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

Yes, local electricity bill would go up but if the price is often extremely low, selling some for higher price is a net win. Ie this is why we have trade as concept in the first place.

Surely, you know that wind power has had a lot of trouble expanding in Sweden due to huge opposition from every community against building wind turbines on their land. Everyone likes the idea of wind power until they try to build a huge turbine on their backyard.

Sun power, in Sweden, in winter, is clearly not going to cut it... even in the southern areas that still get a little bit of sun in winter, you don't get nearly enough power.

Hydropower is great and Sweden produces lots of it, but again, highly unlikely it can build new damns with the current regulations.

The only options left seem to be coal and nuclear. I hope you don't propose to just use coal.

Nuclear power, while expensive to build, is reliable and plenty. No one proposing that it should be one of the options for countries like Sweden is insane.

> 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.)

Actually this year many countries were pushing energy to France were most nuclear plants were not operational for maintanance and heat.

> 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.

Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words (In October 2015, Vattenfall decided to close down Ringhals 1 by 2020 and Ringhals 2 by 2019 due to their declining profitability, instead of, as previously announced, around 2025.[16][5] from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant)

Or are you saying it was because of the introduction of the Swedish Nuclear Waste Fund? I would argue that paying for waste storage should be part of the operating cost (just as CO2 costs should be covered by coal operators btw).

>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.

You mean they could not find investors on the open market because they deemed it too risky with questionable returns, without government guarantees. Is that not how the free market is supposed to operate?

> 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.

HVDC has 3% power loss over 1000km HVAC has 6%, losses are not the problem. From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current You are correct capacity of those lines is a problem though, maybe some investments are in order?

> 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.

What are the bad environmental consequences? Also offshore wind has a capacity factor of 60% that is similar to nuclear.

> 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.

That just points to a huge market opportunity. If the wind turbines have to pay "huge" amounts when the wind is high, I just need to store that energy and make twice the money.

> 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.

Funny, usually it's the nuclear proponents saying it's all straight forward and the opponents are just ideologically motivated.

The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)

We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?

Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.

Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.

This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.

In short, this is not a zero sum game.