Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants
bbc.com
bbc.com
Finland has low emissions from electricity :
https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/all/yearly
71 gC02eq/kwH
France, Sweden and Norway look like good places for data centres in Europe too on the basis of low electricity emissions.
A lot of the green energy is from hydro dams and you can't really add new rivers to the geography to support additional industry.
It will be interesting to see how the Rolls-Royce SMR project works out. Since it appears to be impossible to build anything cheaply in the UK, this will be the real test.
The solution is to build nuclear power stations on ships in China, then sail them to the UK and plug them in.
If power prices elsewhere in the world become advantageous, sail them elsewhere and plug them in there.
You still have the interconnection costs, but seaside places sometimes have high voltage connections for existing or historic power plants (who themselves are water cooled)
The US has effective run this on itself for the past few years. The Chinese look fairly benign in comparison.
Those wind farms would have connected into the zones with the highest prices.
They've rejected an amount that would generate more than the entire grid usage. Or way more than double what the cheap zones generate from their 2/3rds hydro and 1/3rd wind.
" risk-sharing mechanism will be required, for example through two-sided Contracts for Difference and state-backed credit guarantees that reduce investment risk and unlock project financing.”
https://www.renews.biz/offshore-wind/skyborn-calls-for-swedi...
Most small customers are paying using average prices, but these average prices are calculated from the costs of power suppliers and these are affected by hourly market prices. So when many small customers consume use lot of electricity during hours with high hourly market price, the average price for small customers goes up.
Best solution is instalation of smart meters so that small customers pay according to hourly market price.
*if you’re a seller of fossil fuels
And climate change also isn’t in favor of nuclear power plants that need external water sources for cooling
yes, you can - with all those fiords surrounded by mountains you can use excess wind/solar (your own as well as German, etc.) and pump water up a dammed fiord to generate the electricity later when no cheap excess available.
The solution works only to keep a steady production of electricity, but if the demand would require full output all the time then these "mechanical batteries" don't help.
If you run datacenters in the north its substantially cheaper.
Places like Malmö have had issues with power costs, even though there's a lot of generation... because that generation happens in the north.
Not saying we shouldn’t produce more electricity. But from what I have understood it’s mainly about other factors than production.
> Sweden is struggling a lot with scaling its power production, to the point where it's a problem for existing and new industries
In the SE1 region, which is the least populated and probably best candidate for a data center, there was a 400% price drop between February and March this year, then up 100% in May, then down 50% in July. Between summer 2025 and winter 2026, the same region saw a price hike of nearly 1000%.
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli... 12¤cy=EUR&aggregation=MonthlyAggregate&deliveryAreas=SE1,SE2
https://data.nordpoolgroup.com/auction/day-ahead/prices?deli...
I guess if you want a data center that only operates some months of the year that's fine.
The countries that could decarbonize their electricity all rely on nuclear, hydro or geotherm.
There is a lot of hydro generation deployed (1455 GW) but only 30 GW capacity added worldwide in 2025, and 200 GW added worldwide during last 10 years.
Total geothermal capacity is 15 GW worldwide in 2025.
https://www.irena.org/Publications/2026/Mar/Renewable-capaci...
1) We're not expanding hydropower generation very much. We can upgrade existing dams for improved efficiency, but no new dams are being planned, because it's politically and environmentally arduous to do so. There's some wind buildout, but that's also a political quagmire due to nimbyism. Nuclear isn't even close to having a political consensus behind it, and even if it did, it would take years. And our geography is uniquely ill suited for solar.
2) Winters have less and less snow, summers have less and less rain, leading to issues filling reservoirs. This will only get worse in the future.
3) The north has a surplus, but the infrastructure for transferring it to the south is underdeveloped
4) lots of the electricity we generate is being sold to central Europe to compensate for Germany's idiotic decision to shut down their nuclear reactors and Trump's idiotic decision to send oil prices over $100
Unfortunately data centres are currently being built, which depresses me. Because who will use them? Giant American tech companies will use them, to lobotomise our youth, poison our political discourse and steal our personal data. Fuck that.
