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Belgium's Aging Nuclear Plants Worry Neighbors (phys.org)

Posted by samzenpus on from the nothing-to-see-here dept.

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."

20 of 319 comments (clear)

  1. Sweden worries about theirs too... by MindPrison · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...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.
    1. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The reason is that after the referendum back around 1980 there was effectively a ban on all nuclear power research in Sweden.

      That has effectively caused the situation we have where the upgrades of the reactors have been limited.

      That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.

      It's just the power plants themselves that are reasonably clean unless there's an accident (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Kyshtym, Harrisburg, Sellafield)

      Nuclear power is useful in special applications, but due to the long term effects of it if there's a problem it's not a good solution.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    2. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by Firethorn · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.

      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.

      For reactors being torn down, yes it takes energy. But given that we should know how to make plants last 50 years at this point, minimum, it's not actually that big of a proportion. Hell, after 50 years you'll probably be replacing the solar panels as well.

      On nuclear accidents - I'll give you that the earliest plants are dangerous. Fukushima, for example was older than Chernobyl or Three Mile Island. Newer plants would be safer.

      Really, that's all I ask for - build new nuclear plants to replace the old ones, not coal or natural gas. Keep a healthy mix of sources going.

      --
      I don't read AC A human right
    3. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by Christian+Smith · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For reactors being torn down, yes it takes energy. But given that we should know how to make plants last 50 years at this point, minimum, it's not actually that big of a proportion. Hell, after 50 years you'll probably be replacing the solar panels as well.

      The energy expenditure for *one* reactor decommissioning is around the 30-70TWh range [citing Vattenfal *and* Storm for lower and upper ranges] so with 400 odd reactors around the world we have a roughly 2800TWh energy *debt* pending from existing nuclear reactors in the nuclear industry a decade or two after they are decommissioned. An energy debt that will have to be paid by the great grand children of the baby boomers.

      Why would you think new plants have the same energy debt as old plants? New plants are designed with decommissioning in mind, whereas old plants were not and are a bugger to decommission. Dounreay in the UK has had loads of contamination problems, including masses of asbestos contamination, as well as discharges to the local beach (now closed). But all these old reactor problems are lessons learnt for the newer generation of reactors and designs.

    4. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    5. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by Xyrus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The reason is that after the referendum back around 1980 there was effectively a ban on all nuclear power research in Sweden.

      That has effectively caused the situation we have where the upgrades of the reactors have been limited.

      That said - the nuclear reactor technology is mostly a dead end because nuclear energy is very dirty - mines contaminating areas with radioactivity for millenia, mining and refining costing a lot of energy - producing CO2 in the process and post usage waste from the fuel and from the reactors when they are torn down.

      As opposed to coal, which is very clean to mine, have absolutely no radiological or toxicological contamination rendering sites into toxic waste dumps for millenia, produce no wastes whatsoever, and don't require any CO2 output because magical fairies and unicorns support it with their wings and horns.

      It's just the power plants themselves that are reasonably clean unless there's an accident (Fukushima, Chernobyl, Kyshtym, Harrisburg, Sellafield)

      Nuclear power is useful in special applications, but due to the long term effects of it if there's a problem it's not a good solution.

      Yeah, just like all those clean happy underground coal fires, fly ash dumps, etc. that of course have no negative impacts whatsover. And coal doesn't produce massive amounts of CO2 either, that's just a red herring.

      Oh you weren't talking about coal? You were talking about solar? Oh my bad. Rare earth mines are even cleaner. Those pictures of toxic wastelands in China as a result of open pit strip mines are just made up. And since rare earths are so plentiful and easy to get, ramping up production levels by several orders of magnitude to meet the global demand to make everything run on solar is completely feasible and has absolutely no negative repercussions, because reasons. And since solar power is fueled by hopes and dreams you can just put it everywhere and solve all the world's problems.

      Nuclear is "dead end" because a lot of people have worked very hard over many decades to make it dead end.

      --
      ~X~
    6. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    7. Re:Sweden worries about theirs too... by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  2. Lots of unwarranted concerns by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The move away from nuclear power in Europe is a knee-jerk reaction to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. That the plants are old might be cause for concern, if the reactors don't meet modern safety standards. However, nuclear plants are very safe now and every disaster or near-disaster is thoroughly analyzed and changes are implemented at other plants so such incidents never occur again. For example, the United States' Nuclear Regulatory Commission carefully reviewed the Daiichi plant disaster and implemented changes in the US to make such an event even more unlikely at American nuclear plants. The phase out of nuclear power is based on largely unfounded fears, not science and logic. It's easy to ridicule Americans for attitudes about climate change and evolution. But there are equally foolish things in Europe, like the views on nuclear power and GMOs. I just wish people on both sides of the pond were more rational about some pretty important issues. I'm not opposed to phasing out nuclear power if superior technology becomes available, but I don't think there's really a superior alternative in many situations. Fossil fuels are awful and solar and wind aren't without their own problems.

