Rivers
Europe’s rivers are drying up.
In places, the Loire can now be crossed on foot; France’s longest river has never flowed so slowly. The Rhine is fast becoming impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po is 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. Serbia is dredging the Danube.
Across Europe, drought is reducing once-mighty rivers to trickles, with potentially dramatic consequences for industry, freight, energy and food production – just as supply shortages and price rises due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bite.
Ok but it’s only industry, freight, energy and food production. Everything else is ok.
With no significant rainfall recorded for almost two months across western, central and southern Europe and none forecast in the near future, meteorologists say the drought could become the continent’s worst in more than 500 years.
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France’s rivers might not be such key freight arteries, but they do serve to cool the nuclear plants that produce 70% of the country’s electricity. As prices hit all-time highs, power giant EDF has been forced to reduce output because of the drought.
Strict rules regulate how far nuclear plants can raise river temperatures when they discharge cooling water – and if record low water levels and high air temperatures mean the river is already overheated, they have no option but to cut output. With Europe’s looming energy crisis mounting and the Garonne, Rhône and Loire rivers already too warm to allow cooling water to be discharged, the French nuclear regulator last week allowed five plants to temporarily break the rules.
I.e. it allowed already overheated rivers to become even more overheated. We’re trapped in this loop.
Rice production that depends on the Po has crashed.
In the protected wetlands of the river’s delta, near Venice, its high temperature and sluggish flow have reduced the water’s oxygen content to the extent that an estimated 30% of clams growing in the lagoon have already been killed off.
Loop. Trapped.
Sigh. I fondly recall a long, lazy trip up the Rhine in 1992, the river huge and impressive. It saddens me to think of that mighty river brought to its knees.
Global warming, despite what your local denialist (who will commonly double as an antivaxxer and God-botherer) will tell you, results in more energy accumulating in the atmosphere, to be passed via rainfall, snowmelt etc to the oceans, resulting sooner or later in increased evaporation and eventual precipitation. So drought may be duly followed by flood. (See link below.) Meanwhile, energised cyclones can drag polar air towards the temperate zones, resulting in local cool to freezing weather, in turn resulting in the denialists chortling their empty heads off; which latter may then float away on the next flood.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/aug/21/a-family-now-the-volunteers-helping-nsw-flood-victims-six-months-on
So, apparently nuclear fusion is not the Magic Flute that will solve the energy crisis and global warming after all.
#2
Exactly, Omar, a drought doesn’t mean that water disappears (conservation of matter, and all) it merely is in other places or in other states of matter such as vapor. The recent floods in London show what happens when the rain returns too quickly following dry weather. The land can’t soak up the water, it runs off and your tubes are flooded, it all runs off and then you are back to a drought situation as the water has run into the sea.
It’s always amusing to think about how many pairs of kidneys one’s glass of water has been through.
Or how many fish have pooped or expelled their eggs and semen into it.
My daughter once asked me if a glass of water on the counter was fresh or old. I told her it’s at least 4 billion years old.
Wasn’t it Tim Minchin who wondered how homepaths could be so sure that the water they use would “remember” the infinitessimal amount of the diluted “medicinal” ingredient they’d used, while conveniently “forgetting” all the fish poop that had been in it?
Louis Mumford tells the story of the origin of the name ‘loo’ for a toilet, WC, thunderbox, shithouse, dunny or call-it-what-you-will. He contends in The City in History that it arose in Edinburgh, with the custom of householders yelling “gardy loo,” itself a corruption of the French expression ‘garde de l’eau’ – ‘look out for the water,’ as they heaved the contents of their chamberpots out into the street; commonly from a window or balcony on the second floor or above. The ‘water’ also commonly contained cylindrical suspended pieces of paste commonly known as turds, so it was by no means an adequate descriptor. But I believe that the practice also helped the local vendors of umbrellas to keep their sales nice and brisk.
Worth remembering in a drought: things could always be worse. ;-)
Mike Haubrich #3
Some fission designs using molten metal or salt for taking the heat from the fuel to the turbines, run much hotter than the current ones that use water for that purpose. One advantage of the higher operating temperature is that it is practical to use the air as the heat sink for the cool end of those turbines. So you don’t need a large water body to take away the waste heat. Fusion reactors would collect the heat in molten lithium at a similarly high temperature & so if necessary could also use air as the final heat sink.
Of course power plants that use ocean water as their heat sink aren’t affected by the drought
This, however, doesn’t help with the near term problem of power plants that have been designed to use a river as the heat sink on rivers with unexpectedly low water levels.
Not to mention uninhabitable for the Rhinemaidens.