Nuclear still makes sense, I think, in interior areas like the American Midwest where wind and solar are fickle, and transportation (transmission) costs for tidal would be unsustainable.

There’s another downside to depending on nuclear power that wasn’t so much an issue in the past, but is now, and will be even more in the future: the required cooling capacity to operate a nuclear reactor.

The reason nuclear power plants are built next to large bodies of water is that the waste heat needs to be dispersed somewhere. The heat is transferred to the body of water (lake, river, sea or ocean). Except now with climate change the bodies of water are already warmer so they cannot take away as much heat. In other places drought is reducing the amount of water, meaning less waste heat can be carried away. If you can’t get rid of waste heat from your reactor, you have to turn it off until you have sufficient heat dispersal available.

This isn’t theoretical. Its been happening sporadically for almost a decade. Here’s an article from 2018 detailing Finland having to turn off reactors because of ocean temperatures too high to operate.:

“Finland’s Loviisa power plant, located about 65 miles outside Helsinki, first slightly reduced its output on Wednesday. “The situation does not endanger people, [the] environment or the power plant,” its operator, the energy company Fortum, wrote in a statement. The seawater has not cooled since then, and the plant continued to reduce its output on both Thursday and Friday, confirmed the plant’s chief of operations, Timo Eurasto. “The weather forecast [means] it can continue at least a week. But hopefully not that long,” he said.”

I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about this when they recommend nuclear power for a climate changing world. Its only going to get hotter from now on, which means we’ll be able to effectively only use less nuclear power plant capacity.