Belgium has dropped nuclear phaseout plans adopted over two decades ago. Previously, it had delayed the phaseout for 10 years over the energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Belgium’s parliament on Thursday voted to drop the country’s planned nuclear phaseout.
In 2003, Belgium passed a law for the gradual phaseout of nuclear energy. The law stipulated that nuclear power plants were to be closed by 2025 at the latest, while prohibiting the construction of new reactors.
In 2022, Belgium delayed the phaseout by 10 years, with plans to run one reactor in each of its two plants as a backup due to energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
I mean, if the reactors are already built and have plenty of life left in them…
This is the key question. Eventually reactors wear out and need substantial refitting to live longer, and you’re then working on a highly irradiated structure.
The UK hit this point with a number of reactors. Even though they had licenses to continue, reality struck and they had to be decommissioned. Of course, the reason for the extension of service was because no replacement plan was in effect. End result is the UK nuclear generation is slowly dying.
…and that chart is missing 9 years. It’s now 5.9GWe.
This stay, IMO, the big question mark. At which point does maintaining an aged machine is more expensive than building new one. Especially when 20 years are needed to build a new one (including 10 years of legal paperwork, trials and appeals)
Cracks in the pressure vessel? Nah, this’ll hold another two decades…
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest. And easily scalable.
Clean might be debatable, but scalable is just obviously wrong. There is nothing even close to solar and wind when it comes to scalability. When your goal is scalability, anything that takes more than 1-2 years per plant to set up is just worthless. We cant just wait another 20 years for nuclear to make a comeback at this point, its not an option.
Solar and wind aren’t scalable well. Try to increase power output, let’s say, x3. How well is it going? Building additional 2 reactors is completely straightforward.
What? This is what generation capacity looks like in Germany. Solar has gone up 50x in the last 20 years, 2.7x in the last 10 years. We could keep scaling faster, but there is just no need.
We dont need more sources, we need more storage. We already have plenty of surplus solar/wind generation capacity that is being turned off because the grid is lacking storage. We really only need more storage and as you can see from this chart, that is whats happening. This year battery storage filled with solar and wind will probably supply more energy than nuclear did over a year at its peak.
Uh hu… so you are arguing, in good faith, that it’s easier(?), safer(?), cheaper(?), faster(?) to build deveral nuclear reactors than building a couple more wind- and solar parks?
Yes. Watt-comparable amounts, of course.
This is what actual delusion looks like lmao
Its neither actually, and it makes us dependent on foreign countries
GOOD. BUILD MORE. The newer generations of nuclear plants can recycle their own waste and are basically meltdown proof. It’s a no brainer. Shit is literally alchemy magic.
For the haters: https://youtu.be/5WKQsr9v2C0
Still (way) more expensive than just building cheap renewables.
Air and wind are inexpensive insofar as they have a low LCOE, but are intermittent, so require being coupled with energy storage, and that is not inexpensive.
If you’re talking hydropower or geothermal, then they don’t have the intermittency issue (well, hydro does, but to a far lesser degree), but both are subject to the geography of the area. They aren’t available to everyone.
EDIT: And in the case of hydropower, there are also some environmentalists unhappy about the impact on river systems, since dams inevitably have at least some impact on river ecosystems, even if you build those fish channels.
EDIT2: “Fishway” or “fish ladder”.
EDIT3: In fairness, for some uses, intermittency isn’t such a big issue. That is, you may have an industrial process that you can only run when energy is available. So, for example, the Netherlands used to do this (sans electricity) with their windpumps in the process of poldering. That’s not free — if you want your pumps to run only a third of the time on average, then you need triple the pumping capacity — but for some things like that, where the process is basically the pumping side of pumped hydrostorage, it might be cheaper than providing constant operation with a non-intermittent power source.
But for an awful lot of uses, people just want electricity to be available when they flip the switch.
Air and wind are inexpensive insofar as they have a low LCOE, but are intermittent, so require being coupled with energy storage, and that is not inexpensive.
First, AIR and wind?
Second, yes they are intermittent but that’s not an argument in favour of nuclear. Pairing intermittent sources and sources that need to run at full power 24/7 to be economic isn’t a good match.
Solar and wind, sorry.
Second, yes they are intermittent but that’s not an argument in favour of nuclear.
Sure it is. It’s just not an argument in favor of using nuclear as a peaking source to fill in the gaps for solar and wind intermittency.
Nuclear shills out in full force again today, eh?
Lemmy seems 100% astroturfed by pro-nuclear lobbyists.
Fun fact: Multiple people with opinions different than yours are not automatically astroturfers or lobbyists. Turns out, different people have different opinions which they share on an open platform. Inevitably they’re going to end up disagreeing with you.
Nuclear being less efficient and more expensive than renewables is not an opinion.
Ah yes lobbyists and not just people with basic common sense, sure
Ah yes “common sense”, the go to argument from everyone ranging from people who want to throw out migrants to nuclear shills.
After all, why wouldn’t we burn billions on a technology that is less efficient per kw/h, takes decades longer to build, doesn’t scale, has a worse LCOE than renewables and leaves us with toxic forever waste? It’s just common sense bro.