The previous government didn't stop the shutdown planned 40+ years ago (due to a national referendum), in part because the owners (Vattenfall) said it's not economically feasible to run them anymore without subsidies. It's complex.
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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.
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.
Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.
Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines.
On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.
Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.
Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.
In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.
There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?
There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)
This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics.
Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.
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.
https://birdwatchingbuzz.com/do-windmills-kill-birds/
Interestingly the article claims that the power lines that connect the wind mills kill more birds than the wind mills themselves.
On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.
The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.
Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.
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...
Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.
I should have said they will not insure fully for the consequences of the disaster, in particular not long term effects. Nuclear has limited liability and does not need to cover the full cost of a disaster.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
Nuclear is NOT liable for a major nuclear disaster. No insurance would cover it. So I don't know where you got your knowledge from but it is not based on fact.
Edit: OK I should have been clearer. They are liable like everyone else. They have (unlike solar installations I suspect) strict liability which means the damaged person does not have to prove fault. However, the amount of liability is limited (in time and amount) and the state takes over. This is what I was referring to with they don't have liability (admittedly incorrect the way I wrote it).
Source:https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
The article you linked says that TEPCO paid out USD ~65 billion after Fukushima, but it was insured only for USD ~804 million.
Naturally what happened is that the government didn't want to be without electricity, so to prevent bankruptcy TEPCO was nationalized. This is the typical scenario for nuclear power: profits are privatized while losses are socialized.
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.
Anyway, what you asked for; here are the high level notes of the insanity. There are lots of insane but largely inconsequential things that I won't focus on.
Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Because of that: Shuts down functioning nuclear power plants "in the name of the environment".
Attempts to replace plannable nuclear power with wind power. ("It produces the same number of GWh annually.")
Ridiculous. Of course they do.
> Shuts down nuclear power.
You don't know what you are talking about. It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power. A majority of the parties in the parliament has supported this for decades.
Despite that. The government hasn't actively closed down nuclear power. Shut downs have been decided based on the economics of running the plants.
And don't start about the "effektskatten" (a tax on nuclear energy in Sweden), it's older than the green party.
You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
A 1980 referendum where the three options were
1. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible.
2. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible. Work on reducing electricity use (by e.g. stopping new homes from being built with electric heating), invest in renewable power, and nationalize power generation to be able to control its future.
3. Decommission the nuclear power within 10 years.
So, it's no wonder that "Decommission the nuclear power" won that referendum. Anyone who brings up this referendum as a reason to decommission nuclear power 40 years later is being disingenuous.
And because these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices with unemployment as a result, thus both undermining employment and welfare, it actually violates what the winning proposal stipulated in the referendum.
Furthermore the tax on nuclear power was massively increased three times as consequence of influence of the two green parties, Center party and the Green Party, 2006, 2008 and 2015, and the same time subsidizing renewables, thus making nuclear power not economically sustainable. There was even a referendum in parliament about these latest shutdown with only one vote difference. No, it was intentional.
No they have not. Sweden has been a net exporter of electricity every year since 2010. There is no electricity deficit in Sweden.
Prices have increased because we've become more integrated with the European electricity market. Not because electricity production is lower or more expensive. The energy companies make unprecedented profits because they are able to sell cheaply produced electricity at expensive rates.
The last year prices have increased because of the energy/economic warfare waged between the EU and Russia.
The idea that a couple of Swedish nuclear reactors could alter the whole European energy market significantly is ludicrous.
Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The Swedish green party rejects nuclear. The parent commenter hasn't expressed a rejection of renewables.
Anyway, one can perceive a rejection of a particular energy source as "insane", especially if they are a green party who claim the rise in CO2 levels is the world's most pressing crisis.