Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors.
In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!
If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.
Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.
The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.
In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.
This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".
The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.
If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.
Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch. China! Authoritarian alleged communists! That is what policy failure in the EU has led to.
1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.
2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).
3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/vattenfall-vill-forlanga-re...
No option available to continue with nuclear power
> The Moderates, the People's Party and the Social Democrats held separate negotiations to formulate a joint yes option with the implication that the reactors would be allowed to be used during their technical lifespan, which was estimated at 25 years. These negotiations finally broke down mainly because the Moderates could not accept the additional proposals: that the state or the municipalities would own the nuclear power plants and that so-called surplus profits from private production of hydropower would be withdrawn through taxation.
Translated from:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkomr%C3%B6stningen_om_k%C3%...
That was an interesting referendum. There were 3 options to vote for:
1. Nuclear power would be phased out
2. Nuclear power would be phased out, with added support for low income groups
3. Nuclear power would be phased out in 10 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Swedish_nuclear_power_ref...
But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-eu-german...
Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully history now.
We've had to ask you this repeatedly. That's not cool.
I think it's a waste that we've not maintained the reactors well enough to still have them able to run at a profit.
And generally that we've (the government, both sides) haven't done anything about it in the last 10-20 years when they had a chance to invest in alternatives (whether building new nuclear or other types of energy sources).
If it's just a matter of taxes then I'm sure it would be easy for the new government to remove them and start back up the old reactors - but obviously that's not the plan. Most likely it's all quite complex and lots of factors leading to this outcome.
Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.
I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors.
I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.
And they only have to pay to shut it down if a future government forces it to shut it down before the plant stops being commercially viable.
The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
Loan guarantees are actual money, especially if the builder defaults.
> The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
And in most default scenarios, the government wouldn't have to pay the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between the foreclosure sale price and the remaining loan amount.
> So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
First, Solar/wind projects are typically smaller. Less risky to do hundreds or thousands of small projects, spread out over country (or world). The chance of all the projects defaulting at once are small.
Second, one of the biggest risk to nuclear projects are government related. The risk that they might introduce expensive new regulations. Or that the general population (who are typically anti-nuclear) might vote a new anti-nuclear government into power. By having the current government guarantee the loans, future governments will be motivated to not mess with them.
Third, you can't always trust commercial funders to do what's best for the nation, especially from a national security perspective. They might (for example in Germany) decide to rely on cheap natural gas imports from Russia as the primary source of energy, assuming that Russia will always be a stable source of energy forever, and would never start randomly invading it's neighbors.
Well-run governments can borrow money much cheaper than private actors. Lower interest rates means a higher chance of success for a long-running project.
On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.
The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.
There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.
You also don't need to build unlimited hydro plants.
The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.
Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).
However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.
The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.
Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.
People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.
All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.
Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic
Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)
Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)
Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
I would love renewables as much as the next guy but there's simply not a chance that Sweden could sustain a winter with the current supply. Importing helps with survival but the prices are insane, since their neighbors are cold as well. Dispatchable or baseload energy is necessary, and thus nuclear is the only carbon neutral option. Sure, it's more expensive than solar panels midday in the desert, but the comparison is irrelevant.
Starting nukes with the hope of power in ten or fifteen years will not help keep anybody warm in the meantime.
Transmission lines ought to be quite a lot quicker to complete.
"Subsidies to nuclear had varied between €3.2bn and € 4bn between 2008 and 2019 but surged to (€6.3bn) in 2020 due to payments for early closures of nuclear power plants."
"In line with anticipations in the Commission Study, the financial aid to renewables in the EU27 is increasing at a low pace since 2015 to reach €78bn in 2019. Our preliminary estimations show a slight reduction in 2020 to around €77bn. Among the 14 identified subsidy instruments, the feed-in-tariff and feed-in premium schemes remain by far the MS preferred tools to promote RES technologies. They represented 79% of the total RES subsidies, i.e. €61bn in 2019"*
The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time.
I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users paying more than they would for new renewables.
I'm mostly convinced where you, or anyone else, lands on the matter, is heavily biased by preconceptions...
and generally tend to think we have the resources to do a many-pronged approach, and that success is less technology dependant and more dependant on the competence of governments and bureaucracies, and the people who constitute them.
So in fact my cost, as a consumer, is lower than it was.
You clearly wish this were not so.
Here in Finland we do. They can't coerce the rate payers as the customer is free to buy their electricity from whomever producer they want here and the only government subsidy is helping with the insurance.
edit: For example TVO at Olkiluoto
https://www.tvo.fi/material/collections/20221014135458/HnAXI...
