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
diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
Yeah, nuclear provides a steady base load, so the percentage goes up or down depending on overall grid utilization. Right now its doing 2.28 MW [0], which is more than what Wikipedia claims as its "Nameplace capacity" of 2.256 MW [1].
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
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.
"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."
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.
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.
> "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.
> 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.
Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.
You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...
Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
Hmm, I may have been too vague. When I stated "these" I was talking specifically about the Fukushima plants and not Japan's policy for reactors nationally.
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.
You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?
Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).
Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)
I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:
> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors
The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.
I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.
theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
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.
2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.
> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Irrelevant.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.
If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.
> "Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.
There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.
However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.
The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.
What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.
"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.
The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.
This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.
None of this addresses the points made. It is talking around the subject by trying to shift the focus or narrow the perspective.
The cleanup bill is real.
The inability to get insurance is real.
The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.
Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.
> The inability to get insurance is real
It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?
> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.
> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.
edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.
> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.
You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.
The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.
So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.
However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.
The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?
Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.
And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island. On top of that there have been dozens of near-misses. On the other hand: what would have been the result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hitting a wind farm, or a PV installation?
Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?
In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Thought experiment: imagine nuclear were 100 times as deadly as it is, but ten times more prevalent (supplanting other fossil fuels, or even hydroelectric)
What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.
The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.
Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.
> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
That's a non-sequitur.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.
We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.
"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"
"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear
power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."
In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.
"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."
I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.
I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.
> Gen II … need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.
And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.
My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage. Places that are currently safe aren't always safe.
Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.
The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.
What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.
I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.
There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.
So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.
So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.
More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.
Yes we actually are talking about deaths from natural disasters.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.
A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.
IDK why you'd think a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors in an article about decommissioning nuclear reactors should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters.
More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.
It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.
> a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors
This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.
> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters
How did we get to natural disasters?
Well:
You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also claimed, incorrectly, that Japan was turning off reactors, when in fact they are currently in the process of turning them back on.
So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.
And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.
Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.
In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.
In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.
Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.
I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.
Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!
About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).
Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!
Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.
The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...
And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.
There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.
There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.
Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.
Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.
Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.
Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.
Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest
Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.
Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.
A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.
German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.
A larger seawall can still fail. Better to put the generators on a platform. Simple and cheap.
Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.
After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.
I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".
Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.
Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.
1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.
Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.
2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing
Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.
The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.
It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.
> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water
Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.
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.”"
AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.
I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.
Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.
>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.
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)
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.
We don't need baseload energy! That is something the coal lobby likes to repeat but it is false. We need enough energy to supply demand. These days gas peaker plants amortize cheaper to run 24x7 than a new baseload plant and so a lot of new "baseload" is actually covered by a peaker plant.
Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.
25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)
Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.
Where does this "need for baseload" energy come from? Baseload is a demand side concern. It can be fulfilled by any number of sources and we already have grids operating with zero baseload.
The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.
You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?
Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
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.
> 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/ 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.
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.
> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
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.
> 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.
> 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........
> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
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?
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.
"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
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.
It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".
Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.
The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.
> 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.
At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.
Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.
What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.
We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.
You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
You probably have to look at the whole picture. Having part of the energy generation from nuclear probably makes the total cheaper than having no nuclear. Even if nuclear maybe is the most expensive.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
Storage is not just 'a problem', it doesn't exist and won't for many many decades.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
The way China building new reactor is not typical.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
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.
> 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].
I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
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.
Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.
How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?
Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
Me neither.
BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised
> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.
> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?
So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)
Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2
The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.
Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try
> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.
Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?
Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.
It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.
I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.
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.
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
Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.
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.
Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
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.
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.
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.
IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's hat PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
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.
> 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.
Compared to other countries I've lived in, Belgium doesn't do too bad of a job in promoting 'green energy'. Although I've not lived there for some years, they used to subsidize things like solar panels on roofs (at least when my parents installed them 20-ish years ago). And there are 'green energy' companies as far as I'm aware, so you don't have to stick with the larger energy providers.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.
If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow.
Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.
Surely you must realize that the fuel for nuclear power plants is not more freely available than sunlight. In the event of "all out nuclear war or asteroid hit", you're not getting those shipments from Kazakhstan.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
> 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.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>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.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
They asked if it was bankrupt, not for a feel good or balanced essay.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
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.
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.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
> "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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
I'm so glad we saved Diablo. It was VERY close to being shut down the same year we were having rolling blackouts.
So close - big save indeed.
diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously. about 2.2MW/hr they both aren’t always on but that’s the goal. It’s closer to 2MW/hr actual
the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
It would take 20 clones of Ivanpah to match one diablo canyon. Ivanpah took 4 years to build, cost 2.5B and was in discussions to close because it’s not cost effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
The math in this comment is all over the place.
Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW
Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.
mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar
my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth
> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously
MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)
> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.
Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.
Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).
There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.
Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.
The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).
Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.
But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.
So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).
Yeah, nuclear provides a steady base load, so the percentage goes up or down depending on overall grid utilization. Right now its doing 2.28 MW [0], which is more than what Wikipedia claims as its "Nameplace capacity" of 2.256 MW [1].
0. https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
The correct unit is GW.
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
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.
"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."
https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-pumped-hydro-energystorage-renai...
Main challenge with pumped storage is its geographically limited, always a custom project, and large scale deployment.
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-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-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.
> 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.
Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.
You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...
Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..
Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.
These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.
On the contrary, Japan is changing it's energy policy and restarting it's nuclear reactors.
"Japan’s Energy Plan: New Policy Shifts Nuclear Power Stance from Reduction to Maximization"
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01195/
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Hmm, I may have been too vague. When I stated "these" I was talking specifically about the Fukushima plants and not Japan's policy for reactors nationally.
Are they planning on restarting the Fukushima plants? I didn't think they were.
The Fukushima plants were completely destroyed by the meltdowns and subsequent Hydrogen explosions that were caused by the Tsunami.
There was never any chance of "restarting" them, so not sure why you brought that up.
Because I'm confused at to what the
> On the contrary
was about. Contrary to what?
Contrary to your claim Japan is not shutting down its nuclear reactors. It is restarting them.
All nuclear reactors are massively safer than coal power plants though. If you excluded climate change and Co2 emissions entirely and measured harm/deaths adjusted by the amount of power generated the difference would be astronomical.
