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Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

bloomberg.com

121–130 of 583 posts

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#121

The only green solution to our current energy problem is more nuclear power plants. We have to stop relying on coal, wood, oil, gas and the rest of the “dirty” materials.

Except nuclear is expensive and takes decades to build, runs on non renewable materials (a good percentage of which come from Russia), leaves waste that is deadly for 100.000s of years, and promising new technologies will need decades to reach maturity. Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?

Well, I agree with you that they’re expensive and take time to build, but they don’t leave that much waste compared to what we’ve been told and their materials have more or less the same problems as the ones from renewable ones (batteries, non recyclable blades, exotic materials for solar…).

I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs. I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.

We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#122
post #93
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).

Is there any nuclear facility that's privately owned that didn't get massive subsidies/loan guarantees from a government? At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.

No post body was provided.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#123
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s probably fair to say that energy demand over the next ten years will increase significantly. The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society. In such a scenar…

Energy demand will not increase in the next decade. It will, instead, fall, as it has in recent years. Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.

You appear to be contradicting yourself, but I imagine you don't think you are, so you might want to elaborate.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#124
post #25

A bit of context, the south area which this reactor is suggested to be built in has occasionally a 1000% electricity higher price from the northern regions. A big reason for this is that prices in the south is highly connected to markets that the south region is connected to, and those region are heavily importers of electricity creating a higher demand than there is available of cheap energy. For example, in order t…

Another factor affecting the price is that, while there's a lot of hydropower generated in northern Sweden, there's not enough capacity for transferring energy to the south where most consumption is. The investors building industry in the north that can use cheap renewable energy don't seem to mind though. :)

That is, surely, fixable by constructing transmission lines massively cheaper than nukes.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#125
post #79

Quoted post unavailable.

The planet will be fine. Civilization will be likely to have collapsed, but that is our problem.

> Civilization will be likely to have collapsed,

Some in the short term, more in the long term. But I challenge you to find any sane climate model that says Sweden won't be around in 20 years to use any infrastructure built today.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so they get compensated if they have to close it even so the government payed them to build it. this sound like a bad deal. Tax payers pay for the whole thing and the owner gets even more money if they have to close it for whatever reason. I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad m…

Its all built on very old thinking. Nuclear may have been a good idea in the past, but with the rapid reduction of cost of renewable, especially solar, its no longer worth considering. Building a plant takes a decade, and a decade from now the difference in cost will be even greater. Nuclear will look like huge waste of money then.

You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU grid is pretty well interconnected so excess capacity is pretty easy to sell (up to a point). This is one of the reasons why renewables can be used as a large piece of the total supply.

However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.

The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.

Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.

People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.

All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#127
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind and hydro are probably more practical in Sweden. Geothermal is not having a heyday because it depends on the same sort of expensive-to-operate steam turbines as nukes do, so is uncompetitive. Anytime steam turbines have to compete with no steam turbines, the steam turbines tend to lose.

Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean anyone should use nuclear. Perhaps we could come up with ways to distribute renewable energy globally?

Right, there is never any legitimate justification to build new nukes.

At the moment, existing nukes can still be operated at competitive marginal cost, neglecting original capital cost, and carefully not counting continuing subsidies in opex. As renewables costs continues on down, even just nukes' subsidized opex will be unsustainable.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#128
post #112

One question for nuclear advocates, as I know it's full on-trend at the moment: What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities? Just like Russia is playing "games" around the Ukranian nuclear plant? What's to stop that being used as the new threat? We won't turn your gas off, we'll threaten your nuclear plants? Genuine question.

> What's to stop adversaries holding countries to ransom using their nucealer facilities?

Nothing, unless you yourself have leverage. Every resource or dependency is a potential weakness. The idea is to be able to say "ok, if you bomb our fission plant, we'll shut off your fresh water supply."

It's all a huge game of chess.

Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built

#129
post #74
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be stupid to spend on storage before there is enough renewable generating capacity to charge it from. In the meantime they spend, sensibly, on renewable generating capacity. By the time there is enough, storage will be massively cheaper. In the meantime, charging storage from gas or coal and then drawing it down is the same as burning gas or coal for immediate use, just with losses.

Batteries will probably be cheaper, but pumped hydro storage will probably cost about the same since it's a mature technology. I could see Norway or Switzerland being major players in pumped hydro storage, given their geography. Awhile back I did a bunch of math to try to figure out how much stored gravitational energy is in Lake Mead, and if I didn't make any major mistakes it came out to be about as much energy as…

The cost of batteries is actually rising, now that manufacturing costs only make up ~25% of a battery's cost [1]. The remaining 75% is raw materials, dominated by the cathode and anode, which are having trouble keeping up with demand [2].

1. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-the-cost-of-a...

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/18/ev-battery-costs-set-to-spik...

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