[StarvingLion]

Its official....Belgium is BANKRUPT. Its throwing in the towel unable to keep its reactors going....

Belgium pledges to ditch nuclear power by 2025.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy ... r-by-2025/

Belgium ranks fourth globally, with 51.7% of her power coming from fission. But she is woefully behind her 13% renewable energy commitment, and something had to give: “ExxonMobil’s Belgian office tweeted that it was in favour of the new energy pact.”

[Plantagenet]

Its official....Belgium is BANKRUPT. Its throwing in the towel unable to keep its reactors going....

Belgium pledges to ditch nuclear power by 2025.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy ... r-by-2025/

Belgium ranks fourth globally, with 51.7% of her power coming from fission. But she is woefully behind her 13% renewable energy commitment, and something had to give: “ExxonMobil’s Belgian office tweeted that it was in favour of the new energy pact.”

Unfortunately, this may result in even higher CO2 emissions from Belgium. When Germany turned off their nuclear power plants they shifted to coal fired electrical power plants, boosting their CO2 emissions.

IMHO its wrong-headed for countries to shift from nuclear to fossil fuels like coal for their energy production, because its a violation of their commitments to reduce CO2 emissions to fight global warming.

Cheers!

[KaiserJeep]

I'll add something to what Planty said. Germany replaced much of that Nuclear energy with what is euphemisticly termed "Biomass", when burned in what he called "coal plants". This is pellets of bark, compressed sawdust, twigs, etc from logging and from sawmills. Most of this stuff comes from clearcut logging in Canada. The bark, sawdust, etc. really needs to be composted and returned to the soil, if you don't do so, the forest soils get poorer and thinner with each generation of trees logged off.

So the actual situation, since "Biomass" burning is even nastier than coal, and the EU exempts such fuels from air quality standards on the grounds that they are "Green", is quite different today. Clean nuclear has been replaced by dirty coal, and even dirtier Biomass. People are actually dying in the EU in the tens of thousands from this change, versus the one time death of 39 people at Chernobyl.

This is happening because of hysteria over nuclear power, and enthusiam for dirty/deady "Green" power. Meanwhile, the cash-strapped government of Canada is turning the place barren by enabling the "Biomass" exports to the EU.

[StarvingLion]

Told you so. Everything is Ponzi. Replace Westinghouse with "Federal" "Reserve" and its the same.

Kaiserjeep is doomed. He thought Collapse was a process that would last until 2100. But the nightmare is happening at 2020's.

Ponzi and Nuclear don't mix. Thats why Enronables are preferred.

How hedge funds are suing nuclear plant contractors that South Carolina utilities didn't

https://www.postandcourier.com/business ... 29e57.html

Quote:
Westinghouse's nuclear reactor business had become a "de facto Ponzi scheme" by the time it foundered — a money pit that could only be filled by signing up more and more customers to build power plants. That's the case laid out in bankruptcy court filings by Citigroup and a group of hedge funds that have set out to do what a pair of South Carolina power companies didn’t: squeeze more money from the troubled company that could lower power bills for customers.

They accuse Westinghouse of running a project that was "blatantly mismanaged for years." They accuse the company of pulling off an "'extend and pretend' scheme" to string the utilities along for years.

[Plantagenet]

Kaiserjeep is doomed....He thought Collapse was a process that would last until 2100. But the nightmare is happening at 2020's.

Jeepie is going to be fine. When the collapse comes the zombies will riot and rage across the cities of America, but the ticket agents will stop them from getting on the ferry to Nantucket, so he'll be OK out there.

Westinghouse's nuclear reactor business had become a "de facto Ponzi scheme" by the time it foundered — a money pit that could only be filled by signing up more and more customers .....

You could say the same thing about every business in the USA. Businesses all require more customers to keep going. Even the US social security system works that way.

Cheers!

[vox_mundi]

South Florida Nuclear Site to Expand Despite Sea Level Rise Projections

Video - On Thursday, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved a pair of new reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, which is owned by Florida Power & Light, the Palm Beach Post reported. If the reactors are built, they could cost as much as $21.8 billion and wouldn't be ready until at least 2031, the report added.

