The only catch is that those cost lots of money.

-David Ahlport

If perchance it doesn't mean that, then perhaps JMG is just momentarily lacking in judgment. He hasn't conspicuously ignored any recent hot spell  of a week or more when all 104 power reactors in the USA were working, has he?

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen fan
Oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes

* The solar constant is 1,367 W/m^2, the Sirian one, 0.00000012 W/m^2, and anyway, Sirius is shining on some side of the Earth more, I guess, than 99.9 percent of the time. As is the Sun. Their effects always add, they don't have to be lined up.

Also, would it be possible to refit existing reactors to be more tolerant of warmer water?

a sibilant intake of breath

Me, I'd focus on the sources partially responsible for increasing hot weather, and advocate for more conservative (and slightly more expensive) designs. This means focusing on coal, natural gas, oil -- if you fly or drive, this last is especially important to focus on.

Did you check whether new designs plan for hotter weather, or did you just assume that 2015 plants will be using 1970 designs?

A Musing Environment

Karen Street

Yeah, it's silly -- we need to reduce our use of air conditioners.

What is hot weather -- it's free energy being blanketed down on us.

We should sit outside, go in the wading pool, turn off the electricity and enjoy mint juleps like 100 years ago.

Then we wouldn't need to worry about "nukes".

Sindark, Karen: to a degree it's possible to widen the tolerance for higher intake temperatures, but it's a double financial hit:  essentially it's building a more robust cooling system and then not using any of that greater capacity most of the time. (And having to spend on maintenance for it all the time.)

Further, there are absolute limits on discharge temperature--there are a lot of river critters that don't like extremely high water temperature; any thermal plant (nuke or non-nuke) that uses river cooling has to struggle when the injection temperature shoots up and stays up.

Not to mention the hit on overall plant efficiency; any thermal plant loses rated output as cooling water temperature goes up.

Lastly, no it's all thermal plants that have problems (including Solar PV panels, which operate most efficiently in sunny, cool weather)--but the problem with hot injection water illustrates the weakness of a central power system (with monster size power plants as opposed to distributed generation system of many small plants near their loads) -- when a big plant is built, the system has to build enough reserve capacity to deal with what happens when it goes off line.  So just like people say we should include the cost of spinning reserve in the wind-power estimates, we also need to include the cost of reserve capacity for big thermal plants.  The "lumpier" the power sources, the more reserve capacity you need, and the more you spend.

The 5% Project

Could they design nuclear plants to work with warmer water? No matter how hot the river water gets, it will be cooler than the reactor core.

If all you want to do is remove heat from that core, sure.

But if you want to run a heat engine with it, then you must remove heat from the spent fluid from that engine, and that spent fluid is less hot, because some of its heat has been converted to useful energy. And yes, sometimes heat itself is useful energy, but when river water is already near blood temperature, not so much.

Plant operators could beg for an exemption from the rule forbidding them to put water back that is hotter than 90 Fahrenheit. On the day of the recent shutdown strict enforcement of that rule would have meant they couldn't hoist out a bucketful and pour it right back.

They could have applied for rule-bending privileges, but knowing that government has its eye on natural gas tax revenues, and strict enforcement of rules that increase those revenues by forcing nukes to shut down is therefore very likely, they probably didn't bother.

Coolness can be found even where there is no water. Wikipedia has a photo of a dry cooling tower. The German government blew it up because it was cooling a nuclear plant.

--- G. R. L. Cowan, former H2 energy fan
How shall motoring gain nuclear cachet?

It's just that the "best case scenario" cost estimates given for most nuclear plants can't possibly be realistic since they require "Unexpected Essential Upgrades".

-David Ahlport

"If nukes have to go offline just when you need them most, that's a huge monkey wrench in plans for a nuclear resurgence." No, we're talking about a small fraction of increased capacity in new plants.  

"essentially it's building a more robust cooling system and then not using any of that greater capacity most of the time"  No, you're using it all of the time, you've just increased the efficiency (that's a good thing).

"And having to spend on maintenance for it all the time." Not really, we're talking about very simple systems here.  A cooling tower is a concrete tube that you spray water in.  A heat exchanger is a box with two seperated streams of water.  Adding a little more capacity to either system keeps the same system, just makes it a little bigger.

Dumping heat in rivers is certainly an issue, but one that can be overcome in extreme cases by building cooling towers.  

"Canicula" literally means "little bitch."  It is not clear that the Roman astronomers -- or Roman poets writing on astronomical matters -- used it consistently: it seems it might mean either of the constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor (the Canes Venatici, "hunting dogs," accompanying the great hunter Orion), or their brightest stars, Sirius and Procyon respectively.

It is also not clear if the usually diminutive suffix necessarily has a diminutive sense in this word.  Cf. "puella," from "puerula," which means "girl," but more literally means "a small female counterpart to a boy"; also, the name of the brightest star in the beautiful constellation Auriga, "Capella," probably to be translated simply "she-goat," not "small she-goat."

The names "Canicula" and "Capella" may have influenced each other, since Orion and the Canes Venatici, near Gemini, and Auriga, near Taurus, are fairly close to each other, and usually visible from the Northern Hemisphere together during the colder months of the year.  But I do not know how Capella got its name: no doubt there is some mythological association.  "Auriga" is a charioteer.

We may wish to blame the Romans for many things that they said, did and thought, but I am not sure that this idea that Cowan refers to is one of them.  For one thing, the Romans were for the most part not original scientists; what astronomy they knew they learned from Greeks, who for their part were beholden especially to the Babylonians.

For another, the idea does not really deserve to be called "idiotic."  Sirius, after all, is one of the brightest things in the sky, and Procyon is no slouch either.  In an age when it was widely believed that heavenly bodies had all kinds of influences on earthly matters, it looks like a not unreasonable suggestion that the brilliant Sirius might add its heat to that of the Sun during the period of its heliacal rising in July and August.  So call it a manifestation of astrological superstition, if you like; but that is not really the same as "idiotic."

The ancients certainly knew about the connexion between seasonality and the latitude of the Sun.  They knew about Polaris and the Septentriones (the Bears, "with unmoistened foot," who never step into the Ocean), and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.  The influence of Sirius during the "dog days" seems not to have to do directly with the great heat of that period, but more with attendant climatic phenomena, such as sultriness and the appearance of certain sicknesses.

And a further digression: The names of Harry Potter's beloved godfather, Sirius Black, who can turn himself into a black dog, and of the old school chum of Sirius and Harry's father, Remus Lupin, who is a werewolf, strike me as examples of how J.K. Rowling can be so clever as to get ahead of herself sometimes.  Presumably Sirius and Remus were given those names by their parents at birth, highly suitable names for persons with respectively partly canine and lupine identities.  But in fact they seem to have only begun changing into those animals' forms when they were adolescents, a number of years after they had received those names.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.