Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

*if everything works as planned

Solar and wind cannot do that. We'll need oil and gas to tide us over for that decade or more.

I know it's not a green ooze. But thinking it is possible to store something safely for >10000 years is just wishful thinking. The waste is a lot more dangerous than the uranium we dug out and packaging it in a way where you are sure it won't surface for sure is really not a solved problem.

> Nuclear waste is small and solid

As long as all goes well. Fukushima has a slightly different experience.

> You can just bury it deep in a mountain, which is where you extracted the uranium from in the first place.

Imo it's stupid to put nuclear waste in a place where you can't get at it anymore. In the ideal case we invent better reactors where you recycle all radioactive parts as usable fuel and the output is truly 'spent'.

I don't disagree with you that the pros of nuclear (as opposed to fossil) outweigh the cons. But there are cons, and eventually we'd be better off harvesting our energy from the sun.

Nuclear waste is small and solid

That would depend on the category of the waste:

- High level waste - Transuranic waste - Low level waste

where high level waste comes in two classes: spent fuel and reprocessing waste, the latter being liquid (possibly not green).

https://ieer.org/resource/classroom/classifications-nuclear-...

You can just bury it deep in a mountain

Belgium is notably lacking in mountains, which is why they now start building a site for low level nuclear waste storage, adding to the cost. For high level nuclear waste they have to build deep underground, waterproof, bomb-proof facilities at high expense:

https://www.nirasondraf.be/

As for the article by Shellenberger you linked, please note that he is a right winger criticising wokeism etc, who claims eternal growth can continue like until now without ecoogical impact

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

Edit: I just found out that Shellenberger now works on finding the Aliens:

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth", Shellenberger claimed sources have told him that intelligence communities "are sitting on a huge amount of visual and other information" about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)

Same wiki.

My experience is that politicians tend to hand-wave this problem away, while physicists and geologists acknowledge the problem and actually think about it.

So imo not really a political problem.

How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents?

Vs. coal?

Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)

-----

Edit: because of HN rate limits, I can't respond to a sibling comment. I'll do that here:

> Their safety record is good, but can they generate power at a cost that's commercially competitive? If it's too expensive then the plan doesn't work.

Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?

Wouldn't it be better to have a rich heterogeneous mix of various power inputs that can be scaled and maintained independently?

Chernobyl was a state owned and operated facility.

They're expensive because of, arguably, over regulation. The are not inherently expensive, we've just declared them so. The next response will be "all that regulation is needed" but it's arguably that the over regulation is killing people by the unintended consequences of keeping things like coal viable, etc...

Thats the issue with those AGR reactors the brits have IIRC, perfect (or close enough) safety record, super complex and not economical to run.

Mind that nuclear power relies on favorable weather as well. It's not uncommon in Europe that nuclear power plants have to shut down, because the rivers they use for cooling become too hot.

Wind and solar power are remarkably stable in Europe. Last year, the average weekly electricity output was 14.0TWh; not a single week fell below 10.5 TWh.

Weather fronts move across the continent on a very regular basis; when the wind dies down, the sun shines more.

Bad weather often comes with wind or rain.

Obviously it’s possible for solar, hydro and wind farms to stop producing, but that’s what storage is for.

Taxes and levies make up up to 60% of the energy prices.

https://blackout-news.de/en/news/electricity-prices-in-germa...

higher prices means more incentives to be energy efficient

Russia gets blamed for funding every single dissenting voice in most major democracies. And I suspect it’s often true.

They also fund major parts of the establishment - just look at UK politics and House of Lords.

There are plenty that are anti nuclear and don’t get Russian funding.

I live in Germany and dead wild animals are still burned instead of eaten because of radioactive contamination

The category of "well functioning country" is unstable. It takes two elections to make it dysfunctional.

A country can go from well functioning to disasterous shit show in 8 years.

That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...

