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.
> Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge...
There are any number of methods of dealing with this. Using natural bodies of water is a lower cost (thus highly popular) method of sinking heat. Palo Verde has been operating 3 large reactors in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona since the 1970s. There is no reason in engineering or physics that a power reactor must be highly sensitive to any particular lake, river or ocean's temperature. This is strictly about money, being cheaper to rely on a big "free" heatsink, and leaving too little margin for changing conditions.
Nuclear plants can run with those hyperboloid cooling towers as the sink for waste heat. They are just a lot more expensive to build, run and maintain compared to using river water.
There's plenty of work happening with adapting non evaporative cooling loops for data centers. Maybe that can be applied here too, even if to mitigate some of the cooling needed?
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.
The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1]
That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin).
Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degrees, would only reduce the cooling factor by less than 2%.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Which is why live steam is so dangerous. Steam condensing will release a huge amount of thermal energy, making steam burns especially harmful.
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).
OP is correct, the people making fun of OP don't have an engineering background.
The pressure of a condenser at 90F (hot summer day) is about 1/20th of an atmosphere and ... pretty obviously the pressure of a condenser at 212F is about one atmosphere. You can't just arbitrarily decide to change the low pressure side of a turbine like that, its not going to turn out well. You could, in theory, design an entire thermal plant coolant loop to deal with the condenser running at 1 atm instead of 1/20th atm but most will not.
There are also heat flow rate issues where the higher the delta V the higher the watts. Regardless of condenser pressure issue above, if a heat exchanger can pull 1 MW across a 150 degree delta-V then if you run the cold side much warmer at only 15 degrees delta V it can only "pull" 0.1 MW of heat. Its surface area doesn't magically get bigger LOL. Remember that for every watt of electricity you get to dump around three watts of thermal heat. If you lose 9 MW of cooling power you lose 3 MW of output electrical power. You have to move more heat than non-engineers expect, to generate electricity.
Its a simplification, but for various reasons they like to design the hot side as hot as possible, so if you lose 100F of cooling you can't keep the same power output and simply run the hot side 100F hotter than normal and keep the same flow rate. Absolutely nothing good will come from overheating it like that.
You could engineer a thermal plant (thermal as in coal, nuclear, burning recyclables and biowaste, anything to make steam) that runs at an ideal hot side of 212F and let the hot side literally boil water in a pool. However, they don't make plants like that IRL and trying to force it under those conditions would turn out very bad... The first thing that comes to mind is gunk buildup and higher corrosion rates. Steel (generically speaking) corrodes in water about twice as fast per every 20C increase, so turning a cold water plant into a water boiler would to first approximation cause about a year's worth extra corrosion per month. Could be designed around, but I would not want to cowboy a nuke and just try it. Some of those parts are very expensive; even if you can safely run the plant and replace the corroded parts at a substantially accelerated rate, the cost of power due to corroding the cold side parts might make the power too expensive even if its "safe enough", making it cheaper to just shut down. Moving large amounts of water (or air) is extremely expensive, both capex and opex, so an additional 10x higher once in awhile here and there could be a lot of money...
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.
You're probably going to struggle to come up with a motive for that behaviour. It is much more likely that they simply aren't very thoughtful. Complex webs of deception in a public argument are certainly possible, but it generally relies on some group having a clear financial incentive to misdirect. That doesn't exist in the nuclear debate.
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
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.
I find it interesting the discussion here is entirely about water temperature whereas the shutdown is entirely about NPSH.
True there is a small different in NPSH pump limit of hot summer water vs cold winter water, but not as much as you'd think.
Its not that the intake pipes are hanging out in the breeze above water; most pumps are designed not to cavitate at a certain input pressure (often pretty low) and I was bored enough to look it up and when the river is 134 cm below reference at this site, the pumps will be very unhappy long term if you keep sucking water in. They'll keep running, at a reduced rate, but cavitation will cause serious issues. At some sites, perhaps not this site, filtration systems (grates and stuff) on the input are designed for a certain ideal pressure and ideal flow rate, so that can also be a problem.
