Romania blasts rock to divert water from drought-hit Danube to nuclear reactor
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/03/romania-blasts-divert-danube-water-nuclear-reactor-energy-crisis-hungaryOpen linkView original on feddit.orgSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on feddit.orghttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/03/romania-blasts-divert-danube-water-nuclear-reactor-energy-crisis-hungaryOpen linkView original on feddit.org
76 replies
Am I the only moron who thought they meant music?
Wow, all that super stable, super reliable base load energy is just mindblowing!! Let's build more nuclear power plants!
If we had done that early on we wouldn't have global warming and there wouldn't be a cool water shortage.
but that's not true. Electricity only accounts for about 18% of emissons, its non renewable, you'd have a waste pile the size of a mountain, would have run out of fuel by now and you'd need to start decommissioning most of them and rebuilding them
There's a persist myth that some technology can just magic a fix here, nothing short of vastly reduced energy consumption, and lifestyle changes can work, 10000 aging nuclear reactors that need replacing ain't going to cut it.
an example ?
we'd get a 30% reduction in emissions if the richest 10% loved like the average European, not enough but an excellent start
You have to switch all processes to electricity or hydrogen like steel making or fertilizer.
Best results come from not abusing the third world and letting them have a future that allows them to only have two children.
Doesn't turn Uranium into a regrowing resource.
Others have mentioned breeder reactors. There is also Thorium. But it is only necessary to use the energy until renewables take over. The last 70 years and the next 30 would have been enough to prevent global warming.
Suggesting that this would only be possible by going nuclear has absolutely zero basis in reality. Spinning magnets to generate electricity is a known way generate electricity since way before the first nuclear reactor was ever built. Hydropower and wind turbines were invented during the industrial revolution.
What would you have done in the 1960ies and 1970ies to end the usage of fossil fuels?
Hi big oil, propaganda still paying off?
Fissile resources would have been depleted a long time ago if everyone would have went with nuclear. Don't be so daft.
Accounting for breeder reactors your answer is only off by about 4 billion years.
It was a good guess though.
No they wouldn't, plus the drive to nuclear would have pushed us to thorium and breeder reactors far sooner, using those we could power the Earth for billions of years, they can even use nuclear waste as fuel, don't be daft and actually educate yourself instead of carrying water for Big Oil.
It would solve a lot, if the rich were normal people capable of love
another 30% if work from home was standard
It's more relevant what we should/can do now than what we should've done years ago, no?
I mean, obviously learn from history and not make the same mistakes, but it's also not necessarily the case that whatever would've been the solution back then, still is today.
If the same people are still in power and don't show acceptance of their mistakes or a willingness to correct them then it is relevant. There are solutions but it should be clear that they won't implement them.
if you looked at what is going on, you would see that bulk of the missing energy in hungarian grid is supplied from czech and slovak grids, where half or so energy is supplied from nuclear powerplants that don't have such problems https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CZ/72h/hourly
not to mention the french, who put bunch of their reactors near shore and won't ever have problems with cooling, and so export 10-15GW every day
About that: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260712-france-temporarily-shuts-down-three-nuclear-reactors-over-heatwave
This happens literally every hot summer.
This is to avoid overheating river, seashore powerplants or those that rely on evaporative cooling towers don't have this problem. Also, it's as good time for maintenance as any other, and they still exported loads of electricity the entire time
You make this sound like they do it for laughs and giggles and it's optional, not because increasing the temperature in already hot bodies of water even more literally kills wildlife.
Plenty of thermal powerplants use cooling towers and don't have this problem, this is not a limitation of NPP
"Look at all that renewable green solar generation! Sure doesn't work so well when it's buried under a mudslide lol"
That's what you sound like
The thing is that this is a really desperate measure. The danube is one of Europes biggest rivers. That nuclear power plant was build with water inlets. That plant has been there for ages as every nuclear plant in Europe is old as fuck. That rock has been there also a long time. Having to blast it to help a little bit in order to save the reactor producing so much energy that the other plants in the country can't take over, is desperate as fuck
Yeah, they're responding to a (not-so-) natural disaster. Of course infrastructure built half a century ago under wildly different conditions is at risk.
Even if solar panels get buried under a mudslide, you can just build new solar panels very quickly. If that would happen to a nuclear plant, you would need to wait 10+years for a new one.
Yeah, right. Those totally predictable mud slides that happen every summer and are expected to increase in frequency and duration with climate change... 🤣
Nuclear is not a solution, evidence 836382.
Well, most of the time you would be right indeed. Uranium fuel rods are solid. But in a molten-salt reactor the fissile material is actually dissolved in molten salt, so it is a solution!
The more you know!
