[input_sh]

I guess somewhat of a fun fact: Albania has rented(!) two floating(!) oil-powered power plants near the city of Vlöre that are there in case of emergency. The last time they were really needed was in 2022 (if I remember correctly), but these days they're not turned on any more than they need to be to make sure they're operating properly. That very expensive backup system is basically the only non-renewable source in the whole country, and most of the time it's just sitting there doing nothing.

Being powered almost entirely by hydro means that the system is highly susceptible to droughts, so then they either have to spin up those oil plants from time to time or import electricity from abroad. I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s. The country used to have its own oil power plant that it heavily relied on before that decision, which slowly produced less and less until it was shut down for good in 2007. Some images of it from 2019: https://www.oneman-onemap.com/en/2019/06/26/the-abandoned-po...

[graemep]

Sri Lanka used to rely on hydro, with oil as a backup, and has added a lot of coal.

I wonder how many other countries are increasing non-renewable output?

[donkyrf]

Sri Lanka has only one coal power plant (construction began 2006), and the later coal project was canceled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Sri_...

[graemep]

You are correct its only one but its gone from zero in 2010 to about half of what hydro produces now, and the proportion from renewables has gone down quite considerably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sri_Lank...

[donkyrf]

It is bizarre that you are citing a project that was planned in the 90s, broke ground in 2006 and ended in 2015 as a recent development.

[graemep]

I did not use the word recently, and what matters here are long term trends.

[bartvk]

Not increasing but cancelling plans on phasing out. Here in The Netherlands, an absolutely minuscule country of ~18 million people, two coal plants will remain online that previously would've been phased out.

[direwolf20]

And this is an expected problem with renewables that can be engineered around. It's unlikely the whole world has a drought at once during a calm night, so developing ways to transmit power long distances will be important.

[ambicapter]

Or just use nuclear as base load, and battery storage as much as you can.

[jdlshore]

The economics of new nuclear plants don't make sense. They take too long to build and cost too much. By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.

[AnthonyMouse]

> They take too long to build and cost too much.

The global average to build one is ~7 years. People have been saying they take too long to build as an excuse for not building them for what, two decades or more? It seems to be taking longer to not build them than to build them.

> By the time a new plant is ready, alternate sources (likely solar + battery and long-distance HVDC) will have eaten its lunch.

Neither of those have the same purpose. Solar + battery lets you generate power with solar at noon and then use it after sunset. It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January. More than a third of US energy consumption is for heating which is a terrible match for solar because the demand is nearly the exact inverse of solar's generation profile both in terms of time of day and seasonally.

HVDC is pretty overrated in general. It does nothing for the seasonal problem and it's expensive for something that only provides a significant benefit a small minority of the time, i.e. the two days out of the year when the entire local grid has a shortage but a far away one has a surplus. It's also hard to secure because it inherently spans long distances so you can't have anything like a containment building around it and you end up with an infrastructure where multiple GW of grid capacity is susceptible to accidental or purposeful disruption by any idiot with a shovel or a mylar balloon.

[jdlshore]

> It doesn't let you generate power with solar in July and then use it in January.

That’s not necessary. Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Solar panels are so cheap that you can massively overprovision for winter and still come out ahead of nuclear.

Only you don't. In latitudes that get winter, solar output is only about a quarter as much in the winter as in the summer. You often hear things like "twice as much in the warmer half of the year" to try and stuff October and March into the "colder half" and disguise how screwed you are in December and January. Worse, if you electrify heating then it's not just that solar supplies less in the winter, you also have more demand in the winter.

By this point you're not just overbuilding by a bit, you'd need five times as much or more in January as in July. "Five times as much" is already over what it costs to use nuclear. Then it gets worse, because you now have a price of zero during the summer and even the spring and fall because of the massive oversupply and lower demand, so you now have to recover the entire cost of the overbuild during the three months when you're generating the least amount of power.

Then it gets worse yet, because heating demand is higher at night and we haven't yet added the cost of storage.

