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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#191

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

> if input power fails fission ultimately stops

AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.

I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#192

Post by leonidasrup »

cogman10 wrote: post #143
shawabawa3 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

It's always hard count indirect deaths.

We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.

"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"

https://docs.iza.org/dp12687.pdf

"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."

In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.

"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."

https://energyexplained.substack.com/p/japan-1-how-fukushima...

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#193

Post by Levitz »

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…

I don't see how any of this makes sense.

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

Taking this as true (it very evidently isn't), then since Europe already has declining birth rates, the logic step would be to prevent migration no? An influx of people would hurt.

>There isn't a very nice way to force people to stop having children. The remarkably low birthrate is an amazing outcome of a superficially intractable problem.

You say this as if this "amazing outcome" came out of nowhere, magically. People are forced into this because finances make it hard. That is not very nice.

>If the Africans catch up with everyone else and stop having too many children

Why would this happen? From your comment, it doesn't seem to be something to expect?

By the way

>People are choosing not to have kids. That's workable.

This sentence is so extremely out of touch as to be insulting.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#194

Post by SecretDreams »

dalyons wrote: post #169
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…

For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money. The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the…

Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#195

Post by mannykannot »

thrownthatway wrote: post #62
cogman10 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

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

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#196

Post by bell-cot »

jlnthws wrote: post #136
lifty wrote: post #66

There's a very dark scenario where for some reason or another (all out nuclear war or asteroid hit) sunlight is blocked, in which case having stable base load energy production from nuclear would be very useful. I know this is an unlikely scenario and hopefully it never happens, but it's always good to think about tail risks like these.

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.

> Volcanic winters are far more frequent...

True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#199

Post by philipallstar »

cogman10 wrote: post #143
shawabawa3 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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

> That's a non-sequitur.

I think this is to establish that the large number of deaths from the disaster weren't due to the nuclear plant, which people seem to assume.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#200

Post by elric »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #43
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.

> 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…

IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
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