Good. More countries should realize the capability of nuclear power. Whilst it isn't renewable, it's much cleaner than fossil fuels
this post was submitted on 16 May 2025
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It's also cleaner than most renewables too. Ecologically it's a no brainer.
It's a good baseload but it's inflexible. We need more ways to take advantage of it at quiet times.
Electric car chargers are part of it. Maybe house batteries. We need our devices to be smarter about power and when they use it.
It's also very expensive to build and run.
Yes but the problem in all of Europe and the US has almost never in history been too much power. Power requirements go up and up and up and every country wants more and more every year.
Peak loads are always the worry and cause blackouts and brownouts. Low loads almost never happen, even at night because of businesses that constantly leave everything running.
it was russia that was responsible for germanys phase out, because thier sole export is energy to europe.
That's nonsense. In Germany, the nuclear phase-out began under the first red-green government in the year 2000 and it was completed in 2011, when the cabinet under Angela Merkel decided to phase out nuclear power by 2022. On 30 June 2011, the German Bundestag voted in favour of the exit with 513 of 600 votes from members of all parties. There's no way that this was controlled by Russia.
There's a huge movement for renewables in Germany and nuclear power always had it tough in the country where there's no space for the save storage of nuclear waste.
Edit: If anything, Russia would even have an interest in longer operating times for nuclear power plants, because the raw materials for many of the fuel elements used in European nuclear power plants still come from Russia until today.
I mean, if the reactors are already built and have plenty of life left in them…
Thats actually one of the problems.
Yes, there are 2 reactors in the country but they are so old, they needed replacement... In 2002.
Belgium doesnt have the money/wants to invest in a new reactor because that costs billions but really, really, really should...
Still, this is a step in the right direction
TBF work was done to keep it sound until 2025 and it was possible to extend the operational life further (basically you can just keep throwing hundreds of millions at them every 10 years for a long time to come).
What's fucked up is that in the last few years a bunch of maintenance wasn't done because the government said "no for real though super pinky promise we're not extending the contract again they will definitely be shut down in 2025 it's the law".
So now Electrabel/Engie is rightfully super pissed because this flip-flopping is going to cost us billions just to keep the existing reactors running. And they have zero guarantee the greens won't come back into a government coalition in 2029 and fuck the schedule up again.
Ye but the efficiency and safety of a new reaction could save us millions a year. We need those new reactors to replace the current ones. Asap.
Engie is indeed right to complain, but should build new reactors, and they shouldve done it 10 years ago
With what money? NPPs only get built on public funds, private equity cannot make the economics viable due to the multi-decade amortization. It's fine on public debt but breaks down if you have to pay shareholders for billions of euros of loans over 20 years which amounts to so much money the cost is uncompetitive with fossil fuels + renewables. Private equity has been trying to make private nuclear power for 20 years now, mostly with SMRs, with little success and nothing to show for it up to now.
If Belgium ever builds a new NPP, it will be because the government voted on a multi-decade funding plan, which is not guaranteed to happen when the left wants no nuclear and the right wants fiscal austerity. Until then there's nothing that Engie can do but wait.
Oh i know, and youre 100% right and on the money. Also, fyi, nuclear falls under renewables, but your point still stands.
The whole thing is to avoid future problem and create future profits ( as youll need less fuel to create the same power and can reuse the current nuclear waste ). Thats a general problem with (belgian?) politics: now matters, next week is next weeks problem.
Yes it costa billions up front, and i have no fucking idea where that money could come from, but it can save so much more in the long run...
... And would be safer while at it (not that current nuclear isnt safe but it'd be safer )
This is the key question. Eventually reactors wear out and need substantial refitting to live longer, and you're then working on a highly irradiated structure.
The UK hit this point with a number of reactors. Even though they had licenses to continue, reality struck and they had to be decommissioned. Of course, the reason for the extension of service was because no replacement plan was in effect. End result is the UK nuclear generation is slowly dying.
..and that chart is missing 9 years. It's now 5.9GWe.
This stay, IMO, the big question mark. At which point does maintaining an aged machine is more expensive than building new one. Especially when 20 years are needed to build a new one (including 10 years of legal paperwork, trials and appeals)
It doesn't need to take that long. The reason it sometimes does is almost always because laws are payed for by dirty energy companies to make it harder to build them. They manufacture barriers and discontent around nuclear to protect themselves, even though they release far more radioactive waste, and don't even have to capture and control it.
If they want to get serious about nuclear power, they could get it done in 5 years. If they just want a small plant then it could be a fraction of that even.
Article is wrong on a major point though:
They are not undoing the phase-out part (actually a cap on the active lifetime of a reactor), but lifting the ban on building any new reactors. There is no deal to maintain the currently active plants any longer than what the previous governments negotiated with Electrabel/Engie over and they are still poised to close qs planned
This change is here because the ban included medical/research reactors, such as the one in Mol that used to provide chemo-therapy products, which we are now buying abroad.
As for the other arguments usually found on this topic:
- Belgium lacks the space for a scaling-up of windmills, and with the control-components found in chinese transformers, (who have a 80% market share in solar) it would give the Chinese government the power to literally damage our infrastructure, or cause shutdowns like Spain & Portugal saw. All without leaving evidence behind, btw. So an energy reliance built on Chinese products is as dangerous as building it around a Russian gas pipeline.
- Nuclear power has a lower CO2 footprint per GW, lower injury & death toll, and isn't even the top radiation pollution source. (That's actually coal, with Wind a potential second if we had more data on Bayan Obo)
- While >90% of solar panels currently in use globally have no pre-determined disposal, Belgium does require a contribution to Recubel on sale, so their waste which can contain stuff like PFAS atleast won't end up in a landfill. There is no national recycling plan for windmills as far as I could find.
- The largest cost of nuclear power is safety. Both reactor & waste. The largest gain is a massive amount of reliable electricity. Unfortunately, due to how global energy markets work, the profit has become unreliable (ironically in part due to solar/wind) and large nuclear plants are generally considered an economic loss. That's why Engie doesn't want to keep the nuclear plants open anymore, they make more money from "emergency capacity" subsidies not running gas power plants than actually producing electricity in Doel & Tihange. But if someone figures out a way, why would you stop them from innovating? Not to mention the law also banned any potential 'safe' methodin the future, like Thorium reactors, fission, ...
- It's still legal to build a coal plant in Belgium, the government only regulates safety & waste when you do. This law repeal puts nuclear power at the same level as all other sources. It is up to the experts at FANC to define what a safe nuclear plant is, and to investors if the think it's worth the cost, be it financial, PR, or other.
The largest cost of nuclear power is safety. Both reactor & waste.
But, like you said above, it's actually one of the safest sources, even if you include disasters, which are very unlikely now that the technology is so much more mature. Unlike other power sources, their waste is easily accounted for and stored too, and in small quantities. Some of it can even be useful.
Unfortunately, due to how global energy markets work, the profit has become unreliable (ironically in part due to solar/wind) and large nuclear plants are generally considered an economic loss.
This is largely due to regulations specifically designed to increase their costs above dirty energy sources. Those with money will always create barriers for competition, and that's what dirty energy companies have done. There's so many requirements for nuclear plants that other energy sources aren't held back by. Coal can just spew radioactive waste into the air for free, and nuclear has to pay for the safe storage of their waste. Why? Waste for all energy should be paid for by those generating it so they have an incentive to reduce it and it makes all sources equal.
Coal plants require an emission capture to be built into any new plants, which is exactly why nobody wants to build one.
The gas plants should have the same regulations, I agree. The subsidies is a whole different can of worms in the money debate, but my bigger issue there is more about how they were used/implemented.
Personally, I feel as if the government should buy back the nuclear plants after the shutdown and build a new core there for supply safety, and this repeal is a step in that direction. It doesn't happen often, but I think NVA is right in this case
What they ought to be doing is investing in thorium reactor development.
Cracks in the pressure vessel? Nah, this'll hold another two decades...
GOOD. BUILD MORE. The newer generations of nuclear plants can recycle their own waste and are basically meltdown proof. It's a no brainer. Shit is literally alchemy magic.
For the haters: https://youtu.be/5WKQsr9v2C0
Still (way) more expensive than just building cheap renewables.
Air and wind are inexpensive insofar as they have a low LCOE, but are intermittent, so require being coupled with energy storage, and that is not inexpensive.
If you're talking hydropower or geothermal, then they don't have the intermittency issue (well, hydro does, but to a far lesser degree), but both are subject to the geography of the area. They aren't available to everyone.
EDIT: And in the case of hydropower, there are also some environmentalists unhappy about the impact on river systems, since dams inevitably have at least some impact on river ecosystems, even if you build those fish channels.
EDIT2: "Fishway" or "fish ladder".
EDIT3: In fairness, for some uses, intermittency isn't such a big issue. That is, you may have an industrial process that you can only run when energy is available. So, for example, the Netherlands used to do this (sans electricity) with their windpumps in the process of poldering. That's not free
if you want your pumps to run only a third of the time on average, then you need triple the pumping capacity
but for some things like that, where the process is basically the pumping side of pumped hydrostorage, it might be cheaper than providing constant operation with a non-intermittent power source.
But for an awful lot of uses, people just want electricity to be available when they flip the switch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-voltage_electricity_transmission_in_China
Ideally we'd be doing/improving on something like this where modern nuclear plants can make up for gaps in renewables.
Air and wind are inexpensive insofar as they have a low LCOE, but are intermittent, so require being coupled with energy storage, and that is not inexpensive.
First, AIR and wind?
Second, yes they are intermittent but that's not an argument in favour of nuclear. Pairing intermittent sources and sources that need to run at full power 24/7 to be economic isn't a good match.
Solar and wind, sorry.
Second, yes they are intermittent but that's not an argument in favour of nuclear.
Sure it is. It's just not an argument in favor of using nuclear as a peaking source to fill in the gaps for solar and wind intermittency.
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