Sweden plans new nuclear reactors by 2035, will share costs
reuters.com
reuters.com
Here's the corresponding Reuters article, which I could read in its entirety:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-plans-new-nuc...
Key points:
- They intend to build the equivalent of two new conventional nuclear reactors by 2035 (presumably meaning something like 2000 megawatts of generating capacity, but it could come from small reactors).
- They intend to build the equivalent of 10 new conventional reactors by 2045.
The government has not yet announced what sort of funding model will be used to get the new reactors built.
Nuclear energy is a pretty sophisticated topic and I'll be honest, as someone with a degree in physics, who has worked on radiation shielding, and worked at DoE labs (in CS, not physics or engineering, but I was talking to those folks quite a lot given my background and worked on analyzing data), I'm not even confident enough to put my face to my statements. I'm not putting my credentials to boast, but to say that this is a threshold for "unqualified."
It's just too easy to get something little wrong which makes your whole belief collapse. I can tell you, I even see people on the pro-nuclear side make a lot of blunders that have meaningful changes (I've even seen this in shielding even when I have slides showing Geant4 simulations and the results are expected from the math). Nuclear is a pretty tough topic and requires a lot of nuance. Climate even more so. I know a lot of people have strong opinions on these topics but I hope those opinions also do not come with high confidence. A paywall to me suggests higher confidence. Plus is a weird move to advertise your substack. Advertise your domain expertise! That's your quality content.
Solar and wind are winning not because they are cheaper or more balanced for the grid but because you can buy off the shelf components, install them quickly and make it to profitability sooner. There's just a whole lot less time and risk.
If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.
I don’t find the argument that nuclear reactors could be regulated as windmills super compelling, but that’s just me.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Even using sources from a decade ago, pro nuclear sources like world in data couldn't find any credible sources to back that claim.
And solar and wind were just getting started a decade ago.
[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
-edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar.
I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects.
In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates.
I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive)
However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events.
[0]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095965261...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
However, be sure to dig into the methodology.
Data on death rates from solar and wind is sourced from Sovacool et al. (2016) based on a database of accidents from these sources.
We estimate deaths rates for nuclear energy based on the latest death toll figures from Chernobyl and Fukushima as described in our article here: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one:
https://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/cfen/CB1011025.html
(5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release)
I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.
I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.
Why not; what would be a better one?
Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost.
If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.
The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.
to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited.
By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. )
One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries.
So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
1. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/30/asia/futaba-fukushima-nuclear...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
Unfortunately they still seem to be all promise and no deliveries.
Good luck, if one of them shows up in the hands of Daesh or other religious-ideologically or political-ideologically disturbed minds.
Edit: Furthermore, small reactors produce more radioactive waste than big ones. Although the study I read was about conventional reactors, IIRC.
Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind.
The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
Damn ;), but they "waste" the lakes downstream by making them shallower by siltation over decades, not millenia, and "waste" the ecology and biology upstream by flooding the valleys they dam.
Neither would nuclear plants, if the world came to its senses and built breeder reactors: Their "waste" is fuel for other reactors.
> Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
Partly that, and partly (IMO in much larger part) due to scaremongering propaganda. Like you seem to have bought in to.
They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky).
They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.
Especially in the case of flooding, Fukushima style.
Volume and mass are just whatever they are. They don't matter.
The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance
It is no longer 2003. By 2030 it's likely that annual world production of battery storage will be 20-30 TWh. Today, we are getting close to 1TWh production per year.
Edit: just for example, take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits. There are multiple GW, currently, much more in the pipeline, and prices still have a long ways to fall on battery installations (grid assets are usually measured by power, to convert to energy multiply by 4 hours:
> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.
I don't see anyone making this weirdly-specific claim. However, it's widely acknowledged that sufficient battery storage to guarantee national grid-wide power on-demand, sufficient for a modern industrial economy, is not currently feasible, in both economic and practical terms.
If a large chunk of current grid investment in Texas, profit-drivej by independent investors, how could it not be feasible to continue this level of investment? Especially when costs are falling dramatically and production capacity for batteries is just getting started and is scaling at a tremendous rate that will result in a complete excess of battery capacity within the time period that we could only build a thousandth of the same amount of nuclear wattage?
What is the blocker on feasibility?
I’m not saying your claim about the rapid pace of building out battery storage is false - your claim is true. However, there is no currently-feasible way to run an advanced industrial economy on intermittent energy sources backed by chemical batteries. It may become technically feasible at some point in the future (never bet against human ingenuity in the long run), but it’s technically and economically impractical right now.
There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept.
So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.
You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China).
So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.
I would not consider that cheap. I would not consider that highly efficient. It is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough
> The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance
Nowhere did I say we weren't. They just simply aren't good enough for our needs. We can't get there without this intermediate step - and it _is_ doing good and helping humanity. But we're simply not there and won't be for at least a decade.
> take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits
You mean the Texas grid that keeps failing and sticking people with $1000 monthly power bills? Not a great example lol
Personally I think your timeline for storage is going to prove wildly conservative (we already have 5GW installed in CA, China is building capacity exponentially.) But even if you're right: these nuclear plants are going to come online right at the moment when storage makes them economically obsolete.
I do agree wind and solar are cheaper presently. But this is primarily because they're being deployed in the context of supplementing a fossil-fuel backed grid. Provisioning more wind and solar starts becoming much dicier when you start saturating the grid during hours of peak production. In theory, negative electricity prices will prompt people to provision storage and capture the free (cheaper than free!) energy. But in practice, energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles.
Nuclear, on the other hand, is one of the few carbon-free energy sources that is non-intermittent. The only others are geographically limited: hydropower and geothermal power.
Even more staggering is that from 2020 to 2021 solar+wind grew by ~15%.
recycled EV batteries could be a major source for cheap grid battery storage
It isn't about "nuclear and (wind+solar)" but about "nuclear and renewables": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38301796
> energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles
Those are composable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid
It makes a lot of sense for Sweden to buy nuclear, even if it is exceptionally pricy and slow to deliver, if they don't have better options. But the fraction of the world population in that situation is not large, either, so we shouldn't extrapolate from Sweden to too many other places.