On page 8 you can see that they have been producing cheaper electricity then the average nordpool area price for Finland for the last 10+ years. (and even before that but the graph starts at 2010). The difference is basically what their owners make as profits. TVO does not sell directly to end users. It only sells to its owners at production costs who can then flip that on the market if they feel like it or cover their fixed price contracts (or just use it themselves for the owners that are big energy heavy industrial companies)
Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.
At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.
I was thinking more about pollution or nuclear waste management. A coal plant that just buys coal at market prices and sells electricity at market prices isn't paying for externalities unless they're taxed on CO2 and particulate emissions.
> I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.
You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."
So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world!
Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
Just this summer the French had to shut down half of their nuclear reactors because of the heat
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
This is mostly an issue for ("partially") landlocked countries. Those french reactors use rivers for cooling. Also the summer period neatly coincides with the yearly maintenance period, so...
In my neck of the woods (50 deg North, not as North as Sweden), I get a reasonable amount of sunlight. Let's just imagine that 1/3 of the days during winter I get 5 hours of sunlight. I'm going to ignore electricity and just concentrate on heating, because heat is way easier to store. From my meter readings, in the depths of winter I seem to use an average of 2.2kW-worth of gas, most of which goes to the boiler for hot water and heating. Some of it would go to cooking, but I'm guessing not much.
So, if I wanted to collect that much heat from solar, assuming I get 5 hours every 3 days, I would need to collect 2.2×72/5 = 32kW while the sun is shining and then store it for use later. Sunlight is just over 1kW per square metre, so I'd have to have about 32 square metres of parabolic mirrors concentrating light onto a black water pipe. The South-facing side of my house is easily that big.
Then storing it. Water is extremely good at storing heat. Water stores 4194J for each kilogram for each degree centigrade in temperature. If I were to get five 2.4m×1.2m×10cm polyurethane foam insulation boards, I could build an insulated box capable of taking a 2000l hot water tank, which could be put in a shed or something. If that were heated to 90 degrees centigrade, it would be able to return 80kWh of heat before dropping to 55 degrees (which is the lowest acceptable temperature to run a heating system at, before you get Legionnaire's disease). The insulation would lose about 250W, which is small compared to the heat demand from the house.
Yes, there would be times when the stored heat runs out. A sensibly-designed system should hopefully be able to fall back onto the existing gas-fired heating when that happens.
So, these numbers are all very feasible. It'd cost a fair bit to achieve, but it would probably pay itself back within a couple of years, which is way quicker than PV. One of the key factors in that is efficiency and cost. Collecting solar heat is very efficient and uses cheap materials. PV is expensive and still not very efficient.
There are three main requirements for such a project: Enough sunlight when it is cold (and you can adjust the collecting surface area to compensate, so this basically means anywhere outside the polar circles). Enough space to put all the stuff (and as a corollary enough patience from family members to put up with it). And finally a suitable control system that pipes the heat around in an intelligent way, prevents the water tank being over-heated, falls back on gas when necessary, and satisfies the various building standards laws.
On the short term we might need something before those nuclear plants are up and running.
mantra is cheaper.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale.
You are exactly right - this is the only way.
They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane.
Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden
Surely, you know that wind power has had a lot of trouble expanding in Sweden due to huge opposition from every community against building wind turbines on their land. Everyone likes the idea of wind power until they try to build a huge turbine on their backyard.
Sun power, in Sweden, in winter, is clearly not going to cut it... even in the southern areas that still get a little bit of sun in winter, you don't get nearly enough power.
Hydropower is great and Sweden produces lots of it, but again, highly unlikely it can build new damns with the current regulations.
The only options left seem to be coal and nuclear. I hope you don't propose to just use coal.
Nuclear power, while expensive to build, is reliable and plenty. No one proposing that it should be one of the options for countries like Sweden is insane.
Build all the solar, wind whatever you want. Doing so while ignoring the low return on energy security alone is a fools errand.
I’ve sat through meetings where carbon credits have been touted as the greatest weapon to transition the world away from fossil fuels. Carbon credits.
I’ve heard very reliable stories from China about business entities solely set up to generate unbelievable volumes of carbon credits to take advantage of this accounting trick.
I think the opposition you see is to the counterproductive moves of the past two or three decades where enormous amounts of money have been thrown at present renewable strategies and the world is worse off from an energy perspective.
Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.
They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
Enerhodar is not the only example. World war two ended roughly 77 year ago. The US civil war was less than 160 years ago.
