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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

#371

Post by laundermaf »

abigail95 wrote: post #348
f_allwein wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

how did people build nuclear reactors in the 50s then? Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever. the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient. gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power. why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer…

I don’t think anyone is saying that it’s less safe, it’s just that our standards (and fear) have increased. 1960s vehicles didn’t have airbags, now we don’t buy cars without them.

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

#372

Post by kalleboo »

throwaway473825 wrote: post #221
alkonaut wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone should sabotage some energy infrastructure on the Baltic seabed to ensure better prices in Sweden…

Sweden isn't exporting electricity for free. The money is there - it just needs to be redistributed from companies to the people.

Especially since the Swedish power company - Vattenfall, is 100% owned by the Swedish state.

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

#373

Post by halper »

brutusborn wrote: post #299
rags2riches wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission capacity from the northern hydro to the southern nuclear regions has decreased due to the closing of reactors in the south. Power transmission is more complex than just building a fatter pipe to pour more water through. Having stable power in the south is a prerequisite to transfer hydro power from the north.

I don't understand, surely the southern grid is stabilized by interconnections to europe? I thought closing reactors would be independent of transmission. What am I missing?

They are separate grids: not synchronous, not stabilising each other. Most of the interconnections are HVDC links. Wikipedia has an article on synchronous grids of Northern Europe.

The decommissioning of several large generating stations in southern Sweden has indeed affected the effective transmission capacity from the north.

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

#374

Post by Gud »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #19
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…

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.

This doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening.

1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.

2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).

3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.

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

#375

Post by lostlogin »

Akronymus wrote: post #357
dieortin wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that does make a sense, I don’t see the problem

So make the owners of renewables liable too? From what I know ONLY nuclear has that stipulation.

Are they not? Coal has certainly been exempt in most places.

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

#376

Post by adrianN »

ncmncm wrote: post #267
treeman79 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nobody depends on Russia for renewable energy.

Until recently I occasionally heard plans about building wind farms in Siberia and exporting Hydrogen to Europe. Luckily that's off the table now.

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

#377

Post by adrianN »

r00fus wrote: post #96
quelsolaar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Renewables and nuclear are economically incompatible. Nuclear is capex dominated, you want to run your nuclear plants at 100% capacity to make a profit. So if you want to mix them with non-dispatchable power like renewables you either have enough nuclear plants to cover 100% of demand (for times when there is no wind and no sun) and make a loss on them most of the time, or you don't and get blackouts.

Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.

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

#378

Post by dang »

tpmx wrote: post #22
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.

The previous anti-nuclear social-democratic government together with the demonstrably insane "green" party installed a board in the state owned power company Vattenfall that after a while managed to sort of claim that it wasn't economically feasible to run the nuclear plants, with the new heavy taxes the social democrats had put in place on nuclear power production. Yay? Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully his…

Would you please keep flamewar rhetoric off HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

We've had to ask you this repeatedly. That's not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#379

Post by adrianN »

tored wrote: post #297
themitigating wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if it consumes resources what matters is that it's less than what it replaces a.k.a. better for the environment. I see this manipulative arguement used all the time with lithium mining.

How are going to mine resources that doesn’t exist? There is not enough of the metals needed to go full renewable.

Ridiculous claim. What are the assumptions?

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

#380

Post by thatfrenchguy »

ncmncm wrote: post #272
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t, I want batteries to not pay PGE a shit ton of money. I’ve looked at prices, it’s just not happening.
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