... and add a pipe to vent the hydrogen gases outside instead of accumulating it inside the reactor building!
Those old reactors in Belgium have already had several issues.
> Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.
You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?
Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).
Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)
I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:
> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors
The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.
What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.
I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.
theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them
The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.
The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.
Even in case of RBMK where were many lessons learned. There are still to this day 7 operational RBMKs in Russia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
RMBKs are irrelevant to nuclear reactor safety.
You had a good argument up until you went there.
Even if we don't treat Chernobyl as sui generis, the safety situation with nuclear power is akin to that of airplanes. We don't bat an eye at the quotidian death toll of cars or coal
I've yet to see a nuclear safety argument that doesn't reduce to 'nuclear energy provokes emotional fear'
Oh, it occasionally irradiates a swath of land and renders it uninhabitable? How about coal ash ponds or indefinite mine fires or infamous oil spills or dam failures or even the mining scars...
Happy to be proven wrong, but https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
> it occasionally irradiates a swath
That has happened exactly once.
> disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.
There was a single nuclear disaster in history that actually caused a lot of damage (Fukushima was of course very costly financially). Both Chernobyl and Fukushima were caused by variables that can be easily controlled, though. Just don't build them in coastal areas were Tsunamis are fairly common and more importantly don't allow Soviet engineers to design and operate your nuclear power plants.
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.
It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster
1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
> 1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
> 2. Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Sure, but Belgium has to be prepared for something like the North Sea flood of 1953 - which climate change is only going to make worse.
> 3. ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
Irrelevant.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Correct, but a nuclear power plant in Belgium should be safe enough to survive the kind of disaster which is likely to happen in Belgium - which is very much a topic of debate.
If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
> Irrelevant.
How can that be irrelevant. The disaster was directly caused by a very specific external factor that was not properly accounted for when it was built i.e. it's not generalizable to all nuclear plants in different areas.
> "Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
The actual death toll of the accident itself is zero.
There was one incident of cancer that was ruled a "workplace accident" by an insurance tribunal that went through the press without much vetting.
However, this was for his overall work at the plant, largely preceding the accident.
The WHO says there has been and will be no measurable health impact due to Fukushima.
What caused a lot of deaths was the evacuation that almost certainly should not have happened.
"The forced evacuation of 154,000 people ″was not justified by the relatively moderate radiation levels″, but was ordered because ″the government basically panicked″" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Nuclear is insured. The German nuclear insurance so far has paid out €15000,- since it was created in 1957.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Nuclear_Reactor_Insuran...
For comparison, just the German nuclear auto-insurance pays out north of €15 billion per year.
There is a reason both Japan and Ukraine maintain and are actually expanding their nuclear programs.
>Nuclear is insured.
You should read the article you linked to. It actually explains that nuclear is defacto not insured, and that is the reason why they have only paid 15000 euros in total.
The TLDR is that basically no matter what happens, the cost is covered by the government of the country the plant is located in, and secondly other governments.
This is course also true even if nothing goes wrong with the plants, future tax payers pay for decommissioning, maintenance, storage etc.
None of this addresses the points made. It is talking around the subject by trying to shift the focus or narrow the perspective.
The cleanup bill is real.
The inability to get insurance is real.
The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
The possibility of Fukushima scale accidents all depend on local conditions. And it may be as trivial as upgrades and component changes over the decades leading to safeties protecting the component rather than the larger system causing defense in depth to fail. Like happened in Forsmark in 2006.
Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history. There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
> The cleanup bill is real
This still feels irrational compared to other dangerous industries.
> The inability to get insurance is real
It's real, but how much of it is rooted in emotional fear or bad industrial policy?
> The precautionary evacuation of entire cities is real.
And that's one of the lessons to learn from the Fukushima accident, that's why Canada changed their evacuation plans to be more granular for example.
> Renewables and storage are the cheapest energy source in human history.
Storage gets very expensive as your share of renewables increases (because the capacity factor of storage goes down then). Having an amount of clean firm generation (nuclear) brings the overall cost of the system down.
edit: capacity factor might be the wrong term for storage, the point is their rate of utilization goes down and so does their profitability.
> There's no point other than basic research and certain niches like submarines to waste opportunity cost and money on new built nuclear power today.
I don't understand what we could effectively do with civil nuclear builds decades ago cannot be replicated today. Let's also talk about the cost of the transition to renewables in Germany please.
>>1. Lead to basically zero direct deaths
>"Basically zero" is a funny way to spell "a few dozen".
Wikipedia asserts one "suspected" death, which I think is within bounds to call "basically zero". It does list a couple dozen injuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
Just a few lines down:
> The displacements resulted in at least 51 deaths as well as stress and fear of radiological hazards
> It also led to a $187 billion cleanup bill - which is expected to grow by a few more tens of billions over the next decades.
Apparently wildlife is thriving in the radiation zone.
Intensity of radiation fades over the years (exponential decay). The bad stuff is gone fairly quickly. Decades means pretty low levels.
Just leave the radiation zone as a nature preserve, like the Chernobyl zone.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
> Irrelevant.
Well, that needs more nuance.
You have to understand that Japan is unusually well prepared for natural disasters. From earthquake resistant building codes, to alarm systems, education, to building, to earthquake refuges. I would venture to say that it is the most earhquake-prepared country in the world (although I have no proof of that point and I don't feel like looking for evidence on that it). Earthquakes that would have killed hundreds in other countries are footnotes in the news in Japan.
The earthquake alone was not enough to bring down Fukushima; the reactors shut down, as designed. The earthquake wasn't the direct cause of many deaths. It is difficult to estimate given the circumstances, but tens or maybe hundreds.
So in in that sense, yes, the earthquake is irrelevant.
However, after the earthquake, came the tsunami. That did shut down the Fukushima backup generators. No generators means no cooling, which means meltdown.
The tsunami also killed the most people. Now, why is this relevant?
Because the Japanese have had drills and tsunami education for decades. They have seawalls, strong buildings, and prepared infrastructure. The tsunami hit the least populated areas of the coast. In short, they were aware, trained and prepared, and they were not hit where most people live.
And still, ~15000+ died. That gives an idea of the magnitude of the event.
