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[–] 14 points 2 days ago* (3 children)

Just copy-pasting at this point:

Reactors in France are shut down not because of lack of water, but as an ecological precaution because the effects of warming up rivers even more is not well known (even if it seems to have not much more impact than the heat wave in itself )

And even with these reactors shut down, France still exported 5-10GW of power at the time.

So yeah let's not propagate the anti-nuclear propaganda trying to paint the situation as "nuclear can't handle global warming and will cause blackouts", when in reality it's just us having so much decarbonated electricity that we can afford to produce less as an ecological precaution.

And who the hell takes its news for oilprice.com ?

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  • [–] 17 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    For France, this is correct. But in Hungary and Romania the problem was not that the river water was too warm, it was that it had disappeared entirely. The water levels are too low to properly cool the reactors.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 day ago

    Accurate, but concerning this post specifically, it's whataboutism

    France is fine. And their power is dirt cheap in comparison. And they have competent people that plan for that kind of thing as opposed to Romania.

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  • [–] 47 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    Hah, they should just have built more nuclear power plants instead of their stupid, hippy...

    checks notes

    Oh...

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago*
    1. It's 0.14 EUR per kWh. Electricity is more expensive even in ROMANIA. I pay 1.14 RON per kWh which is about 0.23 EUR.

    2. They are winding down due to unproven river warming precautions not because the rivers can no longer cool the reactors. It's a preemptive precaution that they are doing because their LEISURELY CAN do it, not an emergency, not a big deal, not a reason to paint nuclear as the devil AGAIN.

    3. Good job reading the headline, I guess.

    There is a situation in Romania however. One of the 2 parts of the Cernavoda plant is shut down because the Danube can't safely cool them both anymore. But we are just importing more, we're perfectly fine. We still have power with no plans to cut power to home users.

    The situation in Romania is 10 times worse but it's still not even enough to matter for anything but the largest consumers. Our prices haven't gone up either.

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  • Just build nuclear power plants near the ocean instead, no need to rely on stupid rivers...

    Jellyfish-hit French nuclear plant shuts down three reactors

    Guess which marine animal can reproduce better in warmer waters by the way.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 days ago

    142.5 euros per megawatt hour (MWh)

    That's 0,14 Euro per kWh

    Perfectly within normal variation in spot prices here.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Warming rivers are making it so they cannot cool the reactors and stay critical, I never thought I'd see that. Does anyone know if they're still contemplating the thorium breeder reactors south of Vizely?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    oh no, poor people with their ACs are gonna.. oh europe, you silly goofball

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  • [–] -5 points 2 days ago*

    Tap for spoilerIt's a joke, I know my country is not better

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  • [+] -7 points 2 days ago* (2 children)

    Not so funny thing is that the solar power (at least panels as far as I know) doesn't work well either if the weather is really hot.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 days ago

    They lose a bit in efficiency, yes. On the other hand there is usually not much of a cloudy weather when it's that hot either. Solar panels still work more efficiently and deliver more electricity under these conditions than most other forms of power generation.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    This is borderline fake news - I can confirm that the system on my roof worked during the heatwaves without any problem.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    So no problems with efficiency and coating still not starting to degrade and electronics survived it well? What do you consider heatwave? If your system records the temperature / panel inner temperature and production data it would be interesting to see. I'm especially interested in the data from france and spain in the times of extreme heat (close to when the fires happened).

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (1 child)

    A quick google will tell you what it means… 0,3-0,5% efficiency reduction per 1°C over 25°C panel temperature.

    That equates to 10% less power output when the panels are at 60°C for example.

    Source: https://8msolar.com/solar-panel-efficiency-vs-temperature/

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    As you clearly have some idea let me ask what do you think will happen when nuclear is out and outside temperature is closer to 45°C than 40°C.

    I'm not familiar with commercial solar panels. Do those need cooling? Residental probably don't have it anyway?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Well as you can see from the numbers, a 5 degree increase in temperature would mean a 2,5% decrease in output.

    As far as I know, the modules are usually not cooled. There are however modules with integrated water cooling, which can also be used to generate heat output which you can turn into energy.

    But this is only for photovoltaic modules. There is other types of solar energy, for example molten salt.

    /edit: to clearly answer your question: it doesn’t matter that much to solar power in general.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    South of Germany here. We had temperatures up to 40°C and the system on the roof did fine. You can also see stats about german energy production here, there is no broad failures on hot days

    https://energy-charts.info/?l=de&c=DE

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Is there a way to export the actual data from there and is it possible to see different devices and stations? I tried to find a way to get the production data to a chart with the temperature data but it just has some pdf files I'm not ready to start parsing for single time use.

    Btw. Isn't 40 Celsius just the beginning of the extreme heat / weather cycle?

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