It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.
Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues:
In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...
Perhaps if we account for an additional unexpected half year of delay for every year that passes, we might see it in operation in Spring 2024?
To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.
Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place.
But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW.
40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
Militarily they are a liability too.
Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.
Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.
That's a strawman. There is energy transfer to all these places, but the capacity is limited in each case.
Yes, local electricity bill would go up but if the price is often extremely low, selling some for higher price is a net win. Ie this is why we have trade as concept in the first place.
That said, the coalition also wants to improve the transmission lines.
Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the total electricity bill. We got a really good network but it does come with a cost.
Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?
---
[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/08/09/watch-heres-ho...
If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.
This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.
This feels like your splitting hairs because the root cause is ultimately the same: if it wasn’t necessary then it wouldn’t be profitable.
Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market.
A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plant, and out of hundreds of hours operated during this year something like 1-5 hours were not matched by equal or more electricity being exported than it produced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgGy0Vhgt7E
In Swedish, sadly without subtitles, but an amazing overview of the Swedish electrical system.
Logical fallacy
To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.
Why the electricity is expensive is because the electrical grid is connected to northen europe and the expensive prices there makes the prices also goes up in Sweden because it is the same market.
https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...
Short Version is here - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263861/download
Pessimistic scenario: A mix of mostly fossil fuels (natural gas) and wind power by 2050.
For those interested. An overview of the energy in Sweden. https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/Home.mvc?ResourceId=20876...
If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.
Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.
I'm not saying it should be an unregulated free market - we've seen those don't work (exactly because of the externalities). But this does not mean there cannot be regulated markets and partial markets. The grid is infrastructure that shouldn't be run as a company, but production and storage capacity can be bought from markets as long as the grid rules factor in the externalities.
Read: You cannot even run this as an unregulated market, it wouldn't work. That requires every company having its own electricity grid, and for example the possibility that your house has 10 different power connectors available, so you can actually choose which one to pick. That is conceptually broken. And just the grid as infrastructure doesn't work, either, because of reasons outlined above.
Maybe forcing the idea of a market on everything is a dogma which we should eradicate out of our heads, the sooner the better.
https://kristdemokraterna.se/download/18.715f6f45183890627fc...
Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
Surprisingly, this argument is wrong. I have once verified the math for replacing all of vehicles in Germany with electric vehicles. Charged with 100% solar. The required surface area for solar farms would be about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded (used typically in personal cars, AFAIK freight and public transport run on diesel without such additive).
But yeah, according to EU studies a zero-emission grid with nuclear for base load is way cheaper than without it.
To be fair, that is a metric fuckton of land to start with. In the end there's only so many watts per square meter available and a physical limit on conversion efficiency, so you eventually have to expand outwards to to compensate for ever growing demand + land used for battery capacity (which may or may not be negligible). Meanwhile population increases also keep continuously driving up the scarcity of land.
Sounds like an interesting calculation though, do you still have any notes on that?
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
> France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers.
It's just an conservative artificial limit set to ensure that Nuclear is indeed the most ecological source of power since it even has higher standard than anything else.
In case the power is really needed, this limit could be lifted. Oh, this is exactly what happened https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-asn-nuclear-reg...
Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.
Ocean temperatures are already on the rise and causing havoc.
If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/
https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...
In particular, nobody back then anticipated how quickly solar PV prices would drop.
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...
Don't get me wrong, I very much support renewables. I just don't see how renewables could supply our entire energy demand without sufficient energy storage capacity. That's why I think a hybrid solution that includes nuclear power plants is the way to go.
Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever.
the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient.
gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power.
why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?
someone's not telling the truth in this story.
The fact that it is not evenly distributed is a real concern, though.
I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs. I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.
We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)
Nuclear energy is expensive, nuclear power is cheap.
Or put another way: Sun shine at noon is free. Sunshine as midnight isn't.
Have you been to Sweden in winter? What sunshine are you talking about?
Geothermal is not having a heyday because it depends on the same sort of expensive-to-operate steam turbines as nukes do, so is uncompetitive.
Anytime steam turbines have to compete with no steam turbines, the steam turbines tend to lose.
At the moment, existing nukes can still be operated at competitive marginal cost, neglecting original capital cost, and carefully not counting continuing subsidies in opex. As renewables costs continues on down, even just nukes' subsidized opex will be unsustainable.
The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the number of wind turbines is tiny. In the Gothenburg area I'm aware of maybe 10 (only one is really close).