Data centres also create very few jobs beyond the initial construction phase. Overall it's a very, very bad deal for Norway as a nation.
Now Google is planing another hyperscalar in Østfold, and other hyperscalars are being built in rapid succession (about 50 is planned), putting a severe strain on our power transfer net.
Weird
On top of that, heating still runs mostly on gas, which won't be fun this winter. Due to the inefficiency of gas heating, there will be less gas available for Germany's gas power plants.
Now imagine if Germany's dream of hydrogen vehicles, where most hydrogen comes from gas, also became a reality...
>Net imports amounted to only 1.3 TWh, compared with 9.6 TWh during the first half of 2025.
Though 1.3 TWH is a huge improvement over 9.6 by any standard.
Coal is such a dirty fuel, that burning it should be a last resort. A properly running coal plant with all safety equipment working will kill people through pollution. Every year in Germany and all downwind countries people die due to the effects of burning coal. (See https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/dark_cloud_repor.... )
Long term, it is hard to know the loss of life that will come from this foolish policy. The Energiewende was implemented around 2010 - they knew about the role of CO2 as a greenhouse gas and they. did. it. anyway.
So now 15 years later, how much dependent is Germany on coal? Last I looked it was about 20% of the electrical power generated. They estimate that sometime between 2030 - 2038 they will stop all burning of coal.
339 gC02eq/kwH
for the past year. That's ten times the level of France.
This isn't investing in power infrastructure in any way, there is no reality where that nuclear plant wasn't staying in operation as long as they can possibly keep it running in the foreseeable future. Basically only way Google and Fortum will be building new nuclear capacity is by Finland promising to cover any electricity price below 15 cents per kWh in the market.
If you reduce supply,price generally goes up. Buying a power plants output reduces supply
Of course everyone’s else’s co2 emissions then increase instead.
The only solution is more zero co2 emissions. Google could have funded large wind farms, or a new nuclear plant, or grid connections to other locations. But that would cost more.
You buying a doughnut - even half the doughnuts - from a doughnut shop does not increase the price of the remaining doughnuts unless they can't make enough to satisfy remaining demand and people are willing to outbid you rather than wait.
Does that power station have enough capacity to satisfy the remaining demand?
Further, the article specifically says:
> Google signed a 22-year contract with Finnish utility Fortum to buy up to 50% of the output from the Loviisa nuclear power plant.
Norway exports electricity primarily to England and Germany, only a little goes to Finland:
https://www.statnett.no/en/for-stakeholders-in-the-power-ind...
Sweden sent 10.6TWh in 2025:
https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kraftsystemdata/elstatis...
This matches what Finland says about imports - imported 8.1TWh from Sweden but 0.2TWh from Norway in 2024
https://energia.fi/en/statistics/statistics-on-electricity/
Take a look at the map. Sweden has three underwater cables to the south of Finland near Helsinki (quite near Olkiluoto NPP). Norway only connects in the very far north, its nearest "connection" is via Sweden to near Oulu.
Not only disappointing such comments exist on HN, but to be at top is depressing.
> Finland has emerged as an attractive location for data centres because of its cool climate, plentiful low-carbon electricity and relatively uncongested power grid.
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl...
Edit: I was wrong, the locations do have small (5-10 MW) district heating networks.
One can imagine the saunas the guys will have there :)
On the main point - there are persistent leaks/rumors that one of the main points of the Trump's envoys (Kushner and Witkoff) to Putin is building data centers in Karelia ( the Russian side of Finland border) - the same reasons of cheap electricity and plentiful of cool water.
>When the Microsoft datacenter areas are finalized and the waste heat offtake is working fully, the heat from fossil-free fuels will cover 40% of all district heating in Espoo.
