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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

Belgium just shut down a functional nuclear reactor: https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Belgium-T...

When do you suggest nuclear reactors should be shut down? After they stop being functional? Seems risky.

Is the timing unfortunate? Yes. But everything else is just exaggerated. This was a small reactor which was responsible for a tiny amount of production in a tiny country.

Should we replace it? Maybe. But then we should have started construction 20 years ago. Given that this didn't happen, the rest of the discussion is somewhat moot. We could probably start replacing it today, but not many nuclear power plants are being built in Europe, costs are insane, and timeframes are so long that no one is willing to invest.

There are (somewhat literally) crowd funded suppliers of renewable energy (cooperatives like Ecopower.be). Perhaps someone should start something similar for nukes.

This reactor could have continued to run for a long time. It should be should down only if continued running it is more expensive then a complete rebuild of a base load that can replace it (not just a wind farm, but long term storage as well).

This is really a tragedy.

5% of Belgium's power doesn't seem tiny to me.

https://taketonews.com/engie-repeats-message-after-open-lett...

  “The closing dates are determined by law and the licenses to operate the power plants end on those dates. That has been established for a long time and we have been preparing for that for a long time.”  


  The government did ask Engie in July to see whether both reactors could possibly continue for a few more months to bridge the difficult winter, but according to the French energy group, that is unfeasible both technically and in terms of safety.

Germany tried to make the exact same claim this year about their three remaining plants - but the nuclear engineers running the plants were brave enough to say the gov't was lying. ...not that it mattered because the German gov't just doubled down on closing those plants regardless.

There is no technical reason they could not have extended their shutdown plans.

This is just an unfortunate combination of bureaucratic lethargy and anti-nuclear ideologues.

> but the nuclear engineers running the plants were brave enough to say the gov't was lying

can you provide a link to that?

If you only have governments that create regulation that make it impossible to operate then things are impossible to operate.

Just..... Why? This is so balatanly stupid I can't find my words..

In 2003, the Belgian government decided to stop producing nuclear energy, mostly driven by the Green party. They introduced a law that contained a schedule to shut down a number of nuclear power plants in the country.

In 2015 the government already extended the lifespan of 2 nuclear power plants. However, the power plant that was just shut down (Doel 3) did not get an extension of lifespan and so it has been shut down according to the initial law introduced in 2003.

It's an understatement to say it's unfortunate that it has been shut during an energy crisis.

Let me get this straight... Politicians wrote a schedule in 2003. According to the schedule, this particular plant should be shut down now. And we have people in this thread (not you) claiming that there are "technical reasons" why the plant has to be shut down right now, not after this winter. So, by pure coincidence, politicians in 2003 just happened to predict the exact date 19 years in the future when it would no longer be technically feasible to operate the plant? The exact date! Can I please have these same politicians predict next week's lottery numbers for me?

When you have a planned shutdown date, you stop doing maintenance work that is needed to continue operating after that date. Maybe there's some leeway, maybe there isn't. Depends on how much maintenance was skipped, and how much maintenance is required de jure and how much maintenance is required de facto.

Ideally, on the day after planned shutdown, your reactor would be in need of refueling, and all the other large maintenance items; and you wouldn't have the parts on hand to do it. 19 years is plenty of time to align the schedules.

That is the same issue with the idea of keeping the German reactors running. Everything has been planned with the scheduled stop of operations at the end of the year. After politics is now considering to keep them running, the whole technical challenges come to the the light. Take the one reactor operating still in Bavaria: the fuel rods are so weak that after November the plant cannot be restarted with these fuel rods. Also, there is a leaking valve which soon has to be repaired. Only optinon now is to shut the reactor down, repair the valve and restart ist. But even then, the operation isn't guaranteed, as reactors often have to be shut down for small incidents. But any of those would mean the stop of the operation of the reactor.

One way or the other, the next time this plant shuts down after November, it stays down. So there is no big hope of this plant operating for much longer any way you turn it. Of course, new fuel rods could be ordered, but probably that would take over a year, as far as I know. Which means, it will not be part of the energy supply for the next 12 months and whether the investment into getting new fuel rods and keeping the plant ready for service for another year is worth it, is another question.

The 40 year license expires by the end of this year, and an extension wasn't granted.

Someone who can read Belgian news will need to explain why the license extension wasn't granted, and whether that makes sense.

In 1999, to obtain the participation of the greens in the government, the other parties agreed to the closing of nuclear reactors after 40 years of operation [1]. 2022 seemed like a long time away at the time, especially in politics.

In 2012, small cracks were discovered in the pressure vessels of a number of reactors, introduced by hydrogen during the casting of the steel. That was grist on the mill of the anti-nuclear lobby. According to the expert reports, the vessels should be ok (there are some links to English reports on the nuclear safety agency website [2]), but it is easy to fear-monger when nuclear energy is involved. That seemed to have sealed the fate of the nuclear reactors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#Belgiu... [2] https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...

Why? Because the reactor was ancient and decrepit. It doesn't help that the power plant in question was badly damaged by a saboteur a few years ago. A saboteur who was never caught nor identified.

Because “green energy”

It's not, its because it reached end of life, and the date we could've done something about it was ten years ago.

I'm as pro-nuclear as you can be, since at least 2017 but especially since i've read about it, in 2019, but let's not blame nuclear failure on "green energy" when it's not. Nuclear tech have been abandonned by the general public and the politician since the 90s, and especailly after fuckushima, was faded by the society.

It has nothing to do with green energy. Maybe Greepeace is at fault, but this is probably one of the most corrupt environmentalist NGO anyway, so i doubt serious people listen to them.

Yes.

We see how "well" it goes in France, where they kept nuclear going and now their reactors are rotting away under their butts and they have to import from Germany.

Life in Europe would be better if conservatives wouldn't have failed us and we actually had "green energy" by now...

Actually, the nuclear situation in France is the exact same as Belgium, with the same causes, except in 2010 some investment were made to make the plant last twenty more years. Those investments weren't done between 2019 and 2022, for multiple reasons but with one base: the general public don't really care, nor like talking about nuclear plant. Conservatives have nothing to do with this, as they weren't really in power since 2012.

Energy is a complex issue, probably the most complex societal, technical and social issue we have, and trying to put everything on one single actor (or movement) do not make the discussion constructive. I'm for a diverse mix and reducing gas, oil and coal, not in percentage but in actual quantity (we don't really do this in europe sadly).

So we could have rolling blackouts sooner, because without storage to sort out intermittencies and without gas they are inevitable.

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