IIRC those old Belgian reactors got in the way of more renewables for some time. They provided a very cheap base load that seemed hard to modulate, which meant that even cheap renewables couldn't really compete on price. If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
> If I understand correctly, newer nukes can more easily modulate their output, which would be useful at night or on days without wind etc. Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
It's not new, it's that PWRs have to be built and operated with that capability (load following), which most nations didn't bother with until pretty recently because it does have a cost in complexity & efficiency. But France has done it that way pretty much the entire time.
> Gas peaker plants currently fill this gap.
Nukes with load following aren't peakers: PWRs can modulate output by 2~5%/minute (depending on their exact design and operating mode) between 30 and 100%. They're not reactive enough to compensate for wind, although they can work with the daily and seasonal patterns of solar pretty well.
The replacement for peakers are mostly batteries (hydro and pumped hydro where that's available but usually where available it's already done)
This doesn't seem like a terribly great idea, for several reasons. Belgium is nearly bankrupt, with a government deficit that the EU is already giving us grief for, in spite of some of the highest tax rates in the world. That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
The reactors in question have been shut down by virtue of being too old (1974, 1975, 1982, 1985). Some of them have cracks in the reactor vessels. Maintenance has been lacking. There was also a case of sabotage which was never resolved.
Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
Belgium’s government might not be in its best shape. But still the logical conclusion in my humble opinion isn’t “let’s shutting down the one power source that actually works.”
Nuclear it’s still the densest, most reliable zero-carbon option they have. Keeping the existing plants running (and ideally extending their life properly) is far cheaper and faster than hoping wind + batteries will replace dispatchable power.
At some point reality has to trump ideology.
Belgium seems to be slowly waking up to that. The deficit is real, but blackouts and intermittent electricity production prices are also real — and usually more politically painful.
If I remember well those microfissures were detected with methods nobody else anywhere felt the need to use and were probably there since their construction (and in any similar vat across the world) nor do they pose any realistic big risk.
>Meanwhile Belgium has a lot of off-shore wind power in the north sea, but lacks battery capacity and transmission lines. Spending money on that would likely be a much better investment.
You also know it would be a lot lot more expensive which is why the minister that ran the ordeal mentioned before was instead negotiating for a number of gas plants with decades long profit guarantees.
> That same government hasn't exactly managed any of its semi-public companies particularly well: the national telco is for shit, postal service is nearly bankrupt, railways are mismanaged and underfunded, etc.
In fairness, it's not the same gov that nuked the public service than the one in power now. But on the flip side, the selloff of public services to private sector was a success and achieved the stated goals: Destroy it from the inside and use that as an excuse for more liberalization.
Belgium is rated investment grade by all three agencies [1]. The cost to insure its debt implies a <2% chance of default in the next 5 years [2], lower than America [3]; the IMF assesses its "overall risk of sovereign stress...as moderate" [4].
Bankrupt is a politically loaded term, but they have very high debt and taxes, political gridlock (it is very divided among French and Flemish linguistic lines, plus all the other traditional left/right polarization), and it is all but impossible to make reforms. IIRC there was no sitting government for 500 days at some point. It's also got all the classic problems of an aging population.
Belgium is a curious country that was formed via historical quirks around religion (many Flemish/Dutch speaking catholics not wanting to be part of protestant Netherlands, but that is a gross oversimplification and the history is very complex - read up on wikipedia if curious). Historically the Flemish were the poorer part of the country, but after deindustrialization the story flipped as most of the industry was in the French parts. The result is bitterness that holds the whole country back.
They asked if it was bankrupt, not for a feel good or balanced essay.
That being said, Belgium can be and is wonderful. I'm a geopolitical nerd and I loved touring the WW1 battlefields.
Ghent is one of my favourite mid-sized cities in the world! It's got some of the best gothic architecture around, an amazing and creative beer scene, and is not overrun with tourists the way Bruges is. I was there for a conference (I'm Canadian) with a colleague who grew up in Paris. He literally said "If I knew Belgium had this, I would have visited far more often". Belgium gets a bad rap because it got so hammered in both world wars and if you just visit Brussels you're left with the impression that it has little history outside of one preserved tourist block.
Debt to GDP ratio of 107%, only Greece, Italy, and France are worse. Even Spain and Portugal are better! It is frightening how many member states are over 80% when they are supposed to be at 60% or better.
It's fine to shit on things but I have service almost everywhere and I take the train often with usually few issues aside from works on the tracks. Let's not blow up issues, it takes away from what we should focus on.
Well... there are worse places than Belgium for sure, and as a foreign citizen who has been living in Belgium for about a decade I think it's a reasonably well functioning country for west European standards, but I wouldn't use either SNCB/NMBS as an acceptable example as I'm not sure I have even had a single train be on time in the last few years (well I don't take the train much anymore for obvious reasons, but I still have to do it a few times a year) and cell service is absolutely not as good as it should be for such a small and dense country.
