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Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

• pjc50 6mo ago
  Strictly: France will no longer decommission Belgium's nuclear power plants, as Belgium will buy them. The current owner Engie are majority-owned by the French government. Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ramp-up-nuclear-ambitions-amid-eu-energy-shift/gm-GM05F891AA https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram... I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. Further background: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fifth-belgian-reactor-permanently-shut-down https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/fifth-belgian-re... (2025) > "Belgium's federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear power reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 and 2 were originally set to be taken out of service on their 40th anniversaries, in 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 and 2 to remain operational for an additional 10 years. Doel 1 was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 was disconnected from the grid on 30 September this year." > "Belgium's last two reactors - Doel 4 and Tihange 3 - had also been scheduled to close last month. However, following the start of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in February 2022 the government and Electrabel began negotiating the feasibility and terms for the operation of the reactors for a further ten years, to 2035, with a final agreement reached in December, with a balanced risk allocation." It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping.
  • jcattle 6mo ago
    I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler. Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out). Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side. Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actualiteit/betondegradatie-doel-en-tihange https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual... In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.
    • modo_mario 6mo ago
      >I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side. Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?
      • jcattle 6mo ago
        Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-rescheduled-for-concrete-checks https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...
        • modo_mario 6mo ago
          So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant? Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does? Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.
        • Moldoteck 6mo ago
          and this doesnt mean explosion still...
    • mpweiher 6mo ago
      NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.
    • andrepd 6mo ago
      Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding). It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).
  • andrepd 6mo ago
    > I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. This is pretty much the summary of the whole discussion. Building new nuclear is a debate, seeing as renewables are dirt cheap it might or might not make sense to build new nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online. Shutting down existing nuclear capacity to replace it with Russian or Saudi or Qatari oil and gas though........
    • graemep 6mo ago
      Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable. I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?
      • Pay08 6mo ago
        I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.
        • tokai 6mo ago
          No not at all. You can vary reactor output, its generally as simple as pulling rods in or out. But they cannot just turn on and off. That takes a ton of time and effort.
          • Pay08 6mo ago
            Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.
  • 21asdffdsa12 6mo ago
    Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
    • pjc50 6mo ago
      Not really sure what the relevance of this is, other than an argument against proliferation? I note that Pakistan has had a very rapid solar transition extremely recently.
  • close04 6mo ago
    > It seems there has been a complex balancing act which any owner of an old car will be familiar with: spend more money on keeping it operational, vs scrapping. This is a different choice because the car analogy usually has "buy new one" as a term. Not having to build a new plant makes the choice far less controversial and also cheaper.
    • wombatpm 6mo ago
      Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030
  • nandomrumber 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • notachatbot123 6mo ago
      Humankind should depopulate, we cannot sustain infinite growth and are already destroying our planet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
      • derektank 6mo ago
        There’s more forested land in Europe today than there has been since the middle ages
        • Y-bar 6mo ago
          Almost half of which is monocultural plantations and not actual _forests_. That’s about as ecologically true as calling a bunch of crop fields grasslands.
        • nickserv 6mo ago
          Citation needed. Also, even if true, a lot is likely due to people leaving the countryside and migrating to the cities during the latter half of the 20th century. To feed these urban populations, an enormous amount of food needs to be imported from other countries. So really the deforestation has been exported, same as pollution from manufacturing.
          • tokai 6mo ago
            You don't need citation for common knowledge.
            • nickserv 6mo ago
              If OP had said "in last 40 years" then yeah sure. But since the middle ages, or 500 years ago, how is that common knowledge?
  • cogman10 6mo ago
    > I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. Funnily, I have almost the opposite view. I'm terrified of old nuclear because those first gen power plants are all missing a lot of safety lessons. Nuclear disasters happen at old plants. I want old nuclear plants to be either upgraded or decommissioned. I have much less concern about new nuclear (other than it taking a very long time and an a lot of money to deploy). A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
    • thrownthatway 6mo ago
      What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.
      • cogman10 6mo ago
        Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown. 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.
        • navane 6mo ago
          That's a big nevertheless.
