this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Looks like nuclear won't save us from global warming because it can't save itself from it.
I thought that if it came to an emergency they could keep the reactors running, only the exhaust water would be too hot and river wildlife would die around the vents.
On a longer-term basis they could switch to cooling towers that use evaporative cooling. Then they don't have the rivers too hot problem.
France has already upped the maximum temperature legally allowed two or so years ago. And while short term that is a solution, the fact is that us humans need working ecosystems to survive. It's not just fishers being impacted, ecosystems are connected and we're cutting into them at record pace anyway.
Rivers are going to get a lot or do the global warming than they will do to those nuclear reactors if you leave those reactors off for long enough
So instead of running hot, the river runs dry?
Any thermal electricity plant uses an insane amount of water. For every kWh of electricity generated, about 1.5-2 kWh need to be cooled away.
A pure air cooling system is theoretically possible, but it drastically reduces the plants efficency, as the energy you can recoup at the turbine is directly dependant on the temperature difference between the hot and the cold side.
So in any way thermal plants are never going to be an option that is favourable to build now, over building renewables, except for a small degree of net stability that can be provided by already existing plants.
Just so people get the dimensions: somewhere over half(!) of French potable water is used to cool nuclear plants. The dimensions are similar when it comes to coal plants in Germany (but at least Germany plans to exit coal).
France gets a significant portion of its river water from glaciers in the Alps, e.g. that's 20% of the RhΓ΄ne water. Those glaciers will not survive the next 15 years.
By then I'm guessing many nuclear plants will have been taken offline, since they're already pretty old
Some of the power plants are also falling apart because of "stress corrosion" first considered small but relevant but as it turns out bigger than they wanted to admit at first and they have to rethink the way to repair them: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-nuclear-watchdog-says-corrosion-crack-flagged-by-edf-penly-1-reactor-2023-03-07/
They try to speed up building more power plants at a time when we know that many other power plants have needed up to 12 years more time to be built than estimated with exploding cost and all they could come up with in their newest law was to allow parking lots to be built early:
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/05/17/french-government-passes-bill-to-accelerate-the-construction-of-new-nuclear-reactors_6026936_19.html
For a comparison: "Nuclear reactor Olkiluoto 3 has gone online in Finland some 12 years behind schedule and on a massively inflated budget. The 1.6 gigawatt (GW) reactor, built by the French-led Areva-Siemens consortium, had originally been due to open in 2009."
That's 2 new reactors 12 years from now (or even 24 years from now), while their current power plants are falling apart and this is the earliest possible estimate, which will most likely not be met. So when they are built, they will not be actually adding to the power produced but just replace the oldest nuklear power plants still running.
This could be funny if it weren't such a waste of time and money while our time and money to steer us away from doom is running out.
The way things are getting hot, one might just dispense with the primary reactor housing and the fuel and leave the water circulating in the environment to then power the turbines