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

bloomberg.com

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

#141

Post by otikik »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #18
_Microft wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the economics of nuclear power somehow more favorable in Sweden? That seems to be the major issue elsewhere from what I understand.

They aren't better in Sweden. The right's support for it is not really related to the costs. I'm personally curious how it's going to pan out considering the right-wing parties claimed they'd be against state subsidies.

Look at it this way: The army is publicly supported. Do you think they are against the army?

Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.

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

#142

Post by Retric »

tpmx wrote: post #140
otikik wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, I hope you guys are able to build them quickly. > I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.

While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.

Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh.

You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.

And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.

PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.

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

#143

Post by dekken_ »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #133
dekken_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Petrol burned in a car is energy, not electricity.

The fact that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable. The other comment is probably more on point about conversion effeciency.

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

#144

Post by dekken_ »

Gwypaas wrote: post #132
dekken_ wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines. Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines. On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a differen…

Thanks for that

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

#145

Post by zkomp »

ncmncm wrote: post #104
r00fus wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables don't give you baseload power. So renewables + nuclear is a good balance.

Renewables + storage will provide massively cheaper baseload power.

Will not happen. ”green” energy is not green- it consume massive amount of resources, it is expensive, short lived, destabilize the grid. I’m super happy my country is finally waking up from the horrible green hypnosis.

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

#146

Post by ncmncm »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #113
naillo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to start this whole flamewar but I was totally in the other camp (not yours) and then covid hit and now my trust in consensus science is super worn out and have basically started to believe it might be fine.

The "consensus science" doesn't say anything about the "end of the world" or societal collapse in 20 years.

Social science is far from exact enough to predict either eventuality with any confidence.

If waves of tens or hundreds of millions of refugees leaving places they cannot live in any longer begin sweeping across borders, how long will it be before fascist governments, already threatening, and already winning in Turkey, Poland, Russia, Belarus, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, and India take over generally and initiate wars, as they do? Such wars might not go thermonuclear, but they would certainly disrupt fragile global trade networks.

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

#147

Post by hello1234567 »

otikik wrote: post #135
tpmx wrote: post #7

The new coalition government has pledged $40B (approximately the market cap of Twitter, heh) in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction. They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors. In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent s…

Congratulations, I hope you guys are able to build them quickly. > I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.

well nuclear is the current cheapest way of producing electricity. doesn't stop from funding other cheaper and future safe options.

mantra is cheaper.

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

#148

Post by MichaelCollins »

ncmncm wrote: post #138
MichaelCollins wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> where one part of the world has experienced one of the severest droughts in the history of mankind, and the other the worst floods". Nothing happening today, extrapolated out to 20 years with the most severe climate models, will be severe enough to cause the "end of the world". Anybody who's telling you we'll have total societal collapse by 2042 is out of touch with reality. The only way for things to go that badly…

You seem very certain of your facts. I can only say that you are probably right. But we don't know if the ocean ecosystem will collapse in that time, bringing down civilization. The thing about collapse is that it happens terrifyingly fast, and is only sometimes predicted accurately.

Even if the oceans were utterly sterilized today, with all the atmospheric implications that go with that, it would take longer than 20 years for Sweden to no longer exist.

I'm not saying that climate change won't cause huge environmental disasters and social unrest, because it will. I'm saying that "there won't be a planet left after 20 years" is extreme pessimism and unsupported by any model backed by science, even if you read that claim generously and assume "won't be a planet left" is merely hyperbole for the collapse of Swedish society.

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

#149

Post by jules »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #94
ncmncm wrote: post #24

Reactors will not be forced to shut down, in the future. Instead, they will be shut down as unable to produce power at a competitive price. Those that continue operating will depend even more on taxpayer subsidies than they do now. The money that will be spent on these new reactors would buy a hell of a lot more wind power than these nukes could produce. But money for renewables would not go into the pockets of right…

Pure FUD. The wind doesn't blow all the time and battery technology at scale isn't there.

Yes, this argument gets repeated again and again and again, and when you ask about storage you never get a decent answer. And yet, the argument keeps getting repeated even by people who matter and make the decisions. When I started watching debates in the Dutch house of representatives I pretty much lost all hope. Of the 150 members, I'd say 145 are either unable or unwilling to think quantitatively and do simple napkin math. Not just regarding energy policy but in all areas. Yet they are verbally very strong, which makes the problem even worse. I suspect it's the same in most western countries.

If you think I'm exaggerating, remember when the Royal Statistical Society asked "if you spin a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads?" and 47% of Conservative MPs and 77% Labour MPs got the answer wrong. Many technical people cannot even fathom this, and tend to assume that people who cannot answer such questions must be severely mentally impaired in general. That is completely wrong; you have lots of people who are near geniuses verbally but incapable of or unwilling to do quantitative thinking.

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

#150

Post by tpmx »

Retric wrote: post #142
tpmx wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.

Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the…

Hello.

"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."

So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world!

Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.

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