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.

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........

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.

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.

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.

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They are outdated 2nd-gen PWR reactors, designed by a company with no other nuclear experience, operating in some of the most densely populated areas of Europe.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.

can anyone jumpstart me on this, since when is belgium bankrupt?

Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.

At some point reality has to trump ideology.

Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.

If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.

>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.

You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.

It is not only the oil shock.

Most of the nuclear initiatives at the EU level have been mostly blocked by the German government for the last 15y.

The Russian gas crisis in 2022 reshuffled the cards entirely: Germany realized that constructing its entire energy policy on a foreign asset (Russian Gas) was not really a smart move.

The German position changed significantly after the crisis with Friedrich Merz explicitly called the German nuclear phaseout 'a mistake'.

Soon after, Nuclear energy stopped to be a swear word at EU level and EU funding streams seems to have opened up again for Nuclear power.

The recent oil crisis is just the last nail in the coffin of the anti-nuclear lobby.

I want everyone to go all in on anything that isn't a fossil fuel. The problem with gatekeeping new energy is upgrading the grid to accomodate wind and solar, and waiting for batteries to be delivered, creates a gap that gets filled with fossil fuels. The pragmatic solution to the energy problem is all of the above; joined with climate change, it's everything above but fossil fuels.

Short answer: Russians and Germans. The former had influence in the latter. And the latter gained a measure of economic command over the continent. (With its export and energy model under shock, that influence is near its post-unification nadir right now.)

I'm glossing over anti-nuclear national politics, as well as the genuine fiscal pressure of capex-heavy power sources like nukes (versus opex-heavy ones like gas). But broadly speaking, take Russian influence in Germany out of the picture, or have one other large fiscally responsible economy going into the Eurozone crisis, and I doubt this would have happened.

I would be more worried about the fact that a lot of the garbage that first gets separated ends up getting burned anyway because recycling is not even possible in a lot of cases.

Meanwhile I've been filtering the german coal byproducts with my lungs, and paying my electricity 2-3x more per kwh than the french

Meaning no region can be selected by a politician with out committing political suicide.