Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge into the river maybe mitigate this problem? One could also cycle the water from the cooling pond through the plant's cooling loop. The worse that could happen is evaporate the water from the cooling pond which is gets replaced with new water (sans fish) from the river.
> Would a cooling pond with controlled discharge...
There are any number of methods of dealing with this. Using natural bodies of water is a lower cost (thus highly popular) method of sinking heat. Palo Verde has been operating 3 large reactors in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona since the 1970s. There is no reason in engineering or physics that a power reactor must be highly sensitive to any particular lake, river or ocean's temperature. This is strictly about money, being cheaper to rely on a big "free" heatsink, and leaving too little margin for changing conditions.
Nuclear plants can run with those hyperboloid cooling towers as the sink for waste heat. They are just a lot more expensive to build, run and maintain compared to using river water.
You still need water when cooling with towers. Instead of heating the river you consume some of its water and release it into the atmosphere.
There's plenty of work happening with adapting non evaporative cooling loops for data centers. Maybe that can be applied here too, even if to mitigate some of the cooling needed?
Data centers can afford to spend way more per kWh of heat discharged. Nuclear needs to dump 3+kWh of heat per kWh of electricity generated.
making modern websites not 100's of megabytes heavy would go a long way
FWIW, this one was only about 5 MB.
The images related to the article are about 0.5MB.