Note that warm waters is a typical strawman argument against nuclear power.
These are rare anomalies and there's dry-cooling of nuclear power plants (although it's less efficient and costs more).
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These are as rare as the week long events of low wind. Meaning that we must plan for nuclear curtailment just as we must plan for unusual wind weather: with backup generation and with storage.
Trying to brush aside legitimate engineering challenges as "not real" seems far too common among nuclear advocates. Which is my guess that their construction projects fail so often; the engineering and logistics and construction are significant challenges that are not taken seriously enough.
If the nuclear industry took engineering and problem solving as seriously as those in solar and wind, we would probably have a lot more nuclear around, a lot more successful construction projects, and nuclear that was cheap enough to build.
> Note that warm waters is a typical strawman argument against nuclear power.
A strawman is a false opposition argument set up to argue against, so, no, its not. I am not even sure what you are trying to say, but “strawman” isn’t it.
Also, most proposed new reactors a aren’t dry-cooled and the arguments, which include cost, for nuclear don’t assume that higher cost option.
Plus, it's a design parameter in a performance/cost trade-off.
It's _designed_ to not work at full power at this heat, because that was thought to be the ideal trade-off.
Maybe it still is, maybe they underestimated the occurrence of high water temperature incidents, but in any case it's a consciously designed safe state.
Sure, but such mitigation strategies mean even higher costs for nuclear power which is by far its largest problem.
It’s clearly possible to make a great deal of nuclear power safely, just not as cheaply as similarly environmentally friendly alternatives. Electric utilities prefer to spend less on battery backed Solar etc because of all the little details that aren’t obvious until you really study what’s involved.
Can future designs have the operating temp shifted in order to accommodate warmer waters?
You mean the design of the ecology around? No, not in a reasonable timespan ;)
Plus, most reactors were built in the 70s/80s when waterflow of rivers was more plentiful and less warm on average. Ironically, nuclear contributed to none of that.
"Ironically, nuclear contributed to none of that."
Only when you think building them, maintaining them, mining Uran, shipping Uran and shipping and storing the radioactive waste has no CO2 footprint.
Now sure, we still might have been better off, if we would have replaced all the coal plants with nuclear by now. But we did not and now we have to work with what we have.
Rare anomalies currently. Will they continue to be rare anomalies going forward? Also, high heat moments are the times when you likely need more power than ever...
Is it not a chicken and egg? If we don’t build waters get warmer faster from the existing primary sources of power, albeit indirectly
There are scenarios where it could be a chicken and egg. But there's also likely many scenarios where you ought to acknowledge that it's a dumbass place to build a nuclear plant because the water supply it depends on are not reliable and are expected to get worse with no regard to the plant itself. I'm not saying that's the case here. But... I would guess it's likely.
Very curious, where do we have the reliable water supply? Just move existing fleet, or build all new now with what we fail already? And then cool them with the unproblematic salty sea water, boiling the oceans that also start getting temperature problems already? Very confused..
Creating heat to turn into electricity is an outdated 19th century idea at this point.
Now that we’ve mastered the technology to turn ambient energy directly into electricity, traditional nuclear reactors are an overly complex technological dead end.
Though it seems inefficient why don't we see alternative methods take over?
We are seeing alternative methods take over....
Check out the interconnection queue for new generation where there's price competition, and you will see it completely dominated by non-thermal tech.
And the thermal tech that is there, natural gas, is partially combustion turbine driven, and without that combustion turbine component it would likely not be competitive at all. It's likely that within a decade a lot of those new natural gas CCGT assets will be completely stranded and uneconomical.
And as with any high-capital established industry, there are a lot of dinosaurs that will not move until they die off. They will be victims of creative destruction, rather than survive and pivot sooner.
I'm seeing them? (:
These are rare anomalies
Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022. The problem's been around for a while, see e.g. this article [1] from 2009 that also mentions the heatwave of 2003, where regulators had to grant special exemptions to allow discharging 30°C water into waterways, well past the 24°C limit.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110612153407/http://business.t...
> Note that partial shutdowns due to excessive heat happen regularly in France, e.g. in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
And they affect a very small number of plants and energy output. The largest disruption so far has been when French government finally got its head out of its butt and stopped a few plants for long overdue maintenance
Even before the most recent maintenance period, there were problems: In 2019, French regulators had to ask industry to cut consumption by 1.5GW to keep the grid stable as utility frequency was dropping significantly [1]. That issue comes up basically every other winter, but so far, we've avoided catastrophic results.
[1] https://www.cre.fr/actualites/RTE-fait-appel-aux-industriels...
They asked to cut consumption because of nuclear power plants or because insufficient supply of electricity?
Insufficient supply in winter times due to electric heating, mostly. Nuclear power plants are relevant insofar that they (in particular the older generation of power plants) are bad at providing energy on-demand. So while everyone worries about Germany and the issues associated with variable availability of solar and wind power, there are also documented cases where Germany had to fire up its coal plants to meet nuclear posterchild France's electricity demands.
I used to read German online magazine Telepolis regularly. They've got a writer who advocates for renewable energy, hence I used to come across related articles every now and then.
> Nuclear power plants are relevant insofar that they (in particular the older generation of power plants) are bad at providing energy on-demand.
This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.
During winter nuclear power plants already work at near 100% capacity. They can't give you more than 100%, other sources cannot meet demand, and somehow you blame nuclear.
> This is, of course, an easily verifiable lie.
It's not a lie, you just failed to get the point:
Assume, for the sake of the argument, that you have a power plant that always works at 100% capacity and cannot be shut off. To provide energy security, you would have to budget capacity to account for highest possible demand. But if you do so, you will over-produce electricity most of the time, and there are economic incentives against doing so.
> somehow you blame nuclear
I don't blame nuclear energy production, I blame an over-reliance on nuclear energy production.
The largest US nuclear plant is Palo Verde just west of Phoenix were temperature can get crazy hot and nowhere near a body of water. It’s running with waste water of the city. So I’m pretty sure in a country way more humid like France you can have a backup plan, like building larger condenser towers.
Sure. It's not so much a physical limitation, but a failure of policy.
To what extent is it a strawman when it comes to nuclear power generation?
These rare anomalies could happen more often because of climate change and the existence of dry-cooling power plants doesn't help if yout already existing isn't
Never heard of dry-cooling nuclear reactors, how much less efficient, also less safe? Does a prototype even exist? Some reference please.
Will we call the rare anomalies rare until it they are the norm? And then?