Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants
dpa-international.com829 points by mpweiher a day ago
829 points by mpweiher a day ago
Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind, and opposition to nuclear from environmentalist orgs should be viewed as a massive historical mistake as it set us back decades in moving the needle on carbon emissions.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
The engineering side might be a theoretically solved problem, anybody looking at belgium's crumbling nuclear powerplants can help but feeling slightly nervous!
I agree we probably need nuclear to bridge the gap until solar or wind can take over fully, but there are a lot of problems with nuclear and the most pressing ones are connected to the unwillingness of people to spend money before a disaster happens.
On top of that, uranium is a limited resource, it's extraction is (energetically) expensive and dirty and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
All this is not to say we should just skip on nuclear power altogether, we can't afford that I think and burning all the fossil fuels will probably have more disastrous consequences. But we shouldn't close out eyes to the problems either.
> the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem.
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...
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:
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
Just to highlight: in contrast with fossil fuels, at least nuclear waste is something we can capture, creating a storage problem.
Given the actual build times of nuclear plants in Europe, vs the renewables build out rate, we need solar and wind to tide us over for a decade or more before the nuclear plants come on line.
Solar and wind cannot do that. We'll need oil and gas to tide us over for that decade or more.
Some gas, but we can reduce it by an order of magnitude. Either way nuclear is not coming online quickly.
Solar and wind are scaling much faster than gas and oil right now. After the recent Iran war I think it would be insane to rely on new oil or gas. Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
>Yeah let’s rely on this commodity whose supply and price are controlled by the dumbest egomaniacs on the planet.
Don't talk about Americans that way!
> and the storage of the nuclear waste is very far from a solved engineering problem. Storing safely stuff for thousands of years is just not a realistic scenario whatsoever.
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.
The engineering side of running reactors safely is a solved problem, the US navy has > 7500 reactor-years with a perfect safety record.
It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
My point being: by god, let the Navy nukes train everyone else!
They have done. The Three Mile Island accident happened when it was being operated by Navy vets [1]. Simple training isn’t enough.
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...
How many people have died on account of nuclear accidents?
Vs. coal?
Vs. not having enough energy? (eg. blackouts killing hospital ventilators, etc.)
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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?
Per TWh, nuclear kills fewer people than solar, mostly because roofing is dangerous.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
That's almost certainly just an artifact of old data, and I typed that before realizing your URL has the year 2011 in it.
A lot more utility solar has been installed since then. And continual improvements in efficiency spread the mining related deaths over a great many more TWh.
Our World in Data covers this and every time they update the stats, solar gains on nuclear. It's currently in the lead but they haven't updated for 6 years:
Purity isn’t really important. We need to decarbonise as much of our energy grid as we can as quickly as possible since cumulative carbon emissions matter.
Does it make sense for France to replace their existing nuclear power plants with new ones? Possibly, since the existing power generation is clean so there is less rush.
Does spending the effort on building new nuclear outweigh the opportunity costs for others? Given new nuclear plants in Europe are taking 20 years to build I have strong doubts. It seems absolutely clear that wind/solar + batteries can get most countries to 80-90% clean energy faster and at lower cost. And after that happens nuclear seems a very awkward addition to the mix since it is not cost effective to run when it’s power is only needed 10-20% of the time.
> Is a purely wind/solar + battery grid viable?
Yes.
(I don't disagree that a diverse mix is good, and I'm all for nuclear, I'm just saying the old "it's intermittent and can't grid form" boogeyman is no longer true. It would also really behoove Western countries to start manufacturing batteries at scale if we don't want to get a bloody nose in the future, because they're good for more than just the grid)
If it was viable it would have happened already. We have a massive oversupply of solar and wind, particularly on the west coast. Generation is the easy part.
We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
> If it was viable it would have happened already.
It is happening, all over the world, with a persistent and rapid growth curve.
> We have terrible storage and transmission, the parts that are actually expensive.
Better cut those tariffs on cheap Chinese batteries (and aluminium for the transmission).
Not that anyone would build one in the current political reality, but China produces enough aluminium that it would be viable to make a genuinely planet-spanning 1Ω power grid connecting your midwinter nights to someone else's midsummer days.
Would it be fair to say that because the US Navy is not running it as a for-profit power generation that would help. Like every accident seems to be a list of cost saving shortcuts being responsible
Chernobyl was a state owned and operated facility.