- paid 0e company tax in 2023/2024 (2025 hasn't been published yet)
- Doesn't generate any value added taxes as it only has one customer, Google Emea in Ireland
- Employs directly 120 persons
https://www.hetzner.com/pressroom/five-years-helsinki/
These low prices are cost savings that we pass directly onto our customers; they come from the reduced energy prices that we pay in Finland compared to Germany, and also come from the colder climate and lower cooling requirements
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
Will incredibly efficient new GPUs appear? will custom ASIC, models burned in silicons, take off? Will unified memory systems become usable?
The datacenter bets are that things will mostly continue like now, and that these GPUs won’t depreciate too much.
For now theses bets are self-fulfilling, causing hardware to even appreciate.
I used to think "wow, ADSL is so fast, I will never need faster internet connection" and now I need fiber to sync 500GB dataset fast enough so I don't get frustrated. Gosh, I remember the feeling when I upgraded from 14.4k to 56k dialup modem.
I expect as LLMs penetrate further, we'll see much more of it, continually running, and doing more 3D work.
They didn't want to just buy clean hydro that already existed, or renewables that were going to get built anyway without their money, they wanted to be sure that their investment was growing the amount of clean energy available.
I'm hoping they have some justification like this for buying existing nuclear. They appear to be claiming that it would shut if they didn't pay in advance.
A similar deal by Amazon got shot down in America because the regulators realised it was shifting costs onto other grid users.
You'd assume that Finnish regulators are better than American regulators, but I’d like to see some evidence of that.
It is common trend currently here in Finland due to economic situations that data centers can basically get cheap electricity deals and common folks pay it.
I feel this will not end well… if we don’t continue building nuclear. I hope this will force us to continue building asap.
> Google will build new data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala
For more fun perspective, compare those latitudes to America or Asia. Finland is a weird place.
Pretty reductionist. I don't know about tiktok, but Google does a lot more than serve ads
Nuclear power plants are notorious for their long planning, approval and build times (and cost overruns). Then again, I wouldn't want to live near a nuclear power plant built as fast as a data center either...
A lot of reactors in the US are similarly dependent on Russia for uranium enrichment and supplies. Some of that dependency relates to post cold war era treaties (now cancelled because of the strained relationship with Russia) for Russia to decommission its nuclear weaponry and to help Russia economically.
The Loviisa plant actually predates the end of the cold war but Finland at the time was not part of NATO and the relationship with the Soviet Union was very complicated given that they had fought an ugly war in WW II that ended up with the Soviet Union taking a large chunk of Finnish territory. The Loviisa plant ended up built during what is now seen as the definitely very chilly phase of the cold war (under Brezhnev).
And then Finland repeated the mistake with their more recent nuclear additions.
Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
I have no real evidence for this but I think a general principle of good governance is that the policy is agnostic to the industries which it affects and robust under any set of conditions, so for instance, the price that electric utilities charge should be enough to pay for expansions, either prospectively or retroactively (via loans secured before the construction, taken out against projected future revenue), rather than subsidizing the expansion with taxes collected by industries that won't be using the electricity, or exercising discretionary control over which types of industrial expansion are accommodated through investments in expanding the energy infrastructure.
Huge expansions of energy production have occurred in the past to meet growing demand for energy from then-emerging industries. And I'm not aware of any past campaigns to stop the various industries that needed energy on account of the allegation that their increase in energy usage would burden other sectors of society. I have concern that the treatment of AI compute facilities is based on public opinion rather than rule of law and consistent protection of private property rights.
I am not a regulator but that feels like something that needs new rules
My own cursory take on AI compute facilities is that they're mostly much better for the community than previous industries. They emit zero industrial pollution, and only require water for cooling and energy from any source. The water used can also be recycled. And even in the early designs that don't use recycled water, the water consumed is orders of magnitude less than agriculture.
On the downside, they produce fewer jobs, but they encourage and fund infrastructure upgrades in telecom links and power transmission, which has second-order benefits for the local economy.
And they consume very little government services, so the taxes they pay produce a much larger fiscal surplus for local governments.
