Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

It needs the PR because it is so unconscionably expensive. The public needs to be primed to consent to indirect and direct subsidies.

The reason China, US, France, it is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with nukes.

The reason Sweden, Poland, Iran, etc. build a few plants is because it shares a skills base and supply chain with a nuclear weapons program they might want in a hurry one day. It's always obvious for those countries who the existential threat is.

"2025 also saw China commission 78 GW of new coal power capacity, which is more than India’s net coal power additions over a ten-year period from 2015 to 2024"

https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/built-to-peak-coal...

British taxpayer will pay even more pr kwh for some offshore and tidal projects

During the investigation of the accident the Admiral that built and ran the Navy nuclear program was asked how the Navy had managed to operate accident free, and what others could learn. This was his response:

> Over the years, many people have asked me how I run the Naval Reactors Program, so that they might find some benefit for their own work. I am always chagrined at the tendency of people to expect that I have a simple, easy gimmick that makes my program function. Any successful program functions as an integrated whole of many factors. Trying to select one aspect as the key one will not work. Each element depends on all the others.

So recreating that accident free operating environment requires a lot more than just training. It would require wholesale adoption of the Navy’s approach across the entire industry. Which probably doesn’t scale very well. Not to mention the Navy operates much smaller nuclear reactors compared to utility scale reactors, and has extremely easy access to lots of cooling water, which probably gives them a little more wiggle room when dealing unexpected reactor behaviour.

[1] https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/tmi-lessons-what-was-lea...

But submarine/ship reactors are tiny compared with commercial reactors and 5+ times more expensive (although its hard to break out the true lifetime cost of the reactor from the submarine/ship).

Even modern commercial SMR designs (a few by companies that make Submarine reactors) are likely to cost a couple of times more per MW than large existing reactors

BTW - The US Navy has lost 2 nuclear submarines, which are still being periodically monitored - page 7 https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/NT-25-1%2...

https://youtu.be/iW8yuyk3Ugw?si=MEJpGpX8LQuGn7iv

It’s a very semantic claim.

They have lost nuclear submarines (USS Thresher), lost nuclear missiles, depth charges, torpedos and bombs. They have crashed nuclear ships and submarines.

Yeah, they haven’t had a nuclear reactor leak (that we know of).

Nuclear waste is small and solid, not a leaky green ooze like you see in the Simpsons. You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

- https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-spent-...

- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/03/11...

More of a political problem, from what I hear. This is, if anything, worse: simply not knowing is a research problem, but knowing how to do it and yet having an influential group saying "no because reasons" could be genuinely insurmountable.

Uranium is sufficient to outlive the sun. Nuclear requires least amount of materials and mining. Uranium mining is nowadays mostly in situ which is environmentally fine vs say lithium mining.

"Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever." - so you say the same nonsense about storing arsenic/cadmium/lead waste from copper mining for eternity? Storing nuclear waste isnt much different from say Herfa Neurode. An example is onkalo. Soon others will appear, like Fosmark.

FFS you just thrown a bunch of fossil propaganda nonsense

Notice that it was also them (specifically Russia, a major petroleum exporting country) funding those anti-nuclear environmental groups:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127...

https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...

If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage

Nuclear power would help to solve these problems, because it isn't intermittent.

Destroying a whole valley for hydro is something locals could easily oppose. Similar with huge solar farms. You can be a proponent of a technology but anti a particular project.

"The health burden of European CPP emission-induced PM2.5, estimated with the Global Exposure Mortality Model, amounts to at least 16 800 (CI95 14 800–18 700) excess deaths per year over the European domain"

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349938542_Disease_b...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...

But only nuclear accidents get the media attention, because they are big and infreqeunt. Similar to deaths caused by aircraft crashes vs deaths caused by car crashes.

https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...

docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf

https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...

