> a French "hot" day is 'only' 38-40C.

In the place I live (Brittany/west part of France), a hot day is more like 25°C.

Yes. I was referring to the heatwave in 2018 where the temperatures hit 40C in a few places in (central?) France, vs. "typical" Australia where it's 45C+.

Also Australia doesn't have anything like the number of size of major rivers that France, and continental Europe has.

Except the ones in the article, which don't use water for cooling.

Well, they use gas for the primary cooling, but my understanding is that the gas heats water -> vapor turbine -> condense water -> repeat. It is unclear to me how do you condense much water without cooling towers.. Normally lets say 40% of the thermal energy is transformed to electricity, and the rest is lost (needs to be cooled). So basically you still need to cool a lot of water, maybe 200MW worth of heated water.

But this is a conventional issue, a gas or coal generator has similar cooling requirements.

> that likely means that nuclear power stations would still be close to Australian coastal cities.

There are still unending miles of coastline in Australia that aren't peppered with big cities ;-)

Doesn't Australia have underground water? With a cursory search I can see that the Great Artesian Basin[0] could be a good source of cooling water.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Artesian_Basin

Thus people could drink the water warm directly from the nuclear powerplant.

Water is a essential resource, and in a higher level than electricity.