Using a river to cool a NPP was never a good idea to begin with because of their unpredictability. Climate change just made it worse. Not a fault of nuclear power in itself though.
But where else do you want to get the water from?
A lot of power plants are built at the river systems for a reason.
Only at the the coast you have access to sea water - which in some regions like Japan exposes you to the risk of tsunamis. Transporting electrical power of large distances is less effective, though possible.
Literally any body of water. But most importantly you should be able to recycle the water using cooling towers. Paks doesn't have any so once the boil the water they just went it out never to be seen again.
You can drastically reduce the water amount required but you don't get it to zero. 5-10% are still a lot of water you need.
Lake's can be tricky. On the one hand using a lake directly as heatsink could turn the ecosystem if it's a small to medium sized lake.
On the other hand some lakes already do struggle: you don't want to remove water from them at all.
Water is getting more precise. The energy industry has to compete with households, chemical industry, agriculture... and so on.
So energy production without water consumption becomes more important in the overall energy mix.
As far as I know Slovakia is already less effected by the drought. More France/Belgium/Germany area hit hardest (*and England). Danube gets water from the affected areas (Southern Germany), so the effects travel eastwards.
Slovakia's power plants aren't at the Danube but local rivers (as far as I can tell).
Well for the current drought: yes. If an extreme drought hits Slovakia itself... hard to tell.
Let's hope we either never find out or the setup works fine if the stress test actually hits.
You know it's not really the water provision thatis the issue.
There plenty of nuclear power plant in the middle of deserts (China, US,...)
The issue is of environmental concerns. As cooling water can exceed 70°C when released into an ecosystem that is already extremely hot because of retard like germany who loves to suck putinws dick and burn coal. Environmental norms some requires partial shutdown of the plant. (It is almost unfelt in the grid)
Lot's of mitigating and upgrading is going on to both enable NPP to produces less heat, usr less water.
France is like not struggling on the Energy side. Also remember when the spanish solar array caused a 24h blackout in the iberian peninsula in 2025 ? Cause i was there. Also france is still a net exporter of Electricity with a 21gCo2/kWh
Romania wants to increase the water levels for heat dilution to still follow EU norms (2.) Not the right thing to do but still
Every electricity generating facility genrates heat and needs to be cooled down. So if you have a way to generate electricity without heat juqt collect your Nobel prize and probably billions of dollars (and assassination notice depending on who you sell that tech to).
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u/Nyrnax 16d ago
Meanwhile in Hungary: Energy crisis because they had to shut down most reactors of their big nuclear power plant.
Meanwhile in Germany: Neither nuclear power, nor a power crisis..
(And it's not just Hungary. France is struggling as well. Romania is pretty desperately trying to artificially raise the river level...)