When I was travelling up to London on Thursday morning from my home about 60km to the south of the capital, I was a little irritated that the train was late. Hot weather makes metal rails expand, and that brings risks that can be lessened by rolling along them at more cautious speeds. When I heard it was due to speed restrictions on the line, I was more understanding.
Its companies are also using barges with shallower drafts. Électricité de France, a state-owned utility company, has announced investments to improve resilience in the face of drought at both its nuclear plants and its hydropower plants. (Drought is not the only climate-related problem it faces. Hot summers present two problems for such plants. One is that environmental regulations often require the water downstream of the plant to stay below a given temperature for the benefit of the ecosystem. When the riverwater is hot, the amount of extra heat the plant can dump into it is limited. Such concerns regularly reduce the production of plants in France. There are longer-term measures to take. Previous droughts have prompted Germany to shift away from relying on river traffic. On August 10th some of the jellyfish thriving in the uncommonly hot sea found their way into the cooling system of its Gravelines plant, near Dunkirk, shutting down three reactors.)