Due to increased regulation etc you cannot just translate 1985 $, £ or Euro to a 2026 one. There is an actual example in the UK Hinkley Point C current estimate $43b, (£35b) where as sizewell B commissioned in 1987 was $3.2b billion (£2b) or about $7b in todays $. This is probably the worst example but makes the point.

    > $5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. 

After some research, I learned that thermal powerplants (coal/gas/oil) completed in 1985 cost about 0.8B to 1.2B USD per GW. 5.6B USD in 1985 for 2GW sounds like a terrible price -- at least twice the cost.

assuming 300 days/year, 1c/kwh and ignoring opex that's $150m worth of electricity per year.

7B for the first set of batts.

Then 7B in 2046 money which is probably $15 today.

Unfortunately France can no longer build nuclear plants cheaply either. All of the recent nuclear plants built by the French state owned company EDF in France, Finland, and the UK have seen enormous cost and time overruns.

Cumulative emissions matter. We simply don’t have the time to wait the 20 years it takes to build new nuclear plants.

Source please? The numbers I have seen of real opex paint a different picture. In general, nuclear plants close because of cost.

> 100% solar

100% solar is a straw man though, as much as the simplicity of it sounds nice.

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

This is far from being clear, nuclear is one technology that tends to have increased costs the more we do of it. Even in France!

The costs of the French nuclear scale-up: A case of negative learning by doing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Human labor is very expensive, and every time we make humans more productive, that makes human labor more expensive, because their time becomes more valuable. Technological growth does that.

The cost of nuclear is primarily in labor and long-term financing, due to the very long lifetime and upfront labor cost. Until somebody has some sort of technological breathrough to decrease the labor cost of nuclear, it's not going to be able to compete. Even decades ago it had trouble, and now it's far worse.

You are talking only about the operations of the nuclear, and ignoring all the high energy process required to mine and process uranium before it can be used as a fuel, and after as waste. But let’s pass this problem to the next generation, they will know what to do :)

Or solar / wind (which mostly anticorrelate) + biomass + storage + interconnectors + smart demand.

The amount of baseload we technically need can be pretty slim.

Take Denmark: fossil powers just 9% of their electricity generation, the majority of it is wind and solar. Wind is strong in evenings/nights, solar during the day.

Then they have biomass (indirect solar) as a form of baseload, more sustainable than coal/gas.

Then there's interconnectors, they're close to Norway which can pump hydro, and Sweden, each day about 25% of the electricity is exchanged between these two countries, and that's a growing figure.

With more east/west interconnectors you could move surplus solar between countries. Import from the east in the morning before your own solar ramps up, export your midday surplus west before theirs peaks, and import from the west in the late afternoon as yours fades.

With interconnectors you can also share rather than independently build peaker capacity. Because a lot of peaker plants only run a small amount of time and therefore much of the cost is in the construction/maintenance, not the fuel.

And of course there's storage, which will take a while to build out but the trendlines are extremely strong. Just a fleet of EVs alone, an average EV has a 60 kWh battery, an average EU household uses 12 kWh per day so an average car holds 5 days worth of power a home uses.

And then finally there's smart demand. An average car is parked for more than 95% of the day, and driven 5% of the time. Further, the average car drives just 40km a day which you can charge in 3 minutes on say a Tesla. Given these numbers (EVs store 5 days of household use, can sit at a charger for 23 hours a day, and can smartly plan the 3 minutes a day of charging it actually needs to do) just programming cars to charge smartly, is a trivial social and technical problem in the coming 10-20 years.

Given this, baseload coal/gas can really be minimised the coming decades. It's not going to go away as a need, but I don't think it requires gas/coal or nuclear long-term going forward.

The issue with "base load" is that people usually omit to mention how much GW they are talking about and for how long. Which makes it a bit of a bull shit argument.