The question is simple, if you are afraid of nuclear, are you willing to erase any more dangerous tech? I'm not even mentioning cars which cause each 2y same nr of fatalities in Germany as Chernobyl is expected during whole lifetime per UN (or even worse if we look at updated uncsear reports)

Meanwhile coal kills millions each year (mostly the old and children).

And what are these predictable green alternatives? Only hydro is reliable and is heavily restricted by geo. We’d need massive breakthroughs in battery technology to make solar and wind reliable in most of the world (by population).

Look up historical weather patterns days with no sun and no wind, you need massive, massive amounts of energy storage.

Looking at different party platforms here in Sweden (and similar parties in nearby countries), there is a major split between either supporting nuclear or supporting a combination of renewables and fossil fueled power plants (which sometimes goes under the name of reserve energy and other times as thermal power plants). Usually it is combined with some future hope that green hydrogen will replace that natural gas at some time in the distant future.

We could have people with positions that is neither a grid with natural gas nor nuclear, but I have yet to find that in any official party platform. Opposition to the fossil fuel industry should be a stop to building new fossil fueled power plants, and a plan to phase out and decommission existing ones. It is difficult to respect people who claim to believing in a climate crisis but then stand there with a shovel when the next gas peaker plant is being built, then arguing how bad nuclear is to combat the climate crisis.

E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring

They are only expensive because externalities of other solutions are not captures or are subsidised. Wind and solar are expensive if battery storage is included in most of the world.

Waste is mostly a solved problem. Much more solved that waste management for coal plants in any case (whom also produce a lot of radioactive waste in addition to producing tons and tons of co2)

We have more than enough uranium. Currently only a small fraction is economically mineable but we have played that game before with oil.

It is more like being a firefighter and being opposed to airlifting icebergs to drop on fires.

Sure, you'll get water eventually and you might even extinguish a fire; but how long does it take to organise and deliver, what can go wrong in the process, what are the consequences of a mistake like dropping it prematurely, and why are we ignoring the honking great big cheap river right next to the house fire we are fighting?

All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.

Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.

If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.

If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.

This is not the cheaper option.

You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.

That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.

> unpopular with experts

How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?

You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.

Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.

Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).

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...

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..)

Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.

Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.

Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

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...

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.

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.

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?

I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.

First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.

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?

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 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?

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.

Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).

So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.

Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.

Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries.

Further if we build more nuclear we'd be better at it and it would be cheaper.

Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage.

Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.

how much this would cost for the same guaranteed power output?

would it be more or less than 21B?

how it would look like in areas that have winter with snow?

The complexity now is doing it without delays. China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain

Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist.

Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.

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).

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).

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.

Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.

The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.

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.

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

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.

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.

Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.

And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?

So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?

Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiophobia

It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.

And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.

Nord Stream, on the other hand...

Even someone like De Sutter didn't come across as crazy in the European Parliament -- but the German ones, meine Götter!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_De_Sutter

Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.

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.

- the current system based on intermittent renewables is the madness

- it is the intermittent renewables that are difficult to control, not thermal generation

- LCOE, not LOCE.

- Giving priority to intermittent renewables is not a law of nature. In fact it is idiocy that needs to be be stopped.

- Allowing intermittent renewables to externalize the cost of their intermittency to other, stable producers is a huge market distortion

- governments do not prioritize nuclear (yet). They prioritize intermittent renewables

Nuclear can increase load hours with bess buffers

And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.

And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste_management_in_Fr...

The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.

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...

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.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...

Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.

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.

So the stuff they collect doesn't need 12 different kinds of bags/bins, and the (financial) incentives are correctly aligned. I think it's a good system and pretty convenient, but I'd wish they recycle & process the waste even better afterwards. But the hardest part – getting the population on board – seems to be well-established.

Recycling is difficult, some materials are relatively easy (aluminium cans, steel), some not so much (plastics f.e. tend to degrade, some materials are energy intensive to recover). Contaminants are a major issue that still need more public awareness. But we're going in the right direction.