1/ no new nuclear reactor since 1985, despite hydro being the best existing storage system for nuclear (hydro resources there are fantastic), and hydro remaining there the main source of electricity
2/ wind is very quickly gaining traction https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
3/ Some may remember the Forsmark'2006 near-miss ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forsmark_Nuclear_Power_Plant#J... ) and fight against this project.
Why does it have to be run at a profit? Surely it could be just like healthcare or the defence forces - never designed or intended to run a profit.
In the context of Sweden though, with social health care, and a modest military your question makes more sense. And of course as long as it has govt funding it doesn't need to make a profit, or even break even.
Once you look to private capital though, investors expect that capital to generate a return.
Assuming no govt subsidy yo provide that return, it has to come from an excess after operational expenses. (aka profit)
Requiring a resource to be sold at a profit ensures it goes to where it is most needed, and that it is used efficiently.
If your little tale was true, the USA would have cheaper and better healthcare than developed countries that have free healthcare.
That is not the case. Your little tale doesn't have to always be true, there are other ways of doing things in this world.
Population health starts with urban design that forces people to walk.
Running it as a for profit business results in Worse / Worse.
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
Genuine question. What kind of solar/wind installation could generate 2GW of power on demand (including when no wind or sun) and how much would that cost? is it even feasible with actual technology?
2GW of batteries attached to solar installations, spread over multiple sites, is quite common in 2023. What do you mean by "what kind"? Its just the normal kind.
Right now, batteries deployed on the grid cost $300-$500/kWh, and typically LFP batteries are designed to last for 5000-7000 cycles, and will have warranties for 15+ years. This places the cost of storing a MWh at between $42/MWh and $100/MWh. Solar costs vary based on location, but range from $20/MWh to $80/MWh. For places with high seasonal variation, sizing the install for daily storage, using the seasonal minimum of input, in some areas might double or triple the cost for a particular season. Nuclear costs vary widely by construction competence, but in the largely incompetent west costs are going to be far north of $150/MWh.
So for most areas, most of the time, solar+storage is going to be far cheaper than nuclear. But low insolation or high latitudes might make solar+storage more expensive than nuclear.
In the future, nuclear's prices will continue to rise very slowly, and solar and storage prices will continue to plummet at ridiculously fast paces. This is why solar and storage are winning.
For industrial processes that need heat, the storage options become even cheaper. And if the industrial site can be put somewhere with half-decent solar insolation, then the solar power can be directly connected without going through the grid, which means looping off that $60-100/MWh that utilities charge for the very very expensive grid transmission. We are just at the start of industry realizing what is possible with distributed renewables and thermal storage, and there is potential for drastically cheaper energy for energy intensive industry that be built at new sites.
This is why solar and storage are "winning" even if nuclear might be better for Sweden. And with the ever increasing deployment of EVs, people are going to be parking multiple days worth of their home's energy needs in their garage. People will soon realize just how cheap storage is, and how perhaps even their vehicles will act as grid storage, even if it's only though charging at selective times when energy is cheaper.
You can just open the circuit to disconnect a solar panel from the external load. The panel will get slightly warmer in full sunlight when it's not connected to a load, but there's no harm to it. Since there is no rotating mass or hot steam with accumulated energy in a solar farm, you can shut it down completely in seconds if necessary. Solar PV can safely go from 100% output to 0% faster than any other electricity source.
[1] https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/10-large-solar-pr...
In Germany, the right parties did block any project that had the smell of environment protection. And the pseudo-green clowns are no game changer.
Whereas when you report your wind farm or solar farm after 30 years you can take advantage the fall in component prices.
Even that apparently won't be enough to bring in the private contractors, however:
> "Guarantees are very important, but that won't be enough," Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said. "For this type of infrastructure it is going to require the state to take part and share the risk."
I'm not sure what that means, the loan guarantee already seems like quite a risk. Are they going to go for nationalization of the power sector or something like that?
Seems large parts already is nationalized. Vattenfall is a huge power company and is owned by the Swedish state.
A lawsuit that you lose is fine, one that is frivolous really isn't, in those cases even the attorneys may get sanctioned (by the judge, or, less commonly, by the bar to the point where if they keep it up they may end up being disbarred).
It will be years before the lawsuit gets to that point, and if you are willing to trade money for a delay, the prospect of having to pay 2x the money for the same delay is hardly a deterrent.
Again: it is your opinion that these are frivolous lawsuits, and that's fine. But there are probably just as many (or more) people that think that they are not.
A frivolous lawsuit is one that does not have merit, has no facts supporting it and usually isn't intended to be won. The lawsuit itself is the goal. These don't qualify as far as I'm concerned. Not even close.
As an example, the nuclear storage facility was delayed, and ultimately cancelled, because the geologic analysis had only established the stability of the ground for the next 800,000 years, and the lawsuit demanded that it be extended to several MILLION years into the future. ...and they WON.
Absolute INSANITY.
What is the problem exactly? Costs are often awarded in many jurisdictions.
Move to Houston next to numerous chemical plants that blow up from time-to-time and let me know how those utopian talking points without regulation works out.
The problem isn't NIMBY's or regulations, it's insurance costs.
Obstructionism is not a problem with nuclear in the US, basic construction competency and diagnostic competency most certainly is though.
For the nuclear energy industry, environmental justice considerations are relevant to every stage of the life cycle of nuclear energy.
https://www.bdlaw.com/publications/nuclear-energy-and-enviro...
That article has nothing at all to do with Vogtle or Summer, has zero concrete claims, and is at most speculation about how things might be different in the future, and how some vague approaches might be used to make sure the nuclear industry fits in to some hypothetical and similarly vague push for vague values.
I find it very odd how nuclear advocates cannot provide evidence for their claims, and often change the point.
