Comment by izacus
15 hours ago
Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.
No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish.
Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts
Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
All thermal plants have this same issue, not just nuclear. And if you lose the natural gas peakers (which are also thermal and thus has this issue), you lose your baseload renewables too. Not that it matters, renewables used for baseload make more CO2 than just using FFs. Variability is a terrible quality in an energy source.
That said, cooling does have an effect on ecosystems. Not the worst energy plant impact on that regard, but still not like it's all environmental friendly.
And of course, there is the what to do with the waste dilemma. And at least with current French park, there is a dependence on the rarer kind of uranium.
No, I'm not - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...
A lot of NPPs in France are cooled with river water and they need to be kept at low output if the rivers are too warm.
Cooling for French nuclear reactors, yes. More than once since 2020. But nukes?