Belgium has long since said goodbye to its original goal of phasing out nuclear power in 2025, and the country will keep two reactors in operation for many years to come. For another, however, the end is now final: Tihange 2. The reactor has achieved dubious fame in the past.
On Tuesday at 11:59 p.m. the time has come: Then Belgium’s most controversial nuclear reactor will be shut down after exactly 40 years of operation. German politicians and opponents of nuclear power speak of a great success. They fought for years to get rid of the Tihange 2 pile some 50 kilometers from the German border. Walter Schumacher from the Aachen Action Alliance against Nuclear Energy reports that some people around him did not believe in the shutdown until the very end. The retired mathematician has been campaigning for years for the end of the “rift reactor” near Liège, as opponents of nuclear power call it.
Experts had already found thousands of hair-thin cracks in the reactor pressure vessel in 2012. In his words, Schumacher and the other Aachen activists feared that the Tihange 2 kiln could “burst” and then pull a radioactive cloud to the east “that will destroy Aachen”. Bad luck also threatened from a Belgian reactor of the same design near Antwerp. This finally went offline at the end of September.
With the shutdown of the two breakdown reactors, not only an era of fear comes to an end, but also more than a decade of legal disputes. Because Belgium initially allowed the “crack reactors” to continue without hearing the neighboring countries and without checking the environmental compatibility – illegally, as the European Court of Justice ruled, among others. In Germany, this met with criticism from the federal government, and opponents of nuclear power also protested in Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Not only North Rhine-Westphalia will be made safer by the end of the breakdown piles, as State Environment Minister Oliver Krischer (Greens) emphasizes. However, the Green politician sees a drop of bitterness. Because Belgium actually wanted to phase out nuclear power completely in 2025 and thus follow the German example. This was provided for in an exit law passed in 2003. But the Ukraine war and the energy crisis have also brought about a turning point in the neighboring country. Horrendous gas and electricity bills and fears of widespread power outages prompted Prime Minister Alexander De Croo’s government to pull the emergency brake.
Belgium is governed by a “traffic light plus” made up of Liberals, Greens, Social Democrats and Flemish Christian Democrats, where the nuclear debate was at times even more heated than in Germany. At the beginning of the year, the basic agreement followed: The Brussels government agreed with the nuclear park operator Engie to let the two youngest reactors – Tihange 3 and Doel 4 – run for ten years longer, i.e. until 2035 have humps.
Tihange 3 is also not without controversy. For example, in October 2022, the kiln was unexpectedly taken off the grid. According to the operator, the reason was a drop in pressure in one of the three steam generators. Tihange 1 is scheduled to be shut down on October 1, 2025.
First, however, the countdown to the breakdown pile Tihange 2, not far from the German border, has started. The block on the Maas river will be gradually shut down Tuesday from 6.30 p.m. and should then “go off the grid one minute before midnight”, as a spokesman for the operator Engie says. In Aachen, the shut-down of the reactor two weeks before Carnival put everyone in a good mood. The motto of the celebrations announced by the opponents of nuclear power in the cathedral city also sounds carnivalesque. It reads: “Tihange two: over and over.”
