Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#691

Post by jltsiren » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:04 AM 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…

That's not an apples-to-apples comparison. Naval reactors look cheap, because the cost is for the reactor in the narrow sense. Other major costs, such as the containment building and countermeasures against natural disasters and terrorist attacks, are included in the costs for the rest of the ship.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#692

Post by bell-cot » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

peterfirefly wrote: post #543

bell-cot wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

For the 1% who are so interested in science & history & such that learning about those would not be an issue, plausibly yes.

For the 99% - who don't have the time, or interest, or attention span, or cultural identification, or whatever, to sit through all that - NO.

Is your priority further education of the 1%? Or to actually get some large-scale public disaster prep done?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#693

Post by anonymars » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:22 AM UTC

Kon5ole wrote: post #549

anonymars wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly my point. You are looking at a single fantastic instance: you could have 100 Chernobyls and it would still be less destruction, illness, and death per TWh. To consider Deepwater Horizon "ancient history" is a particularly astonishing claim

> 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

Banqiao dam was a single hydroelectric installation, for which the estimated death toll of its failure is in the ballpark of every nuclear death combined including Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#694

Post by UltraSane » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

florkbork wrote: post #656

UltraSane wrote: post #643

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…

The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#695

Post by Manuel_D » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #682

yawaramin wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#696

Post by Manuel_D » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:32 AM UTC

epistasis wrote: post #623

selfmodruntime wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 innovatio…

Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required, it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can.

The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear plant at under 100% output is when nuclear makes up a very large chunk of a country's generation capacity. It's not that only French nuclear plants can reduce output it's that only the French have ever been in the situation where their nuclear capacity exceeds their minimum electricity demand.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#697

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:36 AM UTC

Manuel_D wrote: post #696

epistasis wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 innovatio…

Nuclear can deliver flexible demand if required , it just involves either lowering the reactivity in the core, or if the drop in demand is sudden, bypassing steam from the turbine and running it directly to the condenser. But since their operating costs are so much lower than their construction costs operators run them at 100% capacity as long as they can. The only situation where deliberately operating a nuclear pla…

Not economically. EDF is already crying about renewables cratering the earning potential and increasing maintenance costs for the existing french nuclear fleet. Let alone the horrifyingly expensive new builds.

And that is France which has been actively shielding its inflexible aging nuclear fleet from renewable competition, and it still leaks in on pure economics.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#698

Post by thereisnospork » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:37 AM UTC

thinkcontext wrote: post #614

simplyluke wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 That's quite a comparison given China's governance and environmental record. China will take your land, poison you, imprison you if you protest and suppress any mention of it on social media or in the press. Of course a business can get a lot done in that environment, is that rea…

>Some level of permitting reform is warranted but I would think hard about whether you want to adopt China's policies.

Given the current geopolitical trajectories we are going to be adopting their policies one way or another.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#699

Post by ViewTrick1002 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:38 AM UTC

UltraSane wrote: post #694

florkbork wrote: post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.

Even with Danish insolation 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.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#700

Post by belorn » Fri, May 01, 2026, 1:41 AM UTC

greendestiny wrote: post #615

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.

Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all. What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of t…

I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status.

Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.

We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.