Sure, but Chernobyl didn't require a massive tsunami, and neither did Three Mile Island. On top of that there have been dozens of near-misses. On the other hand: what would have been the result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami hitting a wind farm, or a PV installation?
Nuclear reactors are inherently a very risky business, with virtually unlimited damages if something goes seriously wrong. I'm sure all the reactor operators reviewed their flood procedures after Fukushima and a 1:1 repeat is unlikely, but why didn't they do so before the incident? What other potential causes did the industry miss?
In this case it was indeed a large-scale natural disaster which caused the accident, but how sure are we that some medium-scale terrorism can't do the same, or some small-scale internal sabotage or negligent maintenance? The fact that a Fukushima-scale nuclear disaster can happen at all is a major cause for concern.
Thought experiment: imagine nuclear were 100 times as deadly as it is, but ten times more prevalent (supplanting other fossil fuels, or even hydroelectric)
What would be the net effect? (I think it would be roughly on par with gas or hydroelectric and an order of magnitude safer than other fossil fuels even with this extremely pessimistic hypothetical)
> If nuclear is so safe, how come nobody is willing to insure it?
Almost every plant is bespoke, leading each plant to have unknown failure modes and rates. Additionally, insurance works by pooling risk amongst a large group of individuals but the statistical uncertainties of failure rates (too few events) and low total rate of plants leads to an incredibly uncertain risk profile.
The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.
And also largely irrelevant to a possible future standardised fleet.
Also, obviously, that could lead to an issue with one being an issue with many.
The impression I've gotten is that almost all of the massive bills associated with nuclear power are because of an irrational fear of the radiation. Factoring in all the nuclear disasters and the radiations released from them, nuclear causes something on the order of 10,000 times fewer deaths than coal per megawatt generated.
“Better than coal” is a weak argument. Coal hasn’t been in the “game” for decades. The problem for nuclear isn’t anything irrational - it’s economics and operational and deployment flexibility - newer tech like solar PV, gas turbines, batteries and wind have created a new Pareto frontier for electricity generation and nuclear just isn’t anywhere near this frontier for any objective.
That's kinda like saying we can release the tiger from the cage because it hasn't killed anyone while it was in the cage.
> Lead to basically zero direct deaths
Coal has lead to basically zero direct death, and a lot of indirect deaths. That's a bad way to measure the damage done by a power generation mechanism.
> Was caused by the forth most powerful earthquake to have ever been recorded in the world (since ~1900), and the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan
Yeah, crazy stuff happens and radioactive spills have longterm effects on the environment that are hard to address.
> ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
That's a non-sequitur.
> Requiring a nuclear plant in Belgium to be safe enough to survive what caused the Fukoshima disaster is probably not a good use of money
Japan has spent the equivalent of $180B cleaning up the mess Fukoshima left behind. [1] Decomissioning the old reactors and replacing them with the safer to avoid unexpected disasters which cost hundreds of billions does seem like a good use of money. Far better than just hoping something unexpected doesn't happen.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38131248
It's always hard count indirect deaths.
We could for example argue that Japan, by stopping it's nuclear power plants for long time and replacing it's cheap nuclear electricity with expensive imported gas electricity caused more deaths than by direct radiological impact of Fukoshima accident.
"Be Cautious with the Precautionary Principle: Evidence from Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident"
https://docs.iza.org/dp12687.pdf
"In an effort to meet the energy demands, nuclear power was replaced by imported fossil fuels, which led to increases in electricity prices. The price increases led to a reduction in electricity consumption but only during the coldest times of the year. Given its protective effects from extreme weather, the reduced electricity consumption led to an increase in mortality during very cold temperatures. We estimate that the increased mortality resulting from the higher energy prices outnumbered the mortality from the accident itself, suggesting that applying the precautionary principle caused more harm than good."
In term of money, you have look at the sums that Japan has been pouring into importing gas, which was needed to replace the missing nuclear power generation.
"With the Japanese government’s blessing, these companies are encouraging other countries to use more gas and LNG by investing US$93 billion from March 2013 to March 2024 in midstream and downstream oil and gas infrastructure globally."
https://energyexplained.substack.com/p/japan-1-how-fukushima...
I pretty much fully agree.
I'm not actually arguing that Gen II plants need to be decommissioned immediately. I'm arguing that they need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
The process that takes can look like running the Gen II reactor while a replacement Gen IV reactor is being built and then decommissioning after the IV reactor is up and running.
I'm not against using nuclear, far from it. But I do think we need to actually have a plan about how we evolve the current nuclear fleet.
> Gen II … need to be decommissioned and ideally replaced as soon as possible.
Why? The overwhelming majority of Gen II reactors aren’t on the east coast of Japan.
And the lessons learned from Fukushima Daiitchi can be applied elsewhere to mitigate similar risks.
My opinion is it’s more prudent to run the existing fleet for its economically useful life, remembering that reliable base load can have more value than intermittent wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
You also don’t get process heat not district heating from wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries.
Gen II reactors everywhere are subject to war and sabotage. Places that are currently safe aren't always safe.
Fukushima was a demonstration that these reactors can still melt down. It doesn't take exactly fukushima to cause a meltdown.
The reason to prioritize decommissioning is because the new generations of reactors are completely safe. There can be no meltdown, even if they are explicitly sabotaged. Then the bigger risk becomes not the reactor but the management of waste.
What Gen II reactors are is effectively a landmine in a box. The proposed solution to avoid detonating the landmine is adding more pillows, buffers, and padding, but still keeping the landmine because it'd be expensive to replace.
I think that's just a bad idea. Unexpected things happen. They don't have to (and probably won't) look exactly like a Tsunami hitting the facility. So why not replace the box with a landmine with one that doesn't have the landmine. Yes it cost money to do, but it's simply safer and completely eliminates a whole class of risks.
> > ~20,000 people died due to the Earthquake
> That's a non-sequitur.
I think this is to establish that the large number of deaths from the disaster weren't due to the nuclear plant, which people seem to assume.
People assume it, I did not. Nor did I claim it. It is a non-sequitur because we aren't talking about deaths from natural disasters.
We actually are.
There are plenty of smaller nuclear power reactor issues listen on Wikipedia, but the three big ones are Chernobyl, but that was an RMBK, which no one built except those crazy Russians, TMI which didn’t kill or injury anyone, and Fukushima Daiitchi which resulted in one death.
