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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#511

Post by munk-a »

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

When it comes to residential/consumer use base load is irrelevant - but when it comes to business (especially industrial) use base load is a strict necessity. The proportional requirements of base load are fading but it is still something that needs to be considered carefully.

Do fossil fuel companies overstate the importance and scale of base load to justify additional fuel subsidies? Indubitably - but don't let their bullshit hide the truth within it that actually is a critical requirement for our power grid.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#512

Post by appreciatorBus »

panja wrote: post #414
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…

Maybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?

Because if a thing is valued by thing-consumers at x and you set the price to This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#513

Post by peterfirefly »

Moldoteck wrote: post #507
fnordian_slip wrote: post #385

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, 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)

> continued by cdu in 2011.

because of the electoral threat of the Greens and an uninformed public.

The solar thing was a farce: Germany created all sorts of subsidies and big plans in the expectation that German factories would be supply the solar panels -- only to be almost immediately outcompeted by more efficient Chinese production (and likely a lot of state subsidies there as well).

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#514

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

UltraSane wrote: post #441
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables. Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc. What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing rene…

Nuclear reactors work at night and when there is no wind. Reliable electricity is far more valuable than unreliable electricity.

Did we have rolling blackouts from electricity shortages during the energy crisis? No.

Was the electricity extremely expensive? Yes.

Reliable electricity has a certain worth. And that is vastly lower than what nuclear power needs when running at 100% 24/7 all year around.

And that is disregarding that EDF is already crying about renewables crater the earning potential of their existing nuclear fleet due to load following and increased maintenance costs. Let alone horrifyingly expensive new builds.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#515

Post by Moldoteck »

croes wrote: post #155
toasty228 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

most of Ukraine's ren infra is destroyed or conquered by russia. Zaporozhie is in cold shutdown. Thousands died from dam collapse caused by russia.

Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.

France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.

Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#516

Post by swores »

NoLinkToMe wrote: post #501
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.

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.…

> "just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years."

One problem I've heard about this idea in the past is that cars and their batteries are expensive, and people won't want to run down the lifetime of their car battery more quickly by also using it as a home battery rather than just for driving.

Obviously this can be solved either by making it so cheap to replace car batteries that nobody cares, or by legislating that people have to use their cars this way. But is either of these solutions easy to happen any time soon?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#517

Post by Moldoteck »

crote wrote: post #209
mpweiher wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion. How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this? The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US: "The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[…

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…

asse was never intended to be final repository. It was experimental repository without a plan to extract the waste if their experiment goes sideways. Onkalo does account for such factors, hence the name- final repository

Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#518

Post by Moldoteck »

BirAdam wrote: post #299

Everyone focuses on the safety of power production, and I totally get that and think it's important, but the mining and enrichment of uranium should also be considered. Nuclear "disasters" aren't just 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. There are plenty of other disasters that aren't power plants. Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium proce…

considering nuclear needs least mining, i doubt effects are too big per kwh vs alternatives.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#519

Post by Moldoteck »

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.

the choice here was nuclear or new gas from engie

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#520

Post by ViewTrick1002 »

vince14 wrote: post #411
ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power". https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

That is not the case. There are LCOLC, LFSCOE and others which land on renewables being way more expensive. Even without your made up claim about "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".

Which are extremely simplified metrics.

Like the LFSCOE study is only using one source of renewables through all weather together with 2020 data on battery costs.

Which is why I linked a recent full system analysis. With Danish data so a vastly harder problem than a place with abundant solar. So tell me what they missed.

They even tilted the study heavily towards nuclear power and assumed that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive.

Still finding that renewables are vastly cheaper when it comes to meeting a real grid load.

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