Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#621

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

simplyluke wrote: post #556

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions. The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.

The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.

It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.

My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#622

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

simplyluke wrote: post #572

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd. Compare: If you believe COVID exists you need to use hydroxychloroquine. It makes you sound like you don't even believe in the problem you are proposing an (unpopular with experts) solution for.

> suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying. What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in th…

> How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?

Pretending it's all the fault of the bad environmentalists is a bit ridiculous. A nuclear powerplant is a tricky thing to create. A lot of projects had delay, often not due to any environmentalists or anti-nuclear people, but because the parts failed their internal control, which demonstrates that it is tricky to build. A nuclear powerplant is a huge provider that cannot be turned online for usually ~10 years, so you can also understand the complexity and the uncertainty: we are not able to predict the price of electricity or what will the electricity grid will look like in 2-3 years, and yet they need to predict it for a given region in 10 years.

And some environmental laws are frivolous or turned out the be incorrect (the same way some people who at the time were against some environmental laws turned out to be incorrect years later), but some laws are just legitimate and it is simply not fair to pretend that the opinions of some people should just be discarded because you have a different opinion. I myself don't always agree with some law, sometimes anti-nuclear, sometimes pro-nuclear, but a given fraction of these laws will exist, it is just the reality. It's like saying "communism would work if it was not for people who don't like communism": people who don't like communism will always exist and if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#623

Post by epistasis » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #613

ViewTrick1002 wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with Danish insulation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

This article conveniently doesn't include flexible demands and energy storage, both of which are a solved problem with nuclear but completely unrealistic with renewables.

Nuclear does neither flexible demand nor energy storage, those are in fact the things that nuclear does not solve! There are a few flexible nuclear plants in France but they push up costs. Some of the new modular nuclear rector designs are considering storage/flexibility, but cost there is also expected to be far higher than an AP1000.

Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and are the biggest disruption and innovation on the grid in more than half a century. You can use them to reduce transmission costs, to reduce the load on distribution substations and increase distribution usage capacity, you can use storage to make everything a lot cheaper by allowing smaller sizes for expensive T&D equipment that sees less than 30% average utilization.

Calling batteries "unrealistic" is not based in reality, it's just being stuck in decades past.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#624

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:11 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…

> 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.

Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#625

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #160

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…

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, ele…

Germany has one of the world's highest energy costs because taxes on electricity are astronomical. This is a selfmade problem.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#626

Post by topspin » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:12 PM UTC

BirAdam wrote: post #597

topspin wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2. Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on li…

It carried on until at least 1989, and the effects were present majorly until around 2000, and the superfund site was completed in 2006. So, like, pretty darn recent on the scale of a human lifetime.

That's all correct; a long tail of consequences.

Going in the opposite historical direction is the other side of that ledger. The actual plant in question was shut down in 1957. The AEC stepped in years earlier to triage the operation, after actually establishing formal exposure limits in 1950, which didn't exist prior to that point. Before that, the company itself had hired staff to control waste and detect contamination. They had to build their own survey equipment because there were no commercial tools available. The worst of the actual contamination was actually incurred prior to that; 1942-1945, when the gloves were entirely off building bombs.

The lessons have been learned. It's tragic and shameful history, but not terribly relevant to modern practice in nuclear power.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#627

Post by epistasis » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:13 PM UTC

simplyluke wrote: post #601

epistasis wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's great, but we live in the 2020s, not the 1970s. Technology has changed over 50 years. France talks about building more nuclear, but what's actually getting put on the grid is renewables, not nuclear. It wasn't the weird enviors that stopped nuclear in the US, they don't have much power. What really stopped it was that the industry ordered too many reactors at once in the 1970s, they didn't standardize on a des…

> Technology has changed over 50 years Technology sure has but through a confluence of outsourcing, bad policy, NIMBY attitudes among the boomer generation, and weaponized lawsuits US infrastructure remains somewhat frozen in the 1970s. Look at how much pushback, red tape, and cost there is to building a solar farm, road, datacenter or yes, nuclear plant compared to China. Nuclear actually might be the best example o…

> wouldn't consider what the US navy does scifi.

Military small reactor designs use fuel enriched to levels higher than what we want to be standard in civillian reactors. Second, military nuclear reactors are expensive as hell, and we wouldn't want to power our society with them.

We build nuclear submarines because operationally they are unsurpassed, there's no alternative, and the operational benefits are worth sky-high costs. When it comes to the grid, we have cheaper, more flexible, and faster to deploy options.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#628

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:14 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…

> It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Now that is a lie. The anti-nuclear push came from the Greens in the 90s. Conservatives just used it for a quick win once that policy became very popular in Germany.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#629

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

peterfirefly wrote: post #513

Moldoteck wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Not only that, aggressive cuts to the EEG subsidies killed dogfooding their own solar industry in the country.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#630

Post by selfmodruntime » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 10:15 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.

What is that storage you speak of?