[belorn]

Lets put down some Swedish numbers.

During the coldest winter month, solar energy produce (as per statistics from the solar industry in Sweden) somewhere around 3-7% of the amount produced during the warmest month. Households also consume around 2-4 times the amount of energy during the coldest month compared to the warmest month. Sweden is a country where only a small minority have air conditioning installed at home.

Those are the worst month vs the best month. Overall the winter is not that bad, but it is still pretty bad for solar. Talking with people who has had solar installed here, the general story is very similar. During periods where it do produce the market price is already exceptional low, so it isn't returning a major saving. When the market price is high, the output is low, forcing them to be connected to the grid and pay whatever the electrical company demand during the highest market peaks, as well as taxes and grid fees which themselves has increased to match the cost of high variability.

All this looks very different in countries with much warmer climates and where the major energy consumption from households are air conditioning.

[buzer]

I selected random date in July 2025. During that time Finland produced about 10GWh of solar. I selected random one from February 2025. During that Finland produced about 0.5GWh. February also actually doesn't have shortest daylight hours, mid-December situation is even worse. Christmas Eve 2024 produced about 0.05GWh.

You sure overprovision factor of 200x is still cheaper? This is when looking at the peak generation. From what I understand solar has about 30-40% capacity factor in summer. Just to panels (I'm not sure about total cost of grid-scale solar) seem to be about $300k per rated 1MW or $750k per 1MW during peak. $150M per 1MW during December. OL3 cost about 11B € for 1.44GW (assuming 90% capacity factor) or 7M € per MW.

Unless there has been some huge overnight exchange rate change 7M € seems much cheaper than $150M. Latter of course would actually be much higher when you factor in rest of the equipment, labor etc. Some numbers I found say that it's probably 5x higher.

[renaudg]

1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.

2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

[Spooky23]

The issue with them in addition to time is a huge capital expense that needs to be amortized. Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.

For commercialization, solar makes more sense as there is a much better return on capital.

If I were king, I’d do socialized power and have the government capitalize and own the nuclear plants, and bid out the operations to private entities. Government has better debt economics and doesn’t care about return in monetary means.

Even then, relatively small tweaks to tax law and some grid investment would create a solar boom at lower cost. Every Walmart parking lot and some road infrastructure should be covered with solar. Interstates could be utility and generating corridors - they aren’t because federal law makes any multimodal use very difficult.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Nobody wants to hold 30-80 year debt on giant capital projects that could be rendered obsolete.

There isn't really an "obsolete" after it comes online because things get built when expected revenue exceeds construction costs + operating costs, but once built (or close enough to completion) they continue to operate as long as revenue exceeds only operating costs because by then the construction cost is in the past. When the construction cost is large, the amount the price of electricity would have to decline to fall below operating costs is equally large. And investing in something where you expected a positive ROI and you ended up with a slightly negative ROI clearly isn't what you'd have preferred, but it isn't nearly as bad as the -100% ROI you'd get from shutting down the plant instead of selling it for slightly less than what you put in. There's a reason the US is not only continuing to operate 20th century nuclear plants but even looking to reactivate some of the ones that have already been decommissioned.

Moreover, solar has the same problem. You invest in a solar farm because you're expecting to profitably sell power at current prices, but if e.g. the AI thing turns out to be a bubble then there will be oversupply and current prices won't stick. Solar also has the added "everybody is doing it" risk. If you and everybody else add solar then the price at times when solar output is highest is going to be lowest and vice versa, i.e. if too many people invest in the same type of generation then your output gets inversely correlated with the market price, which is bad for ROI.

[adrianN]

Wind generally works well when solar output is low. That greatly reduces the amount of seasonal storage you need (although you still need some).

[DrScientist]

I think HVDC is a more important component in smoothing out demand/supply than you give it credit for, especially if you add wind into the mix.

In terms of security - one of the reasons nuclear power stations are so expensive is they have to survive a targeted plane crash etc - they are expensive high profile targets.

