This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.
Just imagine what it would spell for your car otherwise.
However, hopefully, they change the plans for (stalled project) Paks 2, because that would've used the same cooling system as the first one.
If for the sake or discussion we simplify cooling to four options:
1: just passing river water through a heat exchanger for cooling
2: ingesting river water, using it for cooling, then passing it through a cooling tower before returning it to the river
3: pass the water output from the cooling tower directly back in the cooling loop, only ingest enough water to replace evaporation
4: fully closed loop via direct heat exchange with air
Then 4 is not very viable. But a lot of nuclear plants are stuck at 1 or 2, and each step up the ladder would allow them to operate in worse conditions. This one seems to be at version one
Any new build can and will include cooling adapted to hotter conditions.
They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.
First day in the comments?
Everyone knows that, or could. It doesn't matter because the point is to use it to mislead people. The extra layer of indirection causes any given rebutter have to deal with that first and once that bullshit is peeled back it's still not provable that they're lying to mislead, they could just be stupid after all.
You see this on every goddamn topic.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/07/13/france-shuts-do...
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hungarys-paks-nuclea...
We keep having folks here argue that nuclear, not renewables are the path to take to get rid of fossil fuels. I have strong doubts - it feels like that doesn't account for the sad realities of climate change.
Then we could stop the nuclear plants when needed for cooling and maintenance
Well that's exactly what they did thanks to solar power provided by the rest of the grid, so your snark seems rather unwarranted.
https://www.dert.hu/hu/sajtoszoba/0/141 (in Hungarian, couldn't find an English source)
There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.
Oh come on.
At some point it will be the new normal.
Every power source has their tradeoffs, and I don't think anyone is denying that.
What I do think is that people are making up arguments or statements that Other People have and call them out on it.
Restoring river water levels can't be done through technical solutions though, they rely on the weather and we can't control that. The European river levels are largely influenced by inland rain, snowfall, and glacier forming/melting; snowfall and rain has been meagre this year, glaciers have been melting and receding for decades now.
Not fossil hydrocarbons forever, of course, but synthetic kerosene might be a thing soon enough.
Heat engines are most efficient when the temperature difference between the hot and cold side is high, so you need to keep it that way to extract energy.
A nuclear power plant achieves this by converting extreme heat from a small, but very angry rock to a huge lake of slightly warmer water.
There exist reactor designs which operate at higher temperatures, thus increasing efficiency, but they're complicated as everything needs to be more heat-resistant.
I don't have a clue either. Don't ask for my vote on how to power a country. Take my taxes and use them to listen to experts
Why is it a good thing that everyone and their brother seeks to apply state violence to micromanage what should be a fairly arcane technical issue?
>We can't let decisions like these be taken by unelected technocrats alone.
Do you feel the same way about topics where your opinion differs substantially from the local majority?
Edit: I don’t understand how you get from „political decision“ to „state violence“. Politics are at play at all levels of civilization where actors have different goals, from your dinner table and your company Slack to democratic institutions.
I almost hesitate to ask, do you think that is the centralised or decentralised option?
And, more directly, that is a bad theory. The billionaires will make money either way. It doesn't make a lot of difference to them as a class. They'll have an inclination to the cheaper form of energy because more energy -> more economy -> more money for them.
About 85 percent of the total primary energy supply in Iceland is derived from domestically produced renewable energy sources. Use of abundant hydroelectric and geothermal power has made Iceland the world's largest electricity producer per capita.
What works for Iceland works in few other places to the same degree (New Zealand, Yellowstone, places with thin crust and feisty caldera's).
Iceland has geothermal, which is amazing, but won't help central Europe.
There are some interesting spots here but it's generally enough through the country to do it everywhere.
Munich gets quite a lot of it's energy from geothermal sources
This is important because wind season anti-correlates with PV season.
Plus, it's not like north-south power lines are beyond the wit of mankind. The US western interconnection includes both Canada and Mexico: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NERC-map-en.svg