        • leonidasrup 6mo ago
          Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was NOT using Generation I reactors. "Gen I refers to the prototype and power reactors that launched civil nuclear power. This generation consists of early prototype reactors from the 1950s and 1960s, such as Shippingport (1957–1982) in Pennsylvania, Dresden-1 (1960–1978) in Illinois, and Calder Hall-1 (1956–2003) in the United Kingdom. This kind of reactor typically ran at power levels that were “proof-of-concept.”" https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generation-generation/section/5 https://www.amacad.org/publication/nuclear-reactors-generati...
  • UltraSane 6mo ago
    A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.
    • Projectiboga 6mo ago
      With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
      • inglor_cz 6mo ago
        There are natural concentrations of radionuclides on the planet as well, there was even one place where a spontaneous fission reaction took place (Oklo, Gabon) millions of years ago. If you dig a sufficiently deep hole in a massive slab of granite (like Scandinavia), you can store all the waste of mankind there for approximately eternity. 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.
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
      • modo_mario 6mo ago
        If I remember well most radioactive waste by volume is not from nuclear energy production and the share that is very small would be drastically lower if places like the US didn't ban it's recycling. It's half life can also be drastically reduced. 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?
        • UltraSane 6mo ago
          You simply put waste deep underground in geologically stable rock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
  • monegator 6mo ago
    > time and cost as much as anything else you people have been saying that for at least twenty years. In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe, sentiment is increasingly pro-nuke but your adage keeps things still. Of course yf you never start, you never finish.
    • pjc50 6mo ago
      > In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh. > twenty years When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.
      • herecomesyour_ 6mo ago
        Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear. 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.
        • pjc50 6mo ago
          > Even small modular reactors fail to address this. I'd be willing to engage with SMRs on the merits of actually constructed systems, but if you open https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-reactors/small-modular-reactors/small-modular-reactor-smr-global-tracker https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-power-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.
  • crote 6mo ago
    > it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime I completely agree, but that's a massive "but". Belgium's nuclear power plants are mostly known for their reliability issues. They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe. Keeping them operating long beyond their original design lifespan probably isn't the best idea - and it is almost a certainty that cleanup costs are going to be significantly higher than expected. To me it sounds like Engie has struck an incredible deal by offloading a giant liability to the Belgian government.
    • Moldoteck 6mo ago
      reliability issues doesnt mean unsafe. Most EU units are gen2 and doing fine. Engie wants units shut down to push for new gas plants. If belgium keeps reactors on engie will suffer massively. Decomissioning of npp is generally fine too. Isar2 decom in germany is going full speed
  • aaron695 6mo ago
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  • Lonestar1440 6mo ago
    >I'm not keen on new nuclear (time and cost as much as anything else), but it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. Time and Cost seem like excellent reasons to get started now, so we can finish by 2035 and get some materials purchased before inflation gets even worse. All of the excellent arguments Pro-existing plants apply to new ones too.
    • pjc50 6mo ago
      Given Hinkley Point C, a plant approved now will be operational some time in the 2040s. I think people have missed how much of a hockey stick graph renewables deployment can look like. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-boom https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...
      • peterfirefly 6mo ago
        Hinkley Point C is a prime example of regulation causing cost and schedule overruns. "Fish disco", for example.
    • bluGill 6mo ago
      If you are starting now wind and solar are almost always your best investment. Some form of storage is next, but not until you have large amounts of wind+solar in the system. (which many areas are already reaching)
      • Lonestar1440 6mo ago
        This just seems like kneejerk anti-Nuclear stance in disguise. Maybe you did intend it as just a neutral observation but it's hard to take it that way. 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.
  • veunes 6mo ago
    The "old car" analogy seems right, with the extra complication that the car is supplying a non-trivial chunk of the country's electricity and replacing it is not quick
  • efdee 6mo ago
    Strictly: Engie was forced by a previous Belgian government to decommision the nuclear power plants.
  • tremon 6mo ago
    > it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime. As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
  • Moldoteck 6mo ago
    It's not France but Engie, a french company with lots of gas business. New nuclear makes sense if it doesnt take 20y to build. Probably that's why US wants to partner with Korea/Japan
• ramesh31 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • graemep 6mo ago
    Any evidence? It has made Europe more reliant on Russian gas, but claiming planning and intent should be backed by evidence.
    • hylaride 6mo ago
      The Soviets (and I'm sure later the Russians) funded, both directly and indirectly, various anti-nuclear power causes. Saying they were "literally" a Russian funded psy-op is too strong, but the roots of the movement definitely benefited from Soviet funding, as did "peace" groups opposing American nuclear weapons being stationed in Europe.
