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posted by janrinok on Tuesday July 26 2022, @04:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the you're-a-fool-if-you-can't-keep-cool dept.

Nuclear power plants are struggling to stay cool:

From its humble start as a glacial trickle in the Swiss Alps, the Rhône River quickly transforms into one of the world's most industrialized waterways. As it winds through the south of France toward the Mediterranean Sea, its chilly water is drawn into boilers, sucked through pipes as coolant, deviated for agriculture. Among its biggest customers is a battalion of nuclear reactors. Since the 1970s, the river and its tributaries have helped generate about a quarter of France's atomic energy.

But in recent weeks that hasn't been the case. Amidst a slow-burning heat wave that has killed hundreds and sparked intense wildfires across Western Europe, and combined with already low water levels due to drought, the Rhône's water has gotten too hot for the job. It's no longer possible to cool reactors without expelling water downstream that's so hot as to extinguish aquatic life. So a few weeks ago, Électricité de France (EDF) began powering down some reactors along the Rhône and a second major river in the south, the Garonne. That's by now a familiar story: Similar shutdowns due to drought and heat occurred in 2018 and 2019. This summer's cuts, combined with malfunctions and maintenance on other reactors, have helped reduce France's nuclear power output by nearly 50 percent.

Of all the low-carbon energy sources that will likely be necessary to fight climate change, nuclear power is usually thought of as the least perturbable. It's the reinforcement that's called in when the weather doesn't cooperate with other zero-carbon energy sources, like wind and solar. But the nuclear industry faces its own climate risks.

Problems with water—too much of it or too little—are more commonly associated with hydroelectric dams, which have struggled to maintain output in drying places like the American West. But as the Swedish historian Per Högselius puts it, much of present-day nuclear engineering is not about splitting atoms, but about managing larger-scale aquatic concerns. Nuclear technicians are known to refer to their craft as a very complicated way of boiling water, producing steam that spins turbines. But much more is usually required to keep the reactor cool. That's why so many facilities are located by the sea and along big rivers like the Rhône.

[...] Nuclear plants are also built to last well into the future, with lifespans that extend a half-century or more. Many were constructed in the 1970s and '80s—long before regulators thought to factor in climate-related threats they would eventually encounter, explains Natalie Kopytko, a researcher at the University of Leeds who has dug into nuclear regulatory frameworks to look for climate considerations. "I saw absolutely nothing about climate change, which was quite scary," she says. Where Kopytko did see the climate invoked, the plans assumed that current weather patterns would hold well into the future.


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Tuesday July 26 2022, @04:29PM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @04:29PM (#1263021)

    At Sizewell B on the English coast, they have a "loss of North Sea" as an issue on their risk register.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by SomeRandomGeek on Tuesday July 26 2022, @04:55PM (8 children)

    by SomeRandomGeek (856) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @04:55PM (#1263027)

    Reading TFS makes is sound like nuclear power is no longer viable due to climate change:

    It's no longer possible to cool reactors without expelling water downstream that's so hot as to extinguish aquatic life.

    But TFA (eventually, near the very end) explains that the problem is not with nuclear power in general, but with specific reactors that were designed with the wrong assumptions.

    Adapting the existing fleet can be difficult, says Thibault Laconde, CEO of Callendar, a Paris-based startup that advises companies on climate risk. It's not possible to move a facility that has already been built, and plants are expensive to overhaul. It might be possible to redesign pipes to reach for deeper, colder water, or add in newer heat-exchange systems that reduce the need for water, as many French plants did after the country's record-breaking 2003 heat wave. But the costs are typically large, and the gains in efficiency small, Laconde says.

    Building from scratch is easier. "The key issue is when we start building new plants, how can we take into account the impact of climate change for the full lifespan of the plant to 2080 or 2100," Laconde says, noting that France's new generation of reactors, recently announced by President Emmanuel Macron, are mostly being built by the coasts. He adds that nuclear power works just fine in hotter climates, like Spain or the United Arab Emirates, because those plants were built to withstand it. "I believe it's possible to adapt," Laconde says.

    Either way, it shows just how hard it is to do nuclear power correctly.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ilPapa on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:06PM (3 children)

      by ilPapa (2366) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:06PM (#1263029) Journal

      But TFA (eventually, near the very end) explains that the problem is not with nuclear power in general, but with specific reactors that were designed with the wrong assumptions.

      When those reactors were built, did they know the assumptions were wrong? And do we know that the current generation of reactors being designed don't also rely on wrong assumptions?

