“Belgium’s parliament on Thursday voted to drop the country’s planned nuclear phaseout. The motion was passed with 102 votes in favor, eight against and 31 abstentions,” reports a German newspaper:
In 2003, Belgium passed a law for the gradual phaseout of nuclear energy. The law stipulated that nuclear power plants were to be closed by 2025 at the latest, while prohibiting the construction of new reactors.
In 2022, Belgium delayed the phaseout by 10 years, with plans to run one reactor in each of its two plants as a backup due to energy uncertainty triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Belgium’s conservative-led coalition government under Prime Minister Bart De Wever took office in February. The previous coalition government included the environmentalist Ecolo and Groen parties, both of which opposed scrapping the phaseout.
Belgium currently has two nuclear power plants…Nuclear energy makes up around 40% of Belgium’s power generation.
Chinese researchers hope to make nuclear power cheaper through a new process for extracting uranium from water. China has also built the first thorium reactor ever built, in the Gobi Desert.
Nuclear power is already “the safest form of energy we have, if you consider deaths per megawatt of energy produced,” notes Yale University’s Steven Novella. “Wind turbines, surprisingly, kill more people than nuclear plants,” notes an environmentalist. And “solar panels require 17 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create over 200 times more waste,” such as “dust from toxic heavy metals including lead, cadmium, and chromium.”
Nuclear plants emit no air pollution, only harmless steam. Unlike wind farms, nuclear power plants don’t kill birds. The biggest utility that generates wind power pleaded guilty to federal crimes for killing 150 eagles.
