The cost of energy in the EU combined with 10% inflation (but not salary increase) has become crushing to the point offices and households shut off heating and use battery lamps and candles for light. Avg. Year total for energy is over 9000€ in Belgium! At this rate we will burn through our savings for basic utilities

Was it worth to reduce nuclear power? 🤔

@iiii Ask the French about nuclear power. Half of their reactors don't work, and Germany is burning expensive gas to export electricity to France.

@Fast-Nop exactly. The thing that could be powering countries for years was neglected because of some anti-science crap and now there's no other way than nervously buying overpriced murican gas. While also neglecting the only way the whole ordeal can be resolved: sending fucking weapons and munition in bulk to Ukraine to stomp Russia as fast as possible.

PS: right now Ukraine's power system is alive mostly thanks to nuclear power plants.

@iiii The nuclear waste storage problem is not solved, that's not anti-science, and while every car must have an insurance because it might do damage to others, nuclear reactors have no insurance, and no insurance company would even do that.

Nuclear has never been economically viable in terms of TCO and never will be.

Also, nuclear reactors are only suited for constant baseline operation, not for covering the changing demand.

@Fast-Nop constant baseline is also important. And it's absent now.

Nooo dude you dont understand we got solar panels and wind energy !!!

Just turn down the heating, stop using your kitchen and only shower once a week

@Fast-Nop Waste is a factor before building a reactor, but its scale would have changed very little by keeping existing plants running for another decade or two. The waste is a good argument against building new plants, but it is an incredibly foolish one for prematurely terminating existing running plants that have given energy security without the most urgent waste we need to get rid of, carbon. As for TCO, since the greatest cost is the initial investment, stopping milking the cow after the biggest chunk of money has been spent is completely irrational. Having that said, your argument is valid for not building new nuclear capacity and spending the money on renewable energy instead.

@ruicraveiro Ask the French about how they want to foot the bill for half of their plants being down, given that these are 35 years old on average.

Also, the nuclear waste is generated constantly through operation, not only when the plant is being built. Actually, no nuclear waste is generated at all during the build phase.

Just for the lulz, in the mid-1950s, the nuclear lobby dished out the phrase "too cheap to meter" for the energy. Yeah sure.

@Fast-Nop don’t agree with waste problem to be a blocker. Without nuclear, we are storing co2 already in the atmosphere. With buclear, we have enough burial sites around for the next couple centuries.

@aviophile First, we're not talking centuries, but millennia or more.

Second, do you really believe that the storage vessels will last much longer than the CEOs of the companies have to live?

Third, we don't have such burial sites. If (or rather: when) the shit will leak, it's not only radioactive, but also extremely toxic. That's a problem especially with plutonium which as a half-life of 24k years.

Not nice for any water that comes through over the next millennia and makes contact with ground water or springs.

@Fast-Nop

Water is an excellent radiation insulator. For all you care, you could *swim* unprotected in what they call stage 1 storage pools (that's when the waste is most radioactive) and you would get way less radiation than if you went into a tanning bed...

Hell, I live in a region where there are *several* nuclear waste processing plants and it's been just fine.

How can batteries and candles be cheaper than using electricity from the outlet?

Non-exessive modern LED lighting also uses orders of magnitude less energy than even modest heating - and it should be winter in Belgium now. I seriously doubt that lighting costs are actually significant compared to other stuff like rent, heating, food, internet access and transportation.

@Fast-Nop Of course nuclear waste isn't created during construction and I didn't say it was. I said it is a problem of scale. We need to build facilities to store waste with all the engineering it requires. Each year that goes by actually adds little required space and to the challenge. It's a scaling issue vs time. It is practically the same problem to store 1 container for 100.000 years than storing 100 containers for 100.000 years. The problem is the 100.000 years problem is already with us. That's why I also see nuclear waste as a sunken cost we get from the moment we start the reactor. Look for Sabine Hossenfelder's YouTube video on nuclear waste. She is the real physicist and explains this much better than I ever could. In the meanwhile, we've been reactivating coal plants 🤦‍♂️

@Oktokolo we don't all live in modern houses (mine was built in 1960). meaning worse or no wall insulation, not the best insulated glazing, and some bulbs still need to be replaced by LED. I already did a lot of renovation in the last 2 years but I can only go so fast w full-time job

By energy you mean electricity alone? Or electricity + heating + hot water + fuel for car?

@netikras

Varies by case. For example, my water heater is gas based, but my kitchen is electric based.

But you can as easily have an electric heater or a gas kitchen.

But yes, heating is usually an order of magnitude costlier than just the lights bill.

@webketje The older the house, the higher the heating costs and therefore the lower the lighting costs in relation to that. Heatbulbs are really inefficient for generating light in the visible spectrum. The upgrade to LED is a trivial nobrainer.