On 28/08/2019 07:34, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Tue, 27 Aug 2019 14:43:02 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Tuesday, 27 August 2019 02:16:10 UTC+1, Rod Speed wrote:
David P wrote
severe droughts have led to the shutting down
of reactors as the surrounding waters become
too warm to provide the vital cooling function.

Trivially avoidable by having the nukes cooled by sea water.

Ie engineers designed the heat exchange system to only cope with so much, and these conditions were exceeded. That's engineering for you, it happens. Future designs will learn from that & be more able.

Saying it's the result of climate change borders on laughable.

It was my impression that they were run on reduced power (not shut
down) because environmental regulations ruled that the river water
temperature should not be allowed to rise beyond a certain value, to
protect the fish and other creatures that lived in it, rather than
insufficient capacity of the cooling system to cope. If the river flow
was low, due to drought, then the same amount of waste heat being
dissipated by the cooling system would raise the river temperature
over that limit value.

Exactly so.

France has a lot of 'interior' where no sea is available.

The nukes are throttled back in summer, which is fine. surplus of
capacity in summer





--
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have
guns, why should we let them have ideas?

Josef Stalin