In a 2014 investigation, weather.com and the Huffington Post identified the Turkey Point plant as one of the eight U.S. power plants most vulnerable to flooding from sea level rise by the end of the century. It showed that in worst-case projections, nearly all of the plant could be flooded by a tropical system in 2033, if current sea level rise projections materialize.

In 2010, when the plant first applied for the license to build these two new reactors, the NRC wanted to know how the plant would stave off sea level rise in future decades. FPL did not mention climate change and used a 1-foot-per-century sea level rise projection in its calculation – far less than NOAA's 5.6-foot worst-case scenario for 2100.

The power plant is located along Biscayne Bay, about 30 miles south of downtown Miami.

[StarvingLion]

Bankrupt Arizona is shuttin her down....givin up on Nukular.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/b ... 491088002/

Palo Verde nuclear plant could close if renewable ... - AZCentral.com

https://www.azcentral.com/story/.../pal ... 491088002/
1 day ago - The nation's biggest producer of electricity, the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, could be forced to close in the next decade if voters approve a renewable-energy ballot measure, the plant's owners said. The plant is run by Arizona Public Service Co., which is fighting the clean-energy ballot measure ...

[StarvingLion]

Bankrupt Japan found out that Nuclear fission reactors are not an ATM machine.

Japan prepares to shut troubled 'dream' nuclear reactor

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan- ... ar-reactor

Quote:
In July, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency will begin decommissioning what was hailed as a "dream" reactor that was expected to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumed. The government has so far spent more than 1 trillion yen ($9.44 billion) on the plant, which has barely ever operated.

[onlooker]

Bankrupt Japan found out that Nuclear fission reactors are not an ATM machine.

Japan prepares to shut troubled 'dream' nuclear reactor

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan- ... ar-reactor

Quote:
In July, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency will begin decommissioning what was hailed as a "dream" reactor that was expected to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumed. The government has so far spent more than 1 trillion yen ($9.44 billion) on the plant, which has barely ever operated.

What do you expect from a county that builds nuclear reactors near the shore of a seismically active area - dumb and dumber

[StarvingLion]

Bankrupt America can no longer keep the lights on...they are admitting TOTAL COLLAPSE IS IMMINENT. What part of "I don't think it is ever going to happen" don't you understand. Baseload electricity generators are now a pipedream. They are preparding for TOTAL COLLAPSE and TYRANNY with Explosive Laden Autonomous EV's and the Utility-Scale Renewables you can't possibly lay claim to because its way too expensive and software controlled. In other words, you are dead.

https://www.platts.com/latest-news/elec ... e-26938511

No new nuclear units will be built in US due to high cost: Exelon official

Quote:
Due to their high cost relative to other generating options, no new nuclear power units will be built in the US, an Exelon official said Thursday.

"The fact is -- and I don't want my message to be misconstrued in this part -- I don't think we're building any more nuclear plants in the United States. I don't think it's ever going to happen," William Von Hoene, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Exelon, told the US Energy Association's annual meeting in Washington. With 23 operational reactors, Exelon is the US' largest nuclear operator.

"I'm not arguing for the construction of new nuclear plants," Von Hoene said. "They are too expensive to construct, relative to the world in which we now live."

Nuclear power in the US "at this point is really a bridge to a different kind of carbon-free world," he said.

If the existing nuclear units in the US can be kept operational despite the economic challenges they face, and technology can be developed to store energy generated by renewable technologies, which are currently intermittently available, "then we won't need these [new nuclear units] at that point," Von Hoene said. "And we won't build them because they'll be too expensive."

"I think it's very unlikely that absent some extraordinary change in environment or technology, that any nuclear plants beyond the Vogtle plant [in Georgia] will be built in my lifetime, by any company," Von Hoene said in an interview at the meeting Thursday.

The two-unit expansion of Georgia Power's Vogtle nuclear plant has experienced first-of-a-kind design, licensing, procurement and construction delays, leading in part to the bankruptcy of main contractor Westinghouse. Georgia Power says Vogtle-3 and -4 will begin commercial operation in November 2021 and November 2022, respectively.

Von Hoene's stance includes so-called small modular reactors, or SMRs, and advanced designs, he said.

"Right now, the costs on the SMRs, in part because of the size and in part because of the security that's associated with any nuclear plant, are prohibitive," Von Hoene said.

