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> 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...

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.

> 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.

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...

> 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).

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

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.

There's a video of Alvin Weinberg explainng why. It's the smaller scale that allows those safety guarantees.

https://youtu.be/iW8yuyk3Ugw?si=MEJpGpX8LQuGn7iv

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

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 ?

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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

And yet somehow those people are never advocating for leading by example.

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.

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?

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.

> suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear

That is a very uncharitable reading of what I'm saying.

What I am saying is that if you're serious about believing climate change is a large threat (I do), you should be all-in on known solutions for reliable grid-level power. The current fallback for when renewables can't meet grid demand is burning natural gas in modernized grids and coal in grids stuck in the 1800s.

> unpopular with experts

How much of this is based on how expensive it is to bring a powerplant online? How much of that expense is based on endless lawsuits from environmental groups and weaponized environmental laws? Why can the navy without those restrictions build safe reactors for ~$2million/megawatt?

The analogy breaks down because hydroxychloroquine does not effectively treat Covid. Whereas nuclear power is carbon free (to be pedantic, it's carbon intensity is on par with that of most renewables).

Renewables can give us large amounts of energy but when you need reliable output 24/7/356 you can choose thermal, gas, coal or nuclear. Not all countries have access to thermal energy so if you want to become carbon neutral nuclear is the only valid choice for that aspect.

> Why do so many nuclear fans try to suggest climate change only exists if you like nuclear? It's very odd.

You’re putting the answer you want to hear (“because they are nuclear fans”) in the question, making it extremely obvious but then stating it is “odd”, as if the answer wasn’t straight forward.

Disingenuous – is the word describing this, I believe.

Also you need to check your concepts. “Climate change” is what we want to prevent (more like catastrophe, really, by now).

> The far bigger fight for climate these days isn't electricity: it's car-centric living

All of transportation, including commercial + aviation, in the US is 28% of greenhouse gasses, electric generation is 25%. They're functionally equivalent. Further, a common refrain from environmentalist messages I've seen my entire life is that "every bit counts" and that's used to justify why an individual should say, buy an EV or recycle.

Personally, I agree with that logic, but I also think grid-level power sources matter more.

If you think we're in an existential crisis then costs be damned, shutter every natural gas and coal plant and replace them with nuclear as quickly as it can be built under extremely aggressive bypassing of red tape that's not safety critical. The US and EU print trillions to fund wars, if it's an existential risk, certainly we can do the same to cut carbon.

If it's a pragmatic decision to slowly shift to wind + solar based on costs (while still burning a lot of natural gas for when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine), that's fine, but it doesn't really convey an existential urgency.

>Building lots of new nuclear instead of doing the cheaper option of tons of batteries and renewables

This is not the cheaper option.

You need to have batteries that can store power for at least a week to have base load as reliable as nuclear power. There isn't enough battery capacity in the world to do this for a state like California, let alone the whole country.

Back in the 1980s if the US had followed France's lead, then we'd be in the position they're in now: 70% nuclear with much lower per-capita emissions.

$5.6B actually sounds like a good deal. It outputs 2GW+ of power. While solar is definitely cheaper for 2GW of power, you still need batteries for when the sun is down. So you probably need approximately 30GWh of batteries to just replace this one power plant. The batteries alone would cost nearly $7B of grid-scale batteries that must be replaced every 20 years.

Ignoring the fact that the nuclear plant already exists, this still seems like the right way to go mostly because it's impossible to build this nuclear power plant for $16B in the US anymore (or so it seems).

It makes economic sense because they require a large initial investment (CAPEX), but low cost per year to keep functioning for many decades (OPEX). In contrast to say wind or solar, which are smaller CAPEX but higher OPEX.

So when you compare average cost per year over the complete expected lifetime of the plants, nuclear is good, but when you compare the up-front cost to build it, yeah it looks bad.

Another thing is that nuclear in the US is far more costly than in e.g. France. The key is that France standardized a few reactor designs that they kept building again and again, which made both construction and maintenance cheaper over time. While in the US, each nuclear plant is a unicorn, which can perhaps result in better individual designs but ends up more expensive.

It doesn't generate power by burning carbon and is a grid replacement for carbon sources. Grid cost rise sharply on 100% solar.

Taking china as an example they currently build solar, coal and nuclear. No country is building only solar/batteries.

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

It's a large amount of money, but the plants have a long service life. And once a nuclear plant is built, it's operational costs are much lower than other forms of electricity generation.