And my experience is only with Flanders which is basically one large city, I can only imagine how it is in the less populated areas of Wallonia or Limburg.
But I absolutely think that nuclear is a good option for such a small and dense country. Taking over the plants as they are nearly decommissioned is a stupid move though, but you can't expect anything sensible from this government.
That's fair, I have plenty of international coworkers and I think (and from what I hear from them), that Belgium is decently welcoming, at least in large cities.
I do take the train quite often as I said, anything on large axes is usually fine (Brussels - Charleroi, Brussels - Antwerp, etc) but yeah smaller lines are usually struggling some more.
I wish we had more ambitious governments in general, not only in terms of energy but also in the (bio)tech scene, which used to be touted as our great strength (we do have a lot of pharma companies though).
While we've been agonizing over Age Verification (real or planned), Greece has apparently introduced a ban on anonymity on social media. I'm not liking where the world is headed, but I have no idea how to push back against it.
It all depends on how you define "social network". We had BBS and forums that operated much like "social networks" in the mid 90s. I don't think being "the first social network" is particularly interesting or noteworthy.
The dissolvable tablets completely fix a runny nose for me. Much better than any nose spray, which tend to irritate the nose and lead to chronic runny nose if taken for too long.
When I go out drinking with my pharmacist buddy, we take NAC before going out. He swears it makes hangovers less likely. I can't say I've noticed that particular effect, but I do seem to sleep a bit better on those nights.
Interstingly, a recent conversation [1] between Hank Green and security researcher Sherri Davidoff argued the opposite. More GenAI generated code targeted at specific audiences should result in a more resilient ecosystem because of greater diversity. That obviously can't work if they end up using the same 3 frameworks in every application.
I love Hank, but he has such a weird EA-shaped blind spot when it comes to AI. idgi
It is true that "more diversity in code" probably means less turnkey spray-and-pray compromises, sure. Probably.
It also means that the models themselves become targets. If your models start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability, how're you gonna patch that?
> start building the same generated code with the same vulnerability
This situation is pretty funny to me. Some of my friends who arent technical tried vibe coding and showed me what they built and asked for feedback
I noticed they were using Supabase by default, pointed out that their database was completely open with no RLS
So I told them not to use Supabase in that way, and they asked the AI (various diff LLMs) to fix it. One example prompt I saw was: please remove Supabase because of the insecure data access and make a proper secure way.
Keep in mind, these ppl dont have a technical background and do not know what supabase or node or python is. They let the llm install docker, install node, etc and just hit approve on "Do you want to continue? bash(brew install ..)"
Whats interesting is that this happened multiple times with different AI models. Instead of fixing the problem the way a developer normally would like moving the database logic to the server or creating proper API endpoints it tried to recreate an emulation of Supabase, specifically PostgREST in a much worse and less secure way.
The result was an API endpoint that looked like: /api/query?q=SELECT * FROM table WHERE x
In one example GLM later bolted on a huge "security" regular expression that blocked , admin, updateadmin, ^delete* lol
As a general hobbyist-type, I can attest to the above post, it is 100% valid and accurate.
This entire process is something anyone can test and reproduce; I was definitely steered towards both vercel and supabase by gemini. It isn't model specific.
A tale as old as time. And hard to defend against. Did the sellers know their plugins were going to be abused? Is there some kind of seller liability in cases like this?
I think a big proportion of them wouldn't 'know'. At least in my experience considering selling out the partners or buyers will try to keep a good image. But there are smells. Maybe the partner has their HQ in place that is a hotspot for intelligence/security industry or the deal is at such a price that it would only make sense if the asset as purchased for nefarious purposes.
In what way is gofmt remotely comparable to a JVM?
In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.
gofmt isn’t really comparable to the JVM, but it is a really strong expression of the opinionated tooling GoLang has.
While gofmt is “just” a formatting tool. The interesting part is that go code that doesn’t follow the go formatting standard is rejected by the go compiler. So not only does gofmt not have knobs, you can’t even fork it to add knobs, because the rest of the go ecosystem will outright reject code formatted in any other way.
It’s a rather extreme approach to opinionated tooling. But you can’t argue with the results, nobody writing go on any project ever worries about code formatting.
I don’t believe the Go compiler would reject unformatted code.
The compiler has its own set of rules for what it views as syntactically correct code, but these rules have nothing to do with gofmt’s formatting rules.
For example, it’s the compiler and not gofmt that dictates that you must write a curly brace only on the same line of an “if” statement. If you put it on the next line, you don’t have unformatted code - you have a syntax error.
However, the compiler doesn’t care if you have too much whitespace between tokens or if you write your slice like []int{1, 2,3,4}, but gofmt does.
We could say the rules of the compiler and gofmt don’t even overlap.
They do worry, they just can't do anything about it. Like the fact that error handling code takes at least three lines no matter how trivial it is. I'm sure error handling would not be critisized nearly as much if it didn't consume so much vertical space and could fit in one line, which go compiler does allow.
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