    1. Re:Lots of unwarranted concerns by zAPPzAPP · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re: Lots of unwarranted concerns by cyber-vandal · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re: Lots of unwarranted concerns by prefec2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The real problem in Belgium is their lack of being organized. They cannot agree on anything in short term. Not in new nuclear plants (super expensive), grid improvements, or even a single wind turbine. The political factions in Belgium are unable to come to any agreements. Especially when a solution is not required at once. And the present plants did not blow up so far, so there is no imminent threat. For US Americans, imagine two tea parties (one from the south and one from the north) which hate each other and two moderate parties where one of the moderate parties is in favour for separation of the north and the other is not. And you need at least three parties to form a government. Forming governments have been hard in this environment. Lately, it took them over 500 days to come up with a coalition. They could also not mitigate their energy crisis by switching of highway illumination at night.

    4. Re: Lots of unwarranted concerns by Xyrus · · Score: 4, Informative

      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~
  3. You can't build new ones because the old ones suck by bolt_the_dhampir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's fascinating how the old reactors are still in service because the public is afraid of them. The collective fear of the old reactors and their flaws leads to new reactors not being a favorable political decision. Thus, we are stuck with the 40 year old old versions of the most efficient clean energy production we're aware of.

  4. Ah Belgium Politcs by prefec2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Ah Belgium Politcs by NaughtyNimitz · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Exactlly: but that dissolving is met with fierce resistance from the French-speaking part of Belgium. Just recently, the leading party (a pro-secession Flemish party that has vowed to delay their already well known secession plans during their appointment in order to get the country back on track) has publicly announced they will look into the confederalistic matter INTERNALLY as a long-term strategy: just to make it clear they do not intend to do it now.
      Immediately and will all guns blazing, the French-speaking parties except the Liberal Party talk of nothing short of a revolution in the Belgian Parliament. Of course, every Flemish person understands it is in their best interest to keep Belgium (an artificial country created by the imperial powers of the 19th century) together as they 'think' the fruits of Flemish labour (a.k.a. money transfers from Flemish to Walloon part) is their due payment for the past 2 centuries of pampering those peasant Flemish farmers with their Germanic-based language into the industrial age.
      I for one think Europe should be about people in regions with their own culture but under the umbrella of a bigger organisation (EU) but without the blooper-government (Greece, Merkel-Migrants, ....)

  5. It's not just the neighbors that are worried by BDeblier · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Speaking as a Belgian, I'm worried about a French multinational in control of the plants not giving a damn about anything but their own profit margins. We hear about incidents (so far in the non-nuclear parts of the plants) at least once per month. The problem is that unlike Chernobyl, Belgium's nuclear plants are in highly populated areas. In case of a real incident, we might have to evacuate and relocate several million people. Not to mention that the parts of our neighbors that could be affected are also pretty densely populated. The deal referred to exists purely to transfer a lot more money to said multinational. This money might be better spent either on a new generation of nuclear plant, or better, reusable energy. Unfortunately, said multinational also appears to have zero interest in investing in new power plants in Belgium.

  6. Re:Cleaner energy? by umghhh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    'would'??? So you say we have no working waste disposal but 'would' be able to fix the problem if we 'could' fix NIMBY problem. Wow that is a small task. Go and fix it today cowboy!
    As for cheap I do not know - the nuclear is subsidized only in different ways than say solar panels. The start of the panels were subsidized by Germans mostly. Once the production facilities were everywhere and forced prices down the subsidies were not needed anymore. Nuclear has been heavily subsidized by powers that be too. The only difference is that they never fixed this 'already fixed' waste problem and insurance is still subsidized. The price hikes on new reactors are faster then the building firms which means costs are almost out of control. Plus it is difficult to manage nuclear device when it works and when it goes out of control there is a huge problem what to do with the smoking pile of shit that remains. You may argue they are safe but if we build and use as much of them as you want then chances of accidents will multiply too. We may still be forced to use them but the way it looks like now - we can invest in so called renewables and in efficiency thus reducing the need for the nuclear besides special applications.

  7. I saw the title... by bluegutang · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and thought "This looks like another post by user 'mdsolar' spreading FUD about alternatives to solar power".

    And guess what, that's exactly what is was.

    Why does Slashdot tolerate his continual shilling and trolling? Does he pay them?

  8. argumentum ad hominem by peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_+! · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of the rare times where, after many users have provided counterarguments against mdsolar's negative posts in the past, we as a group need to resort to directly attacking the character and motive of all posts by mdsolar.

    http://slashdot.org/submission/5458403/20-nations-nuclear-facilities-said-to-be-vulnerable-to-cyberattack

    http://slashdot.org/submission/5439281/why-james-hansen-is-wrong-about-nuclear-power

    http://slashdot.org/submission/5415059/portions-of-land-at-san-onofre-nuclear-plant-may-be-contaminated-navy

    http://slashdot.org/submission/5373577/the-attack-of-the-nuclear-hucksters

    Why are we still accepting such biased submissions from mdsolar?