In the end the renewables model is a much more distributed model of generation, storage and consumption ( rather than a few massive power stations ) - so with a proper grid you could argue you would have fewer single points of failure, and increased resilence.

[mpweiher]

Nuclear power plants are not expensive per unit of power delivered.

"distributed" sounds good as long as you don't think about it too much, because that distribution does not actually buy you decorellation: all these "distributed" plants produce very much in lockstep due to external factors (day/night, weather, seasons) that are extremely correlated, much more than any set of nuclear power plants ever could be.

Intermittent renewables do not increase resilience, they massively reduce resilience. In Germany, redispatch has increased more than tenfold in order to keep the grid stable in light of the destabilizing influence of intermittents that have been introduced. Spain just suffered their blackout last year with over a hundred deaths due to this destabilization (though the PR is trying everything to deflect the blame).

[cyjackx]

How much of this is unnecessary regulatory burden, though? There probably is some margin of improvement over what the anti-nuclear lobbyists have imposed.

[Tepix]

Is it unnecessary burden? We've had major nuclear accidents despite regulations and that was before 9/11 and dron wars.

[littlestymaar]

The definition of “major accident” used in nuclear is orders of magnitude more strict than in any other industries though, which distort the picture.

The worst nuclear accident involving a nuclear plant (Chernobyl, which occurred in a country without regulation for all intent and purpose) killed less people than the food processing industry cause every year (and I'm not counting long term health effect of junk food, just contamination incidents in the processing units leading to deadly intoxications of consumers).

In countries with regulations there's been 2 “major accidents”: TMI killed no one, Fukushima killed 1 guy and injured 24, in the plant itself. In any industries that would be considered workplace safety violation, not “major accident”… And it occurred in the middle of, and because, a tsunami which killed 19000!

I'm actually happy this regulation exist because that's why there ate so little accidents, but claiming that it's still hazardous despite the regulations is preposterous.

[AnthonyMouse]

What's the fatality rate per GWh of civilian nuclear power in the US vs. other forms of power generation?

[nl]

MIT actually measured this, and the conclusion might surprise you:

> Some of the driving factors are definitely regulatory. After the Three Mile Island accident, for example, regulators “required increased documentation of safety-compliant construction practices, prompting companies to develop quality assurance programs to manage the correct use and testing of safety-related equipment and nuclear construction material.” Putting those programs in place and ensuring that documentation both added costs to the projects.

> But those were far from the only costs. They cite a worker survey that indicated that about a quarter of the unproductive labor time came because the workers were waiting for either tools or materials to become available. In a lot of other cases, construction procedures were changed in the middle of the build, leading to confusion and delays. Finally, there was the general decrease in performance noted above. All told, problems that reduced the construction efficiency contributed nearly 70 percent to the increased costs.

> By contrast, R&D-related expenses, which included both regulatory changes and things like the identification of better materials or designs, accounted for the other third of the increases. Often, a single change met several R&D goals, so assigning the full third to regulatory changes is probably an over-estimate.

> So, while safety regulations added to the costs, they were far from the primary factor. And deciding whether they were worthwhile costs would require a detailed analysis of every regulatory change in light of accidents like Three Mile Island and Fukushima.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/11/why-are-nuclear-plan...

[rtpg]

France is all-in on nuclear. Their reactors are still pretty expensive. Worth it, but expensive. Each reactor is a huge piece of infrastructure where small mistakes compound. No matter how little regulation you have reworking these giant buildings takes a lot of work, if only from the physics of it all.

If there's magic that makes em massively cheaper someone should tell France.

[mpweiher]

Actually France knows how to build them cheaper and quicker.

Their whole nuclear industry (reactors and all) cost just €228 billion. And they built 50+ reactors in just 15 years.

They know how this works, and so do we: standardize a design, build lots of them, in overlapping lots so experience accumulates and knowledge gained from earlier builds can be passed on and applied to newer builds. This also worked for Germany with the Konvois, even though only 3 got built and the same technique is now working for the Chinese, who copied it from us.