As an insurance against unspecified lack (how much for how long?) of wind and solar (and batteries, cable capacity, hydro, etc.) base load is supposed to swoop in and save the day when those temporarily fail locally. So, it's a valid question to ask how much insurance we need against that. Nobody seems to really know. There are loose estimates of course. And people seem to assume it's months and that renewables are going to 100% be offline throughout that very very long period. In reality in most connected energy markets, we have a short gap of a few weeks or so in winter at higher latitudes of reduced output that we already manage to cover with flexible generation.

It's more constructive to think in terms of dispatchable power rather than base load. When the sun doesn't shine or there is no wind, it's nice if you can quickly bring online additional generation, tap into battery reserves, or bring in power from elsewhere (via cables). That favors flexible power, not inflexible power. Nuclear and older coal plants are a bit inflexible. Shutting down and starting up a nuclear plant is really slow and expensive and requires a lot of planning. And especially older coal plants need quite a bit of time to bring their boilers up to temperature such that they build up enough steam pressure to generate power. Until then, they are just blowing smoke out of the chimney. Modern coal plants are a bit better on that front. Same with gas plants.

The modern ones only need about 10-20 minutes or so. Still quite slow but something you can plan to do. Slow here means expensive as well. Because shutting them down when there is a surplus of renewables (which is a very common thing now) is really inconvenient. Which means consumers have to pay extra for perfectly good electricity from renewables to be curtailed. That happens by the GW in some markets and keeps consumer prices higher than they should be because they have to pay for gas/coal that is technically not actually needed.

Batteries have a much lower LCOE than gas or coal plants (never mind nuclear) and it's being produced by the TWH per year now. A lot of markets are serving much of their peak demand using batteries now. Australia and China are good examples. Even in the US, you see batteries being deployed at a large scale now. That's starting to push gas and coal out of the market. A gas peaker plant that rarely runs is just really expensive.

A requirement for base load is a fallacy promulgated by fossil fuel preservation lobbying

it actually is a choice between nuclear and PV, because base load supply is an obsolete concept. Because actually nuclear is terrible in a grid increasingly full of nearly-free variable sources (solar&wind). The nukes need to stay at 100% all the time selling their power at a high fixed price to have any remote chance of being economical. Cheap variables push nuke's expensive power off the grid during the day, and increasingly into the evenings with batteries. This is unavoidable in an open energy market, and is fatal to the economics of nuclear. You cannot make them work without massive state subsidies.

Gas is far better suited economically to backstop a variable grid. I wish it werent true, because i dont hate nukes, but it is just economics.

I will also point out that california is down to 25% fossil sourced power in 2025, from 45% in 2022. Due to renewables and batteries, and there's far more coming. The amount left to backstop on gas in a few years could plausibly be 10%! which is amazing.

It was not a good idea for Germany (and certain other parts of the EU) to be so dependent on Russian gas. It was also not a good idea to become dependent on LNG from Qatar or the US. Spain uses natural gas from Algeria (via Morocco), also not great. Italy also gets some from Algeria/Tunesia, still not great. Inside of Europe, we are far too dependent on Norway. Not because Norway is likely to turn on us (or we on them), but because the pipelines are relatively easy to disrupt.

The transition from coal to gas gave us cleaner air (and less CO2) but it definitely also had costs, some of them in the form of many thousands of dead Ukrainians, some of them in the form of concessions to the US.

And $ cost is a poor metric to chase when what you really care about includes a lot more-- exposure to the whims of geopolitical forces you can't foresee or control, which have both $ cost and more.

Power distribution is a natural monopoly, power production is commodified/competitive business.

Because if a thing is valued by thing-consumers at x and you set the price to <x, then you are incentivizing people to use more of the thing than they need, even to waste the thing. This thus requires more infra than is actually needed or wanted.

This doesn't go away under socialism/communism/collectivism. If you set the price too low, you either have to build far more production capacity at public expense than needed, or you cope with regular blackouts.

"Ironically, what originally motivated pumped storage installations was the inflexibility of nuclear power. Nuclear plants’ large steam turbines run best at full power. Pumped storage can defer surplus nuclear power generated overnight (when consumption is low) to help meet the next day’s demand peak."

https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-pumped-hydro-energystorage-renai...

