Yes - a risk for all thermal power plants, since they need a cooling loop to re-condense the steam before putting it through another cycle in the turbines.
(In general it would be physically possible to still run the plant, but regulatorily impossible because the outlet water would be too hot and people don't take kindly to boiling a river and destroying its ecosystem)
The French reactor fleet also has some kind of problem with cracks affecting the longevity. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/concerns-that-cracks...
There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity.
They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
> There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity.
> They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
> Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
> In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
> You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
this will be my go-to example of how random computer programmers on HN have such profound over-confidence about things they know nothing about that their opinions on anything other than programming are actively dangerous. it is a good reminder for everyone else who still has self-awareness, though, to doubt themselves more when talking about topics they don't know anything about.
thanks!
There's been ongoing discussion about nuclear power on HN for months now in response to the Ukraine/Russia crisis. This question of French nuclear cooling keeps coming up.
After mulling over it for a bit the French nuclear regulator has arrived at the solution that I'm advocating for here, i.e. deciding that perhaps it's not such a big deal that the cooling water is a bit over regulatory limits[1].
But I'll admit that I'm not too familiar with France's nuclear industry and regulator. Perhaps it's all run by over-confident computer programmers.
Aside from one's own expertise it's an important skill when reading the news to try to parse out whether the latest news about the sky falling is really something to be concerned about in the longer term, or just overinflated reports about easily solved implementation details.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how say having an empty pool the size of the Blue Lagoon next to a French nuclear power plant could serve as a thermal buffer on hot days. The examples of using public swimming pools adjacent to nuclear plants as thermal buffers was meant to humanize the ballpark of those numbers.
1. https://www.brusselstimes.com/256441/heat-wave-french-nuclea...
There is nothing "manufactured" about not wanting to cook natural water bodies and the flora and fauna that live in said water.
Even very minor changes can have massive effects for everything living in, and around, such waters, as they are part of a bigger ecosystem these changes will also end up affecting wildlife outside of those waters.
> They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
Did you do the math how big they would need to make these giant pools to effectively dissipate the heat? Where is the water for those giant pools supposed to come from?
> Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
From what material will that winding halfpipe be made, to have good thermal conductivity, while still having the stability to support such a massive structure and the pressurized water going trough it?
> In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
Iceland is also not exactly known for its summer heatwaves, even without those I'm pretty sure they still monitor the temperature of those rivers to make sure it doesn't pass certain thresholds.
> You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
Algea that will deprive the water of oxygen, thus killing a lot of other flora and fauna if they build up too much.
I suspect it'll come down to a "not really" in that it's using electric cooling rather than some direct thermal connection. I.e. it could use grid electricity from anywhere, it just happens to be near a nuclear plant. But perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised :)
Will be a little difficult to cool the water down to 40C when the air temperature is higher[0]
0: https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/france-meg...
It's great there are "trivial solutions" but they need to be implemented.
More problematically this lack of imagination was then used to save cost by not building cooling towers: the plants with such issues are generally those next to large rivers for which it was assumed the river flow and temperature would always be sufficient, so the expense and visibility of cooling towers could be done away with.
About nuclear reactor, the river can cool down the reactor, but fish will die. Thus the power generation is limited in summer for reactor cooled by rivers.
Frances population is far more centered in mayor hubs while in Germany the population is dispersed much more homogeneous.
In some places the ICE stops every 20km, there are too many curves, or it shares its rails with slower trains.
There is no need for high speed rails here because you can not accelerate anyway.
"Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."
Unfortunately there is no English Wikipedia page about it, but here is the German one: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_Sprinter
But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating the river water by too much.
The plant itself would be able to run totally fine with the current water temperature, but it would raise the temperature beyond what environmental regulations allow.
Instead, Europe is now burning Coal and Lignite. Which of course is much worse for the water temperature in the long run…
This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant.
An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.
Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.
And also has to keep it running now.
> Germany is the one that's closing reactors
Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
[1] : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map?utm_source=electricityma...
So I don't get how Germany would need to burn coal/gas for the french. If I look here, only 2% are imported from Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electrici...
The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices.
The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again.
Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water).
On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh.
Also:
> Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available.
Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically.
And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time.
While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume.
Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
It's not a new problem [0], it's become somewhat of a regular issue in parts of Europe during summer heatwaves [1]. As the heatwaves will become worse, and the water scarcer, this will become an even more regular issue.
France is currently affected particularly badly because a big chunk of their reactor fleet is also going trough long-overdue maintenance.
[0] https://qz.com/1348969/europes-heatwave-is-forcing-nuclear-p...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-electricity-heatwa...
Instead this was news to me:
> France is currently undergoing an energy crisis, because the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants
Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of.