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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

#271

Post by ClumsyPilot »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #233
Gwypaas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirec…

> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years

We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.

Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.

Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.

In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.

There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.

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

#272

Post by ncmncm »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #253
ncmncm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates. Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.

Renewables (except hydro) have not driven a grid anywhere in the world, because storage is expensive both in $€ terms and in CO2/kWh terms. Maybe you’ll see the California grid running in 20 years all on renewables + storage at a crazy high cost per kWh and a stupid CO2/kWh compared to nuclear, and that’s just because it’s sunny 300 days a year here!

You dearly wish for storage to be expensive, just as you used to wish solar PV would be. But you were wrong then, and you are wrong now.

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

#273

Post by ncmncm »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #109
ncmncm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates. Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.

Show me one place anywhere in the entire history of grid-scale renewables where the consumer's costs went down . The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time. I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users payin…

I frequently get flyers in the mail, from a variety of mostly co-op providers, offering to supply me power more cheaply than the grid operator does.

So in fact my cost, as a consumer, is lower than it was.

You clearly wish this were not so.

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

#274

Post by ncmncm »

sunmag wrote: post #245
ncmncm wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.

.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries. Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.

No post body was provided.

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

#275

Post by NullPrefix »

Gwypaas wrote: post #269
treeman79 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth a lot to not be dependent on Russia for energy.

Sweden is not dependent on Russian energy and is the largest electricity exporter in Europe. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...

Sweden is not, but it's neighbours are in one form or another. Electricity is best replacement for coal and natural gas.

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

#277

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #271
fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirec…

> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure. Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers. Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business…

Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.

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

#278

Post by dahfizz »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #136
cjblomqvist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous government didn't stop the shutdown planned 40+ years ago (due to a national referendum), in part because the owners (Vattenfall) said it's not economically feasible to run them anymore without subsidies. It's complex.

Energy security has a price.

It's interesting Europe is willing to spend billions of tax dollars on human rights like food, housing, medical care, and all sorts of social programs.

But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.

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

#279

Post by elihu »

ncmncm wrote: post #97
elihu wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 overwhelming majority of storage will not be batteries, unless a massively cheaper battery chemistry takes over. Lake Mead stores (well, stored) radically less energy than mountaintop reservoirs with thousands of feet of "head" can hold behind cheap earthen dikes. Look up "penstock".

I suppose I should have clarified that I meant "lake Mead if at capacity" which it isn't.

Stored energy (in a fixed gravitational field) is the product of height and mass. Hoover dam has a "hydraulic height" of 576 feet according to a government website, though the average height of any given drop of water is less than that because the lake is deep (or it was, anyways).

The thing about lake Mead is that the volume of water is absolutely huge. I don't think there are any mountaintop reservoirs anywhere close to it because though the altitude difference could be a lot more, it's hard to store large amounts of water on a mountaintop.

If we estimate that the average height of water in Lake Mead is 400 feet and it holds 26 million acre feet, then a pumped hydro storage system with 4,000 feet of altitude difference would need to hold 2.6 million acre feet to be equivalent. I'm pretty sure there's nothing like that in the U.S. The Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia has an upper reservoir of about 35.6 thousand acre feet and a vertical distance of 380 meters (1,246 feet).

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

#280

Post by ClumsyPilot »

Retric wrote: post #175
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Insufficient detail. You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on. There's a good argument…

A county can’t subsidize it’s own power, it’s got to pay what it costs. Producers, distributors, and consumers of electricity within a county can receive subsides, but that runs into all the usual issues with planned economies. Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency becau…

> runs into all the usual issues with planned economies.

Oh, and the war in Ukraine does not show the glaring weakness of 'Unplanned economy' and just choosing the cheapest supplier?

Subsidies and incentives do not a planned economy make.

Folks in the west seem to have taken the failure of hofhly corrupt planning system of USSR as an indication that they dont need to do any thinking or planning at all.

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