France’s nuclear fleet is under worsening heat stress. EDF projects up to 9.4 GW of curtailments across nine reactors Friday, with six expected fully offline at peak. Total unavailable nuclear capacity could reach 27.7 GW.
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Nine French NPPs Cut Output Due to Heatwave
- Thread starter NuclearID
- Start date
France’s nuclear fleet is under worsening heat stress. EDF projects up to 9.4 GW of curtailments across nine reactors Friday, with six expected fully offline at peak. Total unavailable nuclear capacity could reach 27.7 GW.
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- Aug 11, 2010
- defconwarningsystem
- DEFCONWSALERTS
- YOUTUBE
- DefconWarningSystem
Why is France cutting power output during a heatwave?
The heatwave is warming river water used in the plants cooling systems. As that water gets hotter, reactors can’t reject heat as efficiently while staying within environmental discharge limits, so EDF has to reduce output or temporarily shut units down. This is a cooling and environmental limitation, not the reactor cores “overheating.”
Essentially they don't want to kill the fishes.
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2022
- Location
- Aude département (South France)
Also, a bit more information, we are doing that because we do produce more energy that what we currently consume (we are also selling to foreign countries like Spain, we can also stop doing that if we need)
For you to understand the scale of the heatwave we are having now in France, here is what we got today in my area, and my car was parked in shadow, that's ambient temps. 44°C = 111,2°F (i know, my car is dirty, i didn't had time to clean it lately)
For you to understand the scale of the heatwave we are having now in France, here is what we got today in my area, and my car was parked in shadow, that's ambient temps. 44°C = 111,2°F (i know, my car is dirty, i didn't had time to clean it lately)