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Plus, it's a design parameter in a performance/cost trade-off.

It's _designed_ to not work at full power at this heat, because that was thought to be the ideal trade-off.

Maybe it still is, maybe they underestimated the occurrence of high water temperature incidents, but in any case it's a consciously designed safe state.



Sure, but such mitigation strategies mean even higher costs for nuclear power which is by far its largest problem.

It’s clearly possible to make a great deal of nuclear power safely, just not as cheaply as similarly environmentally friendly alternatives. Electric utilities prefer to spend less on battery backed Solar etc because of all the little details that aren’t obvious until you really study what’s involved.


Can future designs have the operating temp shifted in order to accommodate warmer waters?


You mean the design of the ecology around? No, not in a reasonable timespan ;)




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