Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#151

Post by SecretDreams » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

_aavaa_ wrote: post #133

SecretDreams wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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 governmental debt?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#152

Post by vidarh » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:11 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.

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.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#153

Post by ben_w » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #100

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The #1 problem leading to humans not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources Not particularly. We've ridden massive increases in both quality of life and population (at both the per-country and global scales) over the last two centuries.

In the sense that the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries. That's a big achievement but it isn't exactly the best case scenario. We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.

> the global median income crept from about $0 to $10,000 sure over a few centuries

The floor is 2-300 USD equivalent, because that's what subsistence farming is, and it took two centuries to go from $1500 to $18811: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...

> We want a world where everyone can live at least a 6- or 7- figure salary.

that's a massive shift of goalposts from "not having enough to live comfortably is that we have an enormous number of humans and limited resources".

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#154

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

monegator wrote: post #93

pjc50 wrote: post #2

Strictly: 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…

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#155

Post by croes » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

toasty228 wrote: post #130

kleiba2 wrote: post #105

Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one. All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites. The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earl…

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

How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?

Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?

Me neither.

BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#156

Post by shlant » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

NeutralForest wrote: post #38

I just want Belgium to go all-in on renewables, we [already have a pretty good electricity production make-up]( https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/energy/electricity-product... ) but we're still [too dependent on oil]( https://www.iea.org/countries/belgium/energy-mix ). Hopefully the current energy crisis is a wake up call.

just FYI - unfortunately HN doesn't have markup like reddit so your hyperlinking doesn't work

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#157

Post by croes » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

throwaway_20357 wrote: post #131

kleiba2 wrote: post #105

Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one. All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites. The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earl…

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?

Terrorists already have a use case

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#158

Post by testing22321 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

shawabawa3 wrote: post #119

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…

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 us…

> It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster Lead to basically zero direct deaths

Which was really just pure luck.

It was melting down. Humans could not go in to stop it, robots could not go in to stop it. Pure luck it didn’t go a lot bigger.

Also it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water, which will have impacts for a very long time

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#159

Post by simondotau » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #149

wholinator2 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Plaus…

> 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...

And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#160

Post by dmix » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC

adev_ wrote: post #116

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 significant…

Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China.

They should be adopting every sort of energy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...

> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.