I think a better analogy would be an old gas boiler.

Worst case for a car is that you break down on the side of the road (or I guess the brake lines give out).

Worst case for an old unmaintained gas boiler is that your house explodes. I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Edit for the downvoters: A properly maintained old gas boiler will probably be fine for longer than its designed lifetime. Also here's some sources for the cracked concrete: https://fanc.fgov.be/nl/dossiers/kerncentrales-belgie/actual...

In light of that, planning for their decommissioning is very sensible I would say.

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modo_mario 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>I would put the risk of old NPPs with cracks in their 40 year old concrete more on the gas boiler side.

Are you referencing something specific that isn't bullshit?

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jcattle 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Tihange and Doel have had incidents and significant maintenance downtime related to issues with concrete.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Belgian-outages-...

	▲	modo_mario 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		So we should burn more gas for some decades because of the ceiling of a backup system in the nonnuclear part of the plant? Is this like when Van der Straeten with obviously no ulterior motive whatsoever decided we needed to shut them down over the ultrasonic scanning of those vats that nobody else does? Knowing this country we'll drain a shitload of money trough a bunch of committees. Do feasibility studies of nonsensical shit and then eventually fix and improve support of the ceiling anyway whilst the backup system keeps working ...but at 10 times to cost, in a slow way and a couple years later than one would expect.

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mpweiher 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

NPPs have actually gotten more reliable over time.

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Tade0 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Worst case for a car is the approximately ten people who will die today in the US alone due to the poor state of their, or someone else's vehicle.

I believe the downvotes might be from you downplaying the danger of a badly maintained car.

	▲	jcattle 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yea, fair point. Maybe there just isn't a good analogy for a more than 40 year old NPP. Maybe an old NPP is just an old NPP.

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andrepd 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Back in reality though coal and gas and oil actually kill many tens of thousands of people every year in Europe alone, while nuclear is demonstrably, objectively safer (HBO scaremongering series notwithstanding).

It's actually a great analogy you make, because what you portray as the "car that at worst might break down" is actually the thing that kills 1,500,000 people every year (yet many people seem to take as just a fact of nature).