[mchem]

From memory, we enjoyed a heatwave in Jul - August ‘21 in UK/France.

Beyond demand pressures on the interconnected European market due to secondary effects of the heat and the COVID rebound, it’s likely nuclear output was reduced as the cooling potential of water sources was reduced - I vaguely remember articles on this before the cracking issue stole ‘headlines’.

Reduced nuclear output in France results in increased demand for less cost efficient national or more-expensive-than-nuclear international (interconnected) generators.

[orangepurple]

Why would there be a sudden reduced cooling potential of water sources for the nuclear plants? I have never heard of such a thing anywhere.

[seec]

They are misrepresenting reality. The cooling potential was fine, it is just that France has regulation for how hot the water is allowed to be at the release in order to not raise average stream temperature too much.

It is mostly to protect the ecological system, nothing to do with any technical problem. They calculated that after going through the cooling process the water would be too hot and thus, they didn't restart the reactors.

Because that is second important part, this alone wouldn't be news worthy because reactors could be running in other parts of France and electricity shifted around. But the thing is that after a lack of care/maintenance for its nuclear industry (due to political powers and belief that we could do without in the long term) after the lockdowns of COVID, France had a lot of reactors that needed repairs/inspections/maintenance; all kind of compliance for regulatory approval. So, the heatwave problem was doubling down on an already reduced capacity but most of the time it shouldn't be a problem at all...

[abenga]

It was all over the news at the time, e.g. [0]

0: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/frances-edf-takes-13...