Honestly, I find it kind of rude that you claim to be providing one thing but then provide something completely unrelated, and act as if you actually did have evidence for your claims. It's extremely damaging to discussion, why should I trust anything you say from here on out if you are so unreliable? It's a huge problem that I run into with nuclear advocates, creationists, and anti-vaxxers. There's dedication to the causes but no dedication to conversational norms or even the basic standards of honesty.
We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years. In my country nuclear (which we have none of) is just a dream, but often pushed with those having an agenda against renewables to muddy the discussion.
Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro. As in the price a consumer would have to pay per kWh. Not sure if that even takes into account the massive government subsidies to build it.
Renewables is just a fancy term for "energy whenever the sun shines or the wind blows". This is factually not always the case. We need energy that is available regardless. And that's where fossil fuel and nuclear excels. Fossil fuel's downside that it kills ~3 million people per year. Nuclear's downside that it scares (not kills) ~3 million people per year.
Well we will also need it in 15+ years.
The best time to plant a tree is 15 years ago, and that will still be true in 15 years. The world (hopefully) isn't going to blow up within the next 15 years, so there's no reason we shouldn't consider 15-years investments anymore.
Fossil fuels reserves are going to collapse in the coming decades; even if solar energy prices keep falling, it won't be enough to compensate; any given country has a fixed capacity for hydro power, and it's rather small.
Right now nuclear may not be the cheapest options. But in 15/30 years we're going to desperately wish we'd explored absolutely every realistic option we had.
Carbon capture economically speaking doesn't make anything desirable. We're essentially throwing money at making a problem go away, it's pure spending. So the cheaper, the better, and the sooner the better. Everything else is irrelevant.
So solar and wind are probably are a better bet, and intermittency/storage doesn't really matter.
There are only so many rivers you can dam, so much surface you can put solar panels on without taking away from agriculture, etc.
And a full-renewable approach also has huge risk, it relies on storage technology getting much better in the future, otherwise you need either fossil fuels or nuclear to cover dips. Diversifying probably makes sense.
Source? Quick internet searches seem to say we have more than 50 years left of coal, oil, and natural gas that we know we can extract. And that will expand as we find more and get better at extracting it.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-of-fossil-fuel-rese...
https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
To be clear: we do need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage. Just saying that, so far as I can tell, we're not going to run out of anything in the next 30 years.
What is the lead time in developing new fossil sources?
What is the time to profitability?
How long will there be political will to greenlight new developments?
Depending on those we might run out of the option to increase production of fossil fuels in less time than we have physical reserves for.
It's by far the most expensive power source in common use, and becoming less competitive with other sources every day [1]. This is quite a surprising choice for them to make in 2023.
[1] https://311mieruka.jp/info/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20data...
Hydro: 40 øre/kWh
Windmills on land: 40 øre/kWh
Solar on ground: 63 øre/kWh
Windmills in ocean: 69 øre/kWh
Solar on big roofs: 76 øre/kWh
Nuclear: 78 øre/kWh
Coal: 126 øre/kWh
In 2010, Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, opposed nuclear power because it would only come online "in 2021 or 2022".
That would've been great to have last year when gas generation went up an order of magnitude!
It's fast and cheap to deploy zillions of solar panels. It takes a bit longer to truck in the massive components of wind turbines and do a site install. We're already at 30% renewable production of all electricity worldwide. There isn't a compelling rationale for needing nuclear energy, more often it's individuals fixated on it because they want it. Business people or a nonprofit running an energy utility will look at the possibilities and the opportunity costs, and find nuclear isn't a very good fit given the alternatives apart from rare circumstances.
* fissile waste that lasts centuries (or more)
* potential for meltdown or other accidental release of radiation
* major military target, a threat not just for loss of generation but
for deliberate release of radiation (by attacker)Better than waste from carbon based power which can't even be contained in the short run.
> potential for meltdown or other accidental release of radiation
Releases less radiation than coal plants
> major military target, a threat not just for loss of generation but for deliberate release of radiation (by attacker)
If an attacker wants to release radiation they can just do it directly wherever they want instead of being limited by where a power plant is.
Besides safety concerns, the biggest impediment to nuclear is simple economics. These are massive, capital intensive projects, with very long timelines. I wish I could dig it up easily but in the nuclear thread the other day an engineer posted an interesting retrospective analysis of what sort of engineering projects were likely to go massively over time and budget. Guess what was at the top of the list.
While nuclear proponents would like to place blame solely on what they consider excessive regulation or by demonizing environmental activists, the reality is that investment dried up for nuclear because the bean counters saw the ROI and timeline was bad compared to alternatives.
When you ask this same faction how to fix that they'll say small modular reactors, etc. That would be great if it existed. It doesn't. People have been trying to make it work for decades, NuScale the latest. I was bullish on NuScale when they started; it really looked like they'd cracked the code. Now they're floundering too.
I would be ecstatic if someone creates these great SMR's that are economic, but I'm not holding my breath.
There's no doubt nuclear needs to be part of the future energy mix, but the idea that all we have to do is get aggressive with nuclear and our problems are solved is navie nonsense imo.
Do they just need a tad more leverage in material terms to ensure future moron governments' feet are held to the fire to the extent they cannot escape rare or what do you think is the ideal enforcement mechanism?
So I guess the dozens of military nuclear submarines and a dozen or so advanced aircraft carriers in the world are powered by unicorns and leprechauns?
I don't know the advanced mechanics of navy reactors, but something that generates 165 megawatts, while fitting inside a 360-foot-long, 35-foot-wide tube and still leaving room to house 130 people comfortably along with all their life support for weeks seems pretty usable as a small reactor. (the A1B reactor on the latest USN carriers takes things up to 700MW of thermal power.)
That's why they're cheap.
Here's a timely podcast on the matter from a very very favorable audience:
http://link.chtbl.com/wGGIOQ5_
For a more realistic view of the problems, I'd recommend this podcast:
https://xenetwork.org/ets/episodes/episode-209-end-of-the-nu...
Safety, waste, public opposition don't really rate as the reasons that we are not seeing more nuclear. It's just super hard to build and tends to make utilities go bankrupt. So if you're a utility CEO putting in an order for a nuclear reactor is basically suicide.