Simply saying "use PV plus batteries" really does not engage with the scale of storage required. The US uses 12,000 GWh of electricity per day. The world uses 60,000 GWh of electricity per day. Annual global battery production is around 1,500 GWh, and only ~300 GWh of that production is used for grid storage.

Even just provisioning enough batteries to satisfy the requirements for diurnal fluctuations of solar is far beyond the scale of what battery production can provide. Let alone fluctuations due to weather and seasonal output changes.

It’s not a choice between nuclear and PV. It’s a choice between nuclear and the other things that provide base load: gas and coal.

Maybe there is a discussion to be had about WHY it needs to make economic sense? Power is a natural monopoly, maybe it doesn't need to be a part of the economy?

Wow - nearly 20% of the California bullet train! Almost double the wildlife crossing!

decomissioning is embedded in opex cost and fairly cheap www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte.html

The complexity now is doing it without delays. China shows that it can be built very cheap and fast with good supply chain

> how the fuck does nuclear power make any economic sense

Because these plants run for 80+ years (some countries are now considering 100) while most renewables run for 25 at most. And also because `plus batteries` doesn't exist. The world battery capacity isn't enough to power California for a single week. Large scale battery technology isn't even in its infancy, it just doesn't exist.

Don't forget, you've paid for the nuclear power plant once. You will pay for a new set of renewable capabilities every 25 years in <current-year + 25> dollars.

> PV solar plus batteries: ALL THE WAY.

how much this would cost for the same guaranteed power output?

would it be more or less than 21B?

how it would look like in areas that have winter with snow?

So close - big save indeed.

One upside -- is that SONGS being decommissioned gave the energy storage market the ability to level up in a big way back then. They filled part of the gap with some large MW procurements. Allowed BESS to be part of the collective energy solution. Nuclear + Solar + BESS + some small amounts of NG is a dream team.

The correct unit is GW.

The math in this comment is all over the place.

Ivanpah is solar thermal. Nobody is advocating for solar thermal, photovoltaic has decisively won.

> diablo canyon has 2 reactors that can make 1.1MW per hour continuously

MW/hr is a nonsense unit for generation capacity. The 2 reactors at Diablo Canyon each generate around 1.1GW of electricity (not MW, and not “per hour”, watts are already energy/time.)

> the largest solar plant in california is Ivanpah. It made 85GW/year. Thats 97MW/hr.

Ivanpah is a badly designed plant that isn't representative of CA’s solar generation (which is largely distributed, not large utility-scale plants) and is being shut down, but also these numbers are both nonsense units and unrelated to the actual stats.

Ivanpah’s peak output capacity is 397MW, it was intended to produce around 1TW-h per year, and it has actually produced an average of 732GW-h per year (equivalent to an average output of around 84MW).

There is so much misinformation in here, so densely packed.

Ivanpah is is not the largest solar power plant in California. It's an experimental solar-thermal plant. Talking about megawatts per year is not a meaningful term (megawatt-years would be). Ivanpah despite its much talked about failures delivers between 350 and 850GWh per year.

The largest solar plant in California is Edwards Sandborn, producing somewhere around 2500GWh per year (it's newer so numbers are less published).

Diablo Canyon produces around 18000GWh/year, which is huge.

But with all costs combined, Diablo's price per MWh is close to ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY DOLLARS off of a massive initial capex. Modern solar battery installs trend towards $30-60 for the same output.

So I'm sure your tour guide had some neat numbers but you should be careful not to repeat them verbatim (or unremembered).

Watt contains time already so watt per hour does not make sense. You might mean MWhr/hr which is the same as MW

What does 2.2 MW/hour mean?

Diablo Canyon can output 2.2 GW, if you assume 50% (1.1 GW) for the sustained output, I come up with 9636 GWh per year, or ~19,200 GWh per year if it was able to run at 100%

Nuclear reactors are regularly maintained, tested and checked. When possible, old plants are upgraded to new safety standards.

You can upgrade certain components, and safety systems. However things like the containment structure or pressure vessel can't be changed. You for example can't retrofit a core catcher, but you could improve the turbines, I think Steam Generators as well, replace PLC's, Tsunami proof your site by building a larger tsunami wall / making your backup generators flood proof...

What nuclear disasters? Exactly? Name one nuclear disaster at an old nuclear plant whose lessons weren’t applied to the whole fleet.

> Nuclear disasters happen at old plants.

You used plural? What disasters are you talking about?