  • usrnm 6mo ago
    Not everything is a conspiracy, europeans are perfectly capable of fucking up themselves, one of the things they're still good at. Russia is one of the biggest exporters of nuclear reactors in the world and sells them just as happily as oil or gas.
    • inglor_cz 6mo ago
      Not everything is a conspiracy, true. That said, if something really fits into Russian strategic interests, I'd be surprised if they didn't put their thumbs on the scale somewhere, and propaganda + targeted bribes do have some effect on the population. Already since Lenin, propaganda directed at intellectuals and politicans abroad was the main weapon of the system. USSR formally ended in 1991, but the people and traditions are still extant and after a 90s hiatus are deployed again. The entire Putin's narrow circle of power are old-school USSR 60+ y.o. spooks, they won't change their ways any more than a tiger his spots.
    • fabriceleal 6mo ago
      As far as conspiracies goes, this one pretty much borders on open secret. > In his first term, Schröder's government decided to phase out nuclear power, fund renewable energies > Since leaving public office, Schröder has worked for Russian state-owned energy companies, including Nord Stream AG, Rosneft, and Gazprom. Gerhard Schröder has not worked for russian nuclear reactor companies for a reason.
• trgn 6mo ago
  keen to keep an eye on this. it implies restarting shut down reactors, all the while a transfer of know how to different ownership.
• deanc 6mo ago
  Good. It's time we realised that we need a good strong stable power grid and clean nuclear energy is absolutely going to be a massive part of this.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Pigo 6mo ago
    I'm always wondering how long it will take for popular sentiment to finally shift. So many years of things like Blinky the fish in the Simpsons really did a number on our shared consciousness.
    • teamonkey 6mo ago
      I think the series of actual nuclear disasters from the 1950s to 2000s - plus the fear of a hot nuclear war in the ‘70s - had more impact on the collective consciousness than The Simpsons.
• elric 6mo ago
  This doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, for several reasons. Belgium is nearly bankrupt, with a government deficit that the EU is already giving us grief for, in spite of some of the highest tax rates in the world. That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc. The reactors in question have been shut down by virtue of being too old (1974, 1975, 1982, 1985). Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels. Maintenance has been lacking. There was also a case of sabotage which was never resolved. Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
  • NeutralForest 6mo ago
    It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.
    • seszett 6mo ago
      Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country. And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg. But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
      • NeutralForest 6mo ago
• rob_c 6mo ago
  Good. Lets hope we see less policy which is at a very small step back basically: "we're competing to punch ourselves in the face the hardest" in the international arena.
• 716dpl 6mo ago
  The EU also released a plan in the past week to accelerate the deployment of both nuclear and renewable energy. This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy-union-affordable-and-secure-energy-through-accelerated-action_en https://energy.ec.europa.eu/publications/accelerateeu-energy...
  • adev_ 6mo ago
    > This oil shock is going to have lasting impacts. It is not only the oil shock. Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y. The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move. The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'. Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power. The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.
    • croes 6mo ago
      And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.
      • adev_ 6mo ago
        > And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage. 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-costs/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...
• NeutralForest 6mo ago
  I just want Belgium to go all-in on renewables, we [already have a pretty good electricity production make-up](https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/energy/electricity-production#panel-12 https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/energy/electricity-product...) but we're still [too dependent on oil](https://www.iea.org/countries/belgium/energy-mix https://www.iea.org/countries/belgium/energy-mix). Hopefully the current energy crisis is a wake up call.
  • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > want Belgium to go all-in on renewables I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.
    • NeutralForest 6mo ago
      Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.
      • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
        > you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright 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.
        • NeutralForest 6mo ago
• enricotal 6mo ago
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• 08627843789 6mo ago
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• piokoch 6mo ago
  The most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what. When we have an answer maybe we can look on other ideas the same people figured out and also rethink them. Say, sorting thrash. EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans. So what that all trash goes through sorting process before being dumped, and there are very modern and efficient sorting robots that use AI, etc. that can do sorting much better than any human. So, maybe, just maybe it is better to invest more into new technologies, instead of turning Europeans into wastes sorting machines. And this is only one more example where EU countries are doing something plain idiotic, nevertheless, like in the great Buñuel's movie "The Exterminating Angel", nobody is able to admit that there is something stupid going on and it is enough to open the doors and walk away.
  • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > most important question is: who the hell decided to do such a stupid thing and in the name of what Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.) I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.
  • kleiba2 6mo ago
    Sorting machines are in fact used in these countries. But most of the trash separating efforts were introduced many decades ago, long before the capabilities of modern AI systems. I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.
  • crote 6mo ago
    > EU new idea is to make Europeans to sort thrash into 12 separate beans Do you have a source for this, or are you just making things up?
• lifty 6mo ago
  There's a very dark scenario where for some reason or another (all out nuclear war or asteroid hit) sunlight is blocked, in which case having stable base load energy production from nuclear would be very useful. I know this is an unlikely scenario and hopefully it never happens, but it's always good to think about tail risks like these.
  • NL807 6mo ago
    The world doesn't even have the foresight of doing something basic, like mitigating against fuel crisis scenario, let alone what you have suggested.
  • jlnthws 6mo ago
    Volcanic winters are far more frequent than catastrophic asteroid blasts. Disregarding a volcanic winter possibility and its impact is like disregarding the possibility of a pandemic.
    • bell-cot 6mo ago
      > Volcanic winters are far more frequent... True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.
      • peterfirefly 6mo ago
        536 and the Norse stories about the Fimbulwinter ought to be argument enough.
        • bell-cot 6mo ago
          For the 1% who are so interested in science & history & such that learning about those would not be an issue, plausibly yes. For the 99% - who don't have the time, or interest, or attention span, or cultural identification, or whatever, to sit through all that - NO. Is your priority further education of the 1%? Or to actually get some large-scale public disaster prep done?
• kleiba2 6mo ago
  Interesting fact: Belgium's neighbor Germany has commenced a search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste indefinitely in the 1970s. Given that such a place must be safe for hundreds of thousands of years, they have not yet found one. All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites. The search is not expected to conclude before 2040 at the very earliest.
  • cbg0 6mo ago
    This sounds like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation. There are certain types of reactors that can reuse uranium to further reduce its half life to around 6000 years so the one million years legal requirement is an unreasonable target.
    • bell-cot 6mo ago
      IIR, those "certain types of reactors" and their supporting infrastructure are (1) very handy for producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and (2) extremely difficult to operate (historically) without sundry environmental disasters. Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.
      • peterfirefly 6mo ago
        That's an argument in favour of using such reactors in the EU, isn't it? We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.
    • nikanj 6mo ago
      Any material that is still radioactive after a hundred years wasn’t that deadly to begin with. There is a strong link between ”hotness” and short half-lifes, fast-decaying extra spicy isotopes are..fast-decaying
      • jonkoops 6mo ago
• StreamBright 6mo ago
  Not a big surprise, eventually we are going to move to nuclear one way or another
• skerit 6mo ago
  For years, even leading up to starting the decommission of the power plants, Engie has been saying it's literally impossible to reverse the decision. And now that we're 2 years into the decommission, suddenly it is possible after all. How is that possible? And what are the consequences?
  • IMTDb 6mo ago
    They said it was impossible for them to reverse the decision. Nothing has changed; they won’t be in charge of that. The state will. A significant reason of the “impossibility” of reversing the decision is the regulations around nuclear. Take the problem of micro tears in the concrete. Engie could have maintained the concrete. Because the plant was scheduled for decommission, they did not. So there will be small tears in the concrete. The law does not allow those small tears. Repairing the concrete now is too expensive. The plant will be owned by the state so now the state has two options: (1) invest a truckload of money to repair the concrete or (2) change the law to allow small tears which have virtually no security consequences anyway. We all know that the state will choose option (2) but there would be far more opposition if they did so while the plant were owned by a private company that is making profit rather than owned by the state which is operating at a deficit.
  • vimy 6mo ago
    Engie was lying. They just didn’t want to be in the nuclear business anymore.
• rmoriz 6mo ago
  I‘m very interested in the financials of this decision. Nuclear plants are designed for base loads but are way more expensive than solar and wind energy. The losses will increase the costs of energy.
