Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#501

Post by NoLinkToMe » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #461

throwaway2037 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some research about that nuclear power plant. In 1985 dollars, the total construction cost was 5.6B USD. That is an astonishing amount of money. That is at least 16B USD in 2026 money. If you also include decomissioning costs of about 4-5B USD... how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense? PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY. To be clear, I am not anti-nuclear power by any means. I think it is a t…

It’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.

Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.

The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.

Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.

Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.

Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.

With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.

With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.

And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.

And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.

Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#502

Post by thrownthatway » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

AngryData wrote: post #430

arijun wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.

Fukushima was a known risk though, they just never bothered to fix the problem. Plus just being planned in the 60s meant the initial design was born only about 15 years after nuclear power was invented. Fukishima was like driving around in a Model T, being told original brakes and tires and lack of seatbelts were unsafe, but still being regularly driven down busy roads without bothering to upgrade those features.

You reckon during the 44 years Fukushima Daiitchi operated there were no systems control and data acquisition upgrades?

And you reckon that the site operated for 44 years on a Gen II design without melting down is somehow an insisted or how unsafe those reactors were.

If that earthquake and tsunami had been only a bit different in either magnitude or location, those reactors could be operating still now.

Or if the plant operated had hardened those backup generators and water pumps a bit more.

There are 70 AP1000 reactors in operation, construction or planned.

Look at this:

Because of its simplified design compared to a Westinghouse generation II PWR, the AP1000 has:

50% fewer safety-related valves 35% fewer pumps 80% less safety-related piping 85% less control cable 45% less seismic building volume

Isn’t this the kind of thing hackers and tech advocates should be getting a raging hardon over.

This reactor does nearly twice as much as its predecessor using half the materials to build, at least for some systems.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#503

Post by Moldoteck » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

j16sdiz wrote: post #306

dmix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive? https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i... The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.

The way China building new reactor is not typical. Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification. China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type. If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.

most of chinese units are hualongs now

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#504

Post by Moldoteck » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

dalyons wrote: post #221

dmix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive? https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i... The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.

And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper. And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.

china wants nuclear to provide 10-20% of their needs. If china wants that, they'll achieve it. Nuclear is extremely competitive in china.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#505

Post by projct » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

dv_dt wrote: post #496

rayiner wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.

A requirement for base load is a fallacy promulgated by fossil fuel preservation lobbying

This is a confusing thing to say, can you explain?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#506

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not...

Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#507

Post by Moldoteck » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:53 PM UTC

fnordian_slip wrote: post #385

afh1 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.

>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by th…

phaseout was adopted by redgreens in 2000 and continued by cdu in 2011. THat's a fact German solar was just not competitive - labor, electricity and coal were more expensive in germany. Solar industry was showing problems even before cfd's reduction (which applied to chinese ones too but they endured since costs were lower)

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#508

Post by Moldoteck » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

croes wrote: post #148

adev_ wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#509

Post by Ray20 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

pqtyw wrote: post #350

mannykannot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet. There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common…

> Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though

I mean, when we get Chernobyl 2.0 with hundreds of millions of victims, will the fact that it was caused by "variables that can be easily controlled" somehow make the situation any better?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#510

Post by Moldoteck » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

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…

they havent found one bc they dont want to. Otherwise they would approve storing in say, herfa neurode