Essay by Eric Worrall
Blaming government infrastructure failures on nuclear energy.
Climate change is exposing nuclear power’s reliability problem
By Valerie Arnhold, M.V. Ramana | Opinion | September 6, 2026
One of nuclear energy’s biggest selling points is its claims of reliability. “Nuclear energy is the only large-scale power source that can be tapped in even the most extreme weather conditions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” boaststhe American energy company Constellation. “Nuclear power plants are very reliable, and can run for many months without interruption, providing large amounts of clean electricity, regardless of the time of day, the weather, or the season,” says the World Nuclear Association. At a public meeting in June, Keith Ammon, a pro-nuclear Republican member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, echoed these claims: “Nuclear doesn’t care about the weather,” he said. “It just runs.”
Over the next few months, several countries in Europe had to shut down nuclear plants because of hot weather and drought—proving that nuclear power does, indeed, care about the weather. Coming at a time when demand for electricity was high, these countries were faced with an imminent failure of the electricity grid. Citizens and businesses in Hungary and Romania had to reduce their consumption. Ironically, it was solar power—often critiqued by nuclear boosters as unreliable—that provided additional electricity and staved off shortages in some countries. A further irony is that these heat waves are more likely and more severe because of climate change, which is often advanced as the reason to expand nuclear power in the first place.
…
Underlying most of these shutdowns is water, or lack thereof. Nuclear reactors need even more water than other thermal power plants for regular operations and to ensure vital safety functions. As the Nuclear Energy Agency explained, nuclear “power plants have in general greater cooling needs than other thermoelectric generating technologies. This results from the lower efficiency of the power conversion cycle, as well as from the latent safety function cooling water plays, for instance to evacuate residual heat during planned or unplanned shutdowns.”
…
Climate change is already causing “more frequent and intense extreme events.”Unanticipated shutdowns will increase in frequency as extreme weather events driven by climate change become more common. One study found that “the average frequency of climate-induced disruptions” grew from “0.2 outage per reactor-year in the 1990s to 1.5 in the past decade” (i.e., 2010s). Going by the record so far, this decade will likely record a higher number of outages.
Read more: https://thebulletin.org/2026/09/climate-change-is-exposing-nuclear-powers-reliability-problem/
The article itself admitted the shutdowns weren’t a nuclear problem, they were a water supply problem.
Europe, like many places, has suffered decades of chronic underinvestment in water security – a fact which even the European Commission admits.
So how is it reasonable to blame shutdowns of nuclear plants due to lack of water on the reliability or otherwise of nuclear power? Fix the water underinvestment and you fix the nuclear plant shutdown issue.
Trying to paint solar energy as a reliable alternative for heatwaves and extreme weather resilience is even more absurd – one hailstorm and you lose your solar plant. At least nuclear plants can if necessary be armoured against weather damage, solar not so much.
