The article says nothing about waste.
Russia is the biggest exporter of Uranium.
I have no idea what the CND in Germany is supposed to be and neither has Google.
France had to repeatedly power down nuclear plants and buy electricity from neighbours because they couldnβt cool their plants. Because there was so much drought in Europe there wasnβt enough water. A phenomenon that will surely never happen again in Western Europe in the next couple of decades.
This is the other issue about thermal plants including coal, natural gas, concentrated solar power (CSP), and nuclear: water cooling.
All of these plants boil water to pass over a turbine and crank a generator, but that steam needs to be cooled so it condenses and makes a closed loop. You need cooling water to do this, and a lot of it.
If water is becoming scarce, and we have other needs for it like residential or agricultural uses, then that can greatly impact thermal generators, leading to outages like you say if cooling canβt be done.
Chris Nelder with the Rocky Mountain Institute has a good podcast episode on this on his The Energy Transition Show podcast. Check it out!