Chernobyl was supposed to be an economically viable means of generating electricity. Comparing a tiny billion-dollar submarine reactor to a power plant simply doesn't make any sense.
The reactors on aircraft carriers have a similar thermal output to many commercial power reactors. The ones on submarines are around a third of that size, about the size of SMRs like NuScale VOYGR or the Xe-100 reactors proposed to be built at Long Mott in Texas.
Chernobyl was supposed to turn low enrichment uranium into plutonium for Soviet bombs. They made design choices that compromised safety to make plutonium production more efficient.
> It’s also worth noting that the US Navy is the only organization with a perfect nuclear safety record.
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...
> perfect nuclear safety record.
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).
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.
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...
I meant, the particular way the Navy does it might be too expensive for some reason. Do you know anything about that?
Right. There are countries that aren't particularly wealthy and rely on nuclear power just because they don't have reliable fossil fuel sources.
The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to.
Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.
Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.
Thats the issue with those AGR reactors the brits have IIRC, perfect (or close enough) safety record, super complex and not economical to run.
There's a video of Alvin Weinberg explainng why. It's the smaller scale that allows those safety guarantees.
Powerprice in Germany today minus 500€/MWh. Nuclear power is economic madness in an environment where we see negative electricity prices practically every day.
What happens when there is wide bad weather for renewables? ( for a range of days from 1 - several) Where would the power needed come from?
If, it was to be from some kind of storage, Extra capacity would be needed to allow recharging of the storage
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.
Not really. Storage is most used for short term stabilization and alleviating congestion in certain transmission nodes. In most markets its used to provide capacity under contract with utilities to meet resource adequacy requirements which don’t consider long term regional complete loss of renewables. Longer term storage that can provide power to, say, a whole region during a multi-day storm is basically an uneconomic fantasy that rational developers have no real incentive to build, because it would be a huge overbuild most of the time, and accordingly undercompensated for said overbuild. Developers are building batteries that are just the right size for a capacity contract & providing ancillary services (voltage support, frequency regulation, etc) plus price arbitrage, which are deployed for only minutes to a few hours. There are some 8 hour duration batteries out there, but they are not common.
If Germany power prices are so low, why are Germans power bills so high ? Maybe you are cherry picking spot/marginal price and not netting the subsides ?
Fun fact, "friends of the earth" was originally funded by Robert Anderson, CEO of Atlantic Richfield oil, to oppose nuclear.
What about the opposition from the not exactly environmentalist orgs?
> "The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale ... only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible." — "Nuclear Follies". Forbes Magazine. 1985.
The fossil fuel industries and their shills? Probably not lamenting the delay in moving way from fossil fuels the same way the environmental groups ought to be.
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...
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.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions
I also used to believe that but now I'm not so sure. Nuclear carries massive and unpredictable risks on failure. We can fairly well predict what will happen on catastrophic wind turbine failure, but with nuclear it is much more difficult. And what is arguably worse is that nuclear catastrophic failures are very infrequent and so we have very hard time estimating and thinking about probabilities of them happening.
Personally I think that keeping existing reactors running is better than the alternatives, but I'm not so sure about building up new reactors compared to building more predictable green energy sources.
Burning coal in coal power plants causes more deaths each year in Europe than the total deaths caused by Chernobyl accident (4000-8000).
"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.
I live in Germany and dead wild animals are still burned instead of eaten because of radioactive contamination
Serious question, when has there been a serious nuclear accident? Fukushima was caused by a natural disaster that killed far more people than the nuclear failure did. Chernobyl was pure communist stupidity. This level of incompetence would never happen in a well functioning country. So that leaves Three Mile island?
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.
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.
Renewable generation is not the hard part. Renewable transmission and storage is the hard part. Its so hard, in fact, that building very expensive nuke is still much cheaper and more attainable.
That’s not true. The true capture price of nuclear is much higher https://green-giraffe.com/publication/blog-post/what-capture...
That link is pretty silly:
> So nuclear plants, by and large, get the market price whenever they produce (which is most of the time) and this does not equal the average price as they will be producing a higher share of total production at times of low demand (and low prices), and a smaller share of total production at times of high demand (and high prices).
The assumption here is that the price is set by only demand rather than the combination of supply and demand. Under that false assumption, generating power when demand is lower (i.e. at night) is bad. But how much solar generation is there at night, and what does that change in supply do to prices if you make solar a higher percentage of the grid?
