I think both nuclear steam and car engines are affected by high ambient temp, gas and coal engines too.

That is after all why they bring in water or air to car radiators, to cool them.

Probably only a single percent or so for a few degrees change though.

Begs the question: coul reactors use radiative air cooling? Channel the water through a huge radiator and transfer the heat to the air

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HPsquared 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The temperatures aren't high enough to do that (or air cooling) efficiently enough. Some experimental designs for high temperature operation would have that as a possibility (e.g. molten salt reactor designs). I think a Chinese research project is looking into air cooling for nuclear power in dry regions.

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masklinn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not really, a large reactor is way too power dense. An EPR reactor has a thermal output of 4.6GW. And the tertiary is cooling steam turbines so it's below boiling, you'd need something like 10 sqkm worth of surface, per reactor, with an environment cool enough that this could actually radiate.

Even using industrial air-cooling design you'd need on the order of a million sqm or two (for reference a good quality computer heatsink is about a third of a square meter worth of fins)

	▲	philipkglass 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The German THTR-300 reactor operated with air cooling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THTR-300 But it was admittedly a huge cooling system for a reactor that only produced 750 megawatts of thermal energy.