Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

Vs. coal?

Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)

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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 + battery grid viable?

Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?

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?

That would depend on the category of the waste:

- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste

where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).

https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...

You can just bury it deep in a mountain

Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:

https://www.nirasondraf.be/

As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shellenberger

Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)

Same wiki.

> Nuclear waste is small and solid

As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.

I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.

So imo not really a political problem.

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. Drilling deep enough expensive now but there’s no reason it needs to be. Se Quaise for progress in that area.

3. In a 50 year timeframe we don’t have any spare capacity to add more global warming from the thermal forcing of thermal power plants. Yeah you heard me right, thermal power plants contribute directly to global warming, and the effect is surprisingly significant. The good news is the effect disappears rapidly when you shut them down, unlike greenhouse gases. And we should certainly never shut down any nuclear power plants until we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions. But at the same time, while we have an insane amount of greenhouse gases lingering in the atmosphere we can’t afford adding global warming from thousands of new nuclear reactors… like some nuclear proponents would have us do.

A 100 years from now, if we’ve brought greenhouse gases down again, that’s when we can start considering adding significantly more nuclear power. Though I doubt there will be any interest. Makes sense for space travel though.

I’m pro nuclear despite all that. But more from an R&D perspective.

They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords.

There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.

Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.

Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.

https://blackout-news.de/en/news/electricity-prices-in-germa...

A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.

Well yeah because the battery storage to do that is still exorbitant, at least for the time being. There are some situational options but nothing universal. Other than waiting for the cost of existing battery tech to fall the most promising option I'm aware of are the prototypes utilizing iron ore for seasonal storage.

But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.

Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.

Just look at the statistics. E. g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

To say that they're _potentially_ safe by waving at the US Navy is a fallacy for several reasons.

1. It's p-hacking. E. g. with the same technology the Soviets destroyed five of their reactors.

2. The world of civilian operators is completely incomparable.

3. Civilian power plants use different technologies.

> Waste is mostly a solved problem.

Not as far as I know. In Germany, for example, the search for a final disposal site is still completely open-ended, and the first final disposal site will not open until 2074 at the earliest, while, at the same time, the already collapsed storage facilities consume an enormous amount of money. I personally think it is absurd to assume that an underground nuclear waste storage facility can be operated safely over geological time scales. Needless to say there isn't even a single one worldwide for highly radioactive waste.

And to compare them with coal plants is classical whataboutism. "They can't be bad, because I found something other that's bad as well."

You're right about the minable uranium. That has changed over the last years, so the current estimate is 2080 in a high demand scenario.

But your criticism about the externalized costs falls short as well. Regarding the externalized costs, that is really hard to quantify and I don't know of reliable estimations. How do you want to come up with a number if you don't even know if humans still exist on the planet at that time?

What is clear is that for nuclear energy the majority of the costs is externalized. The bulk of the costs stem from the decommissioning of power plants, final disposal, and accident-related expenses. All three are typically passed on entirely to taxpayers.

The former German vice chancellor even said, he would agree [to build a new nuclear power plant] if <political opponent> found a private operator willing to build a nuclear power plant entirely without government guarantees, subsidies, or liability coverage.

Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.

In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.

Fundamentally, unless you know the Navy's answer and can apply it to override those lawsuits, it doesn't matter: politics can't be wished away just because the wrong people have 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 the 1800s.

Increasingly not; as with all things, you have to aim for where the ball will be rather than where it is, and for this topic that implies that for any given proposed new gas (or nuclear) plant you have to ask about the alternatives, which also include "how fast you we build energy storage, and what would it cost?"

Just leave that part out, it only detracts from your message.

"I think environmental orgs should support nuclear as it is low carbon and generally aligned with their goals. I'm disappointed that many of their members seem to be unaware of the true record on plant safety, particularly compared with coal"

Adding anything about them not believing in climate change makes it sound like you are repeating talking points you picked up from fossil fuel funded propagandists, who to this day are pushing that message.

(Your opinions on nuclear also reveal that media diet, but in a much more subtle way).

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.

I truly can’t comprehend where this massive boner for new built nuclear power comes from. Sci-fi?

I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.

This is a complete myth, somebody pulled "a week" out of their butt a decade ago, it gets repeated a ton, but it's not based on reality or studies or numbers. This is a consistent problem with online nuclear advocacy: there's no basis for the numbers, nobody calculates anything, and if they bother to do a calculation they only calculate the upper bound and then assert "see look a big number" and say that's a proof of impossibility.