It does the oppose of this:
> whilst the capture price for solar is often higher than the average price (thanks to power demand generally being higher during the day)
Because solar generates only during the day, in order to supply power with solar at night, you would need it to oversupply power during the day and then pay extra for storage to resolve the undersupply it leaves at night. So once you have a certain amount of solar, you end up with lower prices during the day, when solar is generating a higher proportion of the power, and higher prices after sunset.
And solar is double screwed by this. Not only does it get the soon-to-be-lower daytime prices for all of its output rather than half, its output is further regionally correlated, so that on sunny days when its output is highest, even the daytime price is lower than it is on cloudy days, because higher or lower solar output is a cause of lower or higher prices, i.e. the daytime price anti-correlates with its output.
"carbon emissions" LOL. Just lookup what's happening In Tuapse, and in other war zones. And we are penalising some poor bugger burning wood to warm his house at winter ...
Funnily (or tragically?) enough, lots of environmentalists here in Italy are opposing solar and wind projects too. I find that crazy.
There is a lot of nuance to these situations.
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.
NIMBY != Nuance
Reducing every personal reason to oppose every specific project to "NIMBY" is not nuance.
It follows Europe's energy policies (declaring nuclear climate-friendly). France is ahead of the US when it comes to civil nuclear plants strategy.
Nonsense, the reluctance of governments to reduce carbon emissions has been driven by the reluctance for entrenched industries to give up their gravy train. There are many ways for power to be produced with lower carbon emissions, it's absolutely not a binary situation at all.
What nuclear is is a wedge issue that can successfully split the opposition to the fossil fuel industry. People should be incredibly wary of the argument being forced into these positions, its artificial and contrary to the desires of people who want action on climate change who support nuclear and don't.
I would be very happy if people who oppose nuclear would abstain from supporting the fossil fuel industry. When EU voted on green technology, one side voted for nuclear to be defined as green, while the other side voted for natural gas to be given the green status.
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.
Yep, I have been saying for decades that I agree on almost everything wirh the local Green Party, _except_ the anti-nuclear stuff. Very emotional, very relatable but very dumb.
The anti-nuclear stuff seems to pair up quite well with "you need to start importing a lot of natural gas", which makes me think it is simply an agenda pushed by a certain rather large country to the east.
You don't have to wonder, because it is the agenda that you're thinking about and also the agenda of fossil fuel companies.
But we now have two lessons that teach us that being anti-nuclear was stupid: the Ukraine war and the current US administration's adventure in the Gulf.
The anti-nuclear area, at least in Western Europe, had historically a very high correlation with those who held sympathies for a certain very large nuclear power who would have strategically benefited from an anti-nuke sentiment that would avoid another nuclear power's weapon deployment in EU bases. But I'm sure it is a coincidence.
I live close to the Belgian border. Some time ago there was concern about Belgian reactors (they are old and their concrete was fracturing) and they were distributing iodine pills. Keeping them open even longer just sounds peak Belgium.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind
Not at all. Some people are depopulationists.
I've heard an opinion that having less people leads to a technological regression, because some things to create/research are so expensive that they become profitable and functioning only at the world's scale
E.g. China is too small to have an isolated closed market for a competitive and efficient semiconductors manufactoring
No it is just that capitalism is a cancer. Nobody has actually cracked the code on how capitalism can work without perpetual growth.
Leaders are looking at Japan and they are panicking. Fascists are demanding more white babies.
Here we go again ...
Did those plants suddenly became manageable? No.
Did those plants suddenly became cheap? No.
Do we suddenly have a solution for the waste? No.
Have new uranium deposits suddenly been discovered? No.
Why are they unmanageable?
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.
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The root of the German Green party goes back to anti-nuclear and anti-war movements from 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement
"Before the 1980s, it was unclear whether the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases was stronger than the cooling effect of airborne particulates in air pollution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change
The original 1980 plan for the Energiewende "Energie-Wende: Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran" called for Germany to move towards "coal+gas" or "coal+solar" scenario. Only later were added any consideration for climate change, but the highest priority, the big evil, was nuclear technology.
Greenpeace has it's roots also in the opposition to underground nuclear weapon tests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Origins
Indeed, anti-nuclear sentiment predates the 1990s.