So we’re not really talking about deaths from nuclear power reactors, because there aren’t any, discounting Chernobyl because that won’t ever happen again.
So we must be talking about the deaths from that one natural disaster associated with the Fukushima Daiitchi meltdowns. Otherwise, I dint know what deaths you’re talking about.
More people injur themselves falling off ladders while trying to clean their solar panels than nuclear power ever will.
You are, I'm not.
Good luck.
Yes we actually are talking about deaths from natural disasters.
The Fukushima nuclear power plant was destroyed by the Tsunami. It didn't spontaneously combust.
A lot of other infrastructure that was impacted/destroyed by the Tsunami claimed lives. For example, a dam broke due to the Tsunami and that dam breach killed 4 people. Which coincidentally happens to be 4 more than were killed by the nuclear power plant when it was destroyed by the Tsunami.
IDK why you'd think a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors in an article about decommissioning nuclear reactors should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters.
More people die from car accidents and heart attacks. More people get radiation poisoning from sun exposure. Also non-sequiturs because we are not talking about that here.
It is very tangentially related because the nuclear accident in the current thread was caused by an earthquake that also killed people. Not something that affects the discussion about how we should handle nuclear plants in the future because "This number is bigger" is a meaninglessly point to make.
> a thread about how we treat and handle nuclear reactors
This is actually an article about Belgium taking over nuclear plants for restart.
> should suddenly be about people that die from natural disasters
How did we get to natural disasters?
Well:
You brought up Fukushima, where a natural disaster destroyed a nuclear power station. You also claimed, incorrectly, that Japan was turning off reactors, when in fact they are currently in the process of turning them back on.
So: we got to natural disasters because you brought up natural disasters.
And yes, technical equipment and infrastructure gets destroyed in natural disasters. Like that dam in Japan that killed 4 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami. Like that nuclear power plant that killed 0 people when it was destroyed by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Tsunami.
> Coal has lead to basically zero direct death
This is not true at all.
Direct Occupational Deaths (Mining & Accidents)
Even in a highly regulated environment like the United States, coal mining is not a zero-fatality industry. United States: According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), there were 8 coal mining deaths in 2025 and 10 in 2024. This is a massive improvement from 1907 (the deadliest year), which saw 3,242 deaths.
In countries with less stringent safety oversight, the numbers are much higher. For example, China's coal industry—though improving—has historically recorded hundreds to thousands of deaths annually.
In 2022 alone, hundreds of people died in global coal mine accidents.
Chronic Disease: "Black Lung" (pneumoconiosis) is still a leading cause of death for miners. In the U.S. alone, thousands of former miners die every decade from lung diseases directly caused by inhaling coal dust.
I don't know but i feel like Nuclear reactors are something worth taking to the 99.99% percentile of safety. How much money does it really cost? And how does that money compare to the economic prosperity of the land that is currently radiation free. As well, i think us (assuming) not knowledgeable Nuclear engineers discussing the cost benefit of reactor safety should be basically locked out of the conversation. Plausible sounding soundbites are just too easily generated these days for anyone without credentials to have stake in these decisions.
Nuclear is already at a much higher safety standard than 99.99%!
About costs: it is actually cheap. 95% of the average total cost of a MWh is in building the plant. Comparisons sometimes show the cost of a MWh from wind or solar, but is a fallacy because they assume an infrastructure on the side to ensure 24x7 power generation (i.e. they point out a marginal cost instead of average total cost).
Yep!
Wind / solar + (largely non-existent) batteries are cheap!
Until you factor in the gas peaker plants that need to be built watt-for-watt unless you’re okay with poor people freezing in the dark, or melting in the heat. Because rich people can afford their own back up generators or on-site batteries.
> How much money does it really cost?
The problem is as much time as it is money. We have reactors producing energy now, it will take a decade plus to replace them, and due to both climate policy and supply issues around the wars in Russia and the Middle East, we can't afford to do without the energy for that decade...
And if that nuclear would be displacing coal power, you have to consider the health and environmental costs of that coal generation which you haven't displaced.
> climate policy
Fuck climate policy.
There could be an earthquake any moment now that ruptures a massive natural CO formation that would eclipse any anthropogenic generated emissions in matter of hours. What have we done to mitigate that risk? Nothing.
There is a non-zero chance Earth will be relieved of the responsibility of harbouring complex life any moment now by a loose pile of gravel travelling at 60 kilometres a second. Zero mitigation.
Let’s work out this food-housing-energy deal for everyone before we mandate unaffordable unreliable energy that results in unaffordable everything.
Maybe your shielded from that because your own a mid six figure income at $UNICORN, but I guarantee you the rest of us have had enough of this climate change fucking bullshit luxury belief.
> What have we done to mitigate that risk
Climate change isn't a risk that needs mitigation, it is not a contingency of hypothetical events. It is happening right now, and lives are already being claimed.
Maybe you are shielded from that and want to keep your lifestyle rather than adapting.
Hey man, I live on a small farm ~50km from the city, where we get to battle more and more wildfires every year, and it no longer rains enough to keep the water supplies flowing all summer. Climate change is a bigger issue for a lot of of the world than your personal experience might suggest
The Fukushima disaster could have been averted simply by putting the backup electric generators on a platform, and venting the hydrogen gases outside.
Yes.
Or not having your plant destroyed by the biggest Tsunami in recorded Japanese history, much larger than the size they planned for when they built the plant.
Or upgrading the seawall to the size mandated after scientists found out that Tsunamis of that size could actually happen, despite having no historical record of them. One of the reasons TEPCO was culpable.
A sister plant of the Fukushima plant actually survived a slightly higher crest and was even used as a shelter for Tsunami victims, because one engineer had insisted on the sea wall being higher.
German plants for example, despite facing no immediate Tsunami risks, have bunkered and distributed backup generators as well as mandatory hydrogen recombinators. Any German plant at the same location would have survived largely unscathed.
A larger seawall can still fail. Better to put the generators on a platform. Simple and cheap.
Another backup would have been a pipe leading away from the reactor, where one can, from a short distance, pump water into it and it would cool the reactor.
Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.
After SL-1 we realized that that we needed to allow a reactor to fully shut down even with the most important control rod stuck in a fully withdrawn position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1#Accident_and_response
> Everything is "simple" with hindsight in mind.