"It's possible that that would evolve over time, and we're involved in looking at that technology," Von Hoene said. "Right now they're prohibitively expensive."

[KaiserJeep]

SL, perhaps you should try Decaf.

[StarvingLion]

SL, perhaps you should try Decaf.

KaiserJeep who believes America's Insolvency is 'Unstoppable Economic Inertia'

Here is what the people charged with keeping the lights will be saying in the next few years.

Coal too "dirty" (aka don't own it anymore because of collateral for unservicable debt)
More Renewables does not help
Nuclear Not an Option (because no access to enough diesel fuel)
Ponzi Shale Gas not Available for various reasons (eg. equipment failure followed by bankruptcy)
Cannot afford LNG Imports

Action Taken: Load Shedding

[StarvingLion]

Roger Andrews at euanmearns.com has thrown in the towel and become a TOTAL DOOMER. The ugly truth is that 5 years from now a nuclear fission reactor will cost over $100 billion US dollars to build. Its operating costs will be impossible to deal with and its a TOTAL LOST CAUSE to build any at this point.

http://euanmearns.com/blowout-week-224/#comments

The week’s most discouraging story:

Platts: No new nuclear units will be built in US due to high cost

If Exelon’s chief strategy officer really believes that the US won’t build any more nuclear plants because intermittent renewables + storage can do the job we are truly doomed.

[dissident]

Bankrupt Japan found out that Nuclear fission reactors are not an ATM machine.

Japan prepares to shut troubled 'dream' nuclear reactor

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan- ... ar-reactor

Quote:
In July, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency will begin decommissioning what was hailed as a "dream" reactor that was expected to produce more nuclear fuel than it consumed. The government has so far spent more than 1 trillion yen ($9.44 billion) on the plant, which has barely ever operated.

What do you expect from a county that builds nuclear reactors near the shore of a seismically active area - dumb and dumber

Your point is invalid. Fukushima survived both the magnitude 9 earthquake and the subsequent tsunami flood fully intact. The only reason it went into meltdown was because some idiot(s) decided to just copy and paste the US layout and keep the backup generators in the basement. They had a hill which they could have used to keep the generators high and dry right behind the plant. Without backup power, the cooling systems cannot function and they are needed since the heat production keeps going even if control rods are fully inserted into the reactor cores. This weakness of water cooled/moderated designs is their primary flaw. Molten salt reactors are based on passive cooling and do not require any backup power generation to keep them from experiencing meltdowns.
So it is ironic that Japan is shutting down its fast breeder program.

The Monju is a pathetic conversion of a pressurized water type reactor. I do not know what the Japanese were doing with all that money. They were certainly not using it for innovation. The French Superphenix was a vastly superior design. While France shot itself in the head and shut the program down thanks to the Green party zealots, similar designs are alive and well in Russia and progressing to commercialization during the 2020s. The BN-800 is fully operational and follows from the BN-600 that was operated from 1980 with a capacity factor averaging over 70%. It was an experimental pilot plant so having a 95% capacity factor was not the main priority. By contrast the Superphenix had a capacity factor of under 30% and was subjected to continuous political and even terrorist attacks from the self-described "greens" (more like fossil fuel industry proxies).

Unlike the US where Carter killed "waste" reprocessing development, Russia has world leading fuel reprocessing capability (*) and is working towards fully closed cycle nuclear generation. Fast neutron breeders remove the basically all long-lived nuclear waste and leave only the most active products (actinides) which are safe after 300 years. Storing long-lived "waste" for tens of thousands of years is delusional nonsense. Storing a much smaller volume of active waste for 300 years is vastly more practical. All the discussion about Yucca mountain would be pointless for 300 year storage.

(*) The US sent its nuclear warhead material to Russia for reprocessing into reactor fuel.

[Yonnipun]

The biggest problem with nuclear for me is the nuclear waste problem. There are no safe ways to eliminate it. Eventually our next generations have to adapt living in an environment that is much more radioactive and in some places it means imminent death. Germany finally admitted it and gave up. The positive eroei fusion is a dream that I am afraid we are never going to see.

[StarvingLion]

Fast Neutron Reactors = Unexplained reactivity fluctuations = Fundamentally Unsafe

There is no such thing as innovation in nuclear fission. No "advanced" design has ever been shown to work reliably.

