To my knowledge, but I did not look this up, these constraints were known at design time. I don’t recall these changing. Hence the statement may be true, but pointing at the known constraint after the fact shifts the blame to nature conservation rather than infrastructure and climate change. This at a time where climate change focus is of utmost importance.
Hence, albeit factually correct, it is disingenuous to give it the focus.
If these constraints were added in the past 10 years then that could be considered different depending on the reasons for the change.
What has changed are the water levels and base temperatures. Our environment has changed and the infrastructure has not been adapted to it. Luckily we have other tools for generating electric power ready to be rolled out.
We are talking 1970. Scientists lacked the numerical models and the computing capacity to make these predictions. To accuse civilian engineers to not take into consideration recent hot topics of environmental science that lacked, at the time, rigorous models is disingenuous.
The design lifespan for those reactors was 40 years. We are extending those past lifetime because it is cheaper to do even if we need to shut them down more and more often.
The infrastructure have not adapted because it is cheaper to build a new power plant or to shutdown existing one occasionally then to adapt old existing design.
I agree with that to some extent. It was probably not the engineers’ task, but as I’ve read in the past, our models of the seventies were not that far off. They did not plan for it probably because they were asked not to, or perhaps they (like many others) did not want to believe in the doomsday predictions, or perhaps they (like many others) believed it would be solved by science by now. The warnings were there though, we chose to ignore what was coming at us if we did not change our ways.
My point is that by stating the reactor could work, you imply that there’s a trivial solution: stop protecting nature to have nuclear electric energy in France. You could state explicitly that we should or should not. By leaving it open it feels to me like we’re pretending nuclear is ready for the climate change ahead of us if only we could get way with that stupid nature. An argument could be had I suppose.
As a side-note: It did make me wonder if you could work with complete evaporation. Not dumping any water back. That would also be horrible for nature but I don’t know if anything in the system has to run at less than 100C.
To my knowledge, but I did not look this up, these constraints were known at design time. I don’t recall these changing. Hence the statement may be true, but pointing at the known constraint after the fact shifts the blame to nature conservation rather than infrastructure and climate change. This at a time where climate change focus is of utmost importance.
Hence, albeit factually correct, it is disingenuous to give it the focus.
If these constraints were added in the past 10 years then that could be considered different depending on the reasons for the change.
What has changed are the water levels and base temperatures. Our environment has changed and the infrastructure has not been adapted to it. Luckily we have other tools for generating electric power ready to be rolled out.
We are talking 1970. Scientists lacked the numerical models and the computing capacity to make these predictions. To accuse civilian engineers to not take into consideration recent hot topics of environmental science that lacked, at the time, rigorous models is disingenuous.
The design lifespan for those reactors was 40 years. We are extending those past lifetime because it is cheaper to do even if we need to shut them down more and more often.
The infrastructure have not adapted because it is cheaper to build a new power plant or to shutdown existing one occasionally then to adapt old existing design.
I do not understand what is your point here.
I agree with that to some extent. It was probably not the engineers’ task, but as I’ve read in the past, our models of the seventies were not that far off. They did not plan for it probably because they were asked not to, or perhaps they (like many others) did not want to believe in the doomsday predictions, or perhaps they (like many others) believed it would be solved by science by now. The warnings were there though, we chose to ignore what was coming at us if we did not change our ways.
My point is that by stating the reactor could work, you imply that there’s a trivial solution: stop protecting nature to have nuclear electric energy in France. You could state explicitly that we should or should not. By leaving it open it feels to me like we’re pretending nuclear is ready for the climate change ahead of us if only we could get way with that stupid nature. An argument could be had I suppose.
As a side-note: It did make me wonder if you could work with complete evaporation. Not dumping any water back. That would also be horrible for nature but I don’t know if anything in the system has to run at less than 100C.