Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#111

Post by ben_w » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #74

nandomrumber wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> And the West is also largely not keen on producing new humans (time and costs as much as anything else). > And seems to think it can just import people from other, far, away places. That seems fundamentally OK? The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources. We can't unlimit resources. There isn't a very nice way to force peo…

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources.

It really isn't. The raw materials in our lives are a tiny fraction of our living costs in the west. 200 tons of concrete, steel, and plastic etc. in appropriate proportions is enough for a very nice house, yet it would cost less than a tenth of the sale price of that house: what you need to turn it into a nice house is expensive human labour.

The raw materials are cheap because we have machines to help extract them; before we invented them, those materials were also expensive.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#112

Post by tokai » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

nickserv wrote: post #64

derektank wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s more forested land in Europe today than there has been since the middle ages

Citation needed. Also, even if true, a lot is likely due to people leaving the countryside and migrating to the cities during the latter half of the 20th century. To feed these urban populations, an enormous amount of food needs to be imported from other countries. So really the deforestation has been exported, same as pollution from manufacturing.

You don't need citation for common knowledge.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#113

Post by thrownthatway » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #76

nokz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This (rational) attitude is why state pensions need to have a strong correlation with the number of children you parent until they complete secondary schooling -- there needs to be a financial payoff for the time, effort and money invested; those children are the ones financing the state pensions.

The people planning for retirement are mostly past child raising age; the best way to have bugger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults, which is the exact opposite of the public health and morality pressure my entire generation and those that followed me have been on the recieving end of. That said, medical tech is speeding up like everything else, so non-human surrogacy, ar…

> bigger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults

Factually incorrect.

The best way to ensure big families is to foster a culture getting marriage younger, stating married, and starting families younger.

Women have their best years of fertility from about 17 to their early thirties. Telling young women to prioritise long educations and a career over family is counter productive to carrying on a civilisation, and has largely gone on to be proven something many women regret - unsurprisingly.

Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families don’t come simply from encouraging young people to have unprotected sex, although yes that is a crude component of it.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#114

Post by graemep » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

Pay08 wrote: post #29

graemep wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 amount…

A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#115

Post by navane » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #78

thrownthatway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 so…

That's a big nevertheless.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#116

Post by adev_ » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

716dpl wrote: post #31

The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy...

> 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.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#117

Post by cogman10 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

leonidasrup wrote: post #108

cogman10 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

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…

Got my gens mixed up, so thanks.

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

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#118

Post by inglor_cz » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:52 PM UTC

Projectiboga wrote: post #94

UltraSane wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#119

Post by shawabawa3 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #78

thrownthatway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 so…

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

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#120

Post by artursapek » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #109

artursapek wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP was drawing a connection between how the West has become less energy independent (not producing nuclear, importing energy) and how it’s become less labor independent (not producing people, importing them instead). The two are related because they are both caused by complacency, and they’re both destabilizing to the West.

That's a leap of logic. Europe also imports consumer goods, digital services, and much else. Why not talk about that?

Those are not mission critical for the survival of a civilization.