With Flamanville 3, the French did none of these things. Why not?

They weren't allowed to do so. Politically. France actually was on a long-term nuclear exit trajectory. The Mitterand government put a law in place that not just demanded reduction of the nuclear share to 50% of total electricity production, it also capped the total permitted capacity to what was installed at the time: exactly 63.2 GW.

https://www.powermag.com/france-to-slash-reliance-on-nuclear...

So they could not build any additional nuclear power plants, meaning they could only build new plants (to retain the know-how of how to build them) if they turned equivalent existing capacity off.

Which is economically idiotic, all these plants have 30-40 years or more of productive use ahead of them.

But in order to retain their industrial capacity, they did just that idiotic thing, knowing that it would be idiotic. The 2 reactors at Fessenheim were turned off to allow exactly 1 new EPR to be built at Flamanville.

Not a standardized design, a brand new design. And a design that was also troubled, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_KbQEMFRkM&t=7s

And not a lot of them, just a single one. And with a single one, obviously also no overlaps.

So that went about as well as one might expect: not at all.

Now the law has been removed, they have 14 EPR2 reactors of a new simplified design planned, with a first batch of 6 in lots of 2 each at 3 sites coming up.

[littlestymaar]

It's not the regulations, it's the financing scheme: if it's not state backed with a long investment horizon, it's very expensive because private investors expect 10% yields in the middle of a ZIRP to cover from the possible political reversal.

The Hinckley Point C EPR reactor would have produced electricity at a rate below £20/MWh instead of a planned £80/MWh if it was financed by government bonds.

[pfdietz]

It's not just political reversal risk; there's the risk of technological obsolescence. It's very much a stretch to assume a nuclear plant will remain operationally viable (in the sense of being competitive) for 40 years, never mind the 60 or 80 years sometimes mentioned, because the competition isn't standing still.

[ViewTrick1002]

”If we compare apples to oranges nuclear power is cheap”.

You can finance the competition in the same way and get similarly cheaper prices.

Hinkley Point C just got a loan at a 7% interest rate to finish the plant. That is after about all uncertainty should already have been discovered.

Now add making a profit and factor in the risk on top and you’ll end up with electricity costing $400 per MWh

[leonidasrup]

Build times and costs of long-distance HVDC is comparable to build times and costs of nuclear power plants.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-starts-construc...

[mpweiher]

Comparable to the build times an costs of badly run FOAK nuclear power plant construction projects.

[ekianjo]

> They take too long to build and cost too much

Not in China apparently

[mpweiher]

Or anywhere where you actually build them in any quantity.

France built 50+ reactors in 15 years. Their entire nuclear industry cost just €228 billion.

[cjrp]

I think that's what Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are hoping to improve? At least the time to build.

[drivebyhooting]

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish”, as my old gaffer used to say.

[SoftTalker]

But they work at night

[jcattle]

For countries that can reliably get to 99% hydro, save for some exceptional droughts, "build nuclear" is about the worst advice you can give them.

[leonidasrup]

Building dams is not without environmental costs especially in water stressed regions. Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has long been a source of tension between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt.

https://www.dw.com/en/gerd-grand-ethiopian-renaissance-dam-s...

Motuo Hydropower Station - will overtake the Three Gorges dam as the world's largest. The project has attracted criticism for its potential impact on millions of Indians and Bangladeshis living downriver, as well as the surrounding environment and local Tibetans.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gk1251w14o

[red-iron-pine]

"a source of tension" is a understatement. might have have caused a war, and still could.

[colechristensen]

You don't need battery storage if you've got hydro.

You need solar. Make hydro the backup, fill reservoirs as your reserve and sell extra energy when they're nearly full.

[tialaramex]

I can see this makes sense especially for medium term storage. A lot full of batteries is great for the next ten seconds, next ten minutes, even to some extent the next ten hours, but it surely doesn't make much sense to store ten days of electricity that way compared to just keeping the water behind a dam. We know that many of the world's large dams are capturing snow melt or other seasonal flows, running them only when solar or wind can't provide the power you need lets you make more effective use of the same resource.