Who is going to wait 40 years for some "advanced" design to be operationally verified while the legacy giant oil field production is cratering?

Answer: Nobody.

[Yonnipun]

Answer: Nobody.

When somebody hacks bitcoin we can say that somewhere there is a working quantum computer.
When there will be news about highly positive eroei fusion then we can assume that we have a true artificial intelligence. But I am afraid we are not going to see either. The only hope after the fossil fuel era is that aliens will save us.

[StarvingLion]

Answer: Nobody.

When somebody hacks bitcoin we can say that somewhere there is a working quantum computer.
When there will be news about highly positive eroei fusion then we can assume that we have a true artificial intelligence. But I am afraid we are not going to see either. The only hope after the fossil fuel era is that aliens will save us.

The aliens are dead. Fast Neutron Reactors are total junk.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/w ... lt.509686/

Most FBRs have been much smaller in power output than typical LWRs. The Phenix FBR was 233 MWe. The German SNR-300 was 300 MWe. The PFR in Dounreay, Scotland was 250 MWe. The Monju FBR was 280 MWe. The French Super-Phenix was the only FBR ever built with more than 1000 MWe. This is no coincidence. There's a trade-off when you scale up the core, as fewer neutrons make it out of the core and into the breeding blanket of depleted uranium. The design can't be scaled up too far without sacrificing its main selling point. If you want to show off a good breeding ratio you need to stick with reactors that are much smaller than modern LWRs, but at the same time the technical challenges (liquid metal cooling, higher temperatures, etc) mean that the reactor ends up costing maybe twice as much to build than an LWR putting out 4 or 5 times the power. That simply does not compute. At 10x the capital cost per kW you'd be cheaper off either sticking with LWRs or going for renewable sources. Even solar at current prices is cheaper, without the proliferation risks. Also there are no reprocessing facilities for spent FBR fuel, which poses special challenges because of high burn-up rates and buildup of trans-uranium elements, leaving a gaping hole in the so-called fuel cycle of FBRs.

[Yonnipun]

Answer: Nobody.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/w ... lt.509686/

Most FBRs have been much smaller in power output than typical LWRs. The Phenix FBR was 233 MWe. The German SNR-300 was 300 MWe. The PFR in Dounreay, Scotland was 250 MWe. The Monju FBR was 280 MWe. The French Super-Phenix was the only FBR ever built with more than 1000 MWe. This is no coincidence. There's a trade-off when you scale up the core, as fewer neutrons make it out of the core and into the breeding blanket of depleted uranium. The design can't be scaled up too far without sacrificing its main selling point. If you want to show off a good breeding ratio you need to stick with reactors that are much smaller than modern LWRs, but at the same time the technical challenges (liquid metal cooling, higher temperatures, etc) mean that the reactor ends up costing maybe twice as much to build than an LWR putting out 4 or 5 times the power. That simply does not compute. At 10x the capital cost per kW you'd be cheaper off either sticking with LWRs or going for renewable sources. Even solar at current prices is cheaper, without the proliferation risks. Also there are no reprocessing facilities for spent FBR fuel, which poses special challenges because of high burn-up rates and buildup of trans-uranium elements, leaving a gaping hole in the so-called fuel cycle of FBRs.

Considering all this no wonder why germans - one of the most technologically advanced countries - gave up with nuclear. They did not want to publicly admit to masses that nuclear is dead end so they came up with pathetic excuse like it was something to do with fukushima s disaster.

[StarvingLion]

First Energy has decided that it better shutter down because America really cannot afford anything industrial anymore.

Market Watch: FirstEnergy to permanently deactivate its 3 US nuclear power plants

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/first ... 2018-04-25

FirstEnergy Solutions said Wednesday it has informed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its decision to permanently deactivate its three nuclear power plants over the next three years. The company said the decision, which will deactivate two plants in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania, is based on “severe economic challenges.” “We are actively seeking policy solutions at the state and federal level as an alternative to retiring these plants, which we believe still have a crucial role to play in the reliability and resilience of our regional grid,” said Don Moul, president of FES Generation Companies and chief nuclear officer. The plants produce a combined 4,048 megawatts of electricity.