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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1764 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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being unable to run the reactors in the summer because the water level is so low in the various inflow rivers to the nuclear power plants can't be used for steam generation

I roll to disbelieve that this is a real problem rather than something like "French law says that there's a temperature limit on the water you can discharge into the river and one single summer during a heatwave all of the water in the river for one plant was already at that temperature so that particular nuclear plant was legally disallowed from using river water for cooling for 2 days".

Reactors could well be designed to run off of colder water than was available. Naively it should have been fine- most of the energy in cooling is used to boil the water rather than heat it up- but euros like to engineer things to have really tight tolerances for some reason.

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