The fixes are still simple and cost little.
I used to work at Boeing on airliner design. The guiding principle is "what happens when X fails" and design for that. It is not "design so X cannot fail", as we do not know how to design things that cannot fail. For Fukushima, it is "what happens if the seawall fails", not "the seawall cannot fail".
Airliners are safe not because critical parts cannot fail, but because there is a backup plan for every critical part.
Venting explosive gas into the building seems like a complete failure to do a proper failure analysis.
Lets try to speak as adults about this.
1) There are at least 403 cases registered of Fukushima residents developing Thyroid cancers after 2011 and the study is still ongoing. This is five times the expected cancer ratio.
Of those at least 155 cases of malignant cancers happened in children (Sokawa 2024). We know that thyroid cancers are rare among young people... except in one special place were a sudden increase in similar cases was registered since the 80's. This place is called Chernobyl. Children that lived in towns around Fukushima daichi where the accident happened have three times more probability of suffering thyroid cancer than children that lived in towns farther from the plant.
2) Not the strong excuse that it seems, after the company was warned by scientists about the possibility of such earthquake and the urgency to improve their safety measures. They had a lot of time to fix it, and did absolutely nothing
You write as if Fukushima was the only example. Take chernobyl: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster
You are correct that there were only few deaths but there was radiation damage, and if you sum that up then Fukushima was definitely noticable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
Chernobyl happened, but it’s irrelevant to calculating risk for any other operational nuclear power reactor.
That RMBK was built by those crazy Russians who thought it was reasonable to not even bother with a containment vessel / building.
> It's worth noting that the Fukoshima disaster Lead to basically zero direct deaths
Which was really just pure luck.
It was melting down. Humans could not go in to stop it, robots could not go in to stop it. Pure luck it didn’t go a lot bigger.
Also it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water, which will have impacts for a very long time
> severe contamination of ocean water
No it didn’t
Like I said at the time, you could melt all of the cores down at the Fukushima Daiitchi site and dissolve them all in to the oceans and it would be undetectable in sea water.
The oceans weigh around 10^21 kilograms, and the six reactor cores at Fukushima Daiichi would weigh, what, several hundred tons and contain, what, several tens of tonnes of radioactive products.
We’re talking beyond parts per trillion.
> Which was really just pure luck.
It's the opposite of luck. They were very unlucky. The objectively extremely unlucky outcome occurred. Yes it could have been worse, and I suppose it could have been struck by a meteor too.
> it resulted in severe contamination of ocean water
Citation please. I suggest reading the relevant Wikipedia article in full.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_of_radioactive_water...
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-generati...
Got my gens mixed up, so thanks.
But I think my point is still valid. These Gen II reactors should be retired and replaced.
> if input power fails fission ultimately stops
AIUI fission was stopped basically immediately. The problem was removing the decay heat from the fission by-products; without pumps to move cooling water that didn't happen.
I think modern reactor designs have enough passive cooling that this failure mode can't happen. There are a lot of active reactor plants where it still could be possible though.
Fukushima Daiichi is irrelevant to European nuclear reactor safety.
That's a big nevertheless.
> A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.
Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.
Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.
Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.
There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.
We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.
The difference between different generations is wildly different and regulations aren't structured to allow for upgrading. It becomes a cost and regulatory burden thing - might as well rebuild then upgrade, very little to do with safety.
Do you fly?
>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.
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)
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.
We don't need baseload energy! That is something the coal lobby likes to repeat but it is false. We need enough energy to supply demand. These days gas peaker plants amortize cheaper to run 24x7 than a new baseload plant and so a lot of new "baseload" is actually covered by a peaker plant.
Baseload doesn't have a consistent definition, but the general concept is some power plants are cheap at 100% output, but don't throttle back well, so you have a mix of these cheaper baseload plants, and the more expensive to operate peaker plants that are more expensive to operate, but can start/stop/slow as needed. However we don't need that. In any case even when baseload is cheaper than peaker, it is still much more expensive than wind+solar which have zero fuel costs, and so when you amortize the costs out wind+solar plus peaker plants to make up the difference is overall cheaper.
25 years ago I was with you - nuclear was the best answer. However wind+solar have really grown since then and now they your best bet. Because the times have changed I've in turned change. I'm against nuclear because it no longer makes sense even if the price was reasonable. (nuclear would still make sense for ships, I don't know how to push that though)
Edit: Come to think of it, I'd go so far as to say if you have a baseload coal plant today, you should be shutting it down immediately for new wind and solar plus gas peaker plants. It is economically stupid to not be doing that. Now, there may be coal power plants that are not baseload, but instead can be dispatchable. If so, I don't know how the economics of those play out. And likewise, nuclear, although it is baseload, probably is cheap enough to continue running as long as it's not too expensive to keep maintaining, and I would keep it running for the near future.
Where does this "need for baseload" energy come from? Baseload is a demand side concern. It can be fulfilled by any number of sources and we already have grids operating with zero baseload.
The grids have dispatchable power. But that is a different concerns.
Point out the "baseload power" in this grid:
https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...
You also have to look at it in terms of outcomes. How do we get the most decarbonization the quickest per dollar spent?
Focusing on reducing the area under the curve. Looking at it from that perspective wasting money and opportunity cost on new built nuclear power leads to spending longer time entirely dependent on fossil fuels.
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-bo...
> 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.
> 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/ 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.
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.
> 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-... and restrict to "operational" all but two of the projects disappear.
> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe
More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.
If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?
Renewables are not suitable for replacing nuclear, coal and other traditional sources of energy due to the fact that you cannot control production.
Why do you need to control production? Why not over provision and store?
How?
Tell me you've been in coma the past 10 years without telling me you've been in a coma the past 10 years.
In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.
As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.
In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.
Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
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.
> 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.
> 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........
The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable.
It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.
We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.
The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.
That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.
Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.
> What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?
No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.
Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.
Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.
Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.
On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.
More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.
With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).
But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.
One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.
The main benefit of battery storage is that it is trivially easy to decentralize, so if anything it will save money on grid upgrades. Same with solar: no need to upgrade long-distance transmission lines when production happens right next door to consumption.
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?
One small problem, nuclear is also dependent on water: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-forc...