To use the strongest plausible interpretation, the writer could be from Belgium, where the meaning of 2.256 depends on whether they wrote the number in French, Dutch or German.

The Belgians apparently typically invert the meaning of . and , in numbers (from how they are used in the US).

  To make large numbers readable, Belgians use either a period (.) or a non-breaking space. Example: Two thousand thirty-six is written as 2.036 or 2 036. In formal Belgian French, the space is increasingly preferred over the period to avoid confusion with the Anglo-American system, but the period remains very common in Belgian Dutch and everyday shorthand.

mount signal, the largest PV plant in california makes 1,200GW/hrs per year. it would still take ~15 copies of mount signal for a single diablo canyon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Signal_Solar

my whole point is solar is great, but the insane scale it requires to get reasonable output is really underestimated. you would need solar fields 100sqmi big. probably many of them. solar alone won’t be the future of humanities energy needs because it’s not efficient enough. we should still keep building solar. but if we aren’t building nuclear too its not enough growth

It doesn't. Watts were a mistake by whatever committee it was that standardized unit names. Power should not have been given a unit; it should have been left as ∆energy/time just as velocity is distance/time.

Belgium's reactors are really old, and have lots of issues. They have been dragging their feet for decades on the subject and instead of building new reactors 10-20 years ago, they are now un-decomissioning older reactors..

Right, and ultimately Japan has decided the safest and I assume cheapest route with these reactors wasn't to rebuild but rather to decommission.

These reactors can be made safer, but they all still have a foundational design flaw which means the ultimate goal should be replacing rather than continually spending money reinforcing.

... and add a pipe to vent the hydrogen gases outside instead of accumulating it inside the reactor building!

Those old reactors in Belgium have already had several issues.

theres the well known inherent problem with the graphite at UK AGR reactors which could be very bad (can crack or misshape in such a way that the control rods or fuel rods cant be moved), not to mention the boiler cracking at the weldseams, they only mitigated this at some sites because they all are slightly different in design, they basically ignored it in the ones which didnt yet have it for decades ,the regulator ended up finding exactly that lessons learnt on older reactors were not being applied to newer ones which had the same problems inherent to them

Chernobyl lacked a containment and there are still reactors of the same type running without containment in Russia.

I think the issue comes with unknown unknowns. Before Fukushima someone might have said the same thing you just have, but a new disaster still came along and caused a lot of issues. I am still bullish on nuclear, but I think waving away concerns might do more harm than good.

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

Fukushima. It was a Gen 1 plant which already has the issue that a thermal runaway is possible. There were other examples of this happening like TMI. The backup for Fukushima was onsite generators which were flooded and ultimately failed causing the meltdown.

The safety lessons we learned from all gen 1 reactors was to apply passive shutdown mechanism where if input power fails fission ultimately stops. That's not something that can be applied across the fleet because it requires more infrastructure and an almost complete redesign of the reactor's setup. Which is why these early reactors all have a potential risk of thermal runaway.

Edit: It looks like all gen Is have been decommissioned as of 2015, which is great. But we really should now be talking about decommissioning gen IIs and leaping forward to Gen IVs.

I may agree with your conclusion that old plants are safe enough (or at least take a deep dive study to see if their expected externality is worse than whatever would replace them). However:

> the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors

The problem is external factors happen. You can’t just raise your hands up and say “wasn’t my fault,” when they do. A tsunami washing over a solar farm would be a lot safer than what happened at Fukushima.

I lost count at 50

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

Name a Gen II plant that was upgraded to a Gen III, III+ or Gen IV plant.

There's a reason new Gen II plants cannot be built, and all the regulations and safety reports in the world will not fix the fundamental design flaw of these plants.

We can mitigate and make meltdown less likely, we can't eliminate it without replacing the plants all together.