1) There is no established community / trade to build and maintain nuclear energy on a industrial stage. I live in the neighboring country (Norway), and the nuclear energy community here is pretty much 100% academic. There's are nuclear engineering, tech, etc. programs, so in the start we'd have to import almost all the workers - all while starting our own programs.
2) It's a very long-term commitment, takes what, 10-15 years from shovel in ground to energy production? Compare that to wind energy and similar. The countries that really need energy, are needing it now.
3) Many countries have long-term plans for energy, which were formed decades ago. This is the case of my country - they analyzed nuclear energy back in the 70s, and deemed it not suitable. They are still, almost 5 decades later, parroting the same strategy. "We will focus on renewable hydro, wind, and solar energy, and concentrate funding to those sources"
4) There's a non-trivial amount of political opposition - even though new tech is much, much more safe than the older plants. Nuclear is still big and scary, and some parties will vehemently oppose it - no mater what facts or findings you present to them. And it is very much a NIMBY thing...even those that want it, become a bit hesitant when it comes time to plan for places to put the plants, if it turns out to be too close to home.
[1]: http://solarcellcentral.com/images/avg_cost_of_energy.jpg
Some attempts weren't particularly enticing.
The EPR is a Gen3+:
One just started in Finland, and as a project it is a major failure. Nearly 4 times the budget, 12 years late... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Olkiluot...
Two of them run in China, they were five years late and 60% overbudget. One had a problem justifying to stop it for more than one year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Taishan_...
One is a WIP in France. It is massively late and overbudget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Flamanvi...
Two are a WIP in the UK, they already are (surprise!) late and overbudget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)#Hinkley_...
So this is pretty much something they had to announce to keep voters happy.
Whether it will happen in practice is another question.
I guess at some point someone will have to make a business plan that shows that it is also a good investment.
Neighbouring countries such as Finland have been more dependant on Russia and the imports from Sweden have increased because of cutting the Russian gas. This has had secondary effects on Sweden by increasing the electricity price.
Eh. Natural gas accounted for less than 5% of Finland's total energy consumption before Russia cut off the gas pipelines. And this was before Finland got a new floating LNG terminal (January 2023) and the new 1600 MW reactor came online (April 2023).
So now the goverment and vattenfall is working out an agreement where the state takes part of the risk (and profit, if any).
Coming from a right-wing government that has ideals of a market based economy, it's ... counterintuitive that this is the way they want to do it.
I think the relationship between the government and Vattenfall is heavily regulated so that they can't micromanage and have to set high profit goals for the company. It is probably required so that it does not interfere with market economy.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/vasterbotten/olofsson-varn...
They might have invested in nuclear if they didn't buy coal, couldn't have that.
Also, I think the largest cash deal in Swedish history is something that is just moving along together with the new coffee machine for the lobby, without political oversight.
The decision also went by the prime minister, although he at first disputed it:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maud_Olofsson
https://www.svd.se/a/Rxl708/drev-igenom-tva-av-sveriges-abso...
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/olofsson-vagrar-svara-pa-...
Since then subsidies have been agreed but costs continue to skyrocket. Only one plant is under construction and the time to operation has shifted from 5 years to 10 years.
Meanwhile pretty much all private sector interest in investing in nuclear seems to have dried up.
We seem to be instead putting all our eggs in the SMR basket hoping that there’ll be the economies of scale to make it viable.
Sweden's competitive advantage during the 1900s was cheap energy. And we have some important industries that rely on it. Steelworks and papermills. If they would have to close down because they can't (unfairly) compete with cheap energy, it may have a big effect on the Swedish economy.
It may also be that businesses will not do the same risk/reward calculation as a country/taxpayers. They are simply not optimising for the same thing.
Might as well say that my job is keeping my kids happy. That is why I give them candies instead of dinner.
But .. .
1. promise something with a simple message that is an oversimplification to get enogh voters. 2. Do it because you promised the voters. Even if it is a bad idea and will not lead to good results.
As a voter and not a member of the elite, I prefer having trains built and new cities expanded for our growing population, rather than incantations being offered to irrational secular gods ("the markets") and the constant shrinkage of beds in our healthcare system.
It points to a Bloomberg article at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-14/sweden-s-... .
The agreement is neither bi-partisan nor contains anything guaranteeing a massive expansion. The article says that if private companies wants to build nuclear reactors they will be able to lend money from the state and also be shielded from (some or all) of the risk. So when the projected cost of the reactors double then triple and the whole project gets delayed a decade or more you can guess who will foot the bill. Sucks to be paying tax.
Fortunately, private investors aren't that interested. They don't want to waste one billion of their money even if the taxpayers waste nine billion of theirs.
But they're still not cost effective which is why the biggest question with nuclear plants always is 'how much subsidy can we get'.
In deeper waters a tsunami isn't very noticeable and we already have proven power cable technology from wind power far out at sea.
Reactors on various vessels have entirely different working parameters from those on shore and there the consumer is right next to the reactor. But in the case that you sketch you'd have a floating reactor tied to a stationary power grid that somehow is resilient to the worst that the ocean can throw at it. I just can't see that working, even in the short term, let alone over the service life of a typical nuclear reactor.
Ship-borne nuclear reactors have been used for emergency power, but that's not a structural solution and it is also a very expensive one (compared to land based generation that power is quite expensive). So as soon as possible the emergency use is discontinued and it's back to land based solutions.
Off-shore windpower shows the complexity of ocean based power generation quite well and they have a much simpler safety situation, maintenance schedule, degree of complexity and so on. And even there the challenges are far more serious than the land based equivalent.
Some work has been done on floating wind farms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_wind_turbine
But the economics are not comparable to those of anchored turbines (either off-shore on on-shore). Likely something similar would hold for nuclear power, that off-shore nuclear power would by default be far more expensive than on-shore nuclear power and that is already economically not feasible without massive subsidies.
To be clear, that acronym is for "Small Modular Reactors". Just in case anyone else was confused or thought it was a NATO/OTAN thing.
