No Belgiums goverment is gonna investigate if it is worth to take them over for free from engie and run then for longer and maybe reopen some, but the study first needs to show if it is viable.
Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#452Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear' Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or i…
> it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable The big fear for me would be that this happens to a nuclear power plant that is located in a densely populated area (of which there are many). Chernobyl was bad, but imagine the impact if the exclusion zone contained a major city.
The only real problem with the Fukushima incident was the (unnecessary) evacuation. It really would be best if they weren't built too close to where people live.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive po…
What happens in days where renewables can't produce enough energy? Or the evenings where we don't have enough batteries (all evenings so far and for the next decade at least)? You can call it base load or whatever you want, but that energy is coming either from hydro, nuclear or a carbon-based source. And those carbons are hard to come by these days, so even if nuclear power is expensive, at least it is reliable.
It takes a decade at least for any new nuclear starting today to come online in the west. In that decade you’ve built an awful lot of batteries for the same amount of money.
No one wants to bet $10s of billions of nuke capex against the relentless progress of batteries and other tech over the next 10 years, and then the 30+ years of plant operations. It’s a suckers bet , so the only ones who can take it are nation states.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.
I agree storage is a problem. But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the gr…
May be base-load is not the best term but in case if batteries and other storages will run out during long cloudy stretch with weak winds nuclear will at least allow to power critical infrastructure. It’s bad that some consumers will loose power but less bad than total apocalypses when the storage is empty and you have no unintermittent power source in the grid.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#455Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government. Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram... I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out…
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does 2.2 MW/hour mean?
It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.
Joule is a derived unit, it is kg*m^2/s^2. There are lots of derived units, like hertz and newton, because they useful than writing out the whole thing. Electronics would be really annoying if had to write out volt, ohm, and watts (ampere is base unit, coulomb is derived).
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#457Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However: > the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a l…
The Fukushima quake was a truly extraordinary outlier though! 4th biggest quake ever recorded in history hit at the exact spot where the tsunami could overpower the protective wall at the reactor. Yet nobody died from the radiation. Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten. No one demands we stop building cities by the ocean.
> Meanwhile the 20k people who died in the tsunami are forgotten.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.) But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
Competent engineering isn't enough. You also need to never end up being in a war zone, and being able to commit to ongoing maintenance forever , or outlawing all construction far downstream (or finding the even more scarce type of locations where nobody wants to build downstream).
Yeah, kinda?
In "most" military situations, the enemy would not want the dam destroyed - because it's a valuable part of what they want to conquer, or doing so would flood their own supply lines, or whatever. And having a well-placed reservoir could save your butt if a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm#City_firestorms got started.
To keep providing power to the grid, everything from coal to solar to nuclear needs "forever" maintenance. Yes, an unmaintained dam is a hazard. That can be neutralized with a strategic breach, or (some locations) letting the reservoir silt up. But high-rise buildings, flood-control dikes, and quite a few other things are also "people die if not properly maintained" hazards.
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine. It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse , and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste…
1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel 2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use. 3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves. 4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.
1. Does it matter where the radioactive material comes from? It still represents the ability of storing nuclear waste.
2. Never intended, but still used as such [0]
4. Seems like most experts disagree here
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20140118011319/http://www.haz.de...
Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 eff…
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, There have been plenty of direct deaths caused by coal power. Coal dust can be quite explosive and has caused a lot of deaths over the years. And plenty of coal fired boilers, both stationary and mobile (locomotives) and failed causing plenty of deaths.
It's instructive (and scary) to google pictures of exploded boilers!