Hinkley Point C is a prime example of regulation causing cost and schedule overruns.

"Fish disco", for example.

This just seems like kneejerk anti-Nuclear stance in disguise. Maybe you did intend it as just a neutral observation but it's hard to take it that way.

Like maybe you're right... why not also support Nuclear plants, which we in fact need for baseload energy? Surely there are better places to cut the budget than other carbon-free energy sources.

I have no argument with building out solar and wind maximally. I will always push for new Nuclear as part of the mix.

Heartening to see someone talking about both the pros and cons. I find here and on, for example reddit or twitter, that people are unanimously in favour of Nuclear.

I really don't think costs and delays are well understood. The costs are astronomical and in the UK the cost of energy has been monstrously subsidized. Consumers (public) are paying for this before the plants are running and for hundreds of years after they are running.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear however as in terms of base load, sovereignty and environmentally it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot.

But I don't think people really appreciate how expensive it costs the public over the lifetime (even if "day to day" cost per MWh compares favourably with other sources), and how long it takes to get running. Even small modular reactors fail to address this.

That relies on imports of nuclear from France and isn't winter, its easy to say you don't need nuclear when you import a massive amount of others nuclear when the sun doesn't shine as much.

UK is not energy independent so its not a good example.

And what is your median domestic electric unit price? (actually consumed)

It's certainly not £0.01203/kWh, or even in the same order of magnitude.

Later

(For context for non-Brits: there is a price cap of £0.2467 kWh currently, which many people are paying (or very close to that))

Yes. On the other hand nuclear is still single biggest source of power in EU, despite german phaseout) There is still not a single country matching french emissions with ren alone if it doesnt have hydro/geothermal

Renewables are not suitable for replacing nuclear, coal and other traditional sources of energy due to the fact that you cannot control production.

> We actually don’t know m any of the long term risks and unintended consequences of providing wind / solar + batteries at scale.

The wind and sun already exist, we've been living with these "long term risks" for the entire time already. Risks like hurricane damage, skin cancer, heat exhaustion, the thing is that harvesting this energy isn't where that risk comes from, the energy was already dangerous.

That's the same lesson for the thermal plants. The nuclear reaction isn't directly how you make energy, it gets hot and we use that to make steam and we use the steam to make electricity, but the dangerous part wasn't the bit where we made electricity. Burning coal, again, you make heat, heat water to make steam, steam drives electricity turbine, but the dangerous parts were the exhaust is poisonous, the ash is poisonous, you're unbalancing the climate, and none of that is the electricity, that's from burning coal.

Releasing energy is dangerous, but the wind and sun were already released, there's nothing to be done about that, the decision is whether we should harness some of this energy or whether we're idiots.

thing is, when you look at what ABWR achieved, I wish we just thrown money at hitachi for a messmer like deployment in all EU countries that want nuclear

> What rational is there to scrap the one and mandate the other?

No one said "scrap", you're making up a lie and arguing against it. They're saying keep one and build more of the other.

Renewables + battery are already the cheapest solution in some places. By the time a new nuclear power plant is built they will be cheaper everywhere.

Nuclear isn't an economically viable option for base load. Nuclear is the most expensive form of power generation. If there is excess supply, forcefully turning off renewables to buy electricity from nuclear would make the electricity needlessly expensive and kill the free market. In other words: it can only be a base load if we massively subsidize it and throw away free renewable electricity.

On the other hand, nuclear isn't a viable peaker plant option either. Virtually all of its costs come from paying back the construction loan, so a nuclear plant which operates at an average capacity of 10% will be 10x as expensive as one operating at 100% capacity. And 10x higher than the already-highest cost isn't exactly going to be competitive when battery storage, carbon capture, hydrogen storage, or even just building spare capacity are also available options.

More improtantly is actually renewables, plus batteries plus massive updates for the grid. The grid updates alone will cost 100s of billions.

With nuclear and centralized distribution you would still have to upgrade the grid for 10s of billions, just because of electric cars and electrification (and general maintance).

