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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

dpa-international.com

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#541

Post by leonidasrup »

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.…

Lot of the biomass used in Denmark to form baseload power generation is imported.

"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."

https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

https://www.eubioenergy.com/2025/03/13/no-smoke-without-fire...

So Denmark replaced lot of imported fossil fuels with imported wood.

Could we scale this form of energy generation to energy requirements of China, India?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#542

Post by Danox »

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.…

So why are the Danish and the Swiss working on Thorium?

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/danish-firm-molten...

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#543

Post by peterfirefly »

bell-cot wrote: post #196
jlnthws wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 preparatio…

536 and the Norse stories about the Fimbulwinter ought to be argument enough.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#544

Post by [deleted] »

pqtyw wrote: post #343
cogman10 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission. These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.

[deleted]

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#545

Post by Ray20 »

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

I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.

First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#547

Post by Danox »

thrownthatway wrote: post #502
AngryData wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pl…

Fukushima failed because of the aftermath of a 9.1 earthquake.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#548

Post by macintux »

dalyons wrote: post #447
ineedasername wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And $ cost is a poor metric to chase when what you really care about includes a lot more-- exposure to the whims of geopolitical forces you can't foresee or control, which have both $ cost and more.

I agree to an extent… but a state forcing a nuclear share and locking the populace into higher power prices for 30+ years is going to politically very unpopular. Short term economic concerns dominate today.

Tough luck. That's the point of representative government: look out for the interests of the nation and sell it to your populace. If you can't sell it, be prepared to be voted out, but do the right thing.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#549

Post by Kon5ole »

anonymars wrote: post #270
thrownthatway wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RMBKs are irrelevant to nuclear reactor safety. You had a good argument up until you went there.

Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear' Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or i…

>How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...

When did a dam failure in the Ukraine affect wildlife in Sweden for 30+ years? It's kind of a several-orders-of-magnitude larger area being affected for orders-of-magniture longer timespans.

Exxon valdez and even deepwater horizon is ancient history, Chernobyl is not, in fact it's current events. And will be, for the foreseeable future, as will Fukushima.

No Japanese alive today will stop paying for Fukushima for as long as they live. Are any other costs from the tsunami still ongoing?

>Happy to be proven wrong, but

Won't prove you wrong but maybe it will make you reconsider the link as a support of your argument:

Danger is what could happen, not what has actually happened.

A loaded gun is dangerous even if it hasn't been fired yet, nuclear plants are dangerous even if they haven't been bunker-buster-bombed yet. More so than any coal plant, tanker ship or hydro dam.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#550

Post by legulere »

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.

Chernobyl lacked a containment and there are still reactors of the same type running without containment in Russia.
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