  • timmg 6mo ago
    That cost has a lot to do with amortizing the construction costs of the plant. I expect that just running a plant is a lot cheaper than that. This is about *not* decommissioning working plants.
  • declan_roberts 6mo ago
    Baseline energy is incredibly important, and often not factored into the "cost" comparisons. Especially true now with the explosive growth of data center and AI workloads.
    • lucb1e 6mo ago
      [dead]
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mpweiher 6mo ago
    Actually, nuclear is not way more expensive. And already-built nuclear is pretty much the cheapest power you can get.
    • bobim 6mo ago
      It's cheap because we are offsetting the cost if its ultimate pollution onto future generations. We do this for everything else, and nuclear is our best chance for a liveable planet - if we don't want to make the slightest effort to give up on our comfort. But we have the belief that humanity will be able to manage nuclear waste for the next 100k years while we don't know how the pyramids were built... and it was only 3k years ago.
• nikanj 6mo ago
  I wonder if there will one say be an autobiography that reveals the russian hand behind the naive EU fossilsmaxxing.
• techteach00 6mo ago
  I think I'm super pro nuclear everything now. See the new Russian built nuclear plant in Bangladesh. Crazy populated country currently not able to import adequate fossil fuels due to the strait conflict. Nuclear energy is a God send if managed with extreme care.
  • jpb0104 6mo ago
    I love that you mention 'extreme care'. I was enthralled with this look inside a plant and the operations involved. Truly a sight to behold. And extreme care is not an overstatement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0afQ6w3Bjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0afQ6w3Bjw
• shevy-java 6mo ago
  I understand the "Realpolitik" here, but ... > "This government chooses safe, affordable, and sustainable energy. With less dependence on fossil imports and more control over our own supply," he wrote on X. Really? So nuclear power plants are suddenly the new "clean" hype? Because if Belgium is stating "more control over our own supply", can we mention a little something THAT BELGIUM HAS TO IMPORT URANIUM? So the "own supply" here is ... what exactly? Besides, I question the "nuclear is now clean" campaign that Leyen is doing. She is the ultimate lobbyist. It is also strange how the EU says "russian energy is bad", but then is silent when uranium is imported into the EU from Russia. We are here being lied to by these lobbyists/politicians. And a few make a lot of money, at the expense of the great majority. Why were renewables barely strategically expanded? China did so. Why are democracies so incompetent nowadays?
  • pmontra 6mo ago
    I found this source about Belgium imports of uranium [1]. The partner "World" is about 50% of the total. These data are from 2023. Maybe something changed in 2024 because [2] "Belgian nuclear plants no longer run on uranium from Russia". It ends with "Engie does not disclose how many different contracts were concluded and with which suppliers, but does say it obtained a sufficient geographical spread of its supply, Belga News Agency reports." So who knows. [1] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/BEL/year/2023/tradeflow/Imports/partner/ALL/product/284420 https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/BEL/yea... [2] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1080337/belgian-nuclear-plants-no-longer-run-on-uranium-from-russia https://www.brusselstimes.com/1080337/belgian-nuclear-plants...
  • Moldoteck 6mo ago
    Nuclear needs least amount of materials/imports per kwh https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-... It's not a campaign to say nuclear is clean, it's a reality https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20... If you dont agree to it it's your problem "uranium is imported into the EU from Russia" - here you prove again you have zero idea about the topic. Russia is ore importer itself. It exports enriched fuel (which can and IS easily done in EU too, by Orano and Urenco, even in Germany). Out of 22bn energy imports from RU last year, only 0.8bn were nuclear related, most of them spent by countries still running VVER units like Hungary because of their specific fuel elements but that will gradually be gone too with Westinghouse/Framatome help
• Alexsky2 6mo ago
  A bit unrelated to the Belgium story but I recently visited Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant near San Luis Obispo, CA and learned a ton about the technical details, safety systems, and policy decisions that go into operating a nuclear power plant. When operating at full capacity, it provides up to 10% of California power! While there is certainly always more such facilities can do for safety and efficiency, my impression is that smart people are working hard to ensure the lessons of previous disasters and potential future ones are mitigated, and that nuclear energy, whether through next-gen small module reactors or legacy systems, will be an important aspect of our future energy grid, especially with the rapidly rising energy demand predicted over the next two decades. If you are interested in a tour, the form can be found here: https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html https://www.pge.com/en/about/pge-systems/nuclear-power.html
  • declan_roberts 6mo ago
    I'm so glad we saved Diablo. It was VERY close to being shut down the same year we were having rolling blackouts.