But renewables and batteries make this so much worse, specially once you talk about long distance renewable.

One you are talking about building solar in Greece and then talk about how nuclear is 'to expensive and slow'.

One small problem, nuclear is also dependent on water: https://www.theenergymix.com/low-water-high-water-temps-forc...

Solar is REALLY CHEAP. And provided you keep existing central European gas heating infrastructure around for a while, you can basically just wait out the really good energy storage by using existing caverns you pre-fill with methane to keep your people from freezing. If you're not curtailing a substantial fraction of PV yield (yearly) in central Europe that's a sign there way not enough capacity yet.

Built facades and roofs out of glass-glass PV laminate. We have the technology from glass roofs/facades; you just add glass-catching-mesh/insulation below because you can't use the insulated multi-pane window glass construction with safety lamination and solar cells all three together.

I'm no expert but I believe the problem there is that you can only vary the power output of a nuclear reactor by very little. Essentially, it's either on or off, and is therefore not able to provide the flexibility needed for power outages, since only some of the generators might be offline, not necessarily all of them. Whereas you can vary the output of a coal or gas plant by a lot, simply via using different amounts of fuel.

And importing gas famously has zero known serious externalities, as vividly demonstrated in Europe and the Gulf at the moment.

in belgium case the choice is rather nuclear or new gas plants from engie. Why do you think engie wants them shut?

> I'm a big advocate for renewables, but it's hard to not also advocate for nuclear to be in that mix.

It's not hard to argue that new nuclear should be added to the mix. The cost and time required to build them is non trivial. During that entire construction time you can build renewables substantially faster and for a lower price. And while you're building the prices continue to go down, meaning it gets ever cheaper. Then there's also the cumulative CO2 savings of getting the green energy faster, 1GW in 15 years requires 15 years of lost CO2 savings, but a 1 GW of renewables in 2 years saves you 13 of those 15.

Germany has one of the world's highest energy costs because taxes on electricity are astronomical. This is a selfmade problem.

Building _new_ nuclear is not going to make their energy costs cheaper. It is the most expensive form of generation

>German anti-nuclear "greens" destroying the country's economy by disabling green power generation will go down in history as one of the worst political blunders in this century,

The sad thing is, you might be right. With the rise of far right populists everywhere, it is entirely possible that it will be written in the history books just as you said it. It won't matter that it is a lie, as nuclear was destroyed by the conservatives (just like our solar industry, incidentally), not the green party.

Facts don't matter when it comes to nuclear energy, otherwise nobody would pretend that it's "the cheapest form of energy" and the like me

What is that storage you speak of?

germany has highest prices in eu without any nuclear. It spent on eeg double the cost of entire french fleet. and that fleet wasnt even very cheap looking at what china does now. Germany also needs gas firming per fraunhofer ise report since bess is not sufficient

> And after 10 to 15 years pf construction and billions of euros they will realize that nuclear energy is a lot more expensive than wind and solar plus storage.

It is not. And people who repeat this lie have generally very little clue of the reality of an electrical grid and how it is designed and managed in practice.

Solar and Wind are cheaper in term of LCOE. LCOE is a secondary metric in a much larger equation.

A grid is managed in term of instant power matching the demand, not in term of energy. That changes a lot over a simplistic LCOE view.

Take into consideration the cost of power lines, the necessity of backup for the long dunkelflaute, the increase of demand over winter and the problem ROI with the overcapacity of solar... and suddenly the equation is not that simple anymore.

In reality, it is not "Just build Wind/Solar + battery Bro": It is much more complex and highly geographically dependent.

(1) A country with a lot of Hydro can generally easy run full renewable with a lot of Wind: Hydro acts as both as storage and a regulation.

(2) A country without much Hydro has a interests to keep the baseload Nuclear. It is mostly CAPEX based and the most economical low CO2 source around.

