Slashdot Mirror
Belgium's Aging Nuclear Plants Worry Neighbors (phys.org)
mdsolar writes with news that Belgium's decision to restart a reactor at its Tihange nuclear power plant and its aging Doel plant have some of its European neighbors uneasy. Phys.org reports: "As the two cooling towers at Belgium's Doel nuclear power belch thick white steam into a wintry sky, people over the border in the Dutch town of Nieuw-Namen are on edge. They are part of a groundswell of concern in the Netherlands, Germany and Luxembourg over the safety of Belgium's seven aging reactors at Doel and at Tihange, further to the south and east. 'I'm happy Holland, Germany and Luxembourg are reacting because they (officials) don't listen to you and me,' butcher Filip van Vlierberge told AFP at his shop in Nieuw-Namen, where people can see the Doel plant. Benedicte, one of his customers, nodded in agreement. Van Vlierberge said he was particularly uneasy with the Belgian government's decision in December to extend the lives of 40-year-old reactors Doel 1 and Doel 2 until 2025 under a deal to preserve jobs and invest in the transition to cleaner energy."
...the Swedish reactors are some of the oldest and the least serviceable in the world.
http://www.thelocal.se/2015062...
Swedish reactors where considered the 2nd least upgradeable and amongst the worst in the world. Kinda interesting since their Finnish neighbour has one of the most efficient and upgradeable reactor designs in the world. Go figure.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Part of the reason for building ITER is to determine how severe these concerns actually are. One of the counterarguments about the radioactivity is that fusion reactors won't produce much of the dangerous waste that comes from fission plants. Fusion power may not be viable in the near term, but ITER will hopefully answer those questions. That said, until there are real tests of fusion power, it can't be considered a viable alternative to fission plants.
Unfortunately Belgium is the most dysfunctional state in Europe's west. Sometimes their political cast is unable to form a government for years. Actually, it is like that after each election. So they are not properly governed for 1/4 to 1/2 of the time. Their police has no clue where their potential terrorists live, and their control and oversight of nuclear plants is not governed by safety concerns, but by the fact that their grid is not that well connected with neighboring countries. They also do not have any program to replace the old and broken reactors with anything not even new plants. It is necessary that they understand that it us not working and that they should dissolve their country.
This has nothing to do with the move away from nuclear. I don't even know if Belgium is moving away from it. France certainly isn't, so it's not like 'Europe is moving away from nuclear'.
These particular reactors have a fail basicly each week. Just over new years weeks they shut down and restarted three times due to various problems. They have cracks in their containment. They are horribly outdated.
And not only is Belgium so small that any critical reactor failure would affect its neighbours directly anyway, they are also built right on the borders. So of course the neighbouring countries do have a word to say about these issues.
For the record, in Belgium, the law to go nuclear-free by 2015 was voted in 1999. Nothing to do with Fukushima.
At the time the government included ecologists who had had "stop nuclear" in their program since forever (funny thing is that they did argue that gas-based plants are a less-worse replacement for nuclear. Of course they'd prefer to go all solar and wind, but this is Belgium, not California).
When the ecologists got kicked out of government a few years later, the other parties did nothing to prepare alternate solutions to nuclear but didn't repel the law either and here we are now with ageing nuclear plants that get a last-minute 10-year extension. Besides the extension is probably a bit unconstitutional, but we cannot know because a part of it consists in a contract with the private firm owning the plants and said contract is confidential with huge penalties for the government if it's made public (or so they say).
The Belgians do not. Maybe you could help them. however, there are also some fundamental differences. First, your provinces have much more autonomy and are larger. Second, Belgium was patched together from different minor territories which where sometimes independent in history or belonged to France or the Dutch or Austria. All in all they have only the king as a common part. To solve this issue they constructed an elaborate balance of influence mechanism which is becoming more and more dysfunctional.
The views on nuclear power are based on how polluting it is and how difficult it is to do it safely, especially when corners are cut as at Fukushima. The opposition to GMOs is based on a completely warranted distrust of large multinationals who are well known for delivering defective products while lying about doing so. Better behaviour and transparency is what's required, not just dismissing justified suspicion as stupidity.
Nuclear power is far less polluting than any other traditional power source by many orders of magnitude. In fact, if people weren't so damn stupid it would be one of the least polluting power sources on the planet for the power density.
~X~