Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed | Hacker News Reader

Italy, Belgium set to lose gas supply after biggest LNG plant bombed

politico.eu

63 pointsleonidasrup125 comments

Hope this will be a wake up call for the countries to double down on green/nuclear energy instead of sucking Russian/Middle Eastern tit.

The majority of Belgium’s electricity comes from nuclear, wind and solar. They have been greatly expanding wind parks in the north sea, and they’re in the early stages of deploying SMRs. But the reality is that Belgium still needs a lot of natural gas for electricity production and its large chemical industry, and that all of this gas has to be imported.

Long term there is the European hydrogen strategy which aims to convert a lot of the current natural gas storage and transportation grid to hydrogen and use that in places that currently use LNG, but this requires inventing new technologies so is not a quick fix.

The long term European hydrogen strategy aims to waste a while bunch of time and money on a dead end technology.

Currently, European (and Chinese) strategy on hydrogen is to use it as a reduction agent in steelmaking and other industrial processes (I've heard cement and some non-steel metallurgy, but steelmaking is the main one). Hydrogen is made from gas locally (as it is cheaper) and replace cocking coal. The next step is to produce hydrogen from water.

People think it is a dead end, and we should keep using coke clearly haven't read enough. The advantage of hydrogen are massive: no need to source the coal, the hydrogen can be made in situ. The reduction effect is for now more controllable (in a mix 80% coal, 20% hydrogen), and the inconvenients are reduced each year.

Hydrogen as a chemical feedstock is not a problem, but that’s not what the “using hydrogen in LNG infrastructure” is what people push for. It’s about the “hydrogen economy” were you hear stupid ideas like energy carrier, hydrogen boilers, and fuel cell vehicles.

This is not necessarily true for all situations. Northern Europe is planning to produce a lot of electricity with offshore wind, but laying deep sea high voltage electricity cables isn’t cheap. There’s already a lot of gas pipelines that can be retrofitted for hydrogen transport at a much lower price. At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.

There are also industries like steel production that are just not going to transition to electricity. Hydrogen has a place there too.

> At a certain point it becomes viable to just use electrolysis and transport hydrogen using excess wind power instead of transporting the electricity to land and storing it in batteries.

If you are talking about excess energy, that implies there is non-excess energy that’s being transported across cables. So you are already transporting it to land and connecting it to the grid. Storage from there is trivial compared to a hydrogen transmission and distribution network.

As for repurposing the LNG pipes for hydrogen, that’s a pipe dream to convert a standard asset into a story you can sell.

The real problem are transport and heating. In most countries, those consume significantly more primary energy than the electricity sector and are still mostly fossil fueled. For example, more than half of the primary energy consumed in France is oil and gas. Heat pumps and electric vehicles or trains can now finally change this, but the transition is very slow.

You have to look at useful energy vs. primary energy. An ICE is 10-30% thermally efficient. Then you have all the energy wasted on getting the fuel into the tank.

For ground transport this is already solved by BEVs and rail. For ferries running fixed routes batteries also already solve it.

What we have left is aviation and longer maritime shipping. They will likely need chemical fuels for the foreseeable future, but to get to them we need to start with the easier applications first and develop the technology.

A heatpump in every home!

Europe could produce plenty of gas but refuses to. Let's not forget that.

Groningen gas field

What about heating?

In China there is already small-scale nuclear district heating.

"China's Haiyang nuclear power plant in Shandong province has begun its sixth heating season, covering an area of nearly 13 million square metres - 500,000 square metres more than last year."

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-com...

Similar plans exist for Finnland. https://thinkatom.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rauli-parta...

In Switzerland both Beznau and Gösgen nuclear power plant produce district heating in addition to power. Beznau makes available 80 MW of heat to industry and homes over a 130 km network serving 11 towns https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profil...

In Slovakia since 1987, Slovak power utility Slovenské Elektrárne (SE) has been producing heat for Trnava, Leopoldov, Hlohovec and the municipality of Jaslovské Bohunice from the Jaslovské Bohunice NPP. This plant produced 429 GWh of heat in 2023. The high ten-kilometre hot water pipe between the Jaslovské Bohunice power plant and the Trnava heating plant began construction in 1983 and was put into operation at the end of 1987. Heat project for Mochovce NPP is also planed.

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/mochovce-npp-heat-project-u...

There are many plans and ideas for advanced uses of nuclear heat for industrial applications.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nucl...

These are local solutions, you can't put nuclear reactor in any city, town and village that needs heating

Placement of nuclear reactor very much depends on the design of the reactor and nuclear regulations of the country.

There is currently construction of LDR‑50 reactor in Salmisaari, Helsinki city centre.

https://www.steadyenergy.com/news-article/construction-of-st...

