this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
5 points (55.8% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe πͺπΊ
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, π©πͺ ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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