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.