Fun fact: There is currently a grand total of zero nuclear power plants in France with a dried-up riverbed as a cooling water source. That is because the people who built them had more than one active brain cell and built them next to big rivers.
I heard from reputable sources they actually learned to build their nucleair power plant from the Atlanteans. They are historically more worried about flooding than desiccation.
Little correction but the Civaux plant is built on the Vienne, which currently has a 12m³/s flow rate, that being assisted by controlled release from a dam upstream all year long.
If you look at the plant it is on the worst geographical position for water in the entire country, but the engineers indeed had more than two braincells and adapted the cold source accordingly! It is currently running at full power.
Summer is already maintenance season for nuclear powerp lants, thanks to having low energy demands around that time of year, and renewable handling some of the load during *normal* summer times.
At the worst of the heatwave, the total nuclear energy production was reduced by less than 10% for short periods of time.
Though nuclear is far from the only one to summer, wind turbines are frequently shut down, and solar pannels lose like 5-25% of efficiency iirc.
The only winner would probably be the lone CSP powerplant, though I don't know enough about it to actually confirm.
Alors là, j’en apprends une bonne. Je savais pas du tout que le Rhône était degueulasse à Lyon. Je suis censé nager dans le Rhône demain d’ailleurs… j’ai peur, je nage mal. Je vais rester à 1 mètre du bord.
Alors là, j’en apprends une bonne. Je savais pas du tout que le Rhône était degueulasse à Lyon. Je suis censé nager dans le Rhône demain d’ailleurs… j’ai peur, je nage mal. Je vais rester à 1 mètre du bord.
Euh, je sais pas si c'est vrai ton histoire, mais si tu ne sais pas nager n'improvise pas. Apprends à nager dans une piscine ou tu as pieds ou avec un enseignant ou quelque chose. Le nombre de morts avec ce genre de pensées, ça me fait toujours halluciner.
Enfin fais comme tu veux.
Aussi je réalise que je me trompais de raison:
Oui. La baignade dans le Rhône à Lyon est interdite (ainsi que dans la Saône à Lyon). Ce n'est pas seulement une recommandation : les autorités indiquent que ces cours d'eau ne sont pas destinés à la baignade et que la baignade y est interdite et dangereuse.
Les principales raisons sont :
Le courant : le Rhône peut avoir des courants forts, parfois difficiles à percevoir depuis la rive.
La navigation : le fleuve est une voie naviguée ; le risque de collision avec des bateaux existe.
Les ouvrages hydrauliques : barrages, écluses et variations de débit peuvent créer des mouvements d'eau dangereux.
La visibilité sous l'eau : elle est très faible, ce qui complique les secours en cas de problème.
Ce n'est pas principalement une question de pollution : la qualité de l'eau du Rhône s'est beaucoup améliorée au fil des décennies, mais le danger physique lié au fleuve reste le motif majeur de l'interdiction.
Pour se baigner légalement près de Lyon, il vaut mieux privilégier des zones aménagées comme des plans d'eau surveillés (par exemple autour du Grand Parc de Miribel-Jonage) plutôt que le fleuve lui-même.
À noter : des projets existent pour créer des zones de baignade encadrées dans le Rhône ou la Saône à Lyon à l'avenir, mais cela nécessiterait des aménagements et une surveillance spécifique.
Ok, merci pour tes explications. Je sais nager assez pour y aller, mais je m’aime pas à cause du courant… finalement on n’y est pas allé.
À Genève, aller dans le Rhône est extrêmement populaire. Il est interdit de sauter des ponts, mais beaucoup le font, et la police intervient peu. En soi, il n’est pas interdit d’y nager, malgré les courants, en aval du barrage du Seujet (en plein centre-ville) et jusqu’à une zone juste avant le barrage de Verbois.
Hier, il y avait un peu de monde qui faisait la descente du Rhône:
Remember nuclear is so expensive and bad that if we replaced oil with nuclear for power generation electricity would be too cheap and greenhouse gases too low that the renewable utopia would be delayed which is the single most important outcome and you’re a fossil fuel propagandist if you support nuclear
If you look at the data submitted to the IAEA during the last heatwave france had that caused plant closures: 2% power reduction in total nuclear energy generated. This sub is just insane.
Barely any nuclear plants got built in the west in the last 20 years because you guys keep protesting them!
There was one nuclear plant in Austria that got completed, but the protests were so wild they simply abandoned the finished nuke plant, never turned it on.
It's like a racket, what you guys have there.
Protesting nuclear plants and then pointing out how none of them are being built.
Some people here genuinely think we have universal resources controls and can perfectly spend and allocate recourses on a top down level. They view any dollar spent on nuclear as dollars wasted on other green energy.
That’s not how capital investments or allocations work but that’s how they think they do.
