Danube's record low levels force shutdown of Hungary's only nuclear plant

There is simply NO safe level of fossil fuel use.

Oh come on.

If you can spend a Dollar only once, you might end up with renewables. People can be economically motivated too. No reason to draw politics in an already heated discussion.

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.

This is entirely an ecological and safety concern.

The heat of vapourisation for water, converting liquid to steam, is 40.66 kJ/mol, or 2257 J/g. It takes a lot of energy to boil off water.[1]

That compares with the latent heat of liquid water, the energy required to heat one unit of water by one degree, which is 4.2 J/g*K (where K is the delta temperature in Kelvin).

Raising the temperature of input by, say, 10 degrees, would only reduce the cooling factor by less than 2%.

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Notes:

1. Which is why live steam is so dangerous. Steam condensing will release a huge amount of thermal energy, making steam burns especially harmful.

Just imagine what it would spell for your car otherwise.

The pressure of a condenser at 90F (hot summer day) is about 1/20th of an atmosphere and ... pretty obviously the pressure of a condenser at 212F is about one atmosphere. You can't just arbitrarily decide to change the low pressure side of a turbine like that, its not going to turn out well. You could, in theory, design an entire thermal plant coolant loop to deal with the condenser running at 1 atm instead of 1/20th atm but most will not.

There are also heat flow rate issues where the higher the delta V the higher the watts. Regardless of condenser pressure issue above, if a heat exchanger can pull 1 MW across a 150 degree delta-V then if you run the cold side much warmer at only 15 degrees delta V it can only "pull" 0.1 MW of heat. Its surface area doesn't magically get bigger LOL. Remember that for every watt of electricity you get to dump around three watts of thermal heat. If you lose 9 MW of cooling power you lose 3 MW of output electrical power. You have to move more heat than non-engineers expect, to generate electricity.

Its a simplification, but for various reasons they like to design the hot side as hot as possible, so if you lose 100F of cooling you can't keep the same power output and simply run the hot side 100F hotter than normal and keep the same flow rate. Absolutely nothing good will come from overheating it like that.

You could engineer a thermal plant (thermal as in coal, nuclear, burning recyclables and biowaste, anything to make steam) that runs at an ideal hot side of 212F and let the hot side literally boil water in a pool. However, they don't make plants like that IRL and trying to force it under those conditions would turn out very bad... The first thing that comes to mind is gunk buildup and higher corrosion rates. Steel (generically speaking) corrodes in water about twice as fast per every 20C increase, so turning a cold water plant into a water boiler would to first approximation cause about a year's worth extra corrosion per month. Could be designed around, but I would not want to cowboy a nuke and just try it. Some of those parts are very expensive; even if you can safely run the plant and replace the corroded parts at a substantially accelerated rate, the cost of power due to corroding the cold side parts might make the power too expensive even if its "safe enough", making it cheaper to just shut down. Moving large amounts of water (or air) is extremely expensive, both capex and opex, so an additional 10x higher once in awhile here and there could be a lot of money...

There are any number of methods of dealing with this. Using natural bodies of water is a lower cost (thus highly popular) method of sinking heat. Palo Verde has been operating 3 large reactors in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona since the 1970s. There is no reason in engineering or physics that a power reactor must be highly sensitive to any particular lake, river or ocean's temperature. This is strictly about money, being cheaper to rely on a big "free" heatsink, and leaving too little margin for changing conditions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

Hungary had the highest share of produced solar electricity of all the countries in the world 27.3%. And even with this results nuclear energy is usefull for them and plan to build new reactors. (with help from Russia, so there may be same changes in this plan)

> let's just use that

Also, let’s use both?

They just absolutely cannot math the math which leaves ideology and this ain't France.

Economics I think. Nuclear power has gone bankrupt in France already (arguably more than once) and gotten bailed out. Now they produce electricity at a price that's often above market price, with losses covered by the taxpayers.

This despite relying on cheap cooling from rivers. Adding more expensive cooling won't help.

We've quite recently reached mass production economies of scale for both solar panels and batteries. The implications are that the price of electricity is set to drop even more in the years to come.

The desert one you refer to is an experimental prototype I think:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-LF1

When your solar panels are hot is noon in the summertime which is when you have way more solar power than you need anyway. Most grids that have substantial solar power are getting saturated with solar power at that time and running everything else at minimum capacity.

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