Call me cynical but I do think an outlet called oil price dot com may not be entirely impartial when they report on this. That is not to say what they wrote here is wrong; I wouldn’t know. It just has a touch of pot and kettle about it.
Since the power networks are linked and European countries import and export electricity, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that next to renewables power from gas stepped in to fill the nuclear gap. And the price for natural gas is often linked to a certain other commodity price.
Several nuclear reactors had to shut down because there was not enough water for cooling.
Reactors in France are shut down not because of lack of water, but as an ecological precaution because the effects of warming up rivers even more is not well known (even if it seems to have not much more impact than the heat wave in itself )
And even with these reactors shut down, France still exported 5-10GW of power at the time.
So yeah let’s not propagate the anti-nuclear propaganda trying to paint the situation as “nuclear can’t handle global warming and will cause blackouts”, when in reality it’s just us having so much decarbonated electricity that we can afford to produce less as an ecological precaution.
Well, if we’re cherrypicking, Paks plant in Hungary has reduced to 10% capacity because the Danube fell too low to get water in. The plant supplied half of the country’s energy. The military has dynamited the river bed to increase flow to the plant. 145,000 cubic metres of rock is arriving from this evening in a bid to alter the river flow, and two barges may be scuttled on Friday.
But it is a consistent problem, because the hotter water is the less oxygen it holds by a lot, so fish frequently die if the water gets too hot.
In France, sure. In Hungary the water level actually dropped below the intake valves so they physically couldn’t pump enough water into the reactor.
From euronews:
an environmental protection requirement to avoid discharging excessively hot water into rivers already warming because of the heatwave
That twists it to “protecting nature raises your electricity bill” where it’s just that that the plant, when built, did not take into account water levels could drop this low. As if they assumed climate change wouldn’t be this influential or something.
It’s not twisting anything, it’s verifiable fact. Water temperatures in rivers in the current heatwaves we’ve had in Europe that are more than 10 degrees celsius above mean average temperatures has meant that the temperatures in rivers and lakes are already reaching levels that are causing severe issues to the wildlife and plants within them. Dumping millions of litres of hot water from power stations into them just makes a critical situation worse.
It is not twisting it. It is exactly like that. The problem is not the water level. The nuclear power plant can work in these condition. The hot water discharge would raise the temperature too much on top of existing higher temperatures in the river for the flora and fauna to survive. We are doing this to protect nature. There is no twisting here.
To my knowledge, but I did not look this up, these constraints were known at design time. I don’t recall these changing. Hence the statement may be true, but pointing at the known constraint after the fact shifts the blame to nature conservation rather than infrastructure and climate change. This at a time where climate change focus is of utmost importance.
Hence, albeit factually correct, it is disingenuous to give it the focus.
If these constraints were added in the past 10 years then that could be considered different depending on the reasons for the change.
What has changed are the water levels and base temperatures. Our environment has changed and the infrastructure has not been adapted to it. Luckily we have other tools for generating electric power ready to be rolled out.
We are talking 1970. Scientists lacked the numerical models and the computing capacity to make these predictions. To accuse civilian engineers to not take into consideration recent hot topics of environmental science that lacked, at the time, rigorous models is disingenuous.
The design lifespan for those reactors was 40 years. We are extending those past lifetime because it is cheaper to do even if we need to shut them down more and more often.
The infrastructure have not adapted because it is cheaper to build a new power plant or to shutdown existing one occasionally then to adapt old existing design.
I do not understand what is your point here.
I agree with that to some extent. It was probably not the engineers’ task, but as I’ve read in the past, our models of the seventies were not that far off. They did not plan for it probably because they were asked not to, or perhaps they (like many others) did not want to believe in the doomsday predictions, or perhaps they (like many others) believed it would be solved by science by now. The warnings were there though, we chose to ignore what was coming at us if we did not change our ways.
My point is that by stating the reactor could work, you imply that there’s a trivial solution: stop protecting nature to have nuclear electric energy in France. You could state explicitly that we should or should not. By leaving it open it feels to me like we’re pretending nuclear is ready for the climate change ahead of us if only we could get way with that stupid nature. An argument could be had I suppose.
As a side-note: It did make me wonder if you could work with complete evaporation. Not dumping any water back. That would also be horrible for nature but I don’t know if anything in the system has to run at less than 100C.
Thermal power plants have the same restrictions when it comes to cooling. They are hit just as hard.
I believe there is something of the kind, that the price of electricity just matches the highest production price, since you cannot differentiate which electricity comes from where in a grid. Si even if you have cheap renewable/nuclear energy, costs may rise if you have to use ‘traditionnal’ power plants. Im not sure of the details, i just heard the mechanism being explained once or twice.