[hvb2]

Except that in many cases there's people living downstream doing agriculture using that water for irrigation. There's just this tiny dispute about that in the nile delta between Egypt and Ethiopia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...

[colechristensen]

Except for very short term peaks (less than 15 minutes-ish) it doesn't make any sense at all to use hydro to charge batteries. You've got a dam, you might as well let water through later than incur the losses of a round trip to batteries and back to the grid.

[znkynz]

There are two types of hydro - run of river, and ones with large lake storage. You need the ones with large lake storage, rather that the ones with a lake to build a head.

[XorNot]

Pumped hydro storage only holds about 8-12 hours of power. To be economically viable to build you need to cycle it daily.

It uses enormous amounts of land and capital to build, and is ongoingly dangerous in a unique way. If LiFePO4 can do 4 hours at full output already, and be placed anywhere using volume manufacturing to expand, then batteries are straight up better.

Pumped hydro is an expensive dead end.

[peterashford]

In NZ we're discussing pumped hydro in Lake Onslow which will provides months of backup for the country

[hunterpayne]

Each way you move the energy costs you 50% in efficiency. Which is why pumped hydro has to have a 4x different in the price of energy in vs energy out to make it economically viable. That's why PG&E almost never uses their pumped storage. Only on days where the mid day price of power is very low does it make sense. And keep in mind that California is the ideal place for pumped storage. I seriously doubt that NZ has a 3x duck curve in its energy demand.

[colechristensen]

I'm not talking about pumped hydro.

[XorNot]

The you're talking about a geographical limited, extremely finite resource with a substantial ecological footprint.

[1718627440]

Like you wrote you can use nuclear as a base load. It's not really useful as a short-term backup for when other plants don't work. If you need batteries and excess power for backup, you might as well create the excess power without nuclear if you can.

[swiftcoder]

Nuclear doesn't really solve this particular problem - solar is already cheaper than nuclear, so no one is going to replace their entire solar capacity with nuclear. And nuclear doesn't spin up/down rapidly like natural gas, so its a lousy solution for nighttime.

[XorNot]

This is just wrong. Nuclear is perfectly fine for nighttime because nighttime is highly predictable and doesn't fluctuate very much.

My state (NSW, Australia) for example uses no less then 6 GW at all times of day. Variable load is on top of that during the day.

If we had 6GW of nuclear plants, our grid would be almost completely green and they'd run at 100% utilization.

[ViewTrick1002]

Now calculate what it costs running a nuclear plant only at night.

You’ll end up at $400 per MWh excluding transmissions costs, taxes etc.

Your state already has coal plants forced to become peakers or be decommissioned because no one wants their expensive electricity during the daytime. Let alone a horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear plant.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-10-13/australian-coal-plant...

[XorNot]

Not what I was responding to. Saying nuclear plants can't ramp for predictable night time demand is wrong.

Nuclear plants can't do instant demand response, but they can absolutely respond over windows of several hours.

[pfdietz]

Or just gradually taper off fossil fuel use until storage and renewables carry everything.

Exactly what "storage" means there is the key, especially at high latitude. Do not assume just batteries.

[direwolf20]

Nuclear takes a week to restart after a shutdown, due to xenon poisoning. It's not reliable base load.

[peterashford]

Over-provisioning with renewables is cheaper

[hunterpayne]

Which of course is why the countries that do that the most have the highest energy costs in the world. And just for fun, they usually have some of the dirtiest grids because of all the drawbacks of renewables.

[iso1631]

Get a drought and you have to shut them down, ask France.

"Base load" is just some nonsense from nuclear fans to get the cost per GWh down.

[hunterpayne]

Base load is an industry term coined by the very engineers who make the grid work. But I'm sure a random poster on an Internet forum knows more than the engineers who actually do the work.

PS France has the cleanest grid in Europe

[iso1631]

https://www.pembina.org/blog/baseload-myths-why-we-need-chan...