      --
      You are still welcome on my lawn.
      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Spamalope on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:20PM (2 children)

        by Spamalope (5233) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:20PM (#1263033) Homepage

        It looks like the assumption was 'there will be excess grid capacity to account for maintenance etc, so it's not worth the extra money' so money was saved, and then money was saved again by not building enough extra surge capacity.
        You seem to me implying this is a plant safety issue. It's not. It's a budget, planning, cost compromise issue affecting power reliability.

        • (Score: 2, Redundant) by crafoo on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:12PM

          by crafoo (6639) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:12PM (#1263066)

          It was a weakness that the environmental activists exploited ruthlessly, successfully.

        • (Score: 2) by ilPapa on Thursday July 28 2022, @02:04AM

          by ilPapa (2366) on Thursday July 28 2022, @02:04AM (#1263363) Journal

          It's a budget, planning, cost compromise issue affecting power reliability.

          And have all those issues now been solved by the nuclear industry?

          --
          You are still welcome on my lawn.
    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Spamalope on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:17PM (3 children)

      by Spamalope (5233) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:17PM (#1263031) Homepage

      Yep! They cheated on the cooling, and made a reactor that can't be run during a drought. Now they need to build a cooling tower or the like.

      • (Score: 2) by oumuamua on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:56PM (1 child)

        by oumuamua (8401) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @05:56PM (#1263046)

        Yes, here is one Saint-Alban with no cooling towers.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Alban_Nuclear_Power_Plant#/media/File:Centrale_Nucl%C3%A9aire_de_Saint-Alban.jpg [wikipedia.org]
        So you could solve the problem by building simple concrete structures if you wanted to.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:13PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:13PM (#1263052)

        It's not just the money, cooling towers have a visual impact on the surrounding countryside and increase political resistance to the construction of the plants.

        The fact that using river water is also cheaper than building a cooling tower makes it a double bonus, although there are issues of biofouling, and of course what we are seeing with discharge over-temp, which bring back some costs.

        My question is: how long before the river is over-temp with no (direct) industrial input whatsoever? The Rhone glacier is a sad shadow of its former self just 30 years ago.

        --
        🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 1) by Hauke on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:20PM (2 children)

    by Hauke (5186) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:20PM (#1263055)

    This would appear to be just another wake-up call. Even if we were able to eliminate fossil fuel use and excessive CO2 in the atmosphere tomorrow, we will eventually have to contend with other forms of atmospheric heating. As our need and subsequent production of energy increases, new technologies will be required to distribute waste heat.

    The laws of Thermodynamics are a harsh mistress.

    From https://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/2012/10/01/waste-heat-part-iii-climbing-kardashevs-scale/ [psu.edu]

    It is interesting to note that humanity’s energy supply has doubled in the last 30 years. At this exponentially increasing pace, we will achieve K=1 in 300 years, and have an energy supply equal to the incident sunlight on Earth in 400 years. At this point, we will have doubled the Earth’s pre-industrial mid-infrared waste heat signature. In fact, this will be a new form of global warming that has nothing to do with greenhouse gasses: just by using energy for our own needs we will significantly warm the planet with the waste heat from our computers and electric cars and phones.

    --
    TANSTAAFL
    • (Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:57PM (1 child)

      by fustakrakich (6150) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @06:57PM (#1263062) Journal

      At this exponentially increasing pace.. we will need the output of the entire galaxy [ucsd.edu] in less than 2500 years.

      --
      La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
      • (Score: 1) by Hauke on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:00PM

        by Hauke (5186) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:00PM (#1263064)

        Oh thank FSM, I can let my kids worry about it then.

        --
        TANSTAAFL
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:25PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 26 2022, @07:25PM (#1263070)

    Repeated paragraph leading with "Of all the low-carbon energy" could use a trim.

  • (Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday July 26 2022, @08:09PM

    by gnuman (5013) on Tuesday July 26 2022, @08:09PM (#1263074)

    The issue is .... "NIMBY for big cooling towers". There is some basic info here about them,

    https://nuclear.duke-energy.com/2017/07/24/blog_post-20170724 [duke-energy.com]

    but in general, most nuclear power plants don't use cooling towers because NIMBY crowd and their "spoiled views". Same people that oppose wind farms too for same reasons. But regarding nuclear, or regular, power plants, using cooling towers makes for much reduced water usage and environmental impact. It's a shame these are not listed as solutions.

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