What? Millions of reactors, more or less unguarded, sinkable by storms and what not. The proposition is insane.
This push and consent for nuclear have come out of nowhere. It is manufactured consent.
Currently any one of these features is either still in its infancy or not even being attempted at all. Expecting a reactor with all of them to show up in time to compete with renewable and conventional nuclear seems fanciful at best.
You are essentially saying that "just make them safe and they will be safe".
> You could melt a couple down each year intentionally
Lets keep this on the draft stage please ...
Yep, thats the proposal. Do you still find it objectionable if they are safe?
The burden is on you to describe exactly how they will be made safe.
Read through the comment chain
>> What if we could make them safe?
>It is not a technical problem. It is a social one.
youtube.com/watch?v=pLBcp3nJlFQ
Also, this proposal is challenging due to issues with nuclear proliferation. Nuclear plants will need guards.
It’s inherently cheaper to build big.
Small modular reactors is a huge bet that if you really manage to scale up production to huge numbers, it’ll offset the inherent cost disadvantage with building small reactors. It remains to be seen if that’s the case. I’m quite sceptical, but worth a shot.
It's not like they can source spare parts from down the road, or call in experts as needed.
True, but many of the costs outside of the containment vessel also seem to scale - in ways inherently disadvantageous to big reactors.
I think that mass manufacturing unlocks a cycle of cumulative improvement through rapid iteration, which eventually leads to way lower costs per energy production capacity. However, scaling energy production profitably requires that energy consumption is scaled as well, i.e. there needs to be new applications which consume a lot of energy, and in general people should be encouraged to use as much energy as possible.
As I understand it, the US has never built the same design more than once (or maybe a few times), so each plant has to be engineered and manufactured from scratch, and all the training, logistics, maintenance schedules, etc, are one-off projects.
- Costs way more than anticipated
- resulting energy costs per kWh more expensive than renewables
- small nuclear reactors found to create more waste
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/nuscale-ceo-defends-...
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/floating-nuclear-powe...
Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny?
So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point.
The grid is really delicate. You need just the right amount of power to keep it at 50Hz. Too little, brownouts. Too much, overload. So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. :-)
Almost more important than the power generation in many countries these days is the grid. With no grid, or a poor grid, or a grid that can’t store energy, you can build all the wind you want: but you can’t bring it online.
> The median approval time to connect to the grid for a new US power project has climbed by 30-days/year since 2001; and has doubled since 2015, to over 1,000 days (almost 3-years) in 2021. Wind and solar projects are now taking longest to inter-connect, due to their prevalence, lower power quality and remoteness.
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-...
> Around £200bn of renewables projects are facing waiting times of 15 years to come online, jeopardising plans to create a net-zero power grid by 2035.
https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-r...
> They have expressed concerns that wait times of up to 15 years have made it difficult to attract investment as the UK competes with the $369bn (£295bn) US package of climate subsidies.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connec...
Sweden is 528 000 km² and there is part a geographical spread even into sea which use to have weather patterns not following those at land, part complemented heavily by hydro, and part large battery parks already in use to complement wind.
What kind of issues still remain after all these countermeasures? Still requiring countermeasures on the extremely costly scale of a massive nuclear expansion?
Renewables, without massive grid storage to dampen their unreliability can not be the base load upon which your grid depends.
This storage could exist, but we haven’t built it and it isn’t proven.
https://group.vattenfall.com/what-we-do/roadmap-to-fossil-fr...
As other comments are on to, you can't rely on wind for base energy due to the extreme fluctuations in output. It isn't uncommon with a few days of basically no wind at all in the whole country, typically when it is at its coldest, with temperatures sometimes around -30 - -40 C in the north, and perhaps -10 - -20 C in the south. Then you gotta have stable energy, or people's lives might be at risk.
You definitely want to let the wind power mostly "top up" the mix, and not constitute major parts of it, unless you have tons of something else to balance up the fluctuations with (related, nuclear is not great for balancing this, as it can't typically change output quickly, but is great as the base load, just as the parent comment says).
The balance is built into the system. When elecricity prices are low wind power just disconnects generation capacity, while nuclear has to sell electricity for negative prices.
And this leads to the second point: There needs to be enough of available balancing power to be able to handle even the worst such deviation to keep the balance, as otherwise a breakdown of the whole system can happen, which would take days to restore from (yea, you can do emergency operations like closing down industries or apartment areas to keep the system from breaking down, but that in itself can have huge economic consequences if nothing else).
Regarding your second point, this is handled via imports and exports and standby capacity. The Nordic power grid is getting denser which reduces the chances of catastrophic failure. While the Swedish right-wing press has predicted brownouts and "electricity ransoning" ever since the right-wing party made more nuclear part of their election platform back in 2020 (what a coincidence...), those dire predictions has not come true.
Battery storage can fill the gap. This blog post makes a good argument why battery storage and over provisioning of renewables could solve this problem - https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b.... In addition it doesn't include dynamically controlling demand (for example not charging EVs when demand is high).
> So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point.
Sweden doesn't appear to use coal as baseload. The UK did, but managed to replace most of it with gas, wind, solar, reduced demand and increased imports (https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/).
From France, who has a shit-load of nuclear. :-)
"So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point."
doesn't take into the impact storage (both stationary and in the form of EVs) will have in the future.
Have you ever heard the expression "hope is not a plan"?
From https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-grid-s...:
* Annual grid-scale battery storage additions went from 0.76 GW in 2016 to 11.21 GW in 2022. I couldn't find the GWh figures, but this is a fast ramp up.
* "In September 2022, India released its draft National Electricity Plan, setting out ambitious targets for the development of battery energy storage, with an estimated capacity of between 51 to 84 GW installed by 2031-32."
* "In December 2022, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency...announced funding support for a total of 2 GW/4.2 GWh of grid-scale storage capacity, equipped with grid-forming inverters to provide essential system services that are currently supplied by thermal power plants."
