It is not our favorite energy source anymore, the plan is to get rid of themynot build more of them. Yes, there was an increase last year, but that was related to the gas situation with russia.

Northrine Westphalia just dumped the minium required distance for wind turbines, so we will see a huge boost of them (hopefully)

Drought is not as much a problem in Germany as it is on the southern states like France and Spain, but groundwater is going down. Everywhere. And like OP said, France had to limit the output of their reactors due to water shortages.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-13/france-cuts-nuclear-output-as-heat-triggers-water-restrictions

Wind and solar has to be the main focus as long as nuclear power is reliant on clean and sufficient water.

Of you want to know more, there is a separate wiki article just related to the European drought of 2023.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_European_drought

Coal power plants have about 45% energy efficency. Liginte about 30-35%, Nuclear plants also about 30-35%. All the other energy ends up using water to cool it away.

So a 1 GW nuclear plant is putting about 2 GW of heat into the water. A lignite plant the same. A 1 GW coal power plant is only putting about 1.25 GW of heat into water.

But again the problem is the false comparison being made here. The alternative to nuclear isnt coal. the alternative is renewables in conjunction with storage technologies and smarter grid management with demand sheduling.

Edit: wow nuclear shills now downvoting basic physics.

I have no idea and coal sucks and is the result of intense lobbying and corrupt politicians being bought for pennies on the dollar for the last 25 years.

The point isn’t the water usage of nuclear power, since most of it is evaporated and returned to the cycle, so I’d be surprised if it’s worse than coal in terms of actual consumption. However you need water in large quantities and the correct temperatures to be able to use it for cooling on nuclear.

If there is no water or not enough water of sufficient temperatures, then you can’t cool the plant. It’s simple as that.

Droughts overall are horrible for Europe just as much as anywhere else. We’re losing tons of valuable topsoil, forrests are dying contributing to the continual errosion. All this could lead to salination and eventual death of farmland. Crop yields are unpredictable. No country on this planet can exist for any prolonged period of time with droughts, unless it can import everything it can’t produce itself from elsewhere.

Water usage is generally a huge issue in Germany. Farmers take out far, far more than they’re allotted already and there’s almost no oversight. Large cities like Frankfurt am Main are pulling in water from surrounding areas, leaving them dry. And this isn’t even touching on the basically free use of water for our industries at large. It’s a really bad situation.

The only point where renewables would “rely” on water beyond their construction processes is either water generated power itself or energy storage (which comes down to the same).