Oh wait! And will stop working if your rivers should run dry, as happened in France this summer.
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
> France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.
It's just an conservative artificial limit set to ensure that Nuclear is indeed the most ecological source of power since it even has higher standard than anything else.
This argument sounds like "oh, in the end it doesn't matter, we can just continue on!". But this is completely wrong. You cannot dump 50°C hot water into rivers without consequences, and very far reaching consequences at that. They are already very very borderline, because we are talking about something slowly creeping towards 30°C already, in large quantities.
Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.
I could say the same about your comment! The ocean is a big place with more than a billion billion liters of water, you can't meaningfully heat it up with a power plant.
With that logic, you couldn't build any power plant with air cooling either since it would heat up the air.
If you want to make a general argument against all power generation that's fine, but singling out ocean cooling specifically doesn't make sense - especially since ocean and air temperatures obviously affect each other.
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.