Water-rich Switzerland controls Western Europe’s taps — and wants it to stay that way. Its drought-ridden neighbors are getting nervous.

Water-rich Switzerland controls Western Europe’s taps — and wants it to stay that way. Its drought-ridden neighbors are getting nervous.

At the western edge of Lake Geneva, where the mighty Rhône river squeezes through a narrow dam, a blunder of French diplomacy is carved into stone for all to see.

The inscription, mounted on the walls of an old industrial building, commemorates the 1884 accord between three Swiss cantons that have regulated the water levels of this vast Alpine lake ever since. It does not mention France — even though some 40 percent of the lake is French territory.

“France, for some reason, wasn’t part of the contract,” said Jérôme Barras as he unlocked a gate below the epigraph to inspect a hydropower plant under the dam he has managed for more than a decade.

When the agreement was renewed and a new dam was built a century later, Paris still wasn’t interested.

The French government now regrets that.

…

And France has suddenly realized it can’t control that tap as it battles water shortages, destructive droughts and baking heat.

  • DiplomjodlerEnglish
    -3•7 months ago

    It’s possible to drastically reduce how much cooling water a nuclear power plant requires by taking a little water out and fully evaporating it, rather than running a lot of water in and heating up the whole river a little bit.

    Ah yes. Great idea. That water wouldn’t influence the local climate at all, right?

    • @[email protected]English
      9•7 months ago

      You’re concerned about a cooling tower that literally just evaporates water? You realize those aren’t nuclear specific?

      • DiplomjodlerEnglish
        1•7 months ago

        How much water? What effects will have on the river and the local water? And yes, these are questions one needs to be concerned about in any project of this size.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•7 months ago

      These guys say that there hasn’t been a much research on microclimate effects since the 1970s, though they did look at it, and found that it slightly increases crop yields in the area in the US by increasing precipitation a bit.

      https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-agricultural-and-applied-economics/article/effect-of-nuclear-power-plants-on-local-crop-yields/5CE7792374CCEF73CCBA9FC39BF131F6

      The growing prevalence of clean energy raises the question of possible associated externalities. This article studies the effects of nuclear power plant development (and, as a result, the increased amount of water in the atmosphere from evaporative cooling systems) on nearby crop yields and finds that an average nuclear power plant increases local soybean yields by 2 and corn yields by 1 percent. Considering the low elasticity of demand for these crops, the yield increases translate to annual net benefits of $229 million (2020 US dollars) – $317 million in losses to farmers and $546 million in benefits to consumers.