I don't understand how starting to build nuclear reactors at this point in time makes sense when it takes over 10 years for them to become productive and they are now already more expensive energy sources when compared to solar and wind.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...