"The pilot is a 1:1 full-scale replica of the LDR‑50 small nuclear heating reactor. Instead of a reactor core, the pilot uses an electric resistor that simulates the decay heat produced by an actual reactor. "

Heat pumps

Are they widely used? Just don't know

Nuclear takes like 15 years to build, it's being worked on but it won't be much more relevant soon.

Green energy isn't very useful for heating in winter.

Google "Messmer Plan". France built 65 reactors in 15 years as a reaction to the 70s oil crisis, and now the majority of electricity in France comes from nuclear without any significant dependency on fossil fuels. The only thing that we're lacking is political will to change things.

Yep. Once people experience true hardship like having to keep their house just above freezing in the winter due to the cost of energy - all of a sudden impossible things become quite possible.

The only potential issue here would be if the west had collectively hollowed out its manufacturing base so much as to make surging capacity and capability a generational thing vs. immediate.

Coasting on past success eventually brings stagnation and pain. Hopefully the pain isn’t too horrible for normal folks this time around.

The French energy sector is more than 50% fossil [1]. If France decarbonizes over the next decades, it will be due to renewables, not nuclear. While the government and population have been extremely pro-nuclear for a long time, the economics just don't work out. The current plan is to barely build enough reactors to replace old ones going off-line over the next decades.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France

That seems to be mostly because of oil use which is coming from transportation. Electrical generation is dominated by nuclear and renewables. Electrification of transport will help, provided they don't generate the additional electricity needed by burning gas or coal...

That's why I used the word electricity and not energy. It isn't perfect, but still much better than the majority if the world and even Europe. The fact that even the French themselves cannot replicate it anymore speaks volumes about the weakness of the current political system. As a counter example, the Chinese can and do.

In 2024, China produced 8 times more electricity from renewables that from nuclear [1], and the renewable share is growing much more quickly. Nuclear is as dead in China as it is elsewhere in the world.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

China has a huge advantage over the majority of Europe: abundance of mostly empty land with a lot of sunlight, it's unrealistic in places like Norther Europe. But I'm not talking about nuclear alone, it was the best answer in the 70s and 80s, nowadays we need a healthy mix of nuclear, solar and wind. But above everything else we need a government willing to make significant changes and make them fast.

China has a larger population density than the EU. There is more empty land in Europe.

Chinese population is concentrated in the East. The Western half of the country is pretty much empty. Lots of sunny semi-desertic/desertic areas, too so they do have a lot of actually empty land well suited for solar (China is more to the South compared to Europe: Beijing is about same latitude as Madrid...) and wind.

> There is more empty land in Europe.

Truly empty? Or nature reserves?

And now Flamanville 3 is 7x over budget and 14 years late. Online but not commercially operational.

Their EPR2 fleet are getting an enormously large subsidy at 11 cents kWh CFD for 40 years and interest free loans. Sum freely. With the first reactor online in 2038 of everything goes to plan.

How many trillions in subsidies should we handout to new built nuclear power to ”try for real”?

Or we can just build renewables and storage which is the cheapest energy source in human history.

> Green energy isn't very useful for heating in winter.

Solar energy isn't the only 'green' energy. The wind, tides, geothermal vents, rivers etc all continue to work as well or better in winter.

Plus there's a lot of room for improvement elsewhere, like insulation.

> Nuclear takes like 15 years to build

6-7 years. France built 40 its nuclear reactors in a decade, at 6-7 years per reactor.

Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.

--- start quote ---

Nearly every Chinese nuclear project that has entered service since 2010 has achieved construction in 7 years or less.

Every single conventional commercial-scale reactor project in Chinese history has achieved completion in under a decade

Since the start of 2022, China has completed an additional five domestic reactor builds, with their completion times ranging from just under five years to just over 7 years. This continues the consistent completion record of Chinese projects even despite potential disruptions from the intervening COVID-19 pandemic.

China successfully constructed six nuclear reactors in Pakistan in around 5.5-6 years each

https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/chinas-impressive-...

--- end quote ---

At the start of 2025 China didn’t manage to reach their 2020 nuclear target, much less their 2025. Meanwhile they met their 2030 target.

Look at their total extra energy generation (including capacity factor) comparing renewables and nuclear: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/06/renewables-in-china-tre...

The actual lesson here is that beyond a small reserve, the case for nuclear is non existent (unless proponents are willing to stop pretending it isn’t about nuclear weapons).

> The actual lesson here is that beyond a small reserve, the case for nuclear is non existent

Except you know, minor things like base load, energy spikes etc.

How does nuclear, an energy source known for needing to run at a very high capacity factor (i.e at max capacity) help with energy spikes?

Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid.

The same Chinese who in addition to wind and solar are also building many nuclear energy plants of several differing designs, have nuclear already as 20% (?? or so, IIRC) of their supply capacity and intend by plan to keep it that way?