They also allow for energy that would otherwise be uneconomical to harvest, to be economically harvested. Let's just take an example of a desert which has very little wildlife, and no major nearby populations. AI compute facilities can make it economical to harvest the sunlight in those regions and make economic use of it.
They don't create many permanent jobs on site, it's true, but they also don't consume many government services. So of all the industries, they produce the highest fiscal surplus for local governments. It's a net benefit to the community.
If you're in Finland and there are two possible uses for electricity production, let's say, either a steel plant or a datacentre. The steel plant will employ a bunch of people locally. A datacentre will employ a bunch of people in California.
So if you are to build a datacentre, the deal must necessarily be that the R&D for the models that are to run on it must happen locally. Otherwise there's no reason to give them the allocation over the steel plant.
But when ad-hoc deals are made anyway, then it is more important that principles like those have been applied than that everything is ideal.
More generally, the bias is to block development until safety/fairness issues are addressed, but it shouldn't be in my opinion, because that overlooks the risk of inaction.
When development is blocked, what that does is reduce visible risks. What it usually increases however is total risk. We are already under constant threat from deterioration: aging, depreciation and decay. Entropy is the default. Action is what pushes back against it.
We need to weigh any risks restriction prevents against the risks it leaves us less equipped to mitigate.
The trouble with this is that people frequently don't like the consequences of that.
For example, a lot of the costs of a grid connection are non-linear if not totally independent of the amount of power you use. When a tree falls on a power line and a crew has to show up and install a new pole, the cost of that has nothing to do with the average percent utilization of those wires. Likewise, a line that can deliver 100MW to a single customer costs more than one that can handle 100kW, but it doesn't cost anywhere near 1000 times as much or consume 1000 times more land etc.
The result of this is that the "works under any set of conditions" pricing for a grid connection would be a flat monthly fee for the capacity of the line totally independent of how much you use, and a line with 1000 times the capacity would only cost e.g. 10 times as much. But then a typical household electric bill would have a fixed charge of ~$100/mo for a grid connection regardless of how little electricity you use.
Likewise, if you have a high proportion of renewable generation in the grid then the price per kWh during daylight hours when there are clear skies would be essentially zero, but the price on a cold still night in winter would be oppressively high and anyone who failed to turn off their electric heat on that specific day would end up with a $5000 electric bill.
So in most places what happens instead is that the power company charges a fee per kWh which is used to pay line crews and other expenses that don't actually depend on usage and then have a much lower fixed connection charge. And charge a certain amount per kWh during days when supply is sufficient and then use the money to subsidize consumption during shortfalls, even though that actually raises total costs, because otherwise people would scream about prices hitting $500/kWh for a few hours every year or two.
But once you're doing those things, a customer that wants megawatts of power is reasonably going to object to that rate structure, because the few percent inefficiency those things induce is millions of dollars in their case. At which point people start complaining about subsidies, even though not doing those things would be the absence of subsidies.
Side note: Really nice dashboard.
That’s just PR spin. There is no way it would have shut down in 4 years, there has literally been no talk about doing so and all the political parties are okay with nuclear power as a means to combat co2.
Let’s not fix that problem, get better at doing the thing that Europe was quite capable of doing (see France, Germany before they decided to let the green ideological extremists less the energy strategy) standardise a design and begin solving the energy problem.
Funny you should mention sovereignty, something a country enjoys when it has a source of energy of its own, especially when we can mine our own uranium right on the continent. Alas, we chose not to.
Instead we listen to the green imbeciles and now we’re buying our uranium and hydrocarbons from abroad.
- This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment
- Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal
- Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth, and the country is largely a giant unpopulated forest
- Finland currently has the highest unemployment in Europe, this is a great win for them, and they correctly view this as such since they are not stupid
- While the media may try to make it happen, very few Finnish people will be wearing tinfoil hats while screaming about conspiracies that data centers destroy H20 molecules, since they have one of the best education systems in the world
Finlands energy use in general is in decline, their economy isn’t growing and neither is their population: https://www.treasuryfinland.fi/annualreview2022/energy-consu...
