EclecticLip

For the third year in eight, European nuclear reactors are having to shut down in summer, on account of the heat.  To understate things mildly, this does not bode well for nuclear as a major power source, in a warming world!  One-third of France’s nuclear capacity is currently offline, to avoid discharging excessively warm water into nearby rivers (water contains less dissolved oxygen as it gets warmer; pumping enough hot water into a river kills marine life).

France has 19 reactors, so if visualized as a litter of identical nineteen-uplets, this is equivalent to knocking six of them offline during peak periods when everyone’s turning up the “climatiseur”.  (Another three are run full-time to enrich the uranium fuel — sadly I can’t recall my source, but it was a generally reliable contributor to The Oil Drum — so electricity for civic purposes has dropped from sixteen to ten reactors’ worth.)

Back home, Ontario’s Bruce Power reactors are sited next to Lake Huron (a much larger body of water) so shouldn’t ever suffer this kind of problem.  For lake- or ocean-side reactors, the primary hurdle to nuclear power is cost — a hurdle with which the fuel cell industry is all too familiar. 

The estimated cost of nuclear power (as calculated by companies submitting bids to build reactors in various countries) is in the 20 cents/kWh range over the reactor lifetime.  Consequently, nuclear is more expensive than pretty much everything but solar photovoltaics — and the latter are getting cheaper as production scales up.  (Each time worldwide installations double, solar gets about 20% cheaper.  And installations are doubling every 2-3 years.)

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