It is called marginal pricing the wholesale electricity market uses which determines the spot price of electricity. It is based on the most expensive form of generation, typically gas, needed to meet demand regardless of how little is required. So here in the UK if 99% is generated by low cost renewable and only 1% is generated by expensive gas it all gets priced at the rate for the gas. Absolute madness when you live in a nation like the UK where all electricity retailers are getting their power from one national network operator.
If the water is still warm, can’t they extract that energy somehow?
Thermoelectric is hilariously inefficient, so you can’t really use it for electricity production, once it’s served its purpose of turning the turbines.
What you can do with spill heat is to reuse it in district heating networks to provide hot water. And heating, of course, but there’s no use for that during heat waves
Heat is the worst form of energy. It’s super hard to extract energy at all from it. Basically, you can’t extract energy from heat itself, you can only extract it through the process of heating something up. So you always need a cold component that gets heated up and a hot component that does the heating.
Without a cold component, you can’t extract energy from heat.
Not if they don’t already have the infrastructure in place. Remember that these power stations were built 30 odd years ago. No one expected climate change to get this bad this quickly even in the most pessimistic of models.
This would work in winter and there are already heat pumps that use river water. Those are utility scale installations, though, so they don’t just pop up overnight. And they’ll be pretty useless in summer, when the air is hotter than the water.
Nuclear energy isn’t a solution to anything. Solar and Windmills are much better, there really isn’t any argument for nuclear energy (if you want to teach me a better one, why don’t we start by building a nuclear repository in your region?).
“why don’t we start by building a nuclear repository in your region” really isn’t the own you think it is? Like sure? I genuinely do not think that would be a problem for my life at all
Your personal comfort isn’t consent, a repository binds an entire region for a timescale (100,000 years) that outlasts every democratic institution we have. Nobody alive can consent on behalf of the thousands of generations that timeline covers. The reason siting takes decades everywhere is precisely that “I personally wouldn’t mind” isn’t how legitimate consent works. You need actual buy-in from residents, municipalities, parliaments, not one guy’s shrug.
So why the fuck did you bring that up as your point then?
Nuclear energy is the most energy dense form of power generation on the planet, and nothing else comes close. When fuel rods are “expended” taken out of a reactor after their 2 year cycle for the first time ~95% of the energy still remains in the rod. Chemical reprocessing can filter out the decay products and put the fissionable or fertile materials back into production.
Additionally, nuclear is one of the safest sources of power production on the planet. Disasters have occurred at places like Chornobyl, fukushima, and three mile island. And there’s a reason we don’t build reactors like that anymore. Every time an incident has occurred the rules for this power generation have been updated to ensure that such an incident can’t happen again.
As far as building a nuclear repository in my region? We are. We are are standing in the beginning of the next golden age of nuclear power.
While wind and solar are good to have for redundancy and diversity of power generation, they cannot change their generation ability easily at any point of day, during any weather conditions, regardless of external factors.
Nuclear’s global share fell from 17.5% (1996) to ~9% (2024) and is flat outside China. That’s not a golden age. Of the 63 reactors under construction worldwide, all but four are backed by China or Russia. No country has an operating repository yet, not even Finland. France had more than half its fleet down in 2022 from corrosion, and had to throttle reactors again this year from heat. And unlike renewables — ~40% of German renewable capacity is literally owned by private citizens and farmers through energy co-ops — nuclear requires the kind of capital and secrecy that only states or utilities can provide. 19 EU reactors are still fully fuel-dependent on Russia’s Rosatom right now, which bundles its reactor exports with political influence programs. That’s not a coincidence, it’s structural.
Nuclear fission is the current cleanest way of generating on demand power, assuming you aren’t able to build a water based powerplant. If done correctly they can be built in such a way that they inherently fail in a state that renders them inert. I’m not all too familiar with the process, but that last time I looked, with proper refining of spent fuel, the waste was 10% or less than the original fissionable material.
The average reactor running today is 32 years old - “inherently fail-safe” describes future designs, not the existing fleet. On reprocessing: Germany has banned it by law since 2005, so that “10%” argument doesn’t even apply to the case you’re probably picturing. And reprocessing plants like La Hague, which separate weapons-grade plutonium, are exactly the kind of high-security, low-transparency facilities that make nuclear a political problem, not just a technical one.
Que? Heat waves don’t trim nuclear output
As this comment (https://feddit.org/comment/14419698) says
In France, Hungary, Romania Nuclear Plants have shut down due to concern over ecological impact or not enough water to cool the plant
Also the jellyfish situation for one of the plants as well.
They do. What happens is that either water levels drop sufficiently enough or the temperature of the water in the rivers that they’re drawing from rises to a point that it cannot provide sufficient cooling so they have to turn down or turn off the reactor.