From https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2023/executive...:
* "Automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% to 550 GWh in 2022, from about 330 GWh in 2021"
* "August 2022 and March 2023, major EV and battery makers announced cumulative post-IRA investments of at least USD 52 billion in North American EV supply chains – of which 50% is for battery manufacturing, and about 20% each for battery components and EV manufacturing."
These pages also list the challenges faced, so I'm not assuming it's a smooth road ahead. However, the trend is clear. Hopefully, technological improvements will continue and drive down costs further (I have no knowledge if this will happen).
I hope there's improvements in nuclear technology that allow for a faster, cheaper nuclear rollout and belief it has it's place.
But to return to original comment I replied that states
"we need something to replace coal...that thing can...only be nuclear at this point"
dismisses the increases in investment and production of battery storage.
Since heating is by far the biggest consumer of energy in winter, just taking care of that with stored thermal energy will deal with a big fraction of the energy storage needs.
We need more districting heating systems.
[1] https://www.malarenergi.se/om-malarenergi/framtidens-samhall... [2] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/ost/de-lagrar-varme-i-berg...
The largest battery based energy storage in the world is 3000 MWh so we just need to build thousand of those (or a 1000x larger one). Good luck with that.
The largest heat storage under construction is 90000 MWh so that is a step in the right direction but still falls short by around 35x and even more if we have to turn that heat into electricity (While a lot of this consumption is district heating it is not all of it. And a large chunk of new district heating is just massive heat pumps)
And now that you have built these tools to make wind/solar work you have to factor the price of these into the price of wind/solar and suddenly they do not look that cheap when compared to nuclear. This is why the government and Vattenfall in Sweden want to build more nuclear.
Realistically the only cost effective energy storage on this scale we have available is hydro and pretty much all the places where it is cheap in Sweden have already been built.
In general I think Sweden is on the right track. They have a lot of wind and are building a lot more of it. They can also build more nuclear at the same time.
Though Sweden (just like here in Finland) are slowly reaching the point that when it is windy the wind farms don't really make much money as the price on the spot markets is very close to 0 so we also need a lot of new intermittent energy consumption (industrial processes that can be slowed down/ramped up cost effectively, make hydrogen, fill the heat storages with heat pumps, etc). This is the place where batteries can play a big role by being able to "move" this electricity into the future to a moment where there is more consumption/less production.
For example in Stockholm you get around 6h of daylight. Malmö (can’t really get further south than that) a bit over 7h.
Basically the northern most point of mainland US is a lot further south than the most southern place in Sweden. Thinking about how good solar panels are in the winter in Anchorage gives you some idea (which has slightly slightly shorter days then Stockholm at around 5h30min at their shortest)
I don’t know the numbers for southern Sweden but for Stockholm level you get maybe 5% to 10% of the production you get in the summer.
Here in Finland we have it even worse but I know where to find the numbers.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market-information/sol...
Basically if we are lucky we hit 5% of a typical summer day for an hour maybe two. As the days are less then half as long you end up with ~1% the production vs summer.
But in reverse the panels are really good during the summer as the days are very long. This is why people bother installing solar here.
And we're still ignoring the fact that many days you'll get barely any direct sunlight during those 6 hours of "daylight"
But we have multiple large industries starting up in the coming decades which will require substantial power, while at the same time electric vehicles are slowly but surely becoming mainstream, further straining our grid.
Increasing nuclear is a great (and necessary) decision, it's just a shame the decision wasn't taken 20 years ago.
Some of the planned industry investment is hydrogen generation, which is perfect for varying power. The gas caverns can be filled when rates are low.
Unfortunately most EVs don't have the hardware to be used as batteries through their Type 2 (Mennekes) connector, as it requires a built-in inverter that just isn't there.
There are some new products (e.g. [1]) coming out that uses the CCS2 port on the car, providing the necessary inverter externally, which would enable older EVs to be used as batteries for grid balancing or other similar uses.
1: https://wallbox.com/sv_se/quasar-2-laddare-dubbelriktade-elf...
Hydro provides about 42%, nuclear 29%, wind 21%, thermal power 5.8%, and "unspecified" at 1.9%.
(Thanks to HN user fifilura who pointed people to the dashboard at https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ a few months ago, showing the real-time data and breakdown.)
The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas.
It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.
But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1]. This makes it a poor companion to renewables.
[1] Except for the couple of weeks a year when it's down for maintenance, refueling, or its river's water has gotten too hot or there isn't enough of it, then the output is zero. Actually, it's negative because you need to provide it with energy or it self-destroys.
The hydro power is not enough as base power for the large cities in the south, on the other hand, in part because in part the capacity is not enough, and in part because how the extremely long transport lines from the far north (where the hydro power is located) to the major cities in the south are a serious bottle-neck. Increasing their capacity (across up to thousands of kilometers) isn't easily done in a few years even.
The thing is though, a lot of heavy industry is built in the North to take advantage of the cheap power there. Shoring up the grid connections would increase the electricity rates in the northern region, due to competition from the South.
EDIT: and yes, if the hydro is far away, it doesn't help much. Besides hydro also depends on weather, although on periods about 10 years or so. But when just once you don't have enough water then what?
Modern reactors can actually ramp up for down pretty quickly, as far a the grid is considered. That is to say, they can go from 50% to 100% in an hour or two.
However, you want to run them mostly constantly because once you build them, they are basically free power.
Besides, Constant power IS what you want for a "stable base load". You can start and stop solar and wind basically at the push of a button for very rapid response.
The point of Nuclear or fossil fuels with respect to the grid is reliability.
No, you can't do that with solar and wind, that's the whole point. Sure, you can choose to waste the renewable energy when it's in excess, but you can't conjure it when it is not.
If you want a grid that has a significant renewable percentage, you don't want stable base load plants, you want power storage, peaker power plants and demand scaling in response to supply.
Cue someone scoffing and saying, yeah, exactly, that's why we don't want any significant amount of renewables on our grid -- Fine! At least that's honest.
The ideal source for base load is something that has an uptime as close to 100% as possible.
Variable load is obviously the tricky part, because that is where you want storage to time shift, overbuilding to deal with seasonal changes, and build redundant peaker plants. This is the really expensive part, far more expensive than building nuclear
In terms of kW/min change rate faster then most gas peaker plants used all over the world.
