alt Hacker NewsStrictly: 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Apparently there also used to be a phaseout policy which is being rescinded: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/belgium-and-czechia-ram...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.
Replies
>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.
> 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.
It's not France but Engie, a french company with lots of gas business. New nuclear makes sense if it doesnt take 20y to build. Probably that's why US wants to partner with Korea/Japan
Strictly: Engie was forced by a previous Belgian government to decommision the nuclear power plants.
> it's a terrible idea to phase out operating nuclear plants which are still safe and within their planned lifetime.
As you explain in your next paragraph, none of Belgium's power plants are within their planned lifetime. Tihange 1, Doel 1 and 2 were operating on an extended service cycle for a decade before their shutdown. The two youngest reactors (Doel 4 and Tihange 3) surpassed their planned lifetime last year.
Everything is cheaper outsourced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_and_weapons_of_mass_d...
> 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........
> 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.
The "old car" analogy seems right, with the extra complication that the car is supplying a non-trivial chunk of the country's electricity and replacing it is not quick
> 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.
A nuclear reactor can generate 1 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for 60 years.
[dead]
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'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.