Can someone layman explain why the water is 'consumed' if it's used for cooling?

Why can't it take the heat, be piped somewhere else to cool down again, and then be used again?

German manufacturing has also been down 15% compared to 2018 so this is mostly a reflection of reduced economic output. Between the nuclear shutdowns and the disruption of Russian energy sources, German manufacturing has been in a crisis the past few years.

Also, nuclear reactors don't deplete water for cooling so the premise of this article doesn't make sense. It goes from water to steam, to rain, back to water.

It's not consumed. It's heated up a bit and returned to the water cycle.

Not needed in Germany, but a 2 gigawatt nuclear plant can be hooked to a desalination plant that can make a billion gallons of fresh water from the sea, per day. It was once considered to use these to make agro-industrial parks. I recently got an archival film on this topic digitized and posted it here along with a bunch of technical papers: https://whatisnuclear.com/news/2025-01-30-no-greater-challen...

Is that all, or did coal consumption go up?

Can we just flag this kind of misleading and propagandist content? It’s literally content+karma farming, and brainwashing hot garbage.

Total rage bait that doesn’t have its place on platforms catering for higher educated and science oriented people.

Nuclear plants evaporates water, water rains down a few kilometers away, gets collected in sewer, recycled/filtered and re-injected in the system.

You know what doesn’t get recycled? Coal & gas burning pollution & CO2. And you know what doesn't get re-injected? Lost lives to pollution and global warming.

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Correlation does not imply causation.