The news here, and thus the interesting and probably unexpected thing to note, is that if we depend on natural sources for water to cool nuclear plants and due to climate change the temperature of waters rise, we need to adjust where we build plants and/or spend extra energy to cool down the water to in turn cool down the plants.
Its not just that water temperature rises but that there is less of it (ie drought) so the constant amount of constantly hot water from the plant gets mixed with less water left in the river increasing its temperature more
It's perfectly able to do so, but not at full power without heating up the river so much it would hurt organisms in there.
Even then, it _could_ have been designed to do so - through more flow - but it's just a design parameter that was optimized in a cost/performance trade-off.
Cost performance tradeoffs aren't some minor thing. If you cannot produce energy at a cost effective level, you might as well not produce it at all. The theoretical capabilities of the thing are not relevant if the economics of them don't work.
Well sort of. Reliable base load power (nuclear, coal, gas, hydroelectric) has become essential to modern civilization in a way that transcends economics. If we can't keep the lights on then nothing else matters. Thus, competent governments will find ways to keep those plants running regardless of cost or environmental impacts. Those that don't will end up as failed states like what is happening to South Africa right now.
Maybe, but irrelevant. If the nuclear plant goes up in costs by 10x then you're just going to buy more fossil fuels. Ignoring costs associated with running and changing the nuclear plant that might cause you to run it anyway and just lose a ton of money. The backup answer is always fossil fuels more or less.
It's cost-efficient to operate in profitable scenarios and halt in costly scenarios.
Optimizing profitability concerns the full operating range, not same anecdotal outliers.
All energy-intensive industry operates only when circumstances are favorable. Sometimes it's more profitable to reduce output temporarily, e.g. during high gas-prices, or during weekends when workers are more expensive.
> It's cost-efficient to operate in profitable scenarios and halt in costly scenarios.
That really depends. You have fixed costs to operating a nuclear plant. You can't suddenly operate for a smaller fraction of the time and expect the economics of operating the plant to be the same.
Also, your comment was about the technical design of the plant and how it used flow to cool things, not the decision to turn lower operational output.