    • boringg 6mo ago
      So close - big save indeed.
  • pdntspa 6mo ago
    I really wish the same could be said for San Onofre. To say nothing of its value as a landmark -- it will live on in our memories as the great San Onofre boobies
    • boringg 6mo ago
      One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.
• Stoick 6mo ago
  [dead]
• veunes 6mo ago
  The interesting part will be whether Belgium can turn this into a coherent long-term plan
• kvgr 6mo ago
  They had so much cheap electricity they had lamps on highways. This is pure civilization regress.
• boringg 6mo ago
  Amen - we need more sense coming from European politicians.
  • peterfirefly 6mo ago
    It really helps that the current European Parliament is not as insane as the previous one... and that both Merkel and Scholz are gone.
• BirAdam 6mo ago
  Everyone focuses on the safety of power production, and I totally get that and think it's important, but the mining and enrichment of uranium should also be considered. Nuclear "disasters" aren't just 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. There are plenty of other disasters that aren't power plants. Growing up in the USA, my home town was contaminated with uranium, thorium, and radium due to a nearby uranium processing plant that later became a superfund site. It was in the soil, the water, and sometimes even the air. I knew far too many people who've died of cancers, and I, like many from that area, have thyroid issues from exposure.
  • trgn 6mo ago
    where was this?
    • topspin 6mo ago
      There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2. Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.
      • BirAdam 6mo ago
        It carried on until at least 1989, and the effects were present majorly until around 2000, and the superfund site was completed in 2006. So, like, pretty darn recent on the scale of a human lifetime.
        • topspin 6mo ago
          That's all correct; a long tail of consequences. Going in the opposite historical direction is the other side of that ledger. The actual plant in question was shut down in 1957. The AEC stepped in years earlier to triage the operation, after actually establishing formal exposure limits in 1950, which didn't exist prior to that point. Before that, the company itself had hired staff to control waste and detect contamination. They had to build their own survey equipment because there were no commercial tools available. The worst of the actual contamination was actually incurred prior to that; 1942-1945, when the gloves were entirely off building bombs. The lessons have been learned. It's tragic and shameful history, but not terribly relevant to modern practice in nuclear power.
• declan_roberts 6mo ago
  Nuclear energy is one of the few technologies that have big tent support. How many things can we get both the Rs and Ds to support? Build build build!!
  • mattmaroon 6mo ago
    Unfortunately that support doesn’t seem to extend to making the process take less than decades and cost less than gazillions due to overregulation so there’s no incentive to build.
  • dalyons 6mo ago
    Lip service support. Nukes are too expensive and too slow to build. in the 10 years it would take to get one producing power from today, they’ll be even more cost obsolete by the relentless progress of renewables and battery. When leaders see the bill, they baulk.
• renewiltord 6mo ago
  [dead]
• thelastgallon 6mo ago
  Everyone is scared of nuclear energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p... Every country should invest massively, nuclear for energy and defense, to eventually protect themselves and solar for energy security.
• Gud 6mo ago
  Yes. A nuclear power plant should be considered a national treasure, like a mine or hydro power plant, or any other large scale resource. To demolish a functional nuclear power facility is pure lunacy.
  • belint 6mo ago
    It is not lunacy. Polish professor Krzysztof Meissner (https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~meissner/home.html https://www.fuw.edu.pl/~meissner/home.html) in one of the interviews called the whole process of turning off nuclear power plants as result "of the pressure of the other forces". It was well crafted plan developed by Germany and Russia. According to this plan Germany suppose to be the hub for gas imported from Russia over Baltic Pipe - man in the middle for all UE countries. War on the Ukraine and Baltic Pipe being destroyed by "unknown people" makes this plan obsolete.
    • Gud 6mo ago
      I am sorry to hear that Belgium also has been sold out by its political elite.
    • peterfirefly 6mo ago
      Baltic Pipe is not destroyed (and it goes in the other direction and not even through Germany). Nord Stream, on the other hand...
  • koonsolo 6mo ago
    If you think that's lunacy, let me add some extra info on top of it: It was the green party that lead the closure, and then replaced it with gas power plants.
