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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what about an existential-crisis-then-costs-be-damned emergency buildout of renewables and batteries? you would displace more carbon emissions far faster than a nuclear buildout, just due to the speed at which they can be deployed and scaled.

We should do both, aggressively! That's exactly the point I'm making. It's always been shocking to me how this discussion immediately goes to a fixed-pie "solar OR nuclear" discussion. You build both! They solve different problems very well.

I guess I agree with your “should” in a world where we have infinite dollars to spend. Sadly we refuse to treat it as existential, so the dollars we have to spend are roughly fixed. In that world we live today any dollar spent on nuclear for 10 years from now isn’t spent on renewables today, so it costs us more emissions.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions.

But they're not entitled to their own facts.

The facts are that all large nuclear plants require a stable water supply, and climate change directly threatens that.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#683
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.

Googling I see numbers like $11/MWh for onshore wind [1] and $5-$10/MWh for solar [2] while nuclear is around $25/MWh [3]. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-wind-power-ope... [2] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/benchmarking-utility-scale-... [3] https://www.nei.org/getContentAsset/47fa8caa-9b0d-4029-932c-...

Also wow, for Solar the property taxes are OpEx. So if there's more sunlight because of good weather these "Operating expenses" decrease because they're based on taking fixed costs like property taxes and just dividing them by power output that's unrelated.

I assume property taxes for a gas turbine are likewise OpEx but they just disappear in the noise of buying enormous amounts of methane as fuel.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we're at 2-3 TWh of world battery production capacity in 2025, that's 4 days of California demand. By 2031 or 2032, we're going to have 20-30TWh of battery production. The 2,200 GWh of batteries produced in 2025 amounts to a bit under 3 days of California's average 750GWh daily electricity consumption, not 4 days. And more broadly, I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production am…

> I'm not sure how pointing out that a year's worth of global battery production amounts to just 3 days of one US state's electricity demand is supposed to demonstrate that battery storage is feasible. It was pointing out that the comment making off-the-wall requirements of battery storage was already not aware of the order of magnitude of existing batteries. You don't know the exact > To put this in perspective, glo…

> The implication seems to be that batteries will get more expensive at some point. Perhaps. Or more chemistries will be discovered or used. Lithium got very expensive for a short while, then cheap. The cure for high prices is high prices, because unlike oil there are tons of substitutions available for all aspects of batteries.

Such as? Is your proposal that we use lead acid batteries instead of lithium based batteries? Those have much shorter lifespans, which drives up cost. Sodium batteries? 9 GWh of sodium batteries were shipped in 2025.

To be blunt, you're just hand waving away the massive disparity in scale between battery production and the storage demands of a predominantly wind and solar grid.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#685
post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships. What's frust…

What? Who is saying that nuclear cannot be successful, this has nothing to do with my comment. Did you read one sentence without understanding the meaning?

It is simple: some environmental laws are a legitimate ask from some people, whether you or I agree with the ask itself. It has nothing to do with the nuclear, it is about your argument framing the existence of environmental laws as the reason it does not work. If nuclear cannot work well in some countries because in some countries there are people who ask legitimate things, the problem is not these people, the problem is that the nuclear model is not adapted to the reality of these countries.

But again, as I've said, it is not even the case: the difficulties with nuclear are not limited to "some environmentalist".

> It's that if you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should be spinning up every option all at once as aggressively as you can.

That does not make sense. If you want to write a software that does something, you don't just spinning up Linux, Windows, Mac, and start writing code in Java, C++, python, typescript, erlang, ... at the same time. What you do is: you write a decision matrix, score it, and _choose one strategy_.

In the context of the climate crisis, the strategy can mix different technologies ... or not. The fact that it does not does not mean that this particular strategy is worse than another. In particular, budgets are obviously limited, so spending X$ on project A may lead to a successful project A while spending X/2$ on project A and X/2$ project B may lead to both projects A and B failing. (and if you don't think it's true, just increase the number N of projects until X/N$ is ridiculously too small to do anything. According to your sentence, you said you should be spinning up every options all at once as aggressively as you can, so you cannot do only N-1 projects, you need to split your money amongst the N projects).

When it comes to climate change, I was 100% pro-nuclear 20 years ago. Now, in some countries, it is too often a money pit (not because of regulation or the bad environmentalists) that is wasting money that could have helped the climate. If you believe that continuing to burn natural gas and coal is an existential risk, you should spend your time, money and energy to real solutions instead of achieving nothing by trying to do everything all at once without a plan.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#686
post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> if your model require a world where it is not the case to work, then your model is stupidly unrealistic And yet, our world contains multiple cases where it is the case that nuclear is being built today, at reasonable costs, and with great success. The two examples I've given in this thread are China and the US Navy. Some others include Japan and South Korea, both of which are notably not dictatorships. What's frust…

And yet...

https://www.ajupress.com/view/20250819103850607

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#687
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Higher energy prices is something the population notices when they come. But when higher prices stick around industries close or never opened.

Yes, and pursing state sponsored nuclear means higher prices are guaranteed to stick around

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear is like being a firefighter and opposing the use of water to extinguish fires.

That seems to be deliberately obtuse. It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires. Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river rig…

so only do things that yield results fast.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#690

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…

What if they dump it in a trench in the ocean, what will actually happen? The ocean is very large...
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