Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants

Re:Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants by laurencerowe on Friday May 01, 2026 @01:04AM (#47971465)

That ignores operating costs and battery costs are falling fast and your assumptions seem overly pessimistic. A 2025 project in Italy came out at $120/kWh made up of $70/kWh in equipment and $50/kWh in engineering and grid connection costs. (The grid connection will still be good and concrete pads can be reused so replacing after 20 years will cost less even before price drops in equipment.)

Even with a 7% cost of capital that gives a levelized cost of storage of $65/MWh or an additional $33/MWh on top of the levelized cost of electricity of solar to spread it across day and night [1].

With a 4% cost of capital the still being designed EPR2 with 30% savings over Flamanville 3 comes in at €93/MWh or $110/MWh [2].

So solar costing less than $77/MWh or €66/MWh + storage should be cheaper than EPR2.

[1] https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/how-cheap-is-batter...

[2] https://itif.org/publications/2025/09/02/lessons-from-france...

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Re:Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants by Manuel_D on Friday May 01, 2026 @01:18AM (#47971522)

The same applies to nuclear power, though: when France built multiple copies of the same plant design, the first few builds were expensive but costs declined for subsequent models. It's fine to include projected costs reductions into your cost estimate, but you have to apply the same logic to competing systems.

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Re:Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants by laurencerowe on Friday May 01, 2026 @03:24AM (#47972089)

These numbers already include a projected 30% drop in costs for EPR2 across building six reactors with the first coming online in 2038.

Building a series of nuclear reactors with overlapping schedules (about one completion every year or two) in one country should help. But it’s simply far easier to find cost reductions for wind turbines which are manufactured in the thousands per year or solar panels and batteries which are manufactured in the millions.

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Re:Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants by ViewTrick1002 on Friday May 01, 2026 @02:53AM (#47971930)

They didn’t. The French nuclear buildout famously experienced negative learning by doing.

Within a generation costs lowered, but between generations they exploded.

And the reductions were to small to make a dent in how horrifyingly expensive new built nuclear power is in 2026.

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