Belgium has dropped nuclear phaseout plans adopted over two decades ago. Previously, it had delayed the phaseout for 10 years over the energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Belgium’s parliament on Thursday voted to drop the country’s planned nuclear phaseout.
In 2003, Belgium passed a law for the gradual phaseout of nuclear energy. The law stipulated that nuclear power plants were to be closed by 2025 at the latest, while prohibiting the construction of new reactors.
In 2022, Belgium delayed the phaseout by 10 years, with plans to run one reactor in each of its two plants as a backup due to energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Nuclear shills out in full force again today, eh?
Lemmy seems 100% astroturfed by pro-nuclear lobbyists.
Fun fact: Multiple people with opinions different than yours are not automatically astroturfers or lobbyists. Turns out, different people have different opinions which they share on an open platform. Inevitably they’re going to end up disagreeing with you.
Nuclear being less efficient and more expensive than renewables is not an opinion.
What do people mean by “less efficient” in these conversations? Energy generated is energy generated, the number one efficiency we should talk about is using less of it. Past that you’re just choosing to optimize for cost, ecological impact, carbon footprint, etc…
So by that logic we should build energy sources that need the smallest input to get running. That’s not nuclear, hence the “less efficient”.
Again, efficiency is not the same thing as scalability. You’re optimizing for investment cost (maybe build time? I can’t tell). If we planned/regulated our usage better that’s irrelevant because power usage is predictable.
People won’t need more tomorrow than today unless they make a drastic change. If electricity isn’t cheap and elastic by default, they just won’t buy that high watt GPU or electric car. Bitcoin isn’t such an important social good that it needs instant access to a continent’s worth of power, but it gobbled it up because nobody stopped it.
And even if you do need account for something unpredictable, you can still adjust with other sources. That doesn’t mean they need to be the foundation of your whole grid.
Renewables needing expensive storage isn’t an opinion either.
We all want a clean, efficient, and reliable power grid. Renewables should be a big part, and I’d prefer not having a bunch of hydrocarbons being burned whenever renewables don’t even cover the base load.
Ah yes lobbyists and not just people with basic common sense, sure
Ah yes “common sense”, the go to argument from everyone ranging from people who want to throw out migrants to nuclear shills.
After all, why wouldn’t we burn billions on a technology that is less efficient per kw/h, takes decades longer to build, doesn’t scale, has a worse LCOE than renewables and leaves us with toxic forever waste? It’s just common sense bro.
“After all, why wouldn’t we burn billions on a technology that requires destructive mining and large scale plastic waste production for a worse climate footprint? What a solar shill”
See, I too can make emotionally charged statements with no basis in reality. All energy solutions have more nuance than “radiation bad” or “cheap good”
Not enough to be relevant
Scale is just how much you build
Continuous power generation.
We could build it faster if we were willing