If you mean the over-confidence of asserting that water you can comfortably swim in (31C / 88F) would "boil a river" as the GP did, I agree. There's been ongoi

If you mean the over-confidence of asserting that water you can comfortably swim in (31C / 88F) would "boil a river" as the GP did, I agree. There's been ongoing discussion about nuclear power on HN for months now in response to the Ukraine/Russia crisis. This question of French nuclear cooling keeps coming up. After mulling over it for a bit the French nuclear regulator has arrived at the solution that I'm advocating for here, i.e. deciding that perhaps it's not such a big deal that the cooling water is a bit over regulatory limits[1]. But I'll admit that I'm not too familiar with France's nuclear industry and regulator. Perhaps it's all run by over-confident computer programmers. Aside from one's own expertise it's an important skill when reading the news to try to parse out whether the latest news about the sky falling is really something to be concerned about in the longer term, or just overinflated reports about easily solved implementation details. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how say having an empty pool the size of the Blue Lagoon next to a French nuclear power plant could serve as a thermal buffer on hot days. The examples of using public swimming pools adjacent to nuclear plants as thermal buffers was meant to humanize the ballpark of those numbers. 1. https://www.brusselstimes.com/256441/heat-wave-french-nuclear-plants-temporarily-allowed-to-discharge-overheated-water https://www.brusselstimes.com/256441/heat-wave-french-nuclea...