  • p0w3n3d 6mo ago
    especially when it is NOT an RBMK
  • kylehotchkiss 6mo ago
    I'll feel even more sad when I drive past San Onfre on the 5 now
• xchip 6mo ago
  Feels like a bailout. Belgium’s playbook is simple: skip maintenance, let it decay, then replace it on the taxpayer’s dime.
  • koonsolo 6mo ago
    No, it was a deliberate strategy from the green party that were very anti-nuclear. They replaced it with gas power plants. And if you think this is a joke, no it isn't.
• wiz21c 6mo ago
  Good news: we will leave oil Bad news: according to the discussions here on HN it appears that there is no consensus on what the good mix of renewable/nuclear is. Therefore us, citizens, will be manipulated by politics.
  • veunes 6mo ago
    The manipulation risk is real, but it usually comes from pretending there is a painless answer
• cryptoneo 6mo ago
  Everytime this comes up, HN is becoming more and more an X-like echo chamber: Touting nukes as the solution to a spike-load problem in a densely populated area, and the waste disposal as a solved problem (by externalizing the cost). Meanwhile the prices dropped further than ever, 20kW peak with 20kWh batteries for EUR 10k, which provides >95% self-sufficiency in a 2p Household and lets you sell more than 80% of the yield (though prices are already very low when the sun is shining). And this is without an EV yet. Please enlighten me: Why are we still having these discussions? I don't see why that wouldn't scale in the US as well, what's the status with flexible energy pricing? If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants, but their lobby groups are well oiled already without our support.
  • FabHK 6mo ago
    Industrial uses plus those missing 5% are the problem.
  • Jensson 6mo ago
    > If anything, we need to build fast, flexible power plants And what are those?
  • Moldoteck 6mo ago
    Cost isnt externalized, it's that antinuclear people fail to inform themselves, like https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... Nor is safety a problem https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy ">95% self-sufficiency" - oh great, and how much to get to 100% with firming, transmission and curtailment and grid forming inverters included? If you want most flexible plants you would advocate for BWR's with BESS buffers Idk about lobbies, but France has one of the cleanest grids in EU and did the job in under 20y. Germany, one of the most antinuclear areas is one of the worst pollutters after 25y. Austria, another antinuclear country with plenty of hydro = easy to finish the job with VRE, still has worse emissions.
• wg0 6mo ago
  Thank you for the sanity.
• mariani 6mo ago
  Praise the Lord
• dadjoker 6mo ago
  [dead]
• soulclap 6mo ago
  I am surprised that a community like HN where a large percentage consists of developers is so positive about a nuclear power plant. One bug could lead to severe damage to everything and everyone around a nuclear power plant. We see those kind of bugs on the front page daily. In my opinion it is absolutely irresponsible to start them up in the first. I have seen too much to actually trust in people always getting their shit right.
  • FabHK 6mo ago
    We can engineer planes to function extremely reliably. And power plants operate in more predictable environments than planes.
  • Moldoteck 6mo ago
    Maybe because we can also check data, like https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-less-mining-fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-... https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20... https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Or just looking at the cost of entire french fleet per court of auditors vs german EEG fund alone?
• ineedasername 6mo ago
  Decommissioning always seemed odd absent either specific dangers or higher costs of operating than renewables. For new construction of course the costs shift dramatically, but existing plants that can continue to run would seem to provide exactly the legroom that enables more rapid expansion of renewables. Less time spent backfilling and exposure to both market and geopolitical forces of other energy sources, eg when there are disruptions of the sort going on now.
  • Moldoteck 6mo ago
    its funny because for ren operators it's financially better if nuclear is gone and expensive gas firming is used instead which would bump merit order
• connoronthejob 6mo ago
  I didn't know there were so many nuclear engineers on HN.
  • LeoPanthera 6mo ago
    What do you mean, I watched that HBO show, so I'm an expert now.
  • Jensson 6mo ago
    What about all the solar and battery engineers?