What event requires a week of storage? Nobody can name one! When has there been a week with zero generation? No one can name it! The assumptions that one has to make up in order to make a "week" even sound plausible are in turn themselves so implausible.

> There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.

Imagining there's a fixed battery capacity is a very short sighted view, it's growing by 10x every year.

So let's take your "week" as the measure, even though it's wrong. 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.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...

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 design, they had a ton of construction projects that were starting to run long, and then TMI happened and scared everyone because TMI had been mismanaged so much, leading to oppressive regulation on the already-failing construction projects.

The reason nobody built nuclear for 30 years after that was because it didn't make financial sense. The only reason any of the utilities signed on for new reactors in the mid 2000s was that state legislatures passed bills saying that the public would pay for any cost overruns from construction, rather than the utility! That's how bad of a financial deal it was. And the disasters at Vogtle and Summer show that the utilities were right to not want to build without passing the buck to others: nuclear is a financial disaster.

People want to put on rosy-colored glasses and look at the best possible picture of nuclear, rather than the messy full picture, which involves tons of cost overruns, and all the failed projects that simple did not work.

The US nuclear industry could have done all sorts of things to succeed: they could have standardized like France, they could have done Candus like Canada, whatever. But they didn't and it looks like they can't. We go into climate action with the industries and technologies we have, not the industries and technologies we read about in scifi.

    > $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. 

After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.

Then 7B in 2046 money which is probably $15 today.

Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.

100% solar is a straw man though, as much as the simplicity of it sounds nice.

> Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.

This is far from being clear, nuclear is one technology that tends to have increased costs the more we do of it. Even in France!

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.

The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.

The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.

Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.

Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.

Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.

With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.

With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.

And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.

And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.

Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.

As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.

It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.

The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.

Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.

Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.

I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.

The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.

This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.

I mean, thank you, the USSR already showed this, no more is needed.

[1] https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-pumped-hydro-energystorage-renai...

The Belgians apparently typically invert the meaning of . and , in numbers (from how they are used in the US).

  To make large numbers readable, Belgians use either a period (.) or a non-breaking space. Example: Two thousand thirty-six is written as 2.036 or 2 036. In formal Belgian French, the space is increasingly preferred over the period to avoid confusion with the Anglo-American system, but the period remains very common in Belgian Dutch and everyday shorthand.

my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth

These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.

Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.

> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors

The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_nuclear_disasters_and...

There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.

We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.

"Fish disco", for example.

Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.

I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.

I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.

But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.

It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.

Later

(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))

The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.

That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.

Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.

No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.

Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.

With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).

But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.

One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.

On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.

It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.

They do degrade over time, especially due to weathering of the seals and UV exposure, but all the quoted numbers are worst-case.

(Inverters are more complicated products and may need more frequently replaced)

I also wonder. Is it the implied danger over those tens of thousands of years or would it end up being something more similar to Ramsar in Iran long before that?

By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.

The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.

The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".

Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:

* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120

* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...

* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...

German Greens absolutely love your argument, but compared to the pollution that we produce everyday and which kills people and animals every day, waste storage is a nothingburger.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...

Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.

Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.

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 the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me

It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.

Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.

A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.

Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.

In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.

(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.

(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.

(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.

Like often: there is no silver bullet.

The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...

Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)

That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.

> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?

So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)

Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.

The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.

Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.

France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.

Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling

2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.

3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.

4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.

Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors

We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.

It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.

> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.

Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.

The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)

The EU has north of €1 trillion into new gas infrastructure. That's €1 trillion of commercial interests with a vested interest in negotiating the non-negotiable.

Using fossil fuels for transition is fine, particularly if it's replacing coal with natural gas. But building LNG terminals and installing gas turbines because ding dongs in Dusseldorf got scared of nukes a quarter of a continent away is a great way to raise the continent's energy prices, volatility and carbon continent.

I actually did look into that and am familiar with the page, as well as the waste situation, thank you

You've successfully ignored the core point of people are literally dying as we speak from the things we are choosing to continue to do. And not just like five in a mine somewhere, as you would have for solar resources as well, but millions, everywhere, every year

It's so weird to read this moral framework where one puts engineering challenges and a risk of brown-outs over so many lives, especially when you include the 150M ~ 1B people that are expected to be uprooted and become climate migrants 25 years from now if we continue like this

Now detail three strengths Belgium posses.

If you hyper focus on the problems, you’ll be completely oblivious to the solutions.

I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.

I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).

Running ancient nuclear power plants in one of the most densely populated countries does not seem wise.

These plants have been running with phase-out in mind for the last 20 years.