I wonder what the analysis on ground source heat exchangers are. A future dominated by climate change and extreme heat events, this looks lile a strategic liability.
Edit: I imagine its crazy unfeasible or it would have been done.
It should be noted that these regulations are there to protect the rivers from overheating, the nuclear power plant doesn’t really care that much.
They’re still a liability though, not only for the reason of heating up rivers
I’m well aware. Both are important, thus my question.
Europe as in the EU member states don’t mine uranium, so it’s a strategic dependency anyways. If you’re not a nuclear power (i.e. France or the UK, though no longer a Union member), nuclear makes no sense
True, but a reliable supply exists with your friends in Canada. Nuclear has to be secondary to wind and solar, but in a fossil fuel free world it still has a place.
“Surely this time relying on partner nations won’t get us in trouble”
Probably cost. Way cheaper to simply intake and output water than too build and maintain a ground loop heat exchange.
I don’t see how that could work. Water cooling is just so much more effective.
A 1 GW reactor operating at 35% thermal efficiency is dumping out
650 MW2 GW of heat (Edit when I realized the nameplate capacity of a reactor is its electrical output, not its total power). It’s hard to see how you can put that heat somewhere in the ground at a continuous rate and maintain some kind of equilibrium.Evaporative cooling can handle roughly 2400 joules/g of water evaporated, so 1 MW (1 MJ/s) of heat could translate into about 416 g of water evaporated each second. That’s what those cooling towers are doing in the stereotypical image of a nuclear power plant.
Meanwhile, if you’re allowed to dump the waste heat by discharging warmer water than you take in, water can take on 4.184 J / °C g, so 1 MW would raise the temperature of about 240 kg of water by °C per second.
That’s a lot of water used to cool these plants, but there’s really nothing that can compete with water at these scales. That’s why these plants are next to plentiful water, like on riverbanks next to rivers that have 100-10,000 cubic meters of water per second flowing by. Evaporate just 1 cubic meter (1,000 kg) of water per second for cooling 2.4 GW of heat.
Or, even without evaporative cooling, you could dump about 4 MJ of heat into each cubic meter of water that passes by and only raise it by a single 1°C.
So when the rivers are already running hot or with low water levels, there’s really nothing else a power plant could do to expel/reject all the heat it’s generating.
Looks like more solar panels are needed.
Somehow this sounds like a quote from a strategy game.
you must construct additional pylons
They can’t replace nuclear, at least not without insanely huge energy storage.
Solar panels would help with the peaks. They don’t need to replace the nuclear plants but deal with air conditioning.
They would certainly help, but there is more energy demand than just AC during the day.
We have a large number of rooftop solar systems in Australia (as well as batteries) and they provide a large part of the daily need. The batteries have reduced the evening peak as well. As it is all getting cheaper, it makes senese.
https://cleanenergycouncil.org.au/news-resources/rooftop-solar-and-storage-report-july-to-dec-2025
Its not insane at all, in fact battery based energy storage is already keeping black outs from happening in California. Batteries are currently on an exponential tech development curve, so in 5 years data becomes obsolete. The result of that is we have people thinking Europe can’t use battery grid storage to help easy nuclear maintaince down time.
Let’s see, a smaller nuclear power plant operates at 1GW, that means you’d need to store 12GWh per day (plus 12 of direct use) assuming half day solar doesn’t yield, or more with cloudy days and long winter nights. Where do we have such energy storage?
Here’s a chart of average daily generation in the NEM (Australian south/east network) over the last 28 days. The dark blue bit is battery charging (average just over 13GWh per day). The dip below the zero line during midday is when batteries and pumped hydro are charged using the excess of solar power.
Speaking of excess of solar power, we have three hours of free power during the day because there is so much free solar that isn’t being stored.
China’s grid-scale battery energy storage capacity surged from just 2.4 gigawatts in 2020 to more than 140 gigawatts in 2025
Chinese nuclear power output is 62GW, which means you’d need 12h*62GW for simplistic optimistic night worth of energy. Which is 744GWh. But realistically you have to look at worst case scenario during long winter nights and cloudy days. Which is a lot more storage required and less solar power output. And batteries get degraded over time, some malfunction etc.
First, Nuclear power plants degrade much faster and at a higher cost than solar/batteries. Its the moving parts simplification. Its a major factor in why we replaced relays with transistors. Senond, you need to do some new research that reflects current technology. China will absolutely produce that amount of grid storage. Look up their production curve its insane.
Nuclear power plants can run many decades at full power with adequate maintenance, even more so newer ones. Can the li-ion batteries though? Note that they’d be under stress each day. Perhaps with new/different battery tech, but that’s yet to see how it pans out. As per China and batteries, perhaps, but that’s yet to see how it turns out at the end. They also reverted from not building (many) coal power plants and they are increasingly building them again. So, it’s complex. Also read “China Targets 180 Gigawatts of Battery Storage by end of 2027” which is far away from minimum required for getting rid of nuclear and coal.
