Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#931

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

laurencerowe wrote: post #724

echelon wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents? Vs. coal? Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.) ----- Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here: > Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work. Is a purely wind/solar…

Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter. Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush. Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Gi…

it depends if you like gas firming or not. France doesnt. Germany loves it

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#932

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:36 PM UTC

ak217 wrote: post #731

echelon wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents? Vs. coal? Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.) ----- Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here: > Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work. Is a purely wind/solar…

> Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable? Yes. (I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)

It's impossible for germany to have such a combo in any economical way.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#933

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

petre wrote: post #748

socalgal2 wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to. Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development. Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

the cost problem is lost experience to build stuff. It's not like berlins airport is so expensive because of new whistles. Many western nations forgot to build. Japanese ABWR has a lower core damage frequency vs french EPR yet EPR took 20y and ABWR - 4

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#934

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #906

petre wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to. Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development. Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

How could japan have made that powerplant tsunami proof? Put the emergency generators on a pontoon or on a inland moumountain?

put some generators on roof. Generator placement in Jp was based on BWRs placement in US - underground, which is sane considering tornados and stuff. But it wasnt adapted there

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#935

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #847

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.

If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better f…

it's strange you mention HPC but dont mention the costs of chinese nuclear...

British taxpayer will pay even more pr kwh for some offshore and tidal projects

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#936

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

audunw wrote: post #910

xphos wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can both build Nuclear that is safe and also build it faster. Its a matter of political will and reasonable regulation. Nations looking on the 100 year horizon would build nuclear and they would be newer and safer nuclear as time goes on. The next generation of reactors are safer and promise to be cheaper to build but the last of the GEN4 nuclear still are safe especially when we actually pay to have nuclear regul…

I don’t see why you would look at nuclear at all on a 100 year horizon. At that timescales you gotta look at the fundamentals: 1. We’ve got a free fusion reactor in the sky and collecting and storing that energy is fundamentally cheap. Especially in a long term perspective when the materials needed to store the energy will be mostly recycled and practically free. 2. We’ve got a free fission reactor under our feet. Dr…

1 - fusion reactor in the sky is not that easy to capture 24/7 due to nights/winter. BESS can partially alleviate the problem, not solve it. 2 - geothermal has an inconvenient property to lower output over time. 3 - nuclear requires far less grid investments, far less mining/materials 4 - If we are serious about nuclear we should investigate up to smallest detail how hitachi deployed first ABWR for such a short time/low cost and do that in series, en masse. I can bet in 20y Germany will still have far worse emissions than France

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#937

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

pydry wrote: post #864

tim333 wrote: post #847

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe in a climate crisis and are serious about it you probably want to run the numbers on different options and policies to see what works rather than saying yay this boo that. Running numbers on producing energy in say 15 years time which is roughly how long it takes to approve and build nuclear, and comparing it with projected solar+wind+battery costs for 15 years hence you tend to come with much better f…

The reason why people tend to get a bit cheerleadery about nuclear power is because it has some great PR and it resonates with them. It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies. The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes. The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants…

very little supply chain is shared with weapons, dont spread nonsense. If you want weapons it's far cheaper to have just an enrichement facility exactly for that.

And nuclear is cheap. Look at lazard estimate for existing fleet. Or open swiss data. Or even german data

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#938

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #795

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 might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous! I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens. On top of…

Belgian plants arent crumbling, they just need refurbs to have higher CF.

Uranium is sufficient to outlive the sun. Nuclear requires least amount of materials and mining. Uranium mining is nowadays mostly in situ which is environmentally fine vs say lithium mining.

"Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever." - so you say the same nonsense about storing arsenic/cadmium/lead waste from copper mining for eternity? Storing nuclear waste isnt much different from say Herfa Neurode. An example is onkalo. Soon others will appear, like Fosmark.

FFS you just thrown a bunch of fossil propaganda nonsense

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#939

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

maybewhenthesun wrote: post #836

DeusExMachina wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place. - https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-... - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... - https://ww…

I know it's not a green ooze. But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking. The waste is a lot more dangerous than the uranium we dug out and packaging it in a way where you are sure it won't surface for sure is really not a solved problem. > Nuclear waste is small and solid As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience. > You can just bury…

what has fukushima to do with storing nuclear waste. I'll go further and ask how many did fukushima kill with radioation or will kill per unscear?

Better reactors were already invented (superphenix, snr300). Both killed by greens.

Re: Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

#940

Post by Moldoteck » Sat, May 02, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

tcfhgj wrote: post #924

leonidasrup wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everything works as planned fossil fuel power plant emmits CO2 and pollutants.

Gladly, you don't need to use them

not if you read fraunhofer ise decarbonization pathways report. If you dont like nuclear and have no hydro, it basically means fossils