Belgium Has Learned Nothing From Germany’s Nuclear Phaseout

In 2021, more than half of Belgium’s power came from its seven operating nuclear reactors at two plants; now only four of those reactors remain online. 

The country has had a nuclear phaseout policy in place since 2003. The most recent victim of this policy is Doel Unit 1, a pressurized water reactor with a 445-megawatt electric capacity. This reactor, which closed on February 14th, was initially slated for closure in 2015, but amendments to the initial policy kept it online for an additional 10 years. Nuclear power plants have remarkably high-capacity factors meaning that they produce close to their maximum output nearly all of the time. This round-the-clock power contributes to a reliable power grid and makes nuclear plants especially hard to replace in the power mix. 

The policy put in place in 2003 would have required the country’s remaining four reactors to be shut down this year as well. In 2021, the Belgian government reaffirmed this commitment. The following year, amid uncertainty in energy supplies, the Belgian government reached a deal with the French utility Engie, which owns the nuclear plants to keep the two newest reactors online, a plan that a recent European Commission ruling will support. 

As should have been expected, shutting down more than half of your country’s electricity supply within a four-year period has consequences for grid reliability and energy security. The new plan will delay the closures of Doel Unit 4 and Tihange Unit 3 by another 10 years. So now, rather than closing a full half of its power in a 4-year period, Belgium is only shutting down 5 of their 7 that quickly. This is an attempt to have your nuclear phaseout and keep a bit of reliability too.  

The back and forth is reminiscent of the German nuclear phaseout, part of the country’s “Energiewende” energy transition policy, which ultimately resulted in the closure of all 17 of the country’s nuclear reactors. The shutdown of the final three reactors was initially scheduled for December of 2022, but was pushed until the following April due to reliability concerns for the winter. Germany was ultimately unable to muster the political will to keep the final units online any longer than that. 

Since it started phasing out nuclear reactors, Germany has seen rising power prices, lower power production, increased imports from its neighbors, and has been losing the heavy industry for which it has always been known. These are serious and predictable consequences to the decision to close what was once about 20 percent of Germany’s power capacity. 

In the wake of Germany’s phaseout, other European countries have been reassessing their own approach to nuclear power. The Spanish parliament just approved a proposal to reverse its nuclear phaseout, and Italy is in the process of reversing its nuclear power ban. In the United States, previously shuttered nuclear reactors are being brought back online to meet rising power demand from AI at both Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Palisades in Michigan. 

Closing reliable capacity for political reasons rather than those grounded in economics and grid reliability is a poor strategy. The closure of Doel 1 is another in a long string of unnecessary shutdowns of these reliable plants. Belgium does not seem to have learned the lessons of the German Energiewende.