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

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

#401
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s Time to Wake Up - The Currently Known Global Mineral Reserves Will Not Be Sufficient to Supply Enough Metals to Manufacture the Planned Non-fossil Fuel Industrial Systems https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/ "No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastruc…

Does this take into account recycling? Regardless of if recycling is occurring now.

If there’s not enough minerals to cover all needs, let alone for EVs and power storage only, how is recycling going to help, even if 100% efficient?

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

#402

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…

> which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands There was no problem with nuclear cooling demands, the problem was if the nuclear plants put more heat into the rivers, it would be bad for the wildlife living there.

Ah, yep, thanks for clarifying.

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

#403
The main effect of this is electricity prices going up. It's completely ideological, Vattenfall the company running nuclear power plants wanted to shut down the reactors because they were not economically viable.

The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the number of wind turbines is tiny. In the Gothenburg area I'm aware of maybe 10 (only one is really close).

Sweden (unlike Denmark or Germany) never really invested in renewables. If they would have invested in wind like those countries (and let the north south connections go to rot) they would be fully renewable already. I suspect the 40B would also pay for enough wind to achieve that goal.

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

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So for example, laws around nuclear has changed so that the owners are now liable for any damages in case of a major accident.

citation required Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.

Ok, seems the amount the companies are now liable for is actually capped at some number, which is a fair amount but still not covering a truly major incident. But the cap has gradually increased over time and is thus costing the electric companies more money.

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

#405
post #96

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.

Everyone forgets about Hydro.

Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.

Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).

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

#406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vattenfall is not the only Swedish producer. Not even the biggest one!

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

#407
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…

There exists a group of folks who claim nuclear isn't green and is going to 'kill the planet'. The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale. You are exactly right - this is the only way.

Funnily the rhetoric of nuclear proponents is always exclusively aimed against renewables not fossil fuels.

They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane.

Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden

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

#408

The funny thing about a country like Sweden is that their energy problem is 100% based on energy exports to the EU market. Sweden produces way more electricity than it needs at any given time. During one of the latest “crises” a single company exported energy worth several hundreds of millions Euros to other countries.

Sweden also has an imbalance problem due to a lack of transmission capability. After shutting down nuclear plants in the south that kept the grid balanced, there are now times where the transmission from the north (where the hydro power is) to the south is at capacity. So the country as a whole has generation, but can't get it to where it needs to be.

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

#409

The main effect of this is electricity prices going up. It's completely ideological, Vattenfall the company running nuclear power plants wanted to shut down the reactors because they were not economically viable. The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the numb…

Nuclear was shut down due to tax raises and switching out the ceo to a wind-friendly person.

Bulding more wind when it is not blowing in the winter does not help. Should we freeze at -10C for days until there is wind again?

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

#410

The main effect of this is electricity prices going up. It's completely ideological, Vattenfall the company running nuclear power plants wanted to shut down the reactors because they were not economically viable. The irony is that Sweden is ideally suited for going 100% renewable. The North has lots of hydro (which is essentially storage) and the south has lots of windy coastline. But if you go around Sweden the numb…

You make a number bad claims here.

The effect of not having enough planable energy production is that prices go up and that the energy industry starts gradually worse power plants. So you have the oil powered plants in the south, spewing out CO2. The reason why this "works" is because a number of countries in the vicinity have large needs for energy in the aftermath of having shut down their planable energy production. (Both coal plants and nuclear plants.)

The swedish nuclear plants were not shut down because they were not economically viable, this is as they say _fake news_. A special tax and a number of new fees were introduced by the swedish green party that prevented economic viability. Plus: further development of more modern technology was prevented actively and also indirectly because of political risk and a lack of stability for such investments.

The hydro power is in the north and cannot be transported to the south for a number of both technical reasons (too much losses with lines that long) and a lack of capacity.

The wind power has to be stored in batteries (or other similar technology) in order for there to be energy available when there's not enough wind blowing. These are problems that are actually hard to solve and that also have plenty of bad consequences for the environment. Not being able to acknowledge this is the real ideological fallacy here.

In fact: there is already "too much" wind farm capacity in relation to storage capacity and immediate power needs, as is evident when the price drops way below viability for the plants themselves (and sometimes into negative territory.) When this happens, the wind farms run huge losses _and so does all the other plants_. And when there is no wind, the wind farms rack up losses again.

Energy management in Sweden is a lot more complex and nuanced than thinking that what's happening now in regards to a want for nuclear power production is some sort of bad ideology.

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