This meme has to end, there’s only one nuclear power plant in France (Blayais) that has no cooling towers, and another 4 have to occasionally throttle power output due to ecological concerns (used water is too hot, they currently have temporary exceptions).
The water is never too hot to cool the reactors, it's too hot to release back into the river, for environmental reasons. Evaporative cooling solves that problem, but then you "lose" water, which is never great in a heat wave.
A nuclear plant using sea water never stops due to heat waves, because it can dilute any amount of hot water.
The water can get too hot and/or short in supply to cool the nuclear plant.
It's not magic, it's a machine with design limits that extreme weather events can push up against.
It also can pollute rivers and kill fish before it gets to that level.
Sea cooled reactors have issues with jellyfish.
Having said that, the EU needs more gas in winter when it's cold, so doing the maintenance/refueling in the summer makes sense.
Still doesn't change the basic facts that a mix of solar/wind etc. is cheaper and better than nuclear and the annoying 'nuclear isn't affected by the weather' meme is wrong.
> It's not magic, it's a machine with design limits that extreme weather events can push up against.
We have yet to see 80°c water in the rivers upstream. As I said earlier, the issue is never cooling the reactor, it's always about the state of the environment downstream.
You forgot storage or massive long distance transportation that nuclear future does not require, but solar/wind future does. That changes the "cheaper and better" to "there is no cheap solution, we need both solar/wind and nuclear".
