19 May (NucNet): Belgium’s policy to close its nuclear power stations between 2022 and 2025 would “seriously challenge” the country’s efforts to ensure electricity security and provide affordable low-carbon electricity, a report by the International Energy Agency says.
The report, ‘Energy Policies of IEA Countries: Belgium 2016 Review’, says nuclear energy from Belgium’s seven commercial reactors accounts for around half of the country’s electricity generation and their potential closure is a “major” issue.
Allowing the plants to run as long as they are considered safe by the regulator would ease electricity security pressures, would reduce the costs of electricity generation in the medium term, would likely reduce the costs of the phaseout itself and would create time for investments in alternative generation options, the report says.
“It is of the utmost importance that Belgium’s policy on nuclear power is consistent with its objectives regarding electricity security and climate change mitigation,” said IEA executive director Fatih Birol.
In December 2011, the previous government confirmed that it would close the nuclear power plants in conformity with a phaseout law of 2003. The IEA said this law dictated that the first 1.8 gigawatts (GW), or 30 percent, of the country’s nuclear capacity was to be shut down in 2015, after 40 years of operation.
This prospect coincided with unforeseen long outages at two units from mid-2012. At the same time, wholesale prices were too low, and policy uncertainty perhaps too high, to trigger investments in other baseload capacity, the report says.
Security of electricity supply in Belgium “thus became heavily under pressure”. The previous government and, subsequently, the current one took several measures. These include setting up a strategic reserve in 2014 for the coming winters, increasing the tariff for imbalance and carrying out a national awareness campaign to save electricity.
Following the approval of the nuclear safety authority, the government also extended the long-term operation of the three oldest nuclear units (Tihange-1, Doel-1, Doel-2) from 2015 to 2025, the first in 2012 and the other two in 2015.
This helped alleviate immediate electricity emergency concerns and was “the right thing to do”, the IEA said.
“However, the underlying issue of capacity adequacy has not disappeared; it has just been postponed to 2022-25 when all nuclear units in Belgium will have to shut down under current policy.”
The report is online: http://bit.ly/1WDS7Qa