It is a totally different question if that is economical (the costs of a nuclear plant don't really change much when running at 20% or 100%). So most operators run their plants at maximum if possible just like what wind/solar do when it is windy/sunny. France is the big exception to this due to how large portion of their production is nuclear they have to follow the load with some of the reactors.
While wind and solar do not meet the definition of base load, they clearly are in the spirit of base load.
When doing wind and solar you need non-base load, not more base load.
also, in case you didn't know sweden doesn't have a huge amount of sun (especially in winter), wind is more affordable but you can't rely on a unique energy source.
The best reason to build nuclear is you can keep neglecting the interconnects between north and south.
It is rare but not unheard of to have 0 hours of sun in December[1].
1. Article is in Swedish: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/morkaste-manaden-i-mannamin...
Secondly, because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends".
And yet Sweden is not giving any subsidies (at least for now) and thus no new plants have actually been seriously planned.
The change here (going from 100% green to 100% fossil free) just means giving nuclear power access to the same subsidies green energy is receiving now with the important one being the government being a guarantor for some of the loans (25 billion SEK for this year). It remains to be seen if this is enough to actually get new projects going (probably not).
> nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons.
Sweden abandoned its (secret) nuclear weapons program in 1972 without managing to build a single weapon and it is very unlikely that they would be trying to get one now.
With regard to nuclear weapons: most of what the UK produced actually went to the USA rather than its own program. Did Sweden do that, or is that still classified?
Basically to the point that they had all the parts needed to assemble one and just needed a law change/approval the government to finish it (would have taken ~6 months of work)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_prog...
People who hate the government have been successfully convinced to hate the one form of electricity that doesn't need the government.
That is a hard thing to get through.
Safety systems are a cost center, but they'd have prevented Chernobyl.
Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist.
In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
And which they had bumped up a few years earlier so as to make -- claim it was, and apparently succeeding at fooling far too many people -- nuclear power "not financially feasible": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272
In that context, spinning up local (and tightly allied) nuclear power might make more sense than it did in an idealized globalist world where you could trust that your investment in some North African solar array was less likely to be disrupted by some political realignment or exploited leverage.
I keep seeing these two mixed together and it's unfair to wind.
Wind has proven itself and entire European countries have been able to run days on wind energy. With HVDC and energy storage wind alone could potentially cover more than half of our energy need.
Has solar shown the same potential?
It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy production. Nuclear still seems like it could be a reasonable/viable/necessary option for decarbonized energy production.
The realistic worst case is that we waste some money building nuclear power plants that operate at a loss and are potentially decommissioned early.
Assuming we collectively have enough money to also keep building wind/solar/etc (it seems like we do!), and the risk of failing to decarbonize remains catastrophic, it's probably a good idea to hedge our bets and try all the viable options.
My guess is that we build a few crappy nuclear power plants with poor economics, learn some really useful things in the process, and then build some better ones with much more favorable economics.
I just want to say two things:
Nuclear power has been incredibly advantageous for Sweden. Sweden was an early adopter and it worked out well for us. Average time to build a reactor here is less than a decade. Swedes are great at building large scale energy infrastructure.
Wind and solar are not very suitable here. The wind is too intermittent, and we are too far away from the equator for solar.
I've heard that there has been substantial moving out of energy-intensive industries like aluminum from Germany because of this.
>So politicians draw nice plans for smart grids and heat pumps with wall boxes that can be turned off remotely by grid operators. I really don’t know how it ends.
Well, last winter wasn't as bad as expected/feared in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in terms of energy shortages. How is this winter looking?
Gas storage is at 100% right now, so no shortcomings to expect really. [1]
Building of renewables has been huge this year with 10.000 MW of new power generation in the first three quarters. Might still get a little bit higher with Q4/23 but as the whole year was expected with 9.000 MW in total those numbers look pretty good, with for example over 700k new solar systems across the country. [2]
I was looking into getting a new electricity rate for my parents and have prices have fallen steeply in comparison to last year. Prices per kWh are down from something like 45 cents to 30 cents for fully renewable energy. While that might be still more expensive than elsewhere I think that's a good price.
Little bump is that the Constitutional Court just ruled that money from the Covid-19 rescue packages, that was not used, might not be repurposed for fighting climate change. Obviously it's not like that money really _existed_ somewhere at all, but just moving it in the books was ruled not okay. We'll see what that leads too.
Companies moving out of Germany because of high energy prices seems like a poor excuse. Power for the industry was/is subsidized like crazy, that has been cut somewhat down so everybody pays a fair share.
For our company, that finally got things going. We're looking into modernizing our heating, utilizing heat recovery systems, switching all lights to LEDs (that alone is heavily subsidized, so not that expensive), putting up movement sensors to automatically turn off lights and installing even more solar panels on the roof. Numbers might look a bit worse next year due to those investments but it will help long-term.
In society there's just quite a bit of fearmongering going on and people always feel like they personally are fucked especially hard in these times. Like ten times harder than the neighbor whose name they don't even know.
Change sometimes hurts. But it's necessary.
[1]: (German) https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Gasspeicher-in-Deutschla...
[2]: https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/aktuelles/ausbau-erne...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_prog...
Politics. The sitting government sees nuclear power and electric airplanes as the solution to all environmental problems.
Because of a referendum in 1980, Sweden stopped investing in nuclear power and the now ageing reactors are going offline. In Sweden’s historical power mix, it’s pretty much a direct split between hydro and nuclear, with hydro having to go offline during critical ice forming periods.
We’re looking at a future where more and more electricity is needed, in particular as the crucial steel production is electrified. The left with the green party in particular has long been opponents of nuclear power, so the conservatives and liberals based their environmental policy on its brilliance and historical value to the country.
The opposition to wind power in Sweden is surprisingly strong for a scarcely populated country with a long coastline and lots of elevation. A lot of that seem to do with the politically important rural population’s resistance to hosting noisy and view-intruding wind powerplants. On the other side of that, when looking at the sea, similar arguments are being used, but also defense-politics. The perhaps most obvious wind park area unfortunately lies in between Sweden and Russia.