Absent AI, this plant is absolutely the type of thing that a left/Green Party would vote to shut down under the premise that the cost is too great to retool/maintain it and “nuclear bad.” This is a Cold War era Russian plant that needs retooling.
That is the estimate by the transmission system operator Fingrid. Note that energy consumption and electricity consumption are two different things.
https://www.fingrid.fi/en/grid/development/prospects-for-fut...
In Finland there aren't any political parties talking about shutting down nuclear power.
Electricity demand will likely stay well under the lower end of those estimates, but its good that estimating is done optimistically, given it means that level of demand is planned to be supported already.
So it's not like electricity demand is going to grow modestly within a declining energy demand environment (which opens up other opportunities) while nothing new is being built.
The American data-center hysteria is mostly due to the fact that Americans have made it impossible (and have lost a lot of the expertise needed) to build infrastructure, and their faster growing power demand is NOT being met with new supply. This was already happening decades ago, before factoring in AI. US infrastructure is massively underfunded and 60-80 years outdated in most areas due to poor government policy.
But yes let’s strawman into cars and heating instead.
Btw excess heat from the reactor can be and is used for central heating.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
We have an election in Sweden tomorrow. The current government have started securing investments in clean energy (i.e nuclear energy).
Some opposition parties, including the "greens" (MP) are vehemently opposed to it.
This is the biggest problem with the EU: the EU as well as the member states, are not really thinking strategically here. Not just with regards to nuclear power plants but in general.
Not Texas and Arizona. Why?
The reason Texas is experiencing a boom in data centers is friendlier power grid policies to data centers (similar to why Google is building in Finland), in combination with (relatively small) tax incentives.
When Finland contracted with France to build their latest reactor, they wisely had a fixed price contract where the French company would pay for const overruns. At groundbreaking in 2005, they planned for a 2009 completion. In 2016 it bankrupted Areva, with the French government owned EDG saving parts of the company crucial to the nation. It wasn't completed u tip 2023:
https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2...
When the US last decided to build nuclear, Westinghouse AP1000s, two in South Carolina and two in Georgia, it resulted in the bankruptcy on Westinghouse, putting all of Toshiba, its owner, at risk:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/westinghouses-bankruptcy-and-i...
The two South Carolina reactors were abandoned at the cost of a substantial fraction of the build cost, in the billions, and utility executives went to jail for deception about it. Georgia finished its two reactors, but only by creating some of the most expensive electricity out there today.
Storage and renewables are cheaper, faster to deploy, and work really really really well in Texas and Arizona. Despite nearly free natural gas in Texas due its state as a by-product of oil extraction, most of the new electricity grid assets in Texas are wind, storage, and solar, and that's independent third party investors making those choice in the grid to make money, as Texas has perhaps the "freest" electricity market in the United States when it comes to who is allowed to build grid assets and make money off them.
If the far north places have hydro that's already built and not being used, that makes sense for data centers. But new nuclear is not a serious technology, it exists mostly based on vibes.
It seems to me the main problem is we build so little of it that we don't have the people, skills, supply chains etc to do it well. China generally builds it's reactors on schedule and within budget.
On time, yes, because China is great at construction. On budget, almost certainly, but we have very little visibility into true costs. China's labor costs are getting far higher as it becomes richer, and there's a good chance that it will reach a state of higher economic development where its costs for nuclear mirror those high costs in present day France.
And even with all that their total share of nuclear is declining y/&y and projected to continue to decline. Because it’s still too expensive even for a autocracy
Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...
Well, avoiding business deals with that neighbor is the only rational action. Building a Russian nuclear reactor as one of their neighbors is suicidally stupid. At least go to South Korea instead.
The US is also finding out that when it threatens its neighbors and allies that it will lose out on crucial industrial deals, such as Canada and Europe moving away from US military contractors.
Loviisa station is Soviet-built, has been working amazingly well and till this day has been supplied with the fuel from Russia, despite the war and all.
