{"id":2629,"date":"2011-11-01T19:50:36","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T00:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2629"},"modified":"2011-11-02T07:15:05","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T12:15:05","slug":"belgium-joins-the-nuclear-de-renaissance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2011\/11\/01\/nuclear-energy\/belgium-joins-the-nuclear-de-renaissance\/","title":{"rendered":"Belgium Joins the Nuclear de-Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"

The move away from nuclear power in Europe is becoming a stampede.\u00a0 According to Reuters, the Belgians <\/a>are now on the bandwagon, with plans for shutting down the country’s last reactors in 2025.\u00a0 The news comes as no surprise, as the anti-nukers in Belgium have had the upper hand for some time.\u00a0 However, the agreement reached by the country’s political parties\u00a0has been made\u00a0“conditional” on whether the energy deficit can be made up by renewable sources.\u00a0 Since Belgium currently gets about 55 percent of its power from nuclear, the chances of that appear slim.\u00a0 It’ s more likely that baseload power deficits will be made up with coal and gas plants that emit tons of carbon and, in the case of coal, represent a greater radioactive hazard than nuclear because of the uranium and thorium <\/a>they spew into the atmosphere.\u00a0 No matter.\u00a0 Since Fukushima global warming hysteria is pass\u00e9 and anti-nuclear hysteria is\u00a0back in fashion again for the professional saviors of the world.<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see how all this turns out in the long run.\u00a0 In the short term it will certainly be a boon to China<\/a> and India<\/a>.\u00a0 They will continue to expand their nuclear capacity and their lead in advanced nuclear technology, with a windfall of cheaper fuel thanks to Western anti-nuclear activism.\u00a0 By the time the\u00a0Europeans come back to the real world and finally realize that renewables aren’t going to cover all their energy needs,\u00a0they will likely be forced to fall back on increasingly expensive and heavily polluting fossil fuels.\u00a0 Germany is already building significant new coal-fired capacity<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Of course, we may be dealt a wild card if one of the\u00a0longshot schemes for taming fusion <\/a>on the cheap actually works.\u00a0 The odds\u00a0look long at the moment, though.\u00a0 We’re hearing nothing but a stoney silence from the National Ignition Facility<\/a>, which bodes ill for what seems to be the world’s last best hope to perfect inertial confinement fusion<\/a>.\u00a0 Things don’t look much better at ITER<\/a>, the flagship facility for magnetic fusion<\/a>, the other mainstream approach.\u00a0 There are no plans to even fuel the facility before 2028.<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The move away from nuclear power in Europe is becoming a stampede.\u00a0 According to Reuters, the Belgians are now on the bandwagon, with plans for shutting down the country’s last reactors in 2025.\u00a0 The news comes as no surprise, as the anti-nukers in Belgium have had the upper hand for some time.\u00a0 However, the agreement … Continue reading “Belgium Joins the Nuclear de-Renaissance”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,41,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-science","category-technology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-Gp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2629"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2634,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions\/2634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}