Thermal limits are also very arbitrary and designed to a financial limit. Most plants worldwide are limited to a delta V, I suppose there could exist an environmental law that limits to an arbitrary fixed temp. Normally if 10 gallons/sec heats up 10 degrees, then 100 gallons/sec would only heat 1 degree. But it would cost 10x as much and only be needed a couple days/year in the driest summers, so a tradeoff point, well chosen or not, was selected. Most absolute limits are utterly ridiculous like 90F. The only long term way to maintain a river at or above 90F is an air dew point of 90F and most people will be dead by then. I find it improbable the water temp is too high, everyone without air conditioning would already be dead if the dew point were substantially over 90F. You could probably "cook" a small lake or dam area with a nuclear plant into something like a giant hot tub, but not a free flowing river.
Looking at the mass media coverage, its mostly pictures and discussion of low water levels (the true cause) followed by journalist and consumer discussion about water temps, there is no meeting of the minds between the engineers and the general public and AI and journalists.
If for whatever weird reason, river levels were low in the winter, low NPSH at the pumps would shut it down just as effectively at a water temperature of 1 C. Large industrial water pumps react extremely poorly to low input pressure.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I have not seen anyone arguing only nuclear to get rid of fossil fuels, what I see is people arguing that we need nuclear to supplement renewables to remove fossil fuel and the other side saying renewables and batteries(and maybe the occasional gas peaker plant or two...) or bust.
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.
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.
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.
A nuclear plant being forced offline by low river levels is a striking reminder that even low-carbon energy depends on climate-resilient infrastructure. How many plants across Europe face the same cooling-water risk?
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.
A lot of energy crisis in Germany is due to the closure of their power plants. Just like any other infrastructure, nuclear power plants needs to be modernised over the time and Hungary didn’t do that. It’s not the fault of nuclear technology, but lack of management in Hungary’s case
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
I wonder if any new hunger stones have been found since the Danube's wafer level reached this new record low.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_stone
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.
> Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge...
There are any number of methods of dealing with this. Using natural bodies of water is a lower cost (thus highly popular) method of sinking heat. Palo Verde has been operating 3 large reactors in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona since the 1970s. There is no reason in engineering or physics that a power reactor must be highly sensitive to any particular lake, river or ocean's temperature. This is strictly about money, being cheaper to rely on a big "free" heatsink, and leaving too little margin for changing conditions.
Nuclear plants can run with those hyperboloid cooling towers as the sink for waste heat. They are just a lot more expensive to build, run and maintain compared to using river water.
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There's plenty of work happening with adapting non evaporative cooling loops for data centers. Maybe that can be applied here too, even if to mitigate some of the cooling needed?
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making modern websites not 100's of megabytes heavy would go a long way
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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.
The principle cooling mechanism is vapourisation.
The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1]
That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin).
Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degrees, would only reduce the cooling factor by less than 2%.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Which is why live steam is so dangerous. Steam condensing will release a huge amount of thermal energy, making steam burns especially harmful.
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).
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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.
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OP is correct, the people making fun of OP don't have an engineering background.
The pressure of a condenser at 90F (hot summer day) is about 1/20th of an atmosphere and ... pretty obviously the pressure of a condenser at 212F is about one atmosphere. You can't just arbitrarily decide to change the low pressure side of a turbine like that, its not going to turn out well. You could, in theory, design an entire thermal plant coolant loop to deal with the condenser running at 1 atm instead of 1/20th atm but most will not.
There are also heat flow rate issues where the higher the delta V the higher the watts. Regardless of condenser pressure issue above, if a heat exchanger can pull 1 MW across a 150 degree delta-V then if you run the cold side much warmer at only 15 degrees delta V it can only "pull" 0.1 MW of heat. Its surface area doesn't magically get bigger LOL. Remember that for every watt of electricity you get to dump around three watts of thermal heat. If you lose 9 MW of cooling power you lose 3 MW of output electrical power. You have to move more heat than non-engineers expect, to generate electricity.
Its a simplification, but for various reasons they like to design the hot side as hot as possible, so if you lose 100F of cooling you can't keep the same power output and simply run the hot side 100F hotter than normal and keep the same flow rate. Absolutely nothing good will come from overheating it like that.