Nuclear station being a big target on its own is the only negative, among a pile of positives. That's why:
1. Mini-reactors should be developed
2. No, even nowadays, Putin has not really attacked nuclear stations for real in Ukraine. It's been a big no-no. All the rest of the energy infra - yes, but not nuclear stations.
3. If the real war starts with nuclear stations being bombed, it will not matter who build the station, Finland is going to be completely fucked, considering how much of the energy is nuclear. Taking this argument into a logical conclusion, Finland (or any other country) should not have any nuclear reactors on the chance that they will be attacked. This is a silly level of risk management, a very shallow and blind view.
> Unfortunately, the project was cancelled for moronic political reasons.
> In March 2022, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Finnish Government declared that a rapid independence from Russian energy production is desired, and that the construction of the plant should not continue. Mika Lintilä, Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, declared that he would not issue a construction permit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanhikivi_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
1. Consistent stable long-term energy 2. Controlled by Finland, to minimize all kinds of risks (war foreign influence, cut sea cables, worsening of relationships with other countries, market conditions and economic situation changing.
So what did Finnish politicians decided to do? To cancel the project for nonsense political reasons (let's see how much Finland will be forced to pay in damages), therefore INCREASING the reliance on foreign sources or unstable local sources.
This is the stupidity on the level of "Germany decided to run down all the nuclear powers for the sake of environment". With disastrous results!
"We don't want to allow Russians to build anything" is a statement full of feelings, but not a lot of sense, if one thinks even a little bit deeper.
Finnish oldest Loviisa nuclear station is Soviet based and this has not caused any problems. The nuclear fuel is also being provided by Russia, despite the war.
Overall, it's not exactly a ton of jobs for how much money is going into them, but it isn't nothing.
I’m not disputing that data center buildouts will have some localized job creation, but the net effect of all those data centers will be overwhelmingly negative on employment if everything the AI companies are saying is true
Renewables can compete but take longer to build. Nuclear is more expensive and takes forever to build. Maybe SMRs will happen but I’m not holding my breath. It’s harder than it sounds to scale that.
Depending on how far north you mean, you lose all or all but one of the above.
* easy permitting
* lots of space
Something like 500g/MWh for gas/coal/nuclear (~70% of power in AZ), so a huge xAI datacenter (Colossus 2, ~1 GW/h) would use ~700 MW of this type, or ~350k gallons of water an hour, which would be 0.2% of the Colorado rivers flow rate last year.
I don't know if that's significant.
That probably matters a lot less for AI.
Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.
Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.
What do you mean Texas is anti-resident?
They are not used to the aggressiveness of FAANG negotiators, they treat them as friends.
So that local consumers start having to depend on bottled water?
What a shit show ...
And just out of curiosity, have you come to this opinion independently through your own research?
Or is this just regurgitated sentiment you’re memetically repeating to signal in-group status after consuming reactionary media/clickbait on this topic?
2. AI requires power^
3. AI companies purchase/produce power
4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI)
^Same for water
This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
Not all humans
5. when the AI bubble bursts, we'll be left with huge amounts of unused/half-built data center capacity and unused power (with complications such as the data centers belonging to creditors and not being worth nearly as much as the inflated prices paid for building them).
"The Finland deal will ensure that the Loviisa plant keeps operating beyond 2030, the companies said in a statement. Keeping it running until 2050 will require about €1 billion of investments over the years"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-09/google-gi...
Second of all, if it is not Google, it'd be either other businesses, or from tax money. Why should tax money be used to bail out a failed business?
OL3 will generate ~745 TWh over his life, from a total investment of ~€11bn.
Loviisa life extension will generate ~170 TWH, from an investment of ~€1bn.
Considering the capacity factor, we are comparing 6€/MWh for Loviisa against ~15€/MWh for OL3.
So, it is worth mentioning that extending the life of an existing power plant can be a really good investment.
Main difference is in initial setup/concrete installment!!
