In this case, it’s the assumption that water supply that’s here now, when you’re building a thermoelectric generating plant (and nukes, as currently built, are the thirstiest), will be here for the life of the plant. And that means not just quantity and purity, but temperature, as well. (The quantity argument applies to hydro, also, of course.)

This is the often overlooked risk of the energy/water nexus I keep talking about: Yes, thermoelectric plants have a high water draw and a much smaller water consumption, but every time you build one you’re creating an enormous, decades-long exposure and dependency on your ability to meet that water draw, a bet on your powers of prediction, with the cost of failure being potentially very high.

Because of the size of these projects and the amount of money involved, I think the only way we’ll learn this lesson is through the pain of failure–e.g. a weeks-long regional blackout in the SE US. Until then, we’ll keep muddling along, ignoring events like the one in this post, and telling ourselves how smart we are.

Meanwhile, rain is hitting France, and weather reports predict maximal temperatures of 20° C and minimals of 11°C, and this in the middle of July! Looks like I have to put the heating back on in my appartment, and at the very least take out my wool sweaters and coats!

I tried to google what sort of cooling towers Westinghouse is using for its planned reactors in Florida, the Carolinas (and Viet Nam), and coudn’t find anythiing specific. There are a number of new configurations. Wet, dry, natural draft, fans, hybrids…and add-ons. Sounds like the French need to invest a few Euros on upgrades. Did they really just pull the plug going to Italy during the heat wave of 2003?

Amazing with all the money that they probably put in to risk assessment they didn’t address this problem. Oh, wait, I think everyone was ignoring it back then for some unfathomable reason. In fact risk assessors have been ignoring global warming up until like last year. Just amazing. They should be sued by the relevant parties.

I guess they didn’t see the sea level rise issue too. So all those nukes on the coast will have to be decommissioned and moved over the next 60yrs. Mmmm, I wonder how that is going to happen and how much it would cost. What will the consequences of an flooded plant on the coast be? The mind boggles.

Nuclear is a dead end.

These are the ‘little’ problems that are going to (have) started to pop up due to GW. Its only going to cascade now.

It seems like the indirect dry cooling systems that you have advocated for using in “solar baseload” could also solve France’s nuclear cooling problem? If so, then this isn’t a good argument against nuclear per se, although you still have all your other ones, since it would add to costs.

[JR: There is no doubt that nuclear can use dry cooling. I believe a Phoenix plant already does. I that all new power plants should be required to use dry cooling -- which of course would further undercut the economics of nuclear.]

This article is ultimate argument against nuclear power addressing global warming. I believe you’ve hit a Homer.

http://climateprogress.org/ 2009/ 04/ 29/ csp-concentrating-solar-power-heller-water-use/

[JR: There is. Too bad virtually no nukes use this. Now we just have to make sure this becomes standard on all new power plants that need cooling.]