For whatever reason, the Chinese are all for hybrid nuclear / renewables - and keeping modern more efficient coal plants in the picture until they no longer needed.

The "trending flat" is by design, they want coal and nuclear as still available fallback, nuclear also has national security benefits for deterrence, the expansion plans for nuclear (not major amounts more, just steady low growth) are still on their table, just throttled back somewhat for now and ready to ramp up as they choose.

> have nuclear already as 20% (?? or so, IIRC) of their supply capacity and intend by plan to keep it that way?

Off by about an order of magnitude. It’s only 4% of generation: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix

Meanwhile wind, hydro, and solar are each on their own at least 2x that.

In China, in 2023, Electricity was only 29% of the total final energy consumption.

~ https://www.iea.org/countries/china/energy-mix

Of that Electricity,

  61.3% - Coal
  13.5% - Hydropower
   9.3% - Wind
   6.1% - Solar PV
   4.6% - Nuclear
   0.1% - Oil

So, Wind on it's own ~ 2x Nuclear, and Solar on it's own about 1.3 x Nuclear.

Clearly I was thinking of some other pivot on energy charting in China taht had it at 20% - perhaps current growth rates .. apologies.

That aside, in the greater picture of energy consumption, Wind, solar, and nuclear in China are all close enough to be ballpark ( a little more seperated just in the context of electricity generation )

> How does nuclear, an energy source known for needing to run at a very high capacity factor (i.e at max capacity) help with energy spikes?

It's one of the fastest load-following power sources we have. I think only gas power stations are faster. And no, they don't run at full capacity at all times.

All modern nuclear plants are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...

You can't ramp up or ramp down any of the renewable sources as quickly. Or you have to insanely overbuild them.

Batteries help to a point, and there are downsides and problems to batteries, too. You want to be as diverse in your power sources and power source backups as possible.

> Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid.

Non-sequitur.

China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.

And while they canceled inland plans after Fukushima, they may still reverse the decision. China is nothing if not pragmatic.

> China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. They build both renewables and nuclear. They literally approve 10 new reactors a year on top of all the renewables they also build.

Not a non-sequitor. They are building out wind solar and hydro at orders of magnitude more than nuclear.

“Look China is building so much nuclear, we should too.” Is disingenuous and self-serving by the nuclear industry since they don’t acknowledge that their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables. If we want to point to China and say we should do what they do, the obvious take away is that renewables are the way to go.

> Not a non-sequitor.

Ah yes.

Me: China is building a lot of nuclear.

You: "Well you better go tell the Chinese that they should slow down on wind and solar, clearly they are misinformed about how to run their grid."

What do you call this? "An argument"? I was polite calling it a non sequitur.

> Is disingenuous and self-serving by the nuclear industry since they don’t acknowledge that their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables.

China: Approves 10 new nuclear reactors a year. Builds up an extremely diversified power source for their country.

You: You're disingenuous. They are not building that much nuclear.

> their nuclear build out is a rounding error (and a decade behind behind schedule) compared to renewables.

Please don't use words and term whose meaning you don't understand. By source of power nuclear is 4.47% of total electricity production. Solar 8%, wind 10%, hydro 13.4%.

China is extremely lucky with their rivers and landscape. Hydro is huge in China.

> If we want to point to China and say we should do what they do

They do literally what I said: China is building out all power sources at tremendous pace. It's diversifying its energy production.

You, on the other hand:

- Claim that I should go and tell China to stop building solar and wind. Something I never said or implied

- That nuclear build up in China is a rounding error compared to renewables. It's not

- That "doing what China is doing" means to somehow only focus on renewables. Whereas China focuses on all sources, and nuclear is literally one of the country's priorities, building and approving more reactors a year than the rest of the world combined (going from 9 constructions in 2000 to 36 in 2025, 42 new ones proposed, and over 140 on the roadmap, 6-7 years construction time per reactor). And they are busy building nuclear reactors around the world (so, gaining more and more expertise and technologies).

At this point I've said all I needed to say to you.

Adieu.

> Right now China is building reactors at 6-7 years per reactor.

Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon. The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.

Besides that, part of the point of switching away from oil and gas is at least some independence. Europe isnt known for its nuclear fuel supply so now you're reliant on another country again.

Yes, most solar is produced in China but its about as low maintence as it gets and there is still enough knowledge to produce in Europe.

> The knowledge to build nuclear at that scale isn't in the coutry/continent anymore. You'd have to reteach an entire generation of engineers.

Well you better get on that, then. It’s going to a lot worse in 5 years.

> Thats China. In Europe, this building speed isnt going to happen anytime soon.

It wasn't going to happen in China either. China also disn't have the knowledge. And yet...