[Tepix]

Nuclear seems to be the worst option:

You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.

It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.

It's dangerous. For millenia. Vulnerable to terrorism. Enabler of nuclear weapons.

It takes a long time to build and bring online.

It doesn't scale down.

Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?

[AnthonyMouse]

> You can't quickly change the amount of power it generates. Which is what you need if you want to use it together with dirt cheap solar.

You always need something in the grid that can change the amount of power it generates regardless of what you use in combination with it, because the demand from the grid isn't fixed. All grids need something in the nature of storage/hydro or peaker plants.

The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different. Nuclear can generate power at night and doesn't have lower output during the peak seasonal demand period for heating. Nuclear is baseload; it doesn't make sense to have more of it than the minimum load on the grid, but no one is really proposing to. The minimum load is generally around half of the maximum load.

> It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.

If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years". If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.

> Vulnerable to terrorism.

Nuclear plants are kind of a hard target. The stuff inside them isn't any more of a biohazard than what's in a thousand other chemical/industrial plants that aren't surrounded in thick concrete.

> Enabler of nuclear weapons.

The US already has nuclear weapons and would continue to do so regardless of how much electricity is generated from what sources. The argument against building nuclear reactors in Iran is not an argument against building nuclear reactors in Ohio.

> It takes a long time to build and bring online.

Better get started then.

> It doesn't scale down.

Decent argument for not having one in your house; not a great argument for not having one in your state.

> Finally, Kasachstan is the major producer of Uranium. Yay?

The country with the largest uranium reserves is Australia. Kazakhstan is #2 and has about the same amount as Canada. Other countries with significant reserves include Russia, India, Brazil, China, Ukraine and several countries in Africa. The US has some itself and plenty of other places to source it. It can also be extracted from seawater.

The US is also in the top 4 for thorium reserves with about 70% as much as the #1 (which is India), and thorium is 3-4 times more abundant overall than uranium.

[Tepix]

> The advantage of combining solar with nuclear is that their generation profiles are different.

Nuclear generates a constant amount of power 24/7. If in the near future we generate a lot of power from photovoltaics during the day, we won't need the nuclear base load. We should switch to something that's a better fit: Batteries or perhaps gas turbines.

> > It's very expensive. In fact, noone knows how expensive it will end up being after a couple thousand of years.

> If you actually reprocess the fuel there is no "couple thousand of years".

We've had nuclear power for many decades. Ask yourself: Why isn't reprocessing being done at a scale that's sufficient to get rid of the most problematic waste?

> If you instead put it in a dry hole in the desert, you have a desert where nobody wanted to live to begin with that now has a box of hot rocks sealed in it. It's not clear how this is supposed to cost an unforeseeable amount of money.

Again, it's harder than it looks because despite billions of dollars spent all over the world, noone has managed to create a final disposal site yet.

[thangalin]

> It's dangerous. For millenia.

See https://www.jlab.org/news/releases/jefferson-lab-tapped-lead...

> Partitioning and recycling of uranium, plutonium, and minor actinide content of used nuclear fuel can dramatically reduce this number to around 300 years.

[hvb2]

The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities.

We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.

[XorNot]

But who cares? Plastic in stabilized landfill is behaving better then the oil in the ground it was manufactured from. It doesn't matter.

[tialaramex]

One reason new plastic is so cheap is that we wanted the other parts of the oil to run automobiles and planes. So if we stop doing that suddenly recycling the plastic makes more sense too...

[pstuart]

Which absolutely should be done, but having energy sovereignty is never a bad thing.

[izacus]

Having a continent-wide draught (or cold winter or other weather effect) is rather common though. Just a few years back Europe had a massive issue where draught caused both drop of hydro production and cooling for French nukes, causing energy prices to spike.

[Moldoteck]

No. Cooling french nukes was never a problem. In that period France was net exporting 14GW. Cooling in general isn't a problem - some modulation is done just to save fish.