Sweden (unlike Denmark or Germany) never really invested in renewables. If they would have invested in wind like those countries (and let the north south connections go to rot) they would be fully renewable already. I suspect the 40B would also pay for enough wind to achieve that goal.
The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability. Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
> The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)
Actually this year many countries were pushing energy to France were most nuclear plants were not operational for maintanance and heat.
> The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability.
Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
Or are you saying it was because of the introduction of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Fund? I would argue that paying for waste storage should be part of the operating cost (just as CO2 costs should be covered by coal operators btw).
>Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.
You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
> The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.
HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
> The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.
What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
> In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.
That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
> Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.
Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
Both statements are true.
They weren't commercially viable because if the extra taxes the government introduced.
So yes they were shut down because they were too expensive, and yes the government indirectly shut them down by making them too expensive.
This is not in any way in contradiction to what I'm saying. In fact: this supports my case. Because the amount of nuclear power generation is down, prices surge. This is my point. Your point was the opposite, remember? More nuclar power will increase prices?
> Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)
If you read what I said, I said that nuclear power was artifically made inviable because of extra charges and taxes. It was perfectly viable and economically sound before these.
> You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?
Right, because the political climate is such in Sweden that there is risk in investing in this, there won't be any interest in investing in this area. I said this as well. A free market would work here but we don't have one. The reason for government guarantees at this point is as an offset to the perceived political risk. A nuclear powerplant is a 20-40 year investment and if there's a very large risk that a populist government were to negate this in 5-10 years, then noone wants to invest in it. This is where we are.
> HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?
Losses are part of the problem, yes more investment here is needed but this is not the biggest problem. Another commenter here mentioned the fact that because there isn't enough capacity to _receive_ the transfers, they can't be made. This is to do with the lack of inertial reserve(?) (svängmassa) after having switched off so many large powerplants over the years.
> What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.
I'm going to have to call that 60% number.
The consequences are visual (i.e.: ugly), noice, birds as well as the fact that they are niether degradable nor recyclable because of the types of material needed. Do note, though, that I am in no way anti wind power.
> That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.
Right. So you need batteries, we need improved tech in that department, someone has to make them and this requires a number of let's call them "troublesome materials." "I just need to store that energy" is as reasonable a thought as: we just need to feed them, about starving people. That just-word there is quite powerful.
> Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.
Well I am not one of them. You started out with the big I-word here and it is my honest opinion that it is better served the other way around, and for these reasons: a number of the problems we have in sweden with the power (and heat) generation is to do with the fact that we did turn away from nuclear power. The same can be said about Germany and both for the same reason: ideologically (or at least populistically) driven policies.
I'm not in love with nuclear power in the slightest. But it is one of the least bad solutions so we must really put away ideologically driven dreams and deal with reality. This is in regards to Sweden's current nuclear technology, which is to say, really old tech as it's basically from the 60:ies. Quite a lot has happend since and saying no to that without understanding the complexities and nuances to this and because Someone Puleaze think of the ch... environment? That's just poor judgement.
Bulding more wind when it is not blowing in the winter does not help. Should we freeze at -10C for days until there is wind again?
FWIW, units 1 and 2 at the Finnish Olkiluoto NPP posted a capacity factor of 92,8% for the year 2021.
What we need is a mix, but thinking that Wind can solely solve things are a bad idea, especially considering the very limited amount of minerals required and what is available.
What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities?
Just like Russia is playing "games" around the Ukranian nuclear plant? What's to stop that being used as the new threat? We won't turn your gas off, we'll threaten your nuclear plants?
Genuine question.
For most of Europe, the main answer is membership in NATO.
Nothing, unless you yourself have leverage. Every resource or dependency is a potential weakness. The idea is to be able to say "ok, if you bomb our fission plant, we'll shut off your fresh water supply."
It's all a huge game of chess.
Clearly some actors are willing to throw the board across the room
In which case, why are 'we' considering creating that weakness?
I understand there is a strong wave behind nuclear right now, but it does feel like we're just creating the instruments of another, different, mess.
No? People play "chess" all the time without sitting down at a board. You're twisting the metaphor.
> Clearly some actors are willing to throw the board across the room
And like I said, there would be consequences for that.
> In which case, why are 'we' considering creating that weakness?
Having a large body of fresh water is a weakness. Maybe we should send it all away to another country...?
> I understand there is a strong wave behind nuclear right now, but it does feel like we're just creating the instruments of another, different, mess.
