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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

• 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