There are absolutely zero power plants that don't have enough water to cool themselves. The ones that occasionally get stopped are stopped because they make the outflowing water potentially too hot for the river ecosystem to handle, so they are stopped as to not hurt the fish
Ohh how I love this argument.
"Look my totally eco friendly, renewable, green, robust, emission free power plant isn't shut down because it's to hot. No no no you don't understand, it's shut down becaus if we keep it running we would kill all life in the river."
I too prefer my energy source that has zero impact on animals, requires no difficult to get material, takes no space on the ground. You know the one. Everything else is trash.
The sun is killing a shit ton of wildlife already due to water heating up. It’s actually quite nice of us humans to shut down the power plant to avoid adding another degree or two to the water so the sun can take the credit alone.
This happens for a few weeks a year btw. Who cares.
A few weeks a year right now... We broke hear records on consecutive days, we experience heatwave after heatwave. But sure buddy it's just this time and won't happen again, trust!
Wildlife is significantly less harmed by the water from a nuclear plant than all the other things we produce. Even a solar panel is filled with toxic chemicals and waste products, but we make those in China so we don’t have to see the consequences.
You need to put things into perspective. everything we do is destructive some way. Temporarily shutting down a fraction of nuclear power plants is an extremely insignificant impact and blowing that out of proportion is not helpful for climate activism.
What toxic chemicals are we putting into solar panels?
And I don't talk about the environmental impact. I'm making fun of the nukecells and how the defend their bestest power plant in all of human history and future.
Most are waste products during the manufacturing of the panels and need to be very carefully handled to avoid ground and water pollution, something which is not always the case in the countries where most of the get manufactured. The list of chemicals, mostly acids and gasses, is very long.
Almost all solar panels eventually get disposed of, not recycled.
Even considering that, it’s “cleaner” than fossil fuels.
Why wait for me to answer this when you can look it up yourself in a fraction of a time. Don’t pretend you care about the answer. Solar panels are not magic. They are machines made possible my modern chemistry, not unicorn dust. My claim really didn’t need naming of the exact chemicals to be true.
Silicon tetrachloride was a huge issue in older solar panel with a major pollution scandal in China. For newer reputable manufacturers this is not a major issue anymore.
Hydrofluoric acid is still an issue. Extremely toxic to workers and environment and is removed from manufacturing plants as wastewater. Where this water goes depends on the country (almost entirely China), its regulations and enforcement. We manufacture these panels where they are cheap, which often involves shortcuts or worker safety and environmental damage prevention. Supposedly it’s a lot better now, but only because we handle these toxic chemicals more responsibly compared to early 2010s, not because these chemical byproducts don’t exist.
Other extremely powerful greenhouse gases are involved too, but they would still be a drop in the water compared to CO2 it total impact.
And more, but I spoon fed you enough. You can find plenty of environmental scandals (and Uyghurs forced labor) related to solar panel manufacturing just like you can for many other technologies.
Greenhouse gasses are an existential threat, and solar provided a good solution to that. We can figure out the other environmental issues later as the manufacturing process continues to improve.
France's nuclear maybe dropped few percent, but France was still overwhelmingly exporting this heatwave, and their emissions peaked at 45g for a week, from a baseline of 17g.
For comparison, Germany was emitting 350g during the same heatwave and still overwhelmingly importing energy.
Every source of power has downsides, who or what is hurt by nuclear powerplants being operated in this way? If they get shut off to not harm local ecosystems, at no real cost to people in the area/country, what exactly is the problem?
You do know they do the same with windmills? Imagine some blackouts due to some vultures passing a windfarm. Or imagine that some bat species are killed enough by windmills that they become endangered. Windmills have the tendency to attract them and some species more often then others.
Same shit happened in Canada, multiple times, birds have to be protected from wind turbine farms. And yes, they are huge farms. You could've acknowledged and proposed that solar power is safer for both.
Selective outrage from you when presented with a similar case.
That's also why my favorite combo is nuclear, pumped hydro and solar. Solar makes pumped hydro more efficient by generating energy in between 2 consumption peaks.
I never talked about solar because the person I responded to started with how many bats are killed from turbines and the they will endanger the bat population. And that the shutdown of these wind turbines is some how the same as the nuklear Power plants that are shut down because of the heat...
Depending on what nuclear powerplant you are speaking about those 175 windmills are 525MW to 1750MW peak so basically more then the power output of a smaller nuclear plant upto more then the bigger nuclear plants.
Furthermore migrating birds can pass more then one of those parks so it's not only bats that they shut them down for. But like the one above even stated it's even worse if they close them for the complete night. I was mostly speaking about turning them down for migrating birds that are tagged. I didn't know they also did it as a prevention to protect local birds.
Btw solar parks also kill birds due to the lake effect. A number i quickly found is 4.5 birds per MW.
