull of the submarine, that's how powerful these things are.
Also, as for cooling, Palo Verde NPP in Nevada is cooled by the treated waste water from Phoenix. So again, not an engineering problem, just politics.
The reason nuclear is expensive is because we make it expensive. We disincentivize long-term planning on almost every aspect of our economy, including energy. We don't require the people who built the wind turbines or solar panels to have a disposal plan in place, so they are off the hook the moment they turn their solar farm over to a utility, or privately owned power company (which shouldn't be a thing). NPP require disposal plans for all waste and all of that is held under intense scrutiny.
Not to mention that Reactors last far longer than wind turbines or solar panels, they require less material overall because of how power dense they are, and they work well with our AC grid, where solar panels need inverters or High voltage DC over long distances, which adds hidden costs and infrastructure costs if you want it to scale at all.
Renewables have the best LCOE
https://www.lazard.com/media/5tlbhyla/lazards-lcoeplus-june-2025-_vf.pdf
Renewables have the best SLCOE
https://www.csiro.au/-/media/Energy/GenCost-2025-26-Draft/GenCost2025-26ConsultDraft_20251216-FINAL.pdf
Thanks!