The mess has already been created. It's called an enormous population of 8 billion people. How do you produce all the things they need without destroying the planet? There are more existential issues at hand than "well, nuclear is a perfect energy source, but people who don't like us might hurt our energy production so we should just do ..."
Do what instead? Any power source can be attacked. I don't even get your position here. The only way to mitigate attack is complete distribution. Solar is great for that, but unfortunately unbelievably underpowered to drive the entire productive system. If you want a happy medium, then smaller, modular nuclear reactors would be the way to go.
Nuclear fission is clean energy.
> Georgia Power announced tonight that fuel load into the Vogtle Unit 3 reactor core has begun at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Ga. The fuel load process marks a historic and pivotal milestone toward startup and commercial operation of the first new nuclear units to be built in the U.S. in more than three decades.
"Public credit" for these massive corruption festivals does not lead to good results.
The money that will be spent on these new reactors would buy a hell of a lot more wind power than these nukes could produce. But money for renewables would not go into the pockets of right-wing blueblood Swedes, which seems to be what matters to the incoming government.
When the nukes are mothballed early, every kWh they ever produced will, instantly, have actually cost much more than had been reckoned, as the fixed costs are amortized over fewer total.
If you think I'm exaggerating, remember when the Royal Statistical Society asked "if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" and 47% of Conservative MPs and 77% Labour MPs got the answer wrong. Many technical people cannot even fathom this, and tend to assume that people who cannot answer such questions must be severely mentally impaired in general. That is completely wrong; you have lots of people who are near geniuses verbally but incapable of or unwilling to do quantitative thinking.
Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.
In your fantasy land a housing crisis is impossible!
The decent answer is that housing will be built there are enough construction materials to build them from. So a housing shortage will never happen.
What, Britain has housing shortage? Did they run out of clay to make bricks? Did they run out of buyers? Did they run out of money, while housing prices rose 10x? Did they run out of Land while 97% of the land is not built on? what could it be?
I thought this should be clear to everyone today, when energy price whent up 10x because yoy can print euros but can't print jeoules of energy or natural gas.
Renewables and nuclear use different resources and manufacturing capacities.
Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
renewables will provide for 80% of Germanies energy needs by 2030, and close enough to 100% in 2050.
There does not seem to be nearly enough construction of pumped storage or battery to cover the unevenness of German wind power. In fact, their prices have gone negative repeatedly in the past, which is not in fact a good thing. (OMG help, we'll pay anyone to take this power before the grid blows up!)
that's not how that works.
also:
Dunkelflaute is 0.5% - 1.5% per year and only very rarely for longer than 24h. peaker power plants are turned off most of the time today and a combination of those and decentralized battery storage will easily buffer Dunkelflaute in Germany.
The idea is that the hydrogen can then be used in existing gas power plants.
By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.
however back then Germany was between a rock and a hard place for our energy supply and we simply added a new supply channel, in addition to US LNG and Saudi and Qatari LNG.
It's reasonable to keep ICE power plants around as an emergency backup; if you have to use them for a week in January or when infrastructure breaks for whatever reason it's not the end of the world. Ideally things would run smoothly enough that they'd never be used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
in my book 98.5% easily fits the bill of "close to 100%"
so the answer is exactly what we do today: have a reserve capacity. part of that may even be traditional peaker power plants that remain turned off most of the year just like today.
I'd be curious about climate data on the distribution of Dunkelflaute duration, by region.
The nuclear exit was supported by the population and not decided against them by politicians.
And to your criticism: A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers. Are they allowed do decide for the country? Do they have an idea about nuclear topics?
Most of the time people who wrote this argument have no concept what nuclear waste actually looks like.
Have you actually seen what nuclear waste looks like?
It is a solid substance, it doesnt go anywhere. Waste is compact, It fits in a small warehouse. Its in a radiation proof container and doesnt kill anyone who isn't trying to eat it. Of you leave and come back in 100 years thos nuclear waste will be exactly where you left it.
Instead of generating this nuclear waste that we can store, transport, or handle in any way we please.
We have replaced nuclear capacity with coal and gas.
Generating billions of tons of CO2. That cannot be stored. There is more CO2 produced ina year that we could fit in every gas canister himanity has ever produced. Also a gas canister doesnt stay sealed for very long by itself. Every attempt at economic carbon capture has not produced very much so far.
> A lot of politicians in germany are lawyers
Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
Yes, it has numerous forms. Most high-level radioactive waste is stored in dry cask storage. Until you destroy the cask and the things in it, it's pretty safe. But if you keep too much at one place it becomes a great target for terrorists. If you put them below the surface you must find conditions which doesn't degrade the cask.
