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."

Comments

Sweden worries about theirs too...

[MindPrison]

...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.

Re:Sweden worries about theirs too...

[Z00L00K]

Citation on the mines causing radioactive contamination? Do you have any idea how dirty other mining operations are? None of them are really 'clean'.

As for the energy cost of refining - I suppose you're one of the ones that argues that we shouldn't be using solar panels because making them involves mining and refining materials that creates nasty waste? Just like with solar power, nuclear power quickly becomes energy positive, and while it takes a relatively large amount of refining to get a fuel rod, it produces so much power over it's life, even in a wasteful US once-through system, that the energy costs are negligible, at least compared to the most frequent replacements - coal, natural gas, and such.

...
To produce the 25 tonnes or so of uranium fuel needed to keep your average reactor going for a year entails the extraction of half a million tonnes of waste rock and over 100,000 tonnes of mill tailings. These are toxic for hundreds of thousands of years. The conversion plant will generate another 144 tonnes of solid waste and 1343 cubic metres of liquid waste.

Contamination of local water supplies around uranium mines and processing plants has been documented in Brazil, Colorado, Texas, Australia, Namibia and many other sites. To supply even a fraction of the power stations the industry expects to be online worldwide in 2020 would mean generating 50 million tonnes of toxic radioactive residues every single year. ...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/dec/05/nuclear-greenpolitics

The time factor involved for radioactive material being hazardous is what makes it bad compared to many other alternatives. The amount of energy needed to produce the fuel at a quality needed for the reactors is also pretty high, which easily can be translated to CO2 emissions.

Re:Sweden worries about theirs too...

[MachineShedFred]

Whenever someone talks about something being 'radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years' it means they are trying to scare you. It's far worse if something is radioactive for only a couple hundred years, because it's far more radioactive.

There are isotopes of Iron that have a half-life in the tens of thousands of years, but I don't hear anyone clamoring to shut down the steel industry over it.

Re:Sweden worries about theirs too...

[MachineShedFred]

You talk about Three Mile Island in the same sentence as Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Sellafield, but from the Wikipedia article YOU linked:

According to the Rogovin report, the vast majority of the radioisotopes released were the noble gases xenon and krypton. The report stated, "During the course of the accident, approximately 2.5 MCi (93 PBq) of radioactive noble gases and 15 Ci (560 GBq) of radioiodines were released." This resulted in an average dose of 1.4 mrem (14 Sv) to the two million people near the plant. The report compared this with the additional 80 mrem (800 Sv) per year received from living in a high altitude city such as Denver.

The safeties worked. There was fuel meltdown, but it was contained, and the radioactive release amounted to less of a radiation dose then you would receive from a round trip flight from New York to Los Angeles.

Was it a mess? Sure. Was it an expensive mess? Absolutely. Was the public in any danger at all? No.

Ah Belgium Politcs

[prefec2]

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.

Re:Ah Belgium Politcs

[Anonymous Coward]

dissolving is met with fierce resistance from the French-speaking part of Belgium

Even in Dutch speaking Belgium, only 6% is in favour of dissolving Belgium. Source

The only ones in favour of splitting up Belgium is a minority in Belgium itself, and people from other countries who do not have a real clue about Belgium.

Re:Lots of unwarranted concerns

[zAPPzAPP]

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.

Re: Lots of unwarranted concerns

[Xyrus]

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.