• jeroen79 6mo ago
  No Belgiums goverment is gonna investigate if it is worth to take them over for free from engie and run then for longer and maybe reopen some, but the study first needs to show if it is viable.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• karmasimida 6mo ago
  The environmentalist put a giant scam on Western nations
• jacquesm 6mo ago
  This is bad news because those are some of the most risky plants operating in Western Europe. Many, many safety issues over the years, quite a few of which were waved off from being properly fixed because they were going to be decommissioned anyway. Now whoever owns them will have to do all that back maintenance first. Or not... Both Doel and Tihange have a long, long list of issues.
  • lucb1e 6mo ago
    Better a potential bad outcome than directly measurable and ongoing harm, though Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-many-people-die-from-air-pollution-1-1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution#/media/File:How-... with the different energy mixes at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/ https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/. I know which european country's energy mix I'd choose if I could just pick one at will (with the caveat that running flat countries on hydro is not going to work, so that's sadly not ubiquitously available) Long term, sure, also France has to transition. Uranium isn't infinite. But an existing reactor? Let's save lives and buy time where we can please :|
    • teamonkey 6mo ago
      It is a really bad idea to half-ass this. A nuclear disaster in Europe would likely kill off any positive sentiment the public has for nuclear power. And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.
      • lucb1e 6mo ago
        I'm not sure where I proposed to half-ass something?
        • teamonkey 6mo ago
          When the parent said that the reactors may not actually be safe and you said “Better a potential bad outcome than directly measurable and ongoing harm, though“
• simplyluke 6mo ago
  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.
  • ardit33 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • deepsun 6mo ago
      Don't forget a large Russian campaign in Europe to discredit all energy sources that don't involve buying from Russia. Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
      • leonidasrup 6mo ago
        The beginning of Soviet and German cooperation goes back much earlier, to early 1970s. The famous policy of "Wandel durch Handel" "Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network. https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-Russian-Energy-Relations-since-1970.pdf https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R... All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war. And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped. https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-lobby-germany/?lang=en https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
• stretchwithme 6mo ago
  Glad to see a country be less foolish.
• graphenus 6mo ago
  I see that here a viewpoint is widely reflected that we can substitute nuclear with solar/wind. And maybe today it could be feasible in certain areas albeit not always economical. What this viewpoint misses, is the fact that we will need an increasingly more power, as we always did, and I am certain that if we would have a chance to go 100 years into the future, power demand will be so high that our current abilities to supply power via nuclear and solar/wind combined will not be enough to cover the demand.
  • boshomi 6mo ago
    Nuclear energy is pure economic madness in a context where wind and solar power are generating a surplus of electricity. Today, May 1, electricity prices in Europe are in some cases at the technical minimum of minus €500/MWh. Thermal power generation, which is difficult to control, is completely unnecessary in an environment where we have negative electricity prices practically every day from March to October. In Europe, we need rapidly controllable energy sources—obviously more storage capacity. Due to the many hours during which electricity prices are close to zero, the economically viable full-load hours of a nuclear power plant are reduced to barely 3,000 hours per year, effectively tripling the real levelized cost of electricity (LOCE). In addition to the high costs of nuclear power plants, there is also the enormous expense incurred by the government for military and police security at the facilities. Since the government prioritizes nuclear power, this leads to heavily manipulated electricity prices, with homeowners with solar panels being among the biggest losers, as they are required to feed electricity into the grid but are effectively paid the full negative prices (usually via weighted average pricing methods)
    • Neil44 6mo ago
      I would counter that being reliant on gas and oil from our enemies as we currently are is madness.
    • graphenus 6mo ago
      [dead]
    • mpweiher 6mo ago
• tsoukase 6mo ago
  If we want decarbonation, nuclear power is inevitable until today. We can't rely on renewables for stable power for the masses. Other possible solutions for the future: hydrogen with it's problems and eFuels that need x4 energy to produce. But we said we have enough cheap solar.
• arjunthazhath 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• zug_zug 6mo ago
  My understanding is that nuclear should have built decades ago, and is probably worth maintaining at this point rather than decommissioning. People got emotional about nuclear. But but solar had a 90% reduction in cost between 2010 and 2026, and is projected to decrease between 50% to 80% again by 2035. So once again, it's just numbers, and some people are being emotional again. Further evidence is that China added 70x as much solar as it did nuclear in 2025.
• jlengelbrecht 6mo ago
  Interesting. Seems like the worlds demand for nuclear is obvious considering the state of oil shipments today.
• matof 6mo ago
  Great idea, Just see how it went for Germany...