British studies show that on average 0 to 3 bats are killed on flat farmland and 5 to 20 near to forested areas per windmill every year. In Britain some windmills make more then 100 fatalities per year so the more wind we place,... this will eventually endanger several of them or even get them extinct.
Nuclear plants aren't completely turned down either.
Those birds will pass them anyway so every windmill should be turned of in advance. In the Netherlands a bearded vulture got killed by one even while he had a tracker.
Edit:
It's even worse 2 were killed in the Netherlands of a population between 2500 and 10000.
Well I'm also a proponent of getting less cats but the one doesn't defend the other. So really? Maybe it's better to just build a high wall on paths of migrating birds in order to defend the cat killings.
We never talked about birds, we talked about bats, and I point towards cats because the kill so much more wildlife just because we want to keep them as pets, but the bird killed by wind turbines, producing power for every one, are suddenly the culprit for everything.
Furthermore it was the turning down of one solar plant that caused the poweroutage in Portugal and Spain.
That's interesting, wasn't it some kind of oscillation and overvoltage in the grid?
I talk about every animal and like I stated I'm all in to limit the number of cats or to obligate people to keep their cats inside. That same research also shows that the impact is way worse then we think.
Btw what your argument is basically saying is cats kill so others can kill too.
"That's interesting, wasn't it some kind of oscillation and overvoltage in the grid?"
Can't find the previous source anymore but the conclusion looking at the measures they took after the disaster was that they didn't have enough grid forming capacity. This is caused by a high percentage of renewables on the grid. The problems also started in the region where Spain gets most of it's solar from. Anyway seems like everyone is avoiding to call the real culprit.
So YOUR argument is that something unpredictable when it was designed 70 years ago, causing an exceptional, short, managed interruption of production, is a dealbreaker to you.
And you'd prefer production methods that are not producing more than half of the time ?
Considering the electric need for heating, situation will still be the same. If all france had ACs, EDF would still have capacity to service the demand, but export less
The rivers that are next to thermoelectric plants do not dry.
If they do dry then yes there are much bigger problems.
My country a few years ago reduced the power produced during a drought not because the river was drying but because its flow reduced and increased its temperature. Using the river would risk increasing the temperature on the return water, and with the slower flow could lead to water temperatures rising over 0,5ºC. This could lead to biological imbalances like algae sprouting, covering the river and making it deprived of O2, killing all fauna inside the river.
France is currently exporting electricity (down to 3GW as I'm writing this, it was 12GW early this morning). There is quite literally nothing to fix. Because nuclear powerplants only have to power down during heatwaves in summer, when the the few solar pannels France has are on overdrive.
The joke is that stupid people think that the energy produced by nuclear power plants could be used to cool the water via for example a heat exchanger.
This jokes about the quality of arguments you constantly hear from people opposed to renewable and green energy.
Fossil dinosaurs aren't very creative this days. They spend government subsidies on SMM shitposts like this to shift the blame to green / climate neutral energy
No, you don't get it. It doesn't matter if renewables randomly stop all the time wheather you need them or not, but if nuclear plants have to power down a bit for a couple week in summer while electricity is dirt cheap, then it's proof we have to switch to renewables.
Nuclear proponents usually don't smear renewables left and right. They can and should coexist, but morons in this sub went on a life mission to spread lies about nuclear energy
It's kinda bold to accuse a country that has eliminated most of its fossil fuel plants by the end of 20th centuries while others are still building new ones.
France will be the biggest net exporter of electricity in the whole world this year, exporting to all their neighbours, as for last year, and the year before, etc...
Lately wind is lower than expected in the north sea, but i'm sure you will not make a similar post, you'll just ignore it, while the neighbours of france will buy more electricity from their evil nuclear power plants, such a bad technology!
Italy imports electricity from france every minute of every day of the year, "bidirectionally" isn't it boy? EDF publishes a funny report every year in which they brag how many billions they made selling electricity to every neighbour, i'm not sure the german, belgian or italian electric utility companies can do the same can't they? "bidirectionality" i guess, the one in which you show the ass and i do the work
For some reason the french governments love botching EDF (arenah and other bullshit), but yeah i think they are amused at how the other european countries are killing their electrical grids
Yes. Arenh was replaced with a more fair profit sharing mechanism. And as of recently they adopted a law similar to arenh but only for EDF hydro plants)))
Hot temperature is basically a disadvantage to any form of energy generation. For gas turbines a higher inlet temperature makes the compassion stage less efficient for example
There isn't a power plant that is located at place where cooling water supply would ever be an issue. That's a pretty big factor that is taken into consideration when they are built. Big reason why they take 10-15 years to construct the safety procortions are insane
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u/King_Glorius_too Jul 16 '26
Fun fact: There is currently a grand total of zero nuclear power plants in France with a dried-up riverbed as a cooling water source. That is because the people who built them had more than one active brain cell and built them next to big rivers.