(3) A sub-tropical / tropical country has all interests to Spawn solar arrays. The air con consumption tend to matches quite well the solar production. At the opposite, Solar is almost an annoyance to the grid in Nordic countries because it produces outside of the peak of consumption and is intermittent.

Like often: there is no silver bullet.

The only part of your sentence what is true, is that indeed 'New nuclear' is way more expensive that it should be. That is however not inevitable, China demonstrate that quite clearly [1].

[1]: https://hub.jhu.edu/2025/07/28/curbing-nuclear-power-plant-c...

Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent

Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)

All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.

Yup, nuclear waste also includes all the hazmat suits and apparatus used at the site, all the fabrics and plastics that have built up sufficient levels of radiation, fluids and chemicals that can’t be treated, vehicles and equipment, irradiated concrete and structural materials…

> Do hear the fears that russia could hit a Ukrainian wind turbine with a rocket?

That's a very dumb point actually, without nuclear Ukraine would be in a much tougher situation energy wise. They're getting their shit fucked regardless, and they seemingly have 15 active reactors producing energy right now, if russians wanted to blow them up they would be long gone.

> BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive?

So what? Energy is a national security matter, electricity is a service, subsidies are fine. Btw these prices are inflated because of European wide electricity schemes (or scams, depending on how you want to see it)

Even if germany got free, unlimited and non polluting electricity right now they'd need 50+ years to make up for how much pollution they released compared to france since ww2

The French government have been able to safely store actual nuclear weapons without incident, so I'm sure they can do just fine with a few barrels of nuclear waste.

"Fears" is the correct word. See also: Radiophobia.

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

Reality, on the other hand, is that nuclear power is what keeps the lights on in Ukraine in this war, and Ukraine is looking to expand.

The ARENH program is not a subsidy, it is, in fact, a reverse subsidy. It requires EDF to sell electricity cheaply to its competitors.

most of Ukraine's ren infra is destroyed or conquered by russia. Zaporozhie is in cold shutdown. Thousands died from dam collapse caused by russia.

Waste is irrelevant for bombs due to parasitic isotopes. You clearly have zero idea about the topic.

France pays no subsidies(yet, epr2 is another topic). In fact EDF was forced to pay a tax till this year called arenh to subsidize competition. This year that tax was replaced by another tax. Many read the law wrongly about 70eur. It's not that EDF will get guaranteed CFD. It's that EDF will be forced to pay EXTRA tax IF it sells above that limit. French prices dropped both in 2025 and now in 2026. French households have lower prices vs german ones per eurostat.

Basically all your statements are nonsense antinuclear rambling

Isn't it rumored that many of the activists who lobbied (successfully) for Germany to shut down all of their nuclear power plants were being unwittingly funded by Russian interests?

1. Asse does not house spent reactor fuel

2. It was an old mine turned into a research mine. It was never intended for actual use.

3. The waste there is mostly medical and low-level other waste like gloves.

4. It is actually safe where it is, moving it is another giant waste of time and money whose sole intent is to stoke fear and create costs.

Why the hell did they build this in a former salt mine with known water intrusion.

asse was never intended to be final repository. It was experimental repository without a plan to extract the waste if their experiment goes sideways. Onkalo does account for such factors, hence the name- final repository

Most of the waste in asse is from medical and research sectors

Actually, those materials can be MUCH more radioactive in the beginning compared to 'conventional' nuclear waste, the half-life is just so short that you can let them sit for a couple of decades and then deal with it.

That's an argument in favour of using such reactors in the EU, isn't it?

We need EU-level nuclear missiles and we need them fast. We also need EU-level nuclear-powered submarines and maybe carrier groups.

It carried on until at least 1989, and the effects were present majorly until around 2000, and the superfund site was completed in 2006. So, like, pretty darn recent on the scale of a human lifetime.

Did a bit of maths and this isn't true - worldwide LED production would only feed ~1%.

536 and the Norse stories about the Fimbulwinter ought to be argument enough.