Nope, they’re less expensive too because they don’t need to operate at high pressures like PWRs, so they don’t need a whole containment structure around it to keep the pressure in and they are more efficient because they can run at higher temperatures.
Research is expensive, but once that’s done (which we are nearing), the life cycle costs are lower with increased efficiency.
It's also now more expensive than renewables. And it has always been less safe. There is literally no reason to build nuclear anymore. Renewables is the way to go. Cheaper, safer, makes Europe energy-independent, and also much better for the environment.
Your comment is not correct.
From Chernobyl alone, and only in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, and only from cancer, there have been 27'000 deaths. http://allthingsnuclear.org/post/4704112149/how-many-cancers-did-chernobyl-really-cause-updated
Then there's all of the other bullshit. 270'000 people irradiated in this accident alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
Then there's all of the nice little things like the literal mafia dumping nuclear waste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_waste_dumping_by_the_'Ndrangheta
Or dumping it into the oceans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_disposal_of_radioactive_waste
Or Germany putting nuclear waste into plain metal barrels and putting them into a salt mine. Since metal and salt mix so well. https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-leaking-nuclear-waste-dump/video-69502364
Clearly one braking dam is an argument against wind turbines and solar panels. Oh the horror and deaths of free rooftop electricity to power ACs.
How many times am I going to hear about Chernobyl or Three Mile Island?
Until you realize that a water dam is very different from a solar panel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster
Right? So now we're comparing Soviet weapons labs to power generation. Okay fine, I'll play ball.
Casualties 270,000-500,000+ affected . 10,000–12,000 evacuated . At least 200 people died of radiation sickness, unknown estimated future death toll from radiation induced illness. 66 diagnosed cases of chronic radiation syndrome
that's 266+ dead and another 25 to 100 likely from long term exposure and contamination casualties over the next century.
How many die each day from petrochemical fumes?
More like 10k to 50k long term deaths due to effects of radiation exposure like cancer. Cancer rates among those affected by radiation are way higher than you assume.
Ha, so nuclear is so bad, we have to compare it to the petrochemical industry, which is the most polluting on earth? That says a lot, but not the way you'd probably like
Dams braking arent a direct consequence of renewables, but a flaw of the engineering. Also your argument bears no merit against wind and solar.
Your comment is deeply dishonest and bad faith.
Whoosh.
If 62 Dam's breaking aren't a direct consequence of sino and Soviet engineers installing dams to generate hydroelectric power because irresponsible engineers didn't do the proper math to make functional safe dams and accidentally got 130k to 260k Chinese drowned...
Then how is it a valid argument that nuclear power isn't safe due to the same mistakes by the engineers who failed to properly safeguard fukishima or Chernobyl or three mile island and accidently killed about 4000 Japanese, Ukrainans and Americans. .
That 4.000 death number is only from liquidators alone aka frontline workers with the most radiation exposure. It doesn't take into account the excess death rate from people dying of cancer in the long run due to environmental radiation from the disaster where deaths could go into the tens of thousands. Like your numbers are absolute bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster
provide a source for your claimed excess deaths https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2889503/
holy shit. I did. If you are going to be arguing in bad faith then it's pointless
Then hopefully you dont ignore this one too https://www.ippnw.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IPPNW-Germany-Health-Effects-of-Chernobyl-20-years-after-the-reactor-catastrophe.pdf
Here they say "50k to 100k long term deaths"
L take..
Begun, the water wars have 😔
This is just the beginning.
This is the least heat and the most water we'll have for the rest of our lives.
I live in west europe and am young enough to possibly experience colder summers and more extreme cold and rain in winter.
Missed opportunity to use a nuke for peak Fallout.
Call it the Blew(up) Danube?
Meanwhile I want to nuke one measly hurricane and everyone looses their minds
so, like, black sabbath? or something harder that the kids today listen to?
At least some pyros from the Romanian navy have fun ... 🎆🔥
ITT: Gas and oil simps
Astroturfing bots
Where?
When you hit rock bottom, that's at least the point, where yo-...hm, wait a second...
I live in an area that purely runs on renewables. We have wind, solar and hydroelectric. No outages.
We're providing France with energy because their nuclear power stations can't deal with the heat.
Law of fossil propaganda on the Internet: When astroturfers don't have any credible argument left, they will resort to trolling.
Nobody is really thinking. Some of the people who hate nuclear power think reactors are literally nuclear bombs, some of them believe the wildly exaggerated claims about waste storage and disposal, some of them are getting paid by Russia to undermine competition for their gas.
Acting as if nuclear power failures can't and haven't caused catastrophic problems doesn't help the argument. I can understand why people don't trust the government to properly regulate and police the industry when there are multiple incidents when that's been proven.