Nuclear is actually a very poor fit for baseline power because of the high costs involved and the problem of it being expensive and slow to turn on or off. Kept turned off, nuclear is a massive money bleeder which is why investment companies rarely touch them.
Because solar and wind are variable, you need a baseline that’s also variable to be able to quickly compensate. The only real viable options are battery power (harder to scale), hydro (geographically limited) and unfortunately gas power plants (polluting, but cheap). Nuclear is excellent stable power, good if solar/wind are never able to reach 100% of needs, but multiple countries have now shown that that is very much within the realm of possibilities.
Biggest issue with nuclear remains cost, excessively long time to build and if there’s a drought you don’t get enough water to cool with so you need to switch it off (see Hungary and France these days to see the very expensive consequences of that).
Biggest issue with nuclear remains cost, excessively long time to build and if there’s a drought you don’t get enough water to cool with so you need to switch it off (see Hungary and France these days to see the very expensive consequences of that).
Sigh, thats not how any of that works. The plants can run fine in an environment that is much hotter than current the issue is the water they would release back into the river would be hotter than the fish like and cause lower oxygen concentrations as the water temp rises. Its an enviromental protection law and could easily be solved by just not dumping the water directly into the river and instead using it for other industrial and utility purposes till it cools. You should read into this.
Maybe you should read into it more, because what you said is blatantly wrong.
The Paks power plant in Hungary takes water from the Danube, but due to the drought the water level dropped to a mere 23cm. The suction nozzles physically can’t reach enough water. It’s an intake problem, it’s not an issue with pumping it out again or storing it until the water cools.
So in other words: when there is already a heat and probably drought problem, let’s extract even more water from the river than before?
Smart! That’s totally not going to be an environmental disaster.
Ah yes lets re-engineer the water intake to force more water through the heat ex changer rather than checks my comment above : not dumping the water directly into the river and instead using it for other industrial and utility purposes till it cools.
Nuclear is actually a very poor fit for baseline power because of the high costs involved and the problem of it being expensive and slow to turn on or off. Kept turned off, nuclear is a massive money bleeder which is why investment companies rarely touch them.
Because solar and wind are variable, you need a baseline that’s also variable to be able to quickly compensate. The only real viable options are battery power (harder to scale), hydro (geographically limited) and unfortunately gas power plants (polluting, but cheap). Nuclear is excellent stable power, good if solar/wind are never able to reach 100% of needs, but multiple countries have now shown that that is very much within the realm of possibilities.
Biggest issue with nuclear remains cost, excessively long time to build and if there’s a drought you don’t get enough water to cool with so you need to switch it off (see Hungary and France these days to see the very expensive consequences of that).
Sigh, thats not how any of that works. The plants can run fine in an environment that is much hotter than current the issue is the water they would release back into the river would be hotter than the fish like and cause lower oxygen concentrations as the water temp rises. Its an enviromental protection law and could easily be solved by just not dumping the water directly into the river and instead using it for other industrial and utility purposes till it cools. You should read into this.
Maybe you should read into it more, because what you said is blatantly wrong.
The Paks power plant in Hungary takes water from the Danube, but due to the drought the water level dropped to a mere 23cm. The suction nozzles physically can’t reach enough water. It’s an intake problem, it’s not an issue with pumping it out again or storing it until the water cools.
Here’s an article that mentions this: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0nqv05g0do
So in other words: when there is already a heat and probably drought problem, let’s extract even more water from the river than before? Smart! That’s totally not going to be an environmental disaster.
Ah yes lets re-engineer the water intake to force more water through the heat ex changer rather than checks my comment above : not dumping the water directly into the river and instead using it for other industrial and utility purposes till it cools.