The electricity prices are through the roof for other reasons (and have been for almost a year now) and are not related to Russia at all.
Correct!
> are not related to Russia at all.
Wrong!
The price increase has EVERYTHING to do with Russia... because the conflict has been ongoing for much longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30522164
Those trading energy knew of the energy related tensions between Russia and the west and hence were bidding high prices for these commidities in the futures markets.
I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial entities?
Simply put, Sweden and Norway share the Scandinavian mountain ridge which gives a lot of rain at altitude and dammable valleys; Finland is on the whole much flatter, so has less favourable conditions for hydro power.
> I have to do some reading, but my understanding was that the Finnish plant is using an alternate funding structure from many of the existing nuclear installations. Less direct subsidies or more risk directly on the commercial entities?
Haven't checked recently, but at a guess / from vague memory: Probably shoving off as much as possible of the financing onto the builder / owner, Rosatom (mainly via its Finnish "partners" / subsidiaries), but in the end backed up by State guarantees because who else would voluntarily/ is big enough. All of course dressed up in more or less convoluted arrangements as suitable to make it look a little better / less bad.
(What, me cynical?)
Yeah, I had Quebec in mind as a similar geography without the large mountains of the Rockies and Cascades. I didn't account for just how flat Finland is, and how high a big chunk of Quebec is. Interestingly at first they appeared similar, the high points are quite close. But looking at elevation profiles it was clear how misleading that can be.
It looks like I was a bit mixed up, the structure I was thinking of is called the Finnish Mankala system. Energy producers are owned by parties that bear the costs of operating the company. Owners receive shares of electricity at cost, any unwanted portion is sold by them into the Nordic market. This means that output is effectively contracted to each owner over the life of the plant. The private owners are mostly heavy industry with a high demand for base-load power, and hence low costs are critical for them.
FWIW the plant construction appears to be a fixed price contract with a consortium of plant suppliers: AREVA GmbH, AREVA NP SAS and Siemens AG, which are jointly liable for the obligations under the plant supply contract until the end of the plant unit's warranty period.