Even Chernobyl wasn't technically first generation (not that it has anything to do with power plan safety in western countries anyway).

Three Mile Island kind of proved it was fairly safe given that's the worst disaster to ever happen without any external factors (like tsunamis or being designed and run by soviet engineers..)

> A healthy social attitude to nuclear would be to require periodic upgrades or decommissions as the plant ages.

Tell me you don't work in energy without telling me.

Most heavily regulated industry on the planet - constant upgrades and safety reports.

safety is great and in some cases it can be improved. check out what great carenage is in france

Even assuming all bad stuff, nuclear is statistically ok https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Do you fly?

Given Hinkley Point C, a plant approved now will be operational some time in the 2040s.

I think people have missed how much of a hockey stick graph renewables deployment can look like. https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...

If you are starting now wind and solar are almost always your best investment. Some form of storage is next, but not until you have large amounts of wind+solar in the system. (which many areas are already reaching)

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

Skill issue in your part of Europe, then. In my part of Europe, https://grid.iamkate.com/ is currently reporting 95% non-carbon sources, 85% renewables, and a power price of −£12.03/MWh.

> twenty years

When it comes online, Hinkley Point C will have taken 20 years from first approval. Too slow.

In my part of Europe (Hungary), on a sunny day we have more energy produced from solar (on top of about 50% nuclear) than we can actually use. Sometimes we're 110% zero-carbon and it's because of solar and nuclear.

As of writing this comment our energy mix is 35.69% solar, 23.19% nuclear, 26.66% nuclear imported from Slovakia. The rest is hydro and solar from Austria and about 5% gas and biomass.

In my opinion clean electricity is an almost solved problem, especially as storage gets better.

> renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

More electricity in Europe comes from renewables than from either nuclear or fossil, with renewables rapidly approaching 50% market share. Several countries (even the non-hydro-heavy ones) are already showing multi-day periods where renewable electricity exceeds 100% of demand.

If your part of Europe isn't showing a noticeable change, perhaps it might be because your part isn't trying?

> In the meantime the renewables have failed to produce a noticeable change in my part of europe

I don't know, but I've seen quite noticeable change.

First, you spend 20 years paying several times more for fuel and electricity because "we need to fight global warming" and "ensure energy security from those russians," and then they tell you, hey, global warming is actually worse than ever, and yeah, we are dependent on the russians.

Not really sure what the relevance of this is, other than an argument against proliferation? I note that Pakistan has had a very rapid solar transition extremely recently.

The West built the existing rector fleet cheap and fast in the past, and those reactors have proven to be safe and reliable and maintainable.

It’s a proven technology with decades decades in service.

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

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

Renewables are cheap. Renewables plus battery storage still are not and nuclear is a reasonable alternative for base load power.

Renewables (especially wind) are mostly more variable.

I have lived in a country that was reliant on hydroelectricity and the consequences of a drought were severe (literally days of power cuts, water cuts because of the lack of power...). Part of the solution was to build coal and oil power. Surely nuclear is better than coal?

Shutting down at the intended end of life is a third decision point.

New renewables are approaching the marginal running cost of nuclear that is still within their intended life span.

It would need to be shown that an expensive refurb is better than running it down efficiently while building out new renewables as far as bang for buck in getting off imported gas.

> nuclear reactors that take a fuckton of money and many years to come online.

Yeah, but they last the majority of a lifetime. If you look at areas that built out nuclear 50 years ago, their kids and grandkids have still been benefiting from those infrastructure choices. They've been politically agnostic, because, once built, they're there. They're also relatively clean, and insensitive to the weather.

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

reliability issues doesnt mean unsafe. Most EU units are gen2 and doing fine. Engie wants units shut down to push for new gas plants. If belgium keeps reactors on engie will suffer massively. Decomissioning of npp is generally fine too. Isar2 decom in germany is going full speed

Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030

At a cost which could generate ~10 billion watts of very low CO2 electricity for decades if invested in renewables.

Also remember that large parts of a nuclear plant is replaced over its operational life. Control systems, steam generators, turbines, generators, tubing, valves etc.

What stays is the outer shell and pressure vessel. A nuclear plant doesn't just "work" for 60 years. And there's no trouble designing renewables with a 60 year lifespan.

We just don't do it because spending money on getting their expected operational lifetimes from decades to 60+ years is betting on extremely uncertain future returns.

With waste with half lifes in the tens of thousands of years sitting in metal casks which cant last 1,000 years.

>I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?

NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.

Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.

I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.

Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).

