Posted on 04/30/2026 4:50:54 PM PDT by Red Badger
Many European countries are in a pickle of their own making: they’ve allowed unfettered immigration (often by people who despise their Western values), they’ve gone all in on green energy despite the fact that it’s not ready for prime time, and they’ve embraced woke politics even more than some of the wide-eyed leftists in our own country.
But the small northwestern Euro country of Belgium (population 11.8 million) is waking up to the unfortunate fact that a lot of what’s going on isn’t doing them any favors. They can do all the windmills and solar farms they want, but if they really want to take their energy needs seriously, it’s time to re-embrace nuclear power:
Belgium is reversing its decadeslong phasing-out course, seeking more energy independence by reviving its nuclear plants.
The Belgian government signed on Thursday a Letter of Intent to acquire Electrabel's (ENGIE) entire nuclear operations in the country.
Such a move would reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy legislation adopted in the early 2000s amid safety concerns.
Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever stated that the country is aiming to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels and gain greater autonomy in managing its own energy supplies.
The PM posted to X on Thursday, saying that it’s time the country takes control of its future:
(Excerpt) Read more at redstate.com ...
Back when SNL was worth watching :)
How much money do you have?
The cost to put 1 pound of anything into space can range anywhere from $1000 to $30,000 per pound. A single nuclear fuel assembly weighs between 600 and 1200 pounds based on type of reactor. The average Nuclear plant has over 100 nuclear fuel assemblies each.
So, if we take the mid range of orbital costs at say $15,000 per pound X the weight of one assembly say 900 pounds, that’s $13,000,000 for one assembly X. 100 assemblies in one nuclear plant, that’s $1.3 billion for one nuclear plant. World wide, there are over 400 nuclear plants. That would be $520 billion. On average, they will replace the entire core (100 fuel assemblies) every 6-8 years.
Again, how much money you got?.
Switching to nuclear is the most effective way, though wind power and the like are not bad in some applications.
“Launch the spent fuel into the Sun...........”
Thank God people who say this nonsense have zero power to actually try it.
First off spent fuel is just that fuel it is 96% fuel and 4% fission products.
Only the fission products need to be isolated from the biosphere for 300 years that it would take for all but 4 of them to decay to natural uranium ore levels.
The 4ing lived FPs should be put back in with the other 96% that is still fuel and burnt up some more. They will eventually capture neutrons and be transmuted to shorter lived or stable fission products. All the U238+ elements are fertile or fissile in moderated reactors and all of them are fissile in the fast spectrum. Aka fuel.
It should be a crime against humanity to bury spent fuel it should all be reprocessed into new fuel for fast spectrum reactors preferred.
1kg of spent fuel is 83,000 gigajoules or 14,300 barrels of oil equivalent. It is a crime to throw this away because some boomers got scared by a Jane Fonda movie before most of the people alive today were even born.
Ask the Russians, Chinese or the French for the reprocessing tech they do it every year at industrial scale.
All the French fission products are stored under 3 feet of concrete as solid glass inside steel and copper tubes you can walk on the warehouse floor above it and not get a dose higher than the background levels outside in sunlight.
Look at it this way if you got all of your energy consumption not just electricity ALL of your yearly energy , substituting out liquid hydrocarbons on a BTU for BTU basis for nuclear energy , plus the energy it took to plant, fertilize,harvest,transport and store your food. All energy all in your lifetime waste volume of spent fuel pellets would for inside a 500ml sized water bottle.
Read that again so you grasp it.
The volume shrinks when you ditch the wasteful first law combustion vehicle and instead use nuclear energy as electricity vs making synthetic liquid fuels which the above volumes took into account. A second law EV is an order of magnitude more efficient. It takes 1.4kg of H2 and 8.86kg of CO2 to make a single gallon of synthetic octane. Which will send your vehicle 35 miles at most for a 5 passenger sedans.
A similar sized model 3 Tesla goes 4 miles per single kWh. 1.4kg of H2 is 78.4kWh just to make the H2 alone not compressed to FT pressure or temps either. 78.4 kWh sends a Model 3 313.4 miles down the road, more in the city exactly opposite to a first law ICE machine. 8.86 kg of CO2 is not energy free at all you need to either grab it from the air at $200+ per tonne and 3kWh per kg for pumps,fans and solvent regeneration. So another 26.58kWh and 106 more mileage the Tesla model 3 all this so the ICE heads can burn crap into the sky getting 35mpg.
Shifting the energy from liquids to electrons cuts your waste volume by a factor of more than 10. It now fits inside a half cup sized container and this is still 96% by mass of fuel the avital waste is the 4% of fission products inside those fuel pins the side of a thimble and 11g/cm^3 in density. Reprocessing out the 4% fission products brings the mass down to under a kg the volume stays roughly the same because the molten glass that 4% is mixed with is 1/10th as dense as the uranium pellet and you can only put 15% by mass of FP into the glass. So you end up with almost the same volume but much less mass. Either way it’s a soup cans worth for a 78 year average lifetimes worth of total energy.
Nothing humans have come up with can complete with this density. A coal ash pile of the equal energy supplies would be 7000+ feet high if it was the same diameter can at its base.
“Switching to nuclear is the most effective way, though wind power and the like are not bad in some applications.”
Nukes make sense in areas that don’t have class 4+ wind fields or 200+ days of sunlight per year.
Northern Scotland sucks for solar, but it’s a class VI wind zone and they see capacity factors in the 45-55% range for large 100 meter tall turbines.
Scotland makes at times 200% of it’s energy needs is it from wind they export all south to England via high voltage lines.
Sunny Texas right now is making 54% of its total ERCOT grid from sokar and another 25% from wind,8.5% is nukes so 87% of the entire grid is SWN aka forever energy.
The luddites said it was impossible we said get the F out of our way.
Here is the live feed
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
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