Solar is seeing quite some deployment, in particular during the summer it can be quite effective, Sweden has more sun hours over the full year than some of our southern neighbors. The winter argument is used against overreliance on it, but it’s still seen as a good thing to install solar on the top of buildings and in other otherwise unused areas.
I’m a bit tired of this all, because it seems like the energy production discussion has devolved into a two-sided debate where the only thing that matters is whether you’re on team redgreen or blue. Whether or not nuclear power is a good idea or not barely matter.
What is the Swedish political system doing right?
Expensive winters and the idea of green steel and the massive and likely unrecoverable expenses it brings requires massive amounts of power that just isn’t possible with any other means. If you want the green steel you need nuclear in Sweden, we just can’t put up tens of thousands of wind power plants to cover for stability and delivery.
This means something very different in most multiparty parliamentary systems. Basically as there isn't any single party with a majority every government is at least bipartisan (usually more like 3 or 4 parties). So technically "bipartisan" but quite misleading wording/title.
What actually is happening the new government changed some goals (100% green -> 100% non carbon producing) giving nuclear access to the same subsidies that wind/solar have. Most of those subsidies are in the form of loan guarantees and not really big enough so maybe more subsidies are needed if they actually want some new reactors (but not actually agreed upon yet)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
China, India and Russia are operating these with Russia having the biggest one that produces 800 MW.
Would you trust (as a random example) Egypt with the fate of the Mediterranean for all the future ?
> THE U.S. GENERATES ABOUT 2,000 METRIC TONS OF SPENT FUEL EACH YEAR This number may sound like a lot, but the volume of the spent fuel assemblies is actually quite small considering the amount of energy they produce.
> The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
> And, the clean energy generated from this fuel would be enough to power more than 70 million homes—avoiding more than 400 million metrics tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
You say that you have yet to hear a convincing argument but have you been listening?
If we've lost the ability to read signs, we've lost the ability to dig deep and will never encounter it.
The risk of death from any form of nuclear waste is insignificant compared to fact we've already killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people killed mining for fossil fuels through to those killed by extreme weather caused by climate change right now.
FYI, the number of deaths attributed to climate over the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019 dropped to a third[0], even as the world population more than doubled and atmospheric CO2 went from 325ppm to 410ppm at the same time. That's one-third of the absolute number of deaths, not one-third the rate.
This can be attributed to the increasing capacity of those in developing countries to deal with the vagaries of their natural environment, enabled by cheap energy from fossil fuels.
Obviously the issue at hand is that use of those fossil fuels has led to a huge unpaid debt (negative externality) in the form of compounding climate change.
But even without that, the number of deaths attributed to air pollution is estimated at 7 million annually. Air pollution pretty much all comes from burning fossil fuels. So you aren't counting right.
If your entire lifetime was fueled 100% by nuclear energy, at the end of your life, the waste would be the size of a hockey puck.
The amount of waste is very manageable, because the volume is so small. Right now, all of the plants in the US just keep the waste on-site... for the entire lifetime of the plant.
Does that count your food production you think?
This issue is pretty much a red herring. A coal-fired power plant produces thousands of times more radiation--in the form of radioactive fly ash--than nuclear plants do. Where is that stored? The air. In your lungs. People die from cancer by the hundreds of thousands because of it.
Switching to nuclear would reduce the amount of radioactive waste humanity produces, by a lot, and concentrate it in liquid and solid forms, that actually can be managed.
So there's your answer. Nuclear waste is solid, and it's not much. We can manage it. Is there an answer for the radiation from coal? Nope.
1. In 2021, sweden produced 165TWh (using 139TWh) of electricity [1];
2. Sweden plans to build 2 nuclear reactors by 2035 [2] but it's not clear what the output of the new reacctors will be. 1GW seems to be typical [3]. Sweden's current six reactors produce about 50TWh [4] of power so about 8.33TWh each, which about maps to 1GW converted to TWh/year. So even in 20 years nuclear will still not be the majority of power in Sweden based on current production and usage growth;
3. These reactors (as per the Reuters link) will have their costs shared with the state. Not a single nuclear reactor has been built without government subsidies [5]. Why? Because it's still too expensive.
4. Part of the delay (to 2035) seems to be that no final decision has been made on design to use. Proximity to consumers is best for efficiency but faces opposition from people not wanting to live near nuclear power stations. Also, larger reactors, by definition, will have a larger mean transmission distance to customers just because they cover more customers. Proponents of smaller nuclear reactor designs ignore that these are fundamentally less efficient and none are commercially in operation, for a reason;
5. Costs of nuclear powers tend to be lower on initial capital costs but higher on operational costs. Nuclear advocates tend to ignore the latter. If addressed at all, it's argued that economies of scale will lower overall costs despite there being decades of building hundreds of plants and no evidence of that at all;
6. While the cost of climate change is of course high and needs to be addressed, no single fossil fuel plant has a catastrophic failure mode comparable to a single nuclear reactor. Actual disasters (eg Chernobyl, Fukushima) get written off as outliers or due to some other reason but the cleanup for Fukushima is in Japan so Soviet Union factors don't apply (and tsunamis and earthquakes happen so you can't ignore that eiher). The cleanup of Fukushima is going to take decades, has already cost $82 billion and the final cost may exceed $1 trillion [6]. For one reactor incident.
7. Nuclear is also pushed compared to renewables by their ability to produce base load. But do we really need base load? Not really [7]. It's really a function of having a large, interconnected energy grid.
Fission power still doesn't make sense.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-plans-new-nuc...
[3]: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliab...
[4]: https://www.uniper.energy/sweden/about-uniper-sweden/nuclear...
[5]: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/nuclear-power-still-not-via...
[6]: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Fukushima-Anniversary/Fuku...
[7]: https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/28/we-dont-need-base-load-...
"From 1945 to 1972[1] the government ran a clandestine nuclear weapons program" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...