There's plenty of work happening with adapting non evaporative cooling loops for data centers. Maybe that can be applied here too, even if to mitigate some of the cooling needed?

OP is correct, the people making fun of OP don't have an engineering background.

The pressure of a condenser at 90F (hot summer day) is about 1/20th of an atmosphere and ... pretty obviously the pressure of a condenser at 212F is about one atmosphere. You can't just arbitrarily decide to change the low pressure side of a turbine like that, its not going to turn out well. You could, in theory, design an entire thermal plant coolant loop to deal with the condenser running at 1 atm instead of 1/20th atm but most will not.

There are also heat flow rate issues where the higher the delta V the higher the watts. Regardless of condenser pressure issue above, if a heat exchanger can pull 1 MW across a 150 degree delta-V then if you run the cold side much warmer at only 15 degrees delta V it can only "pull" 0.1 MW of heat. Its surface area doesn't magically get bigger LOL. Remember that for every watt of electricity you get to dump around three watts of thermal heat. If you lose 9 MW of cooling power you lose 3 MW of output electrical power. You have to move more heat than non-engineers expect, to generate electricity.

Its a simplification, but for various reasons they like to design the hot side as hot as possible, so if you lose 100F of cooling you can't keep the same power output and simply run the hot side 100F hotter than normal and keep the same flow rate. Absolutely nothing good will come from overheating it like that.

You could engineer a thermal plant (thermal as in coal, nuclear, burning recyclables and biowaste, anything to make steam) that runs at an ideal hot side of 212F and let the hot side literally boil water in a pool. However, they don't make plants like that IRL and trying to force it under those conditions would turn out very bad... The first thing that comes to mind is gunk buildup and higher corrosion rates. Steel (generically speaking) corrodes in water about twice as fast per every 20C increase, so turning a cold water plant into a water boiler would to first approximation cause about a year's worth extra corrosion per month. Could be designed around, but I would not want to cowboy a nuke and just try it. Some of those parts are very expensive; even if you can safely run the plant and replace the corroded parts at a substantially accelerated rate, the cost of power due to corroding the cold side parts might make the power too expensive even if its "safe enough", making it cheaper to just shut down. Moving large amounts of water (or air) is extremely expensive, both capex and opex, so an additional 10x higher once in awhile here and there could be a lot of money...

The reactor absolutely is not going to care, it’s the tertiary cooling circuit cooling for the steam turbines, it will have cooked off everything downstream long before it’s an issue.

This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.

The principle cooling mechanism is vapourisation.

The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1]

That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin).

Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degrees, would only reduce the cooling factor by less than 2%.

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Notes:

1. Which is why live steam is so dangerous. Steam condensing will release a huge amount of thermal energy, making steam burns especially harmful.

No that's never the problem, even 40°C intake is cool enough to cool a reactor, it's all just a question of returned water temperature that can be harmful to a river if too high (generally the limit in Europe is set to 30°C).

Absolutely wrong. A difference of a couple degrees is not going to hamper cooling a reactor that is running at many hundred degrees.

Just imagine what it would spell for your car otherwise.

Fully closed loop is probably not viable. But I suspect that's not the extreme GP might have meant.

If for the sake or discussion we simplify cooling to four options:

1: just passing river water through a heat exchanger for cooling

2: ingesting river water, using it for cooling, then passing it through a cooling tower before returning it to the river

3: pass the water output from the cooling tower directly back in the cooling loop, only ingest enough water to replace evaporation

4: fully closed loop via direct heat exchange with air

Then 4 is not very viable. But a lot of nuclear plants are stuck at 1 or 2, and each step up the ladder would allow them to operate in worse conditions. This one seems to be at version one

First of all you can't retrofit every npp with that, it's a lie. And eve; if you could, you are correct, it's financially not viable. Renewable energy is always the cheaper option by far.

Precisely why the Netherlands does not have nuclear power plants. Cheap coal. Cheap oil. Cheap gas. And now cheap wind and solar.

They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.

> sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit

There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.

> People arguing for one alternative over the other are usually politically motivated.

If you can spend a Dollar only once, you might end up with renewables. People can be economically motivated too. No reason to draw politics in an already heated discussion.

The point they are making is that climate change will further push these conditions, so are we willing to build more nuclear power plants, knowing that by the time they are ready to go online this problem will be worse? Or better to invest in renewables which can be implemented today and will alleviate this problem? A mix of both with heavy majority of renewables and nuclear/fossil only to guarantee baseloads seems like the best idea to me.

Everyone is politically motivated on this subject, and that's a good thing, because this is a political decision by default, where the "political" is comprised of is, the voting citizens. We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.

Agreed, whenever I hear someone say "we need more/less nuclear and less/more solar/wind", I hear "let's burn more fossil fuels while we uselessly split hairs".

I'm not really opposed to nuclear power politically. I just think it's a non-starter given the much higher cost, complexity of buildout and lack of reliability.

>sometimes fossil fuels are a good fit.

Oh come on.

https://telex.hu/belfold/2026/07/31/energia-krizishelyzet-ho...

Kind of? I'm sure you can change a nuclear power plant so it doesn't rely on river or sea water but that's not something that can be done overnight.

Restoring river water levels can't be done through technical solutions though, they rely on the weather and we can't control that. The European river levels are largely influenced by inland rain, snowfall, and glacier forming/melting; snowfall and rain has been meagre this year, glaciers have been melting and receding for decades now.

Electricity costs by nuclear power is heavily subsidized by tax money in France, so the French are paying the higher costs anyway. Just saying. Maybe there's a technical solution involving nuclear but it's really expensive compared to the much cheaper technical solution: renewable energy.

Not true at all. It's both in France and increasingly because the rivers run dry in the summer. Besides killing rivers for electricity and for "saving CO2" is as stupid as burning coal to keep HVACs running becauae the summers are getting hotter and hotter each year.

A lot of energy crisis in Germany is due to the closure of their power plants. Just like any other infrastructure, nuclear power plants needs to be modernised over the time and Hungary didn’t do that. It’s not the fault of nuclear technology, but lack of management in Hungary’s case