You can review all the maths using data from OL3 here: https://reactoratlas.com/en?y=2026&s=finland-olkiluoto-nucle...
And to answer your question: yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out, it was and is not feasible option to shut it down in few years. If it actually was a realistic option this would have been big news for years now with the highly variable electricity prices we've had after the Russia attack on Ukraine.
According to whom? Show the number, don't just be hand wavy. If it is struggling now to extend beyond 2030 then how can it easily be profitable? Think about your logic.
> Yes I and everyone else in Finland were willkng to wait and find out
Not the plant operator apparently, who has the stakes in it. Do you pay them enough to run the plant?
Why does it matter that homes "aren't clean" while Google is? That's silly. There's going to be the same level of demand no matter what - the same mix of coal and nuclear inputs will happen regardless of where the outflows are. It's fungible.
More demand will in time result in an increase in supply. That's a good thing. We'll be building a lot more, and it's long overdue.
Fortum said Google's commitment would support an investment programme aimed at extending the life of the nuclear station and increasing its generating capacity."
Long-term PPAs are what you usually want because they are bankable and give you solid demand on which to expand. Which is literally what they're talking about doing.
I don't know about Finland specifically, but isn't this already the case practically everywhere?
Is that not the miracle of the free market?
King Richard II would have killed for an iPhone, PS5, air conditioning, and Uber Eats. He'd swap places with you, and he was king. You don't realize how awesome you have it.
Just a hundred years ago your ancestors were (probably) eating rotten meat and drinking unclean water.
I don't for a moment believe that, but apparently arguments that cannot possibly be proven are in vogue nowadays.
If supply was just in time constructed so you maybe have only like 10-30% extra vs peak, the 50% of a nuclear power plant shifts the preexisting non-Google demand onto the non-nuclear sources as the plant can no longer meet its non-Google demand. It’s generally no different than if Google acquired that electricity from the available mix rather than the plant directly.
The thing it gives them is the ability to meet their individual net-0 targets (and thus government incentives) - a local optimization at the cost of a global net negative (at least as far as carbon electricity sources goes)
China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
They are not. The plant may not survive beyond 2030 without this order.
That's not the case, because in EU (and thus Finland) electric production is under cap-and-trade. There is just no way to increase dirty electricity production in EU. Apart from political pressure to change rules, which for example Italy is doing because Italy built their grid on gas...
It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the biggest corporations in the world and all they can do is act like it doesn't count because they don't actually care
Also, unlike solar and wind, nuclear is a very important anchor source to prevent fossil fuel use in the grid. Solar and wind only absorb growth but so far have never managed to actually compete on baseload power requirements.
Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an adversarial neighbor.
But if this is all well reasoned we can now start building data centers on the south pole and dump the nuclear waste where no one notices it. Because that's the fumbling policy relied on. The people are being played for fools.
2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton catching mechanism
3. Closed zone is currently habitable (except Sarcophagus area). You'll receive much higher radiation dose simply by flying to Norway. Nature is returning there, there're plans to repopulate it
4. This was in Soviet Union and power plant was "public". Most of the power plant in EU is public if not every single one. I don't have exact information on this topic
Please do not treat entire technology, which is safe, as a threat simply because some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position and paid ultimate price for it
We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
His skin was falling from body while he was still breathing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
In terms of loss of life Chernobyl disaster is comparable to Bhopal disaster (at least 3,787 over 16,000 claimed deaths), caused by Methyl isocyanate leak from the storage tank. A combination of poorly-maintained or non-functional facilities, a disregard of safety standards, and an under-trained workforce made it possible for water to leak into the MIC tanks in the absence of properly working safety systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
Chernobyl disaster was caused by a combination of reactor design error and operator error. After this errors have been fixed (different nuclear fuel composition, modern monitoring and controlling equipment, improved operator training and procedures) there are still 7 operational RBMK in Russia. (The same reactor type as Chernobyl)
" Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity. "
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
It's the decommissioning costs for both nuclear and fossil fuel plants that are most often missing or overlooked.