Medium and low-level radioactive (dry) waste is often stored in plastic bags in normal steel barrels. When they rust through, you have a big problem. And steel barrels tend to rust faster than radioactive waste decays. Germany put a lot if these barrels into the former mine Asse and had to get it back at really high cost after saline water entered the storage location. After that there was even more waste to store because you need new barrels and have to store parts of salt from the mine as well. So Germany practically had a nuclear waste storage. It didn't work out so well, so people there are skeptical when someone else says it's not a problem.
And then there are radioactive liquids in storage tanks. The only solution I have heard so far is to dilute them so that they can be dumped into the sea. That may work for small quantities of waste, but if it's done globally, we have a problem.
> Same here, and I think thats precisely the problem - there are few scientists and technical proffeshions in government. Like a huge chunk of human society is not present in decision making.
I just wanted to say that a formal degree doesn't necessarily qualify you more on the subject and I don't like someone saying "you haven't studied this shut up". I judge people by their arguments, not by their title.
But I think more expertise among politicians can never hurt.
How about with their very friendly neighbors across the Baltic Sea who are about to finish a facility for exactly this purpose? https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
Even ignoring this, pearl clutching about the nuclear waste storage problem without directly contrasting it with the CO2 waste problem is highly problematic. Nuclear waste is a contained, tractable problem even if challenging. We barely even know where to begin with tackling the problem of removing gigatons of CO2 from the high atmosphere.
More people die every year from radiation from coal, excluding accidents, than have died from nuclear (including accidents) since the beginning of time.
And France is still building their nuclear waste dump site not that far from the border. Many also have a problem with this.
Can’t see that getting any better climate wise
Relying on hyperbole like this undermines your own argument.
> Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible since these energy sources are variable. Critics of 100% RE systems like to contrast solar and wind with ’firm’ energy sources like nuclear and fossil fuels (often combined with CCS) that bring their own storage. This is the key point made in some already mentioned reactions, such as those by Clack et al. [225], Trainer [226], Heard et al. [227] Jenkins et al. [228], and Caldeira et al. [275], [276].
> However, while it is true that keeping a system with variable sources stable is more complex, a range of strategies can be employed that are often ignored or underutilized in critical studies: oversizing solar and wind capacities; strengthening interconnections [68], [82], [132], [143], [277], [278]; demand response [279], [172], e.g. smart electric vehicles charging using delayed charging or delivering energy back to the electricity grid via vehicle-to-grid [181], [280]–[282]; storage (battery, compressed air, pumped hydro)[40]–[43], [46], [83], [140], [142], such as stationary batteries; sector coupling [16], [39], [90]–[92], [97], [132], [216], e.g. optimizing the interaction between electricity, heat, transport, and industry; power-to-X [39], [106], [134], [176], e.g. producing hydrogen at moments when there is abundant energy; et cetera. Using all these strategies effectively to mitigate variability is where much of the cutting-edge development of 100% RE scenarios takes place.
> With every iteration in the research and with every technological breakthrough in these areas, 100% RE systems become increasingly viable. Even former critics must admit that adding e-fuels through PtX makes 100% RE possible at costs similar to fossil fuels. These critics are still questioning whether 100% RE is the cheapest solution but no longer claim it would be unfeasible or prohibitively expensive. Variability, especially short term, has many mitigation options, and energy system studies are increasingly capturing these in their 100% RE scenarios.
They know the writing is on the wall, but profits can be good right up to the end.
The previous government had basically said the same thing. Neither will actually built anything in the near future.
It's true that in the winter it's a bit crap but in the summer the long days of the north are a boon. It doesn't need to be great in all times of the year to be "feasible" though since it's just one part of the production palette.
Sweden is after all located in one of the windiest places on earth.
Besides: Are they going to buy Uranium from Russia as the US are doing for their reactors?
Sweden has been anti-nuclear for several decades, and one of the laws that has been passed is to forbid Uranium extraction, even though Sweden has quite a bit in its soil.
So if this development is any sign, maybe they'll do away with that silly law as well and make it so Sweden doesn't have to buy it from someone else?
Also, Russia isn't the largest exporter of Uranium.
„Russia is a significant supplier of both uranium and uranium enrichment services. According to the latest available data, the European Union purchased about 20 percent of its natural uranium and 26 percent of its enrichment services from Russia in 2020. The United States imported about 14 percent of its uranium and 28 percent of all enrichment services from Russia in 2021.“
https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-nuclear-power-industry-grap...