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.
"PWR plants are very flexible at the beginning of their cycle, with fresh fuel and high reserve reactivity. An EdF reactor can reduce its power from 100% to 30% in 30 minutes. But when the fuel cycle is around 65% through these reactors are less flexible, and they take a rapidly diminishing part in the third, load-following, aspect above. When they are 90% through the fuel cycle, they only take part in frequency regulation, and essentially no power variation is allowed (unless necessary for safety)."
On the other hand it doesn't make economic sense to not utilize 100% of nuclear reactor output, because nuclear fuel is cheap.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...
Good news: nuclear costs the same to run at max output as it does idle! No change in fuel costs.
Other good news: solar and wind is trivial to curtail at the press of a button. And very cheap to deploy far more than needed on a day with perfect conditions.
Thus the obvious solution is keep your nuclear running at full load 24x7 and vary the rate at which you feed solar and wind into the grid on those days of optimal production. Idle solar is nearly free, which is one of its largest benefits! This way you have enough solar and even short term battery to meet peak daytime demand even on relatively cloudy days, and don’t need to overbuild your nuclear fleet. But you still get seasonal energy storage in the form of extremely dense nuclear fuel.
Nuclear compliments renewables quite well if you remove the fake financial incentives of “I must be allowed to be paid dump every watt possible into the grid at all times even if not needed, but cannot be called on to produce more energy when required”. Solar produces the least valuable watts. Nuclear the most. So use the cheap stuff whenever possible but fill it in with the expensive reliable source when needed.
That or you’re just gonna be backing renewables with natural gas. Which is of course cheaper, but not all that green.
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.
Huh, I don't know where I read that their output can only be at 100% then.
It's generally uneconomical to throttle output once the plant is built. because the fuel is so cheap. The real cost is building the plant and decommissioning it.
There is a lot of disinformation about nuclear power that has been so widely and consistently disseminated that it has basically diffused into the background.
A small amount of coal has a huge environmental impact.
Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.
New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.
It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.
> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.
Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.
I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.
It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.
> The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price.
They're not mutually exclusive. If time and money were the only considerations in life, I'd only have pets instead of some kids too. We'd never go to war because it would be expensive and costly. I'd drive only gas cars because they're cheaper and easier to fuel up. And so on and so forth.
Nuclear takes more time and money, but it is great for the diversification of your energy grid. It will likely outlive either of us. It will produce jobs for generations and a RELIABLE base load for as long as it exists. It will not easily be at the whims of different politicians of the day because of the momentum required to get it going in the first place.
The list goes on. We shouldn't make energy decisions based only on time and money in an economy where other choices don't play by those same rules.
Except they are mutually exclusive. Money spent by utility companies (or by taxpayers more broadly) to add new generation is not infinite, every dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar not spent on other renewables.
Do you also believe they're eventually going to balance the budget and tackle governmental debt?
For better or worse, we live in a highly capitalist world, and most western electricity is an open market. In this construct we only make decisions based on money.
The markets won’t do it, because nukes don’t make any capital sense to invest in, so the only way you can build nukes is nation states forcing it. Forcing the populace to pay extra for very expensive power that will only get even less competitive over the 30+ year lifetime… is not a popular move. It works only in single party states (eg china)
This is just the reality of economics and the world we live in
Power build outs are rarely driven by cost structures in a vacuum, or we'd all still be digging for coal. They're regularly driven by policy. It is a farce to think electricity choices are entirely capitalistic in nature, although maybe that's the case in some localized regions that probably (and regularly) hold other backwards policies in the name of "capitalism".
So your answer is use the state to force people to pay more for less competitive energy? There isn’t another choice here.
That's what we are currently doing. We are using the state to force people to pay for expensive intermittent renewables.
Where? In every country in the world? Because the world met something like 85% of the energy growth of 2025 with renewables. All regions of the world are seeing massive and accelerating renewables buildout. All forced by the state? Extraordinary claims require evidence.
The state's role is to help shape policies that might help people over a time horizon greater than a couple of years. Often, this means current people are supposed to subsidize the world for future generations. This used to be the societal handshake that let kids have better outcomes than their parents. Somewhere along the way, the average joe seems to have lost sight of that societal contract and is more focused on instant gratification and short term payback.
> 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.
Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030
A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.
At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.
Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.
What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.
We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.
With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
You'd likely do less harm if you just dumped that waste in a heap on a roadside than if you shut down the plants and as a result ended up with more coal plans continuing to run. Where shutting down nuclear would result in wind or solar replacing it, you might be better off. Maybe hydro - with a very big caveat that the big risk with hydro is dam failures, which are rare, but can be absolutely devastating when they happen. For pretty much every other tech, the death toll is higher than the amortised death toll of nuclear with a large enough margin that you could up the danger of nuclear massively (such as by completely failing to take care of the waste) and still come out ahead.
Going forward, so long as you have competent engineering, the biggest risk of hydro power will be your water sources effectively drying up. (That could be literal, or diversion to irrigation and other uses, or various combinations.)
But the yet-bigger problem with hydro power is the extreme scarcity of suitable dam locations.
> With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.
By "waste" do you need unused nuclear fuel? We can reduce the "waste" if we wanted to (see France), but it's cheaper to dig up more fuel.
The '10,000 year' thing is interesting: the nuclear "waste" that lasts that long is actually the stuff is not that dangerous. It can be stopped by tinfoil, and the only way for it to harm someone is either eat it or ground it into powder and snort it like cocaine: just being around it is not that big of deal.
The stuff that will get you is primary the stuff that is still around in the cooling pools for the first 6-10 years after removal. After that, there's a bunch of stuff that's around for ~200 years that you don't want to be touching. Once you're >300 years in, the radiation that's given is higher than 'background' in most places, that's why it's considered "risky".
Otherwise, as Madison Hilly demonstrated, it's not that big of a deal:
* https://xcancel.com/MadiHilly/status/1671491294831493120
* https://www.newsweek.com/pregnant-woman-poses-nuclear-waste-...
* Also: https://xcancel.com/ParisOrtizWines/status/11951849706139361...
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?
And? Conventional power plants are killing people now.
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.
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/actual...
In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.
>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?
Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...
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.
NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.
Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.
I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.
Yea, fair point.
Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP.
Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.
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).
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China.
They should be adopting every sort of energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...
> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.
Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation
You probably have to look at the whole picture. Having part of the energy generation from nuclear probably makes the total cheaper than having no nuclear. Even if nuclear maybe is the most expensive.
Not having enough energy or having it cut off by a neighbour is very expensive.
That is not the case. Grid modelers always land on renewables being cheaper. Except for the cases when the studies start with "assuming cheap and fast to build nuclear power".
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/04/17/new-metric-shows-rene...
While this is true, we don't have a good solution for long term energy storage. Even with plummeting costs and new technologies like sodium ion, batteries still only get you maybe ~12 hours of discharge. Pumped hydro give you longer storage, but there are limited places where you can build it. Unless geothermal becomes competitive, nuclear is still the best solution for carbon-free baseload.
There is a good solution for long term energy storage: use solar energy to make synthetic hydrocarbons. This is a solution that has been proven for billions of years.
We can already capture solar energy at a much better energy efficiency than living beings. Making hydrocarbons with hydrogen extracted from water by electrolysis and concentrated carbon dioxide has acceptable efficiency and already almost one century ago it was possible to do this at a large scale where fossil oil was not available.
The step that has the least efficiency for now is concentrating the dilute carbon dioxide from air, which plants do much better.
There is no doubt that the global efficiency of such a process could have been greatly improved if only a small fraction of the resources allocated to much more frivolous goals had been allocated to this purpose.
While other alternatives are speculative, it is enough to look outside to see plenty of PoCs that this is feasible.
I agree storage is a problem.
But the concept of “base load” is outdated. As I mentioned in another comment - Because actually “base load” nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
The only way you can make it work is state subsidies and/or forcing people to buy the more expensive nuke power. Which will be unpopular. But maybe you can sell it as a “grid backup fee” or something.
Storage is not just 'a problem', it doesn't exist and won't for many many decades.
The planned solution is hydrogen power plants, but no one wants to build them because the infrastructure, including electrolysers, is way too economically unfeasible.
Therefore, Germany is and will continue to be dependent on coal and gas, as these are the main producers every night. That's your 'grid backup fee' for you.
Then why is China building 30 new reactors on top of the 60 they already have, if it's not competitive?
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/china-says-i...
The answer is usually more about how China can actually build things, not that nuclear isn't economically feasible.
The way China building new reactor is not typical.
Most of the countries builds _one_ type of reactor, or a group of similar type of reactor. This help reduce the cost of training and certification.
China, otoh, tries to _diversify_ their reactor type.
If you look closely on how China treat techs, they have been doing the same for all tech for past 15+ years. They are strategically growing their tech profile.
And yet, even with their buildout the nuclear share of electricity is projected to decline y/y. Because renewables are cheaper.
And yes it does show china can build things, but it also highlights the different calculus of a single party state. They can force people & the state to buy uncompetitive nuclear power (under the banner of energy stability) and not worry about being voted out.
No it's not.
You actually have to build out intermittent renewables much faster than nuclear even for comparable generating capacity due to the much shorter lifetime of the equipment. See Little's Law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little%27s_law
China recently signed up to the COP28 pledge to triple nuclear generation. In the same time period, worldwide electricity generation is predicted to rise by 50-100%, so the nuclear share will grow by 50% - 100%.
Are you referring to the debunked idea that solar panels only last 20 years? Because yeah, bunk.
https://www.ecoticias.com/en/goodbye-to-the-idea-that-solar-...
China can build ten reactors for the cost of Germany running the appeals, environmental studies and neighborhood consultations for one
Citation needed.
(Narrator: yes it will, and no it's not).
German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.
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.
> 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-c...
I think it is actually the pro nuke case that often has misconceptions of how a modern grid works, repeating terms like “base load” etc
Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear.
Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
> Yes they are building a bunch but Chinas grid share of nukes is actually declining y/y and is projected to continue to decline. Renewables are too cheap.
No. Nuclear energy production in China continue to increase and will probably continue to increase for the next 60y.
Its relative percentage in the global mix decreased. And this has nothing to do with Solar, but with the insane amount of Coal power plants that China had to setup quickly to match the increasing electricity demand of the developing country [1]
> The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical.
Nuclear plants are mainly CAPEX based. And yes, excessive solar capacity tend to decrease nuclear profitability and increase global electricity cost.
But that is mainly a problem of public policy, not a technical one.
In country without tremendous of Hydro storage (e.g Switzerland or Norway), the most balanced economical combination tend to be Nuclear for baseload and Wind+Hydro+Storage for peaks.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/countries/china/electricity
A lot has changed since the 2023 data in your link.
Chinas coal use declined in 2025, and is projected to continue to decline in 2026 and into the future [1]. Not share, absolute. Despite overall generation growing by 5%. And it’s all driven by guess what, renewables growth.
1 https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
> Edit: love to see a source for how cheap renewables _increase_ energy costs as you claimed
That is just economics.
The intermittent nature of renewable means that overcapacity is structurally required to arrive to match partially the demand.
As an example, Germany has > 100GW of Solar installed capacity for a country where the average power demand is around ~60GW *total*.
Overcapacity means that the price of electricity naturally goes to zero (or even to negative) as soon as the sun shine. And this is very visible on the EU electricity market currently [1].
It is (obviously) terrible for the profitability of the means of production and it is not sustainable: No investor sane of mind would put money on the table for a system that sell at negative price when it produces...
To compensate that, most EU countries created the CfDs (Contract for difference) system. A minimum price is guaranteed by contract to the investor and the State pay the difference when the price are too low. The UK did it (and it costs billions) [2], France did it (and it costs billions) [3] and Germany is doing it [4].
So we are subsidizing and using public money to create an artificial profitability on top of an industry that we know is not profitable due to overcapacity caused by bad public policies.
Considering that this overcapacity is also reducing the profitability of nuclear powerplants in the first place (because nuclear is CAPEX based).
The pain is triple: The final consumer pays (1) the cost of the Grid restructuring for renewable (2) the cost of the Cfds to maintain the system alive due to overcapacity (3) the additional €/MWh to the now reduced profitability of the historical production means.
So yes, at the end, the price increase.
And it is what we see currently everywhere in Europe: Electricity price are increasing continuously even if Solar/Wind LCOE is lower than ever.