You are right to point out the astonishing developments in Chinese nuclear reactors technology most people are totally oblivious of. It has been standardized, is seemingly safe and far more efficient due to Chinese technological advancements; however you may be overlooking that the ability, the capacity to do that, to do what France did by installing 56 nuclear reactors due to the last oil shock, takes an industrial capacity that does not seem to really exist anymore in Europe to the same degree. I won’t even get into why that is, because it would simply turn into a book, but suffice to say, it’s a euphemistic, polite “challenge”, so to say.

But people also forget that it still takes nuclear fuel to do any of that, which France/Europe has now also largely lost access to, due to the Niger situation along with cutting itself off from Russia/BRICS. That will at some point become an issue for France/Europe, which the “remilitarizing” EU may even make one of its first contrived America-style military adventures to “protect democracy” or some other manipulative, emotive, contrived lie by the lying Epstein, Mandelson, Brunel Class.

It sure does look like Niger really could use some democracy, don’t you? Their women can’t even show off their orifices for money on Onlyfans! Oh, they happen to have rich uranium ore, well isn’t that just an odd coincidence of doing good by sharing Our Democracy©, as decreed by the unelected EU Commission.

Fun fact: Germany blew up its nuclear energy capacity with voted approval by the current EU Commission President von der Leyen, while she was in the German government ruling coalition … she has described that her own action as a “strategic mistake”. That is who is basically the dictator of Europe, someone who makes self-described “strategic mistakes” of the highest order, multi-generational, rippling, echoing, de facto permanently consequential mistakes.

> That is who is basically the dictator of Europe

Tell me how your opinion can be dismissed in its entirety without telling me

> Green energy isn’t very useful for heating in winter.

Why? Your usefulness is driven by economics. As prices have continued to fall or becomes easier to overbuild, sizing solar panels for winter needs.

> Green energy isn't very useful for heating in winter.

We do manage quite well to use green energy for heating during winter in Sweden.

Do we? I see plenty of complaints about high electricity prices and criticism of shutdown of nuclear reactors

We do, it's not our fault that the electricity market in the EU is such that the spot price is based on the most expensive kWh produced in the zone we supply to. It sucks that we have to pay high energy prices because Germany fucked up their energy policies, or because Poland is still mostly coal-based.

Nuclear reactors are running, Forsmark, Oskarshamn, and Ringhals are still there and producing 25% of our electricity right at this moment.

So we do, and we are getting ratfucked by the common electricity market in the EU that pushes our prices much higher than what it costs to produce.

Poland plans to enter nuclear power. Three AP1000 reactors at the Choczewo site in the voivodeship of Pomerania. The European Commission granted formal approval for state aid in December 2025, including a capital injection of approximately PLN 60 billion (approximately $17 billion) and a 40‑year contract for difference.

https://www.ans.org/news/2026-01-29/article-7720/plans-for-p...

Discussing whose fault it is does not change the fact that a statement such as "we do manage quite well to use green energy for heating during winter in Sweden" is quite questionable. The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors

> The electricity prices ARE high and they would be significantly lower if we had not decommissioned half of our nuclear reactors

Where is the source for this statement?

The prices are not set by our producing costs, do you know how electricity is priced in the EU electricity market?

We do manage quite well, if you understood the pricing mechanism you'd know what I meant instead of knee-jerking into the umbrella "but more nuclear!".

>Green energy isn't very useful for heating in winter.

Citation very much needed, or "yes it is"

Heat pumps are very common in the Nordics and can be used for almost the entire year.

no one ever talks about how nuclear presents glaring massive military targets.

a few missiles and your vaunted "green" plants are now spreading death, mutation and radiation for hundreds or thousands of years.

even when they operate "clean" their waste storage is also growing military target.

Its not a green solution, its a kick the can down the road solution.

Green energy is super useful for heating in winter. At this point heat pumps are better than gas in almost every way unless the temperature is well below freezing. So it's just a matter of electricity which Italy and Belgium can get from the current mix of green energy (wind and even solar) and other forms (nuclear, coal, etc...)

Can't heat a home with solar

800 lbs. gorilla: for energy generation uses (so excluding petrochem processes explicitly requiring petroleum feedstock without any closely practical substitute(s)), the goal of decarbonization is essential not just for climate change reasons.

AFAIK, 1970s energy crisis pushed Europeans to invent efficient small cars so let's hope this crisis pushes EU into completely abandoning fossils in favor of electricity generated by local means like nuclear, solar, hydro, wind etc. Even if the war doesn't go long enough, the contrast between Spain and Italy in energy security is stark enough to make a point.

Maybe Trump is playing 4D chess after all, pushing Europe into independence so US can spend its energy on China :)

How many different types of Dementia are there?

Are there 4?