It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).

Yep even before the war German industry was ringing alarm bells about how their high energy costs made it very difficult to compete against China.

They should be adopting every sort of energy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/energy-environme...

> For many industrial companies in Europe, high energy costs have been a big concern, especially since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But even before then, electricity, fuels and other forms of energy were consistently much higher in Germany, Italy and other European countries than they are in the United States and China.

Austria is also trying to block nuclear, at least in Czechia and Slovakia.

> 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.

Man do I wish that were the case. In any way, we simply don't hold the cards in the EU as much anymore as the rest of the EU has recognized that we're idiots, and they're certainly not keen on joining us in that regard.

Can we get one in Lithuania?

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, probably next to Trump's war in Iran. And for 15y if you said anything about it you were an evil capitalist who doesn't care about the environment. No wonder the country is ever more polarized.

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.

Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.

The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.

Yep. The anti-nuclear group's narrative is always that "but no one wants that in their backyard..." but my god if only most voters realize that the waste from their whole state/country can literally fit in one single backyard.

That’s only the high-level radioactive waste. There is also the intermediate-level with long life radioactive waste that is problematic. Overall you’re right, it’s much less of a concern than many people seem to think, but no point in downplaying it.

Is that the real location or a mere simulation of size? If it's the former I wonder why close to the water? I'd understand if it was a nuclear reactor...maybe for cooling purposes but only for storing the waste? I guess it's just a size simulation, although if it were reality maybe the though is: Oceans are big enough to dilute the whole thing in case it breaks...as a watersports and ocean fan that makes me sad

How much of that waste is needed for a dirty bomb?

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

Me neither.

BTW did you also hear that the French government hat to rise the nuclear subsidies because the nuclear energy is so expensive? The prices for consumers were still raised

> if it's so incredibly difficult that Germany has not managed to do this?

The german government and institutions were (are?) full of pro gas (pro russian/russian tied) people who spend decades in the government before bouncing of to russia to work for petro companies. It's hard enough when you try, so imagine how hard it is if you don't even try

> Gerhard Schröder, who served as Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, has worked extensively for Russian state-owned energy companies since leaving office.

Oh, Germany did - see for example the Asse II mine.

It just turned out that they weren't careful enough, so now they have got a giant nuclear waste storage pit which is unstable, is trying to leak into the groundwater, needs constant babysitting to prevent it from getting even worse, and will eventually need a nearly-impossible multi-billion-euro cleanup effort. At which point they'll be left with the original waste, plus a large amount of contaminated salt mine material, sitting above ground right where it started.

I reckon they would rather not want a repeat of this.

Any material that is still radioactive after a hundred years wasn’t that deadly to begin with. There is a strong link between ”hotness” and short half-lifes, fast-decaying extra spicy isotopes are..fast-decaying

IIR, those "certain types of reactors" and their supporting infrastructure are (1) very handy for producing weapons-grade nuclear material, and (2) extremely difficult to operate (historically) without sundry environmental disasters.

Which problems make them considerably hotter - politically - than no-reuse type reactors.

If you have more info on that, I'd be interested. They're currently trying to keep it geologically stable and far away from any water that might disperse it, but then dispersion by just putting tiny tiny quantities per m³ of sea water sounds... almost too easy to be true tbh. Would be interesting to read about. (Surely they've looked into this and found that stable geology was the better solution, rather than that it's just more palatable to the public!)

And do you know, even if there's no trace today (sufficient dilution), if it also didn't have an impact on the ecosystem in the area at the time?

In their lungs.

On ash and slag heaps that are incredibly toxic to their surroundings. Current research suggests that living in the vicinity of such a heap has an immense effect on cancer rates.

> if not, just send it to space

So what do you think is going to happen when (not "if") one of those rockets has a malfunction and blows up?

Terrorists already have a use case

I think it's the other way around:

Rejecting nuclear waste site is an easy and almost cost-free way of garnering browny points with the part of your electorate that has been indoctrinated into massive radiophobia.

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

It is almost cost-free because in reality, nuclear waste is so low in quantity and so easy/unproblematic to store "temporarily" that it just isn't a real problem. Politicians know this. So they can play this game.

And once pressure builds enough you dig a hole in the ground like you always could have and like the Fins just did and start storing.

Yes, putting it in a swing state is a non-starter. But putting the waste in a solid red or blue state? Makes perfect sense.

I would counter that being reliant on gas and oil from our enemies as we currently are is madness.