[1]: https://ibb.co/6cf99PfZ
[2]: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/another-record-year-cfd-s...
[3]: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/euro...
[4]: https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/germany-to-reset-gove...
Couldn't ask for better unintended outcomes from that Iran war than to fast track deployment of renewable and nuclear energy.
Get europe off their anti-nuclear, pro gas stance. France gains a fair bit from this development. Russia loses influence as does the mid-east if the trajectory holds.
Winners: heat pump manufacturers, nuclear re-processing, uranium enrichment, eVs, nuclear heavy manufacturers, solar panels (China)...
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
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.
This is such a non problem, here is the waste from the entire french nuclear production ever (the red cube): https://www.discoverthegreentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2023...
Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french
Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.
How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?
Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
Me neither.
BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised
> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?
That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.
> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?
So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)
Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2
The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.
So you want to guard nuclear waste by the military just like nuclear weapons or what is your point?
"Fears" is the correct word. See also: Radiophobia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia
Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.
The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.
Interesting fact: Finland just built one, for €1 billion.
How can that be, if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The simple fact is that it has virtually nothing to do with any "difficulty" of finding a repository site, the problems are purely political, same as the US:
"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[6]" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
Some German state governments even made this explicit, stating that they would not allow a repository to be designated until the German nuclear exit was finalized in their official coalition agreements.
Another nice little trick was changing the language to require the "best possible" site, rather than a suitable one. Sounds innocuous, but anyone with a bit of experience in algorithms know that in theory, this actually makes the task impossible, because how can you definitively prove that there isn't an even better site that you haven't looked at yet?
In practice it has made the process of finding a site incredibly lengthy, difficult and expensive. It doesn't help that the BASE, the Germany federal agency for nuclear waste has been completely taken over by the Green Party, so there is no interest in actually finding a site, and they spend almost their entire budget every year on spreading anti-nuclear propaganda.
> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?
The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try
> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.
Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?
Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.
It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.
I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.
1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel
2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.
3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.
4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.
Why the hell did they build this in a former salt mine with known water intrusion.
They didn't. It's a research mine and never stored any spent fuel.
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.
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
Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.
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.
Yes, nuclear power regulations are unreasonably strict because that was the method we used to soft-ban it.
Most of the "danger" from nuclear waste passes in a few years as the most radioactive isotopes decay quickly (which is obvious when you think about it).
Interestingly the US/UK/USSR dumped loads of nuclear waste in the ocean in the 1950s-70s and I recently read that there was basically no trace detectable of any of it.
> All the nuclear waste they've got is stored in temporary places (above ground) at former nuclear reactor sites.
Some was stored underground in the past with bad results because the former mines were unstable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morsleben_radioactive_waste_re...
I wonder where they store coal waste.
In their lungs.
> they have not yet found one.
Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.
The most bureaucratic thing ever done... search for a place to store something for 56 years. still not done
Why would it need to be safe for "hundreds of thousands of years" in the first place? Do we not think we would find some other use of nuclear waste within the next decades/centuries, and if not, just send it to space?
> if not, just send it to space
So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?
Terrorists already have a use case
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.
where was this?
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.
Everyone is scared of nuclear energy: 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.
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-product...) but we're still [too dependent on oil](https://www.iea.org/countries/belgium/energy-mix).
Hopefully the current energy crisis is a wake up call.
> 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.
IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's hat PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
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.
> 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.
I'm not disagreeing
Compared to other countries I've lived in, Belgium doesn't do too bad of a job in promoting 'green energy'. Although I've not lived there for some years, they used to subsidize things like solar panels on roofs (at least when my parents installed them 20-ish years ago). And there are 'green energy' companies as far as I'm aware, so you don't have to stick with the larger energy providers.
That said, my information is outdated.
just FYI - unfortunately HN doesn't have markup like reddit so your hyperlinking doesn't work
Thanks, I'll leave it as sucky markdown :D
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?
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.
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.
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.
Amen - we need more sense coming from European politicians.
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.
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
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.
Actually, nuclear is not way more expensive.
And already-built nuclear is pretty much the cheapest power you can get.
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.
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.
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.
The world doesn't even have the foresight of doing something basic, like mitigating against fuel crisis scenario, let alone what you have suggested.
If sunlight is blocked the amount of people who die due to starvation from crop failures will probably more than make up for the difference in lost solar power energy. That is to say, we'll have much larger issues than a stable power grid to contend with.
If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow.
Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.
It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.
Surely you must realize that the fuel for nuclear power plants is not more freely available than sunlight. In the event of "all out nuclear war or asteroid hit", you're not getting those shipments from Kazakhstan.
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.
> 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.
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!!
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.
The interesting part will be whether Belgium can turn this into a coherent long-term plan
They had so much cheap electricity they had lamps on highways. This is pure civilization regress.
keen to keep an eye on this. it implies restarting shut down reactors, all the while a transfer of know how to different ownership.
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.
Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
> 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.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
>Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>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.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
> Belgium is nearly bankrupt
can anyone jumpstart me on this, since when is belgium bankrupt?
> since when is belgium bankrupt?
It's not.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_ra...
[2] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/bel...
[3] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/uni...
[4] https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/en...
Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
Good job.
Now detail three strengths Belgium posses.
If you hyper focus on the problems, you’ll be completely oblivious to the solutions.
They asked if it was bankrupt, not for a feel good or balanced essay.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
You still didn’t answers the question.
I’ll get the ball rolling.
Belgium is tiny about 30,000 square kilometres.
But it produces a metric fuck tonne of food.
You only got to come up with two more now. C’mon, you can do eeeeit!
I had the same thought. Even we have a high debt ratio (near 107% of GDP), we can still pay this debt.
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.
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.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
Agreed.
Running ancient nuclear power plants in one of the most densely populated countries does not seem wise.
These plants have been running with phase-out in mind for the last 20 years.
I wonder if there will one say be an autobiography that reveals the russian hand behind the naive EU fossilsmaxxing.
Feels like a bailout. Belgium’s playbook is simple: skip maintenance, let it decay, then replace it on the taxpayer’s dime.
Not a big surprise, eventually we are going to move to nuclear one way or another
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?
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/yea...
[2] https://www.brusselstimes.com/1080337/belgian-nuclear-plants...
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.