You could engineer a thermal plant (thermal as in coal, nuclear, burning recyclables and biowaste, anything to make steam) that runs at an ideal hot side of 212F and let the hot side literally boil water in a pool. However, they don't make plants like that IRL and trying to force it under those conditions would turn out very bad... The first thing that comes to mind is gunk buildup and higher corrosion rates. Steel (generically speaking) corrodes in water about twice as fast per every 20C increase, so turning a cold water plant into a water boiler would to first approximation cause about a year's worth extra corrosion per month. Could be designed around, but I would not want to cowboy a nuke and just try it. Some of those parts are very expensive; even if you can safely run the plant and replace the corroded parts at a substantially accelerated rate, the cost of power due to corroding the cold side parts might make the power too expensive even if its "safe enough", making it cheaper to just shut down. Moving large amounts of water (or air) is extremely expensive, both capex and opex, so an additional 10x higher once in awhile here and there could be a lot of money...
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.
There's a nuclear reaction in the sky beaming free energy to us, let's just use that
Hungary is already using that (today we were 90% carbon-free thanks to solar), the problem is what to do when it gets dark.
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The one that shut down in Romania is a CANDU, built in the 80s.
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.
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[flagged]
You're probably going to struggle to come up with a motive for that behaviour. It is much more likely that they simply aren't very thoughtful. Complex webs of deception in a public argument are certainly possible, but it generally relies on some group having a clear financial incentive to misdirect. That doesn't exist in the nuclear debate.
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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.
I believe there was also a planned much cheaper retrofit to use pumps to increase force to necessary levels but it was scrapped.
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
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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.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49107044
I find it interesting the discussion here is entirely about water temperature whereas the shutdown is entirely about NPSH.
True there is a small different in NPSH pump limit of hot summer water vs cold winter water, but not as much as you'd think.
Its not that the intake pipes are hanging out in the breeze above water; most pumps are designed not to cavitate at a certain input pressure (often pretty low) and I was bored enough to look it up and when the river is 134 cm below reference at this site, the pumps will be very unhappy long term if you keep sucking water in. They'll keep running, at a reduced rate, but cavitation will cause serious issues. At some sites, perhaps not this site, filtration systems (grates and stuff) on the input are designed for a certain ideal pressure and ideal flow rate, so that can also be a problem.
Thermal limits are also very arbitrary and designed to a financial limit. Most plants worldwide are limited to a delta V, I suppose there could exist an environmental law that limits to an arbitrary fixed temp. Normally if 10 gallons/sec heats up 10 degrees, then 100 gallons/sec would only heat 1 degree. But it would cost 10x as much and only be needed a couple days/year in the driest summers, so a tradeoff point, well chosen or not, was selected. Most absolute limits are utterly ridiculous like 90F. The only long term way to maintain a river at or above 90F is an air dew point of 90F and most people will be dead by then. I find it improbable the water temp is too high, everyone without air conditioning would already be dead if the dew point were substantially over 90F. You could probably "cook" a small lake or dam area with a nuclear plant into something like a giant hot tub, but not a free flowing river.
Looking at the mass media coverage, its mostly pictures and discussion of low water levels (the true cause) followed by journalist and consumer discussion about water temps, there is no meeting of the minds between the engineers and the general public and AI and journalists.
If for whatever weird reason, river levels were low in the winter, low NPSH at the pumps would shut it down just as effectively at a water temperature of 1 C. Large industrial water pumps react extremely poorly to low input pressure.
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.
> sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit
There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.
3 replies →
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".
1 reply →
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.
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.
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>sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit.
Oh come on.
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.
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> 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.
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I have not seen anyone arguing only nuclear to get rid of fossil fuels, what I see is people arguing that we need nuclear to supplement renewables to remove fossil fuel and the other side saying renewables and batteries(and maybe the occasional gas peaker plant or two...) or bust.
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.
High temperatures also severely affect solar panel efficiency.
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.
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.
A nuclear plant being forced offline by low river levels is a striking reminder that even low-carbon energy depends on climate-resilient infrastructure. How many plants across Europe face the same cooling-water risk?
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
Hungary actually has a ton of solar, video from today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqpTN5PZLow
The problem is we don't have enough storage to use it after dark.
> 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.
Desertification is next.
It's now.
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.
A lot of energy crisis in Germany is due to the closure of their power plants. Just like any other infrastructure, nuclear power plants needs to be modernised over the time and Hungary didn’t do that. It’s not the fault of nuclear technology, but lack of management in Hungary’s case
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
Thorium Reactors are the future, much more controllable and "fails safe-r"
they also can "burn" nuclear waste (spent fuel from water reactors)
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElulEJruhRQ