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Belgian parliament scraps nuclear phaseout plan (www.dw.com)
from MicroWave@lemmy.world to world@lemmy.world on 16 May 10:22
https://lemmy.world/post/29745161

Belgium has dropped nuclear phaseout plans adopted over two decades ago. Previously, it had delayed the phaseout for 10 years over the energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Belgium’s parliament on Thursday voted to drop the country’s planned nuclear phaseout.

In 2003, Belgium passed a law for the gradual phaseout of nuclear energy. The law stipulated that nuclear power plants were to be closed by 2025 at the latest, while prohibiting the construction of new reactors.

In 2022, Belgium delayed the phaseout by 10 years, with plans to run one reactor in each of its two plants as a backup due to energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

#world

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Lembot_0002@lemm.ee on 16 May 10:29 next collapse

Nuclear power is one of the cleanest. And easily scalable.

unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de on 16 May 14:56 next collapse

Clean might be debatable, but scalable is just obviously wrong. There is nothing even close to solar and wind when it comes to scalability. When your goal is scalability, anything that takes more than 1-2 years per plant to set up is just worthless. We cant just wait another 20 years for nuclear to make a comeback at this point, its not an option.

Lembot_0002@lemm.ee on 16 May 15:06 collapse

Solar and wind aren’t scalable well. Try to increase power output, let’s say, x3. How well is it going? Building additional 2 reactors is completely straightforward.

Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org on 16 May 15:13 next collapse

Uh hu… so you are arguing, in good faith, that it’s easier(?), safer(?), cheaper(?), faster(?) to build deveral nuclear reactors than building a couple more wind- and solar parks?

Lembot_0002@lemm.ee on 16 May 15:17 collapse

Yes. Watt-comparable amounts, of course.

Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org on 16 May 15:21 collapse

This is what actual delusion looks like lmao

abbadon420@lemm.ee on 17 May 07:34 collapse

Why the name calling? The guy is obviously wrong, but calling them delusional is not useful in any way. You’re only spoiling this community

Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org on 17 May 08:03 collapse

Delusional

having false or unrealistic beliefs or opinions:

Tell that to the dictionary.

abbadon420@lemm.ee on 17 May 08:28 collapse

Lmao

when you think something is funny or you intend it as a joke

You’re basically pointing and laughing.

Cyberbullying

the activity of using the internet to harm or frighten another person, especially by sending them unpleasant messages

unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de on 16 May 15:28 collapse

What? This is what generation capacity looks like in Germany. Solar has gone up 50x in the last 20 years, 2.7x in the last 10 years. We could keep scaling faster, but there is just no need.

We dont need more sources, we need more storage. We already have plenty of surplus solar/wind generation capacity that is being turned off because the grid is lacking storage. We really only need more storage and as you can see from this chart, that is whats happening. This year battery storage filled with solar and wind will probably supply more energy than nuclear did over a year at its peak.

tflyghtz@lemm.ee on 16 May 15:06 next collapse

Its neither actually, and it makes us dependent on foreign countries

yournamehere@lemm.ee on 17 May 07:26 collapse

Are you retarded? how many sources of power that are dirtier can you come up with. then pause a moment and list the cleaner sources. then try counting again.

stickly@lemmy.world on 17 May 09:18 collapse

Well if we’re talking about lifetime carbon footprint, renewables. The drawbacks for nuclear are almost entirely political and economical, but that doesn’t make the technology irrelevant.

Railison@aussie.zone on 16 May 10:53 next collapse

I mean, if the reactors are already built and have plenty of life left in them…

Ziggurat@jlai.lu on 16 May 11:31 next collapse

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)

wewbull@feddit.uk on 16 May 19:35 next collapse

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.

DacoTaco@lemmy.world on 17 May 06:08 collapse

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 does 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

fossilesque@mander.xyz on 16 May 11:04 next collapse

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: youtu.be/5WKQsr9v2C0

torrentialgrain@lemm.ee on 16 May 16:18 next collapse

Still (way) more expensive than just building cheap renewables.

tal@lemmy.today on 16 May 17:47 collapse

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.

wewbull@feddit.uk on 16 May 19:45 collapse

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.

tal@lemmy.today on 16 May 20:57 collapse

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.

yournamehere@lemm.ee on 17 May 07:24 collapse

+120% cancer in children in the area…so worth it.

Duke_Nukem_1990@feddit.org on 16 May 15:14 next collapse

Nuclear shills out in full force again today, eh?

torrentialgrain@lemm.ee on 16 May 16:16 collapse

Lemmy seems 100% astroturfed by pro-nuclear lobbyists.

Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone on 17 May 02:32 next collapse

Ah yes lobbyists and not just people with basic common sense, sure

torrentialgrain@lemm.ee on 17 May 04:39 collapse

Ah yes “common sense”, the go to argument from everyone ranging from people who want to throw out migrants to nuclear shills.

After all, why wouldn’t we burn billions on a technology that is less efficient per kw/h, takes decades longer to build, doesn’t scale, has a worse LCOE than renewables and leaves us with toxic forever waste? It’s just common sense bro.

Snowpix@lemmy.ca on 17 May 03:03 collapse

Fun fact: Multiple people with opinions different than yours are not automatically astroturfers or lobbyists. Turns out, different people have different opinions which they share on an open platform. Inevitably they’re going to end up disagreeing with you.

torrentialgrain@lemm.ee on 17 May 04:40 collapse

Nuclear being less efficient and more expensive than renewables is not an opinion.

Lemzlez@lemmy.world on 17 May 07:06 collapse

Renewables needing expensive storage isn’t an opinion either.

We all want a clean, efficient, and reliable power grid. Renewables should be a big part, and I’d prefer not having a bunch of hydrocarbons being burned whenever renewables don’t even cover the base load.

Cobrachicken@lemmy.world on 16 May 17:41 next collapse

Cracks in the pressure vessel? Nah, this’ll hold another two decades…

yournamehere@lemm.ee on 17 May 07:22 next collapse

as much as we all hate belgium for pretending to be a country, we should hate them for their rotten powerplants. the amount of people that “dislike” belgium is increasing fast in germany.

Airowird@lemm.ee on 17 May 08:57 collapse

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.