
Nuclear Power Threatened by Heat Waves - howard941
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2019-07-01/nuclear-power-once-seen-as-impervious-to-climate-change-threatened-by-heat-waves
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Accujack
These are installed/operating reactors with a cooling design as old as their
nuclear technology, whose designers made assumptions about what future water
temperatures would be in the locations they were built. Those assumptions
turned out to not be valid... it's not unusual for that to happen in
engineering designs for systems with a lifetime that spans decades.

The article implies that nuclear power isn't an option to reduce carbon
footprint because nuclear reactors won't work with elevated water
temperatures. This is false, and is probably an attempt at influencing public
opinion away from nuclear energy.

All that's really happening is that existing reactors aren't getting the
cooling capacity they need from their existing water cooling plant. This can
be addressed by expanding the cooling system or building a new one with
greater capacity. Expensive, and undesirable to have to do, but that's very
different from "Nukes can't work because of climate change"

Newly built reactors would simply take into account the elevated external
temperatures from climate change and be designed according to those
constraints in the first place.

The core of modern reactor designs is fueled by molten salts which also
function as a coolant at temperatures of 900F or higher. As long as the
cooling water that removes waste heat is cool enough in ambient temperatures
to not be already boiling, a cooling system that uses it can be designed.

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jfengel
... because their cooling water is becoming too hot. Also droughts.