Maybe you are confusing with 2022 when half of french fleet was shut down to check for potential pipe cracks/corrosion esp in one of their reactor designs due to poor geometry. But that's unrelated to droughts

[derriz]

Happens regularly. Last year’s heatwave caused a bunch of reactor shutdown across Switzerland and France - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

[Moldoteck]

And during that time France was net exporting 14GW to neighbors at dirt cheap prices. There's no reason to fix this. It's a nothing burger pushed by 'concerned' people

[hunterpayne]

All thermal plants have this same issue, not just nuclear. And if you lose the natural gas peakers (which are also thermal and thus has this issue), you lose your baseload renewables too. Not that it matters, renewables used for baseload make more CO2 than just using FFs. Variability is a terrible quality in an energy source.

[sehansen]

No, natural gas _peakers_ don't need water for cooling, since they don't have steam turbines like combined cycle gas plants. Cooling is only necessary in thermal plants to condense the steam on the low-pressure side of the steam turbine.

And excessive stability is also a terrible quality in an energy source. The only reason we used to put up with base-load power plants was because they were cheap; if they weren't we might as well have used peaker plants all the time.

[tialaramex]

Right, so rather than "We should have more thermal plants" what you want is a non-thermal electrical generator, and what do you know all the major renewable sources qualify, whether that's a wind turbine, hydro-electric or PV.

Do you know what else you'd get a lot of if it's so hot in the summer that you can't use lake and river water for cooling? Sunlight to run your PV. Because that's exactly why the water was heating up.

[izacus]

No, I'm not - https://www.euronews.com/2025/07/02/france-and-switzerland-s...

A lot of NPPs in France are cooled with river water and they need to be kept at low output if the rivers are too warm.

[Moldoteck]

Are you? It impacts 0.02% of annual production and during this time EDF is net exporting 14GW. Does this sound as an issue to you?

[mayama]

Problem isn't nuclear cooling per se. It's the designs of these nuclear reactors which expected to work with mild European weather. India and China have nuclear reactors working in desert without any cooling issues. Of course, as most of EU and west atrophied in building nuclear reactors in general, building new reactors or modifications won't be economical.

[Moldoteck]

it's not economical because in the same period summer prices are dirt cheap. EDF is already maxing export in that period, where do you want to squeeze some extra GW? why would you?

[psychoslave]

That said, cooling does have an effect on ecosystems. Not the worst energy plant impact on that regard, but still not like it's all environmental friendly.

And of course, there is the what to do with the waste dilemma. And at least with current French park, there is a dependence on the rarer kind of uranium.

[Moldoteck]

Waste dilemma? You either bury it (Onkalo, Cigeo, Fosmark, etc...) like any other waste that must be isolated forever (herfa neurode) or you do some recycling one way or another, or both.

Impact on environment from nuclear is minimal per UNECE. And cooling impact is minimal too, esp with towers. Uranium can be sourced from a variety of countries and enriched locally. Nuclear in general needs least amount of mining and materials per kwh

[Tepix]

Cooling for French nuclear reactors, yes. More than once since 2020. But nukes?

[1718627440]

> nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s.

Climate change was known well in the 90s, so what is your assumption, that it can't be to help lessen climate change?

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> I think it's also worth pointing out that nothing really changed because of climate change, the decision to rely on hydro was made in the 90s.

Why do you think it is worth pointing this out?

[Supermancho]

To assuage any implication that the conversion was based on that concern?

It's helpful to know that there are economics and environmental concerns outside of an existential threat, to galvanize a country's momentum.

[input_sh]

Mostly because when the title says "seven countries now generate...", it sure makes it look like there was some sort of a recent development made in response to climate change, and not something that would've been the case regardless.

[rob74]

Correct for the others, but Ethiopia was only added to this list after GERD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...) came online, which is a fairly recent development.

[Shitty-kitty]

Funny, TAP runs straight-thru Albania. They could just build a gas power station. Of course rented rigs line the pockets much better.

[Tepix]

Why would they want to do that?

[AnthonyMouse]

Building something is cheaper than renting it forever?