There are a small number of such sites in the US. One that fits closely with this description is a legacy of the Manhattan Project: Coldwater Creek, MO. The Mallinckrodt Chemical Works refined a lot of uranium, and waste handling was about what you would expect given the prerogatives of the 1940's and the Cold War. They carried on refining for power plants after WW2.

Obviously, fuel refining hasn't just carried on like that, in the US and Europe at least. But it's one of many handy cudgels to use whenever folks get excited about nuclear.

I think the series of actual nuclear disasters from the 1950s to 2000s - plus the fear of a hot nuclear war in the ‘70s - had more impact on the collective consciousness than The Simpsons.

Baltic Pipe is not destroyed (and it goes in the other direction and not even through Germany).

Nord Stream, on the other hand...

I am sorry to hear that Belgium also has been sold out by its political elite.

If we directed worldwide LED production all into artificial light for farming, and grew whatever was most calorie-efficient, I think we could theoretically feed every human alive if the sun was blocked out tomorrow.

Obviously that isn't what would happen. The poor would starve whilst the rich still fed cows to eat steak.

It doesn't necessarily take a full blockage of sunlight. Extreme weather conditions that create multi week collapse in solar outputs is enough to create grid stress, if one is totally dependent on solar and 24hr batteries.

> Volcanic winters are far more frequent...

True. But if you're working in public policy in a vaguely-democratic country, and trying to get anything useful done - then the public feels vastly more familiar with "giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs" than with volcanic winters. So, just like "Zombie Apocalypse (wink)" disaster prep - you go with a "close enough" scenario which lets you achieve some actual preparation.

IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.

Depending on the country's situation, you might have to use fossil fuels during the transition, that's alright. But the transition is non-negotiable at this point.

Belgian greens are remarkably less crazy than German "greens".

Even someone like De Sutter didn't come across as crazy in the European Parliament -- but the German ones, meine Götter!

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

Thanks, I'll leave it as sucky markdown :D

It's cheap because we are offsetting the cost if its ultimate pollution onto future generations. We do this for everything else, and nuclear is our best chance for a liveable planet - if we don't want to make the slightest effort to give up on our comfort. But we have the belief that humanity will be able to manage nuclear waste for the next 100k years while we don't know how the pyramids were built... and it was only 3k years ago.

> since when is belgium bankrupt?

It's not.

Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_credit_ra...

[2] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/bel...

[3] https://www.worldgovernmentbonds.com/cds-historical-data/uni...

[4] https://www.imf.org/en/-/media/files/publications/cr/2025/en...

Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.

Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.

It isn't, but it is inching closer.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-euro-indicators/w...

Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.

I had the same thought. Even we have a high debt ratio (near 107% of GDP), we can still pay this debt.

Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country.

And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.

But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.

Almost everybody that trumpets how fantastic France is doing with their nuclear fleet has no clue how they are really doing. You can start here:

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

Oh, and good chance that in the summer months (when demand is pretty high, especially in the South of France) they may have to shut down again because of a lack of cooling capacity. France was ahead of the game in the 70's, but should have invested a lot more than they did since then. That they installed more than they needed also didn't help, especially not because the energy produced is sold on the open market at a net loss just to keep the reactors operating.

And last but not least: they have an ever growing waste problem.

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

The cost of which (besides the maintenance costs mentioned above) has not been accounted for in the electricity pricing. If they did, they'd be running at an even higher loss. Probably the next generation will be presented the bill for that.

It is a really bad idea to half-ass this. A nuclear disaster in Europe would likely kill off any positive sentiment the public has for nuclear power.

And that’s ignoring all the physical effects of the disaster.

Where I live (Belgium) waste collectors pick up "rest" waste in relatively expensive trash bags weekly, PMD (plastic/metal/drink cartons) weekly, compostable waste every two weeks, cardboard monthly, and glass also monthly. Certain things we have to bring ourselves to a collection point (batteries) or recycling park where everything gets sorted even more specifically. I tend to go to the recycling park once every two or three months, the rest gets collected at home.

So the stuff they collect doesn't need 12 different kinds of bags/bins, and the (financial) incentives are correctly aligned. I think it's a good system and pretty convenient, but I'd wish they recycle & process the waste even better afterwards. But the hardest part – getting the population on board – seems to be well-established.

Recycling is difficult, some materials are relatively easy (aluminium cans, steel), some not so much (plastics f.e. tend to degrade, some materials are energy intensive to recover). Contaminants are a major issue that still need more public awareness. But we're going in the right direction.