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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

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Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident. In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaw…

How about the VVER-440 still running e.g. in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that lack proper containment? Still only Russia being Russia?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, Russia is Russia. The RBMK with its well-known design flaws could never have been certified/built in the West. Yes, these design flaws were well-known long before the Chernobyl accident. In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had significant design flaw…

How about the VVER-440 still running e.g. in the Czech Republic and Slovakia that lack proper containment? Still only Russia being Russia?

The subject was modifications made to reactor types that had major accidents, and specifically the RBMK-1000.

Last I checked, the VVER-440 is not an RBMK-1000, did not explode at Chernobyl, and has not had a major accident.

"The two VVER-440 units in Loviisa, Finland have containment buildings that fulfil Western safety standards.

A typical design feature of nuclear reactors is layered safety barriers preventing escape of radioactive material. VVER reactors have three layers:

1. Fuel rods: the hermetic zirconium alloy (Zircaloy) cladding around the uranium oxide sintered ceramic fuel pellets provides a barrier resistant to heat and high pressure.

2. Reactor pressure vessel wall: a massive steel shell encases the whole fuel assembly and primary coolant hermetically.

3. Reactor building: a concrete containment building that encases the whole first circuit is strong enough to resist the pressure surge a breach in the first circuit would cause.

Compared to the RBMK reactors – the type involved in the Chernobyl disaster – the VVER uses an inherently safer design because the coolant is also the moderator, and by nature of its design has a negative void coefficient like all PWRs. It does not have the graphite-moderated RBMK's risk of increased reactivity and large power transients in the event of a loss of coolant accident. The RBMK reactors were also constructed without containment structures on grounds of cost due to their size; the VVER core is considerably smaller"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VVER#Safety_barriers

It also appears that the VVER-440 does have a containment building, and older variants that had problems with said containment building were forced to shut down.

"One of the earliest versions of the VVER-type, the VVER-440, manifested certain problems with its containment building design. As the V-230 and older models were from the outset not built to resist a design-critical large pipe break, the manufacturer added, with the newer V-213 model, a so called Bubble condenser tower that – with its additional volume and a number of water layers – aims to suppress the forces of rapidly escaping steam without the onset of a containment-leak. As a consequence, all member-countries[citation needed] with plants of the VVER-440 V-230 type, as well as older types, were forced by the politicians of the European Union to shut them down permanently. Because of this, the Bohunice Nuclear Power Plant had to close two reactors and the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant had to close four. Whereas in the case of the Greifswald Nuclear Power Plant, the German regulatory body had already made the same decision in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be. Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...

Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.

The shills do fear mongering to scare people into passing regulations that increase costs independent of the cost/benefit ratio, require costs to be internalized that other generation methods aren't required to (it should either be everyone or no one), and file lawsuits against construction projects to induce delays and increase costs again.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> perfect nuclear safety record. It’s a very semantic claim. They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines. Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).

Zero of these instances were due to shipboard reactor failure.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when there is wide bad weather for renewables? ( for a range of days from 1 - several) Where would the power needed come from? If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage

Wind and solar power are remarkably stable in Europe. Last year, the average weekly electricity output was 14.0TWh; not a single week fell below 10.5 TWh. Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.

Surely global warming is going to lead to a less stable environment going forward?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#916

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear. As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass. In my opinion clean…

I am surprised that this is the case after reading how Orban was behaving on the matter of its oil and gas sources. I guess the big problem is that the economy and heating is still very fossil dependent ?

Yes, we can't immediately convert all vehicles to electric and gas boilers to heat pumps, so if we lose access to gas and oil we're kind of screwed.

Orbán had 16 years of unlimited power to diversify from Russia as the only source though, so there's no excuse.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough. During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response: > Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Progra…

The Three Mile Island accident is also dramatically exaggerated in the public conscience with its severity and risk factor - solely because of the default fear of Nuclear.

Oil, Gas, Coal, and random chemical plants have had much more significant accidents even in the US, but never made a blip in the public's minds.

Aren't France and Canada the ones to learn from at this point with regards to safe nuclear operation?

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#918
post #896
post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden. Most people I spend quite a lot more than 5 years learning skills; I know someone who spent 15 years in the education system to end up working at a petrol station. This long list is not relevant. These skills are clearly easy enough to learn. > Clearly you've also never gotten a line by line price estimate for a…

> I don't buy the idea that Europe might have abandoned the concept of childhood education all of a sudden. My school education didn't include pouring concrete, plastering, laying tiles, architecture. Just about covered some basic woodworking, but not the structural kind. > These skills are clearly easy enough to learn. UK minimum wage times fifteen years is enough to buy a house. After tax. As a 100% mortgage. And t…

Ok, so let's quickly run through this argument. Stop me at the part you think is a mischaracterisation:

1) Resource constraints are negligible. Other than labour, obviously.

2) The skills to build a house are quick to acquire. It takes a couple of years. Less time than people are already spending anyway under general schooling as I assume the UK has 10 years compulsory education like most of the civilised world does.

3) The payback on a house is huge because the compensation for labour is high.

4) And I suspect you just demonstrated that people need to coordinate in groups of double-digit size to build a new house. Since they can sell the house for a 90% markup on costs they'd probably get wealthy doing it.

So is your argument here that the UK can comfortably house the entire world population? All 8.5 billion? Everyone gets a nice big apartment, maybe 2x the size of the current median? Let alone rental stress and housing unaffordability which are banished problems? Because given that we're ignoring the actual constraints (physical space, capital and materials) I'm not seeing what you think is the limiting factor here that doesn't just scale up as we add in more humans.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.

>Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet. Don't talk about Americans that way!

We aren’t making a very good case for ourselves on the world stage are we…

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#920

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infreque…

Serious question, when has there been a serious nuclear accident? Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that killed far more people than the nuclear failure did. Chernobyl was pure communist stupidity. This level of incompetence would never happen in a well functioning country. So that leaves Three Mile island? Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children). And what are these predictable…

My point is that since we have had so few nuclear incidents, but they have done massive damage, it is very possible that we don't actually know much worse it could get. We have only seen a few points from a distribution that could be much wider than we think. Compared to renewable failures for which we have a pretty good idea.
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