The book _The Power of Nuclear_ by Marco Visscher does a good job tracing the history from the shock of the nuclear bomb in 1945 to the enthusiasm of the 1950s and the increasing scepticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
France did not get it totally right. We decomissionned superphénix for mostly dogmatic reasons, and also halted the Astrid project (although it look like it may be restarted we only lost 10 years)
Don't forget a large Russian campaign in Europe to discredit all energy sources that don't involve buying from Russia.
Financing green movements, working with governments, especially Germany (Gerhard Schröder now holds good positions in Russian energy companies, Angela Merkel had good relationship with Putin). Puting worked in Germany as KGB agent before his ascension.
The beginning of Soviet and German cooperation goes back much earlier, to early 1970s. The famous policy of "Wandel durch Handel"
"Wandel durch Handel (WdH, German for "Change through trade"), also known as Wandel durch Annäherung, is a political and economic notion, mostly associated with German foreign policy, of increasing trade with authoritarian regimes in an effort to induce political change. Although most strongly associated with Germany, similar policies have been pursued by several Western countries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wandel_durch_Handel
For example, West Germany has helped with building Soviet gas network.
https://ost-ausschuss.de/sites/default/files/pm_pdf/German-R...
All subsequent goverments of Kohl, Schröder, Merkel supported expansion of gas imports from Russia. It was cheap and reliable even during Cold war.
And little bit of money from Gazprom to politicians always helped.
https://correctiv.org/en/latest-stories/2022/10/07/gazprom-l...
Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear is like being a firefighter and opposing the use of water to extinguish fires.
That seems to be deliberately obtuse.
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?
The time to build nuclear reactors is a completely pointless argument because humanity is going to need low CO2 power forever. Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
> Without nuclear wind and solar will ALWAYS require gas turbines for backup.
So this myth is what you need to tell yourself we need nuclear?
Even with Danish insolation and weather and tilting the study heavily towards nuclear power by assuming that the nuclear costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C while modeling solar as 20% more expensive renewables come out to vastly cheaper when doing system analyses.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
This paper is very heavily biased against nuclear power and is only valid for Denmark
It uses 8% discount rate for nuclear vs 5% for VRE
It uses the most expensive nuclear reactor costs instead of Korean and Chinese reactors delivered at 3,500–5,000 USD/kW
80% capacity factor for nuclear is very low and should be over 90% for new reactors.
It's least cost mix intentionally excludes nuclear power which is absurd. Standard practice would let the optimizer choose nuclear's share in a hybrid mix. Sepulveda et al. (MIT, Joule 2018; Nature Energy 2021) using exactly this approach repeatedly find firm low-carbon resources (including nuclear) reduce total system cost under deep decarbonization. https://www.eavor.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/The-role-of... "Availability of firm low-carbon resources reduces costs 10%–62% in zero-CO2 cases"
They intentionally ignore inter-annual variability which is where dispatchable nuclear is most needed.
It generalizes based on Denmark's unique situation of having some of the best off-shore wind in the world and access to cheap hydro power and storage in Norway and no domestic nuclear supply chain.
The authors are editors of the journal this was published in.
Lund is the creator of EnergyPLAN and cites himself a lot.
This paper just repeats Aalborg group and Breyer's LUT group's anti-nuclear opposition.
Hinkley Point C and EDF just got a 7% interest rate to finish the project. That is after nearly 20 years of project work and 10 years of construction, so about all risk should already have been found.
Like I said. The costs are 40% lower than Flamanville 3 and 70% lower than Hinkley Point C.
Imaginary cheap and fast to build nuclear power is amazing. It also does not exist. In South Korea those costs are from before the corruption scandal.
In China they are barely building nuclear power. It peaked at 4.7% of their grid mix in 2021 and is now down to 4.3%. For every plan they release the nuclear portion shrinks and is pushed further into the future.
Then I just see you trying to handwave the study away. The entire point is literally to prove that Denmark does not need to rely on its neighbors, and still get a cheaper result.
And like I said. Denmark is the hard case due to the winter sun being awful. As soon as you go south in latitude the problem becomes vastly easier. We’re talking like 99% of the worlds population having more sunlight than Denmark.
> Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind,
I wonder how many people actually believe that we are in good shape so mankind should have no development whatsoever. Just stay as is or even go back decades just to preserve the environment. The first world need more energy because we're greedy and etc.
>Believing we're in a climate crisis and also being anti-nuclear are mutually exclusive positions in my mind
Yes hello, these are both my opinions, do I exist for you or not ;)? You can say that we are in a climate crisis AND be anti-nuclear.
