> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime

I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues.

They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected.

To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.

Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...

> It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.

This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.

> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.

I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy).

A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.

> time and cost as much as anything else

you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.

A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.

> I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.

This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.

Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........

> This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts.

It is not only the oil shock.

Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.

The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.

The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.

Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.

The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.

Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.

You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.

> twenty years

When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.

Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.

New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.

It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.

And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.

Yes, nuclear power regulations are unreasonably strict because that was the method we used to soft-ban it.

This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.

The most bureaucratic thing ever done... search for a place to store something for 56 years. still not done

> they have not yet found one.

Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.

Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?

I wonder where they store coal waste.

If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.

The world doesn't even have the foresight of doing something basic, like mitigating against fuel crisis scenario, let alone what you have suggested.

Volcanic winters are far more frequent than catastrophic asteroid blasts. Disregarding a volcanic winter possibility and its impact is like disregarding the possibility of a pandemic.

Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”

Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.

At some point reality has to trump ideology.

Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.

>Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels.

If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.

>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.

You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.

It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.

> most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what

Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.)

I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.

Sorting machines are in fact used in these countries. But most of the trash separating efforts were introduced many decades ago, long before the capabilities of modern AI systems.

I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.

I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler.

Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).

Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...

In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.

What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.

With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable.

It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.

We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.

What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?

Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.

Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.

I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?

> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.

Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.

I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.

This is such a non problem, here is the waste from the entire french nuclear production ever (the red cube): https://www.discoverthegreentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...

Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french

> want Belgium to go all-in on renewables

I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.

> Belgium is nearly bankrupt

can anyone jumpstart me on this, since when is belgium bankrupt?

NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.

Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).

It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).

You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.

If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced.

I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?

And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.

There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity.

German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.

> What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?

No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.

Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.

More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.

With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).

But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.

One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.

>I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?

Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.

I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.

Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown.

The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.

Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.

I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.

> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.

It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.

Yea, fair point.

Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.

Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.

That's a big nevertheless.

"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."

On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.

Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors.

"Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”"

https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...

It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster

1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.

So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant?

Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does?

Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.

Got my gens mixed up, so thanks.

But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.

> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths

"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".

It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.

> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.

> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

Irrelevant.

> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.

If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?

> Lead to basically zero direct deaths

Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.

> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan

Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.

> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake

That's a non-sequitur.

> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money

Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248

I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.

Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.

> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.

They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.

Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.

The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.

I'm not disagreeing

> How much money does it really cost?

The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...

It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.

Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.

Do you also believe they're eventually going to balance the budget and tackle the deficit?