Sure, someone can be both concerned about climate change and oppose nuclear power. But it's a largely self-defeating stance: nuclear is the only non-intermittent geographically independent form of clean energy. Dams and geothermal are geographically constrained. Solar and wind are intermittent, as well as varying in output depending on location.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
But they're not entitled to their own facts.
There's not much trust in anyone who says nuclear is completely safe, "we fixed it now," etc. That shouldn't be the motto. But fossil fuel is already killing more people, coal puts more radioactive uranium dust into the air even, and that's before getting into climate change.
I think people who are anti-nuclear and environmentalist are wrong, but it's not an insane opinion to have. There's no fact you can point to that says nuclear is safer than renewables. I just don't see how the world is realistically going to switch to renewables. We've already seen oil companies use those as distractions from nuclear.
Nothing man-made is "completely safe". No such thing.
However, nuclear energy is the safest form of energy production we have.
By far.
And that includes Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People overestimate the danger from nuclear energy by incredible amounts.
That doesn't mean that close exposure to a running nuclear reactor won't kill you in short order. That's why we build these things with shielding. A lot of other things will kill you in short order if exposed to them: cars/trains in motion, for example.
The facts are that all large nuclear plants require a stable water supply, and climate change directly threatens that.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2...
To be clear, all thermal plants - be they nuclear, fossil fuel, biofuel, etc. - require water for cooling. But this doesn't need to be freshwater, many nuclear plants are cooled with seawater. In non-costal arid areas, nuclear plants can be cooled with sewer water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...
Electricity demand is concentrated in population centers, which themselves require water and produce sewage as a byproduct. Thus it's pretty rare for a place with strong electricity demand to simultaneously have a shortage of water available for cooling. In places with limited freshwater supply, this results in plants using wastewater. Again, thermal plants of all kinds need cooling. Nuclear changes nothing relative to the status quo in this regard.
Small thing, dams are not carbon neutral. Depending on location, the plant life they inundate no longer absorbs carbon and, worse yet, the rotting plant life emits methane and other not-good gasses.
Yes, and pouring concrete also emits carbon dioxide. And building wind turbines requires fossil fuel emissions. And the truck driving solar panels out to the solar farm emits CO2, etc. But at the end of the day, the carbon intensity of dams, nuclear, wind, etc. relative to fossil fuels is near zero: https://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electricity-emissions-around...
Nuclear is also in practice significantly geographically dependent.
Cities basically won't let you put a nuclear power station within a stone's throw, never mind in their midst. Have you ever visited London? There's a wonderful modern art gallery, on the side of the Thames called Tate Modern, and it has this enormous space which is called the "Turbine Hall". Huh. Tate Modern's shell was a 300MW oil fired power station named "Bankside". They burned tonnes of oil right in the heart of London until the 1980s to make electricity. People weren't happy about it, but they designed, built, and operated the station because although any fool can see there's toxic smoke pouring out of it into your city, electricity is pretty useful.
In practice nuclear power stations get built somewhere with abundant cheap water, far from population centres yet easily connected to the grid. England has more places to put a Nuke than say, a Hydro dam, but they are not, as you've suggested, "geographically independent", unlike say solar PV which doesn't even stop you grazing animals on the land or parking vehicles or whatever else you might want to do.
What you're describing is substantially different than, say, attempting to build a dam in a flat place with no rivers.
"It can function here, but people choose not to" is a very different kind of geographic restrictions than "it is physically impossible for it to work here"
Nuclear power is definitely more geographically independent than solar. There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe: https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-insolation-map-for-the...
The only thing a nuclear plant - any thermal plant for that matter - requires is cooling. But that doesn't need to be freshwater. It can be seawater or waste-water, like the Palo Verde plant.
> There's easily a factor of 3 or 4 difference in output between a solar panel in Australia vs Northern Europe
That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.
No, you cannot just build a larger array.
That map doesn't effectively capture the intermittency of solar energy in different climates. In Britain the country gets less than 8 hours of energy during peak winter. It also often goes with overcast skies for extended periods of time. A bigger array does not solve these extended periods of non-production.
I do not think anyone is suggesting a pure solar solution.
Your reply to me quite explicitly suggested that countries in far northern latitudes just build a proportionally larger array:
> That only really matters if there is some constraint preventing you from building a proportionally larger array at the northern latitudes.