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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

#461

Post by stkdump »

themitigating wrote: post #197
belorn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to both sides, the electricity prices at the time when the decision was made was very different from today. We had prices in the south of sweden 2020 that was as low as around €0.02 per kw/h, compared to over €0.3 in 2022, and in 2020 the price trend was looking to be going downwards. If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclea…

To be fair electricity prices vary throughout time. Basing a long term decision on a short term price is foolish. Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.

The increase of energy prices in Europe doesn't seem to be short term anymore. It reflects a new geopolitical reality, that has almost zero hope of changing soon again. Sure, energy prices will decrease over time, but it will be a very slow process, until we get even in a similar region as a few years back. Governments will have to subsidize not just energy creation, but many more activities, unless we are ready to loose a lot of the wealth and equality we have left in the population.

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

#462

Post by fyvhbhn »

lawn wrote: post #399
ncmncm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, surely, fixable by constructing transmission lines massively cheaper than nukes.

It doesn't in any way solve the increasing electricity need in the future though, even assuming it would be fast and cheap to fix (it's not). That said, the coalition also wants to improve the transmission lines.

Fix increasing electricity need

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

#463

Post by fyvhbhn »

hnlmorg wrote: post #447
cinntaile wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices. This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.

> If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity. This feels like your splitting hairs because the root cause is ultimately the same: if it wasn’t necessary then it wouldn’t be profitable.

Roding rain forests is profitable, but not necessary.

Logical fallacy

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

#464

Post by lrem »

moffkalast wrote: post #177
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?

Geothermal doesn't really work for most places, since you'd have to drill down for tens of kilometres to get the required temperature. If you can use it then great, but it's a rarity. > Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat th…

> doesn't take up half the country in surface area

Surprisingly, this argument is wrong. I have once verified the math for replacing all of vehicles in Germany with electric vehicles. Charged with 100% solar. The required surface area for solar farms would be about a tenth of what is currently used for the ethanol additive for unleaded (used typically in personal cars, AFAIK freight and public transport run on diesel without such additive).

But yeah, according to EU studies a zero-emission grid with nuclear for base load is way cheaper than without it.

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

#465

Post by fyvhbhn »

enra wrote: post #241
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.

During winter, when electricity needs are high, northern Europe maybe gets total of 0-6 hours of sunlight, and most of is not the optimal angle or intensity. It's also often overcast, so solar barely generates power. On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind. The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement. There isn't really a renewable tha…

In Europe there is never no wind, and wind generates more power in the winter contrary to nuclear plants.

You also don't need to build unlimited hydro plants.

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

#466

Post by fyvhbhn »

sneaky_verily wrote: post #232
ncmncm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables + storage will provide massively cheaper baseload power.

Renweable + storage in the form of lithium ion batteries exceeds the cost of nuclear by at least 50%. Some upcoming technologies liek compressed CO2 batteries make make price parity with nuclear a possibility but as of now your comment is incorrect.

No post body was provided.

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

#467

Post by lawn »

cycomanic wrote: post #436
hurril wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 productio…

> 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 produ…

> Are you saying Vattenfall did not shut down ringhals because they said they are not commercially viable? You are directly contradicting their own words

Both statements are true.

They weren't commercially viable because if the extra taxes the government introduced.

So yes they were shut down because they were too expensive, and yes the government indirectly shut them down by making them too expensive.

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

#468

Post by fyvhbhn »

Roark66 wrote: post #126
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.

You realise we are talking about Sweden here, not a subsaharan country by any stretch. In general in Europe (especially in Northern Europe) all solar and wind capacity has to backed up by at least the same amount of quickly available online dependable capacity. In practice this means natural gas and diesel plants that are off, or coal/nuclear that is being diverted elsewhere when the sun shines/wind blows. The EU gri…

No post body was provided.

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

#469

Post by pixelfarmer »

varajelle wrote: post #433
f_allwein wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wait! And will stop working if your rivers should run dry, as happened in France this summer. Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf. Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.

It was not because the river were dry, but because the river where too warm. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu... > France’s nuclear safety authority (ASN) set temperature and river flow limits beyond which power stations must reduce their production, to ensure the water used to cool the plants will not harm wildlife when it is released back into the rivers. It's just an conservative artifi…

This argument sounds like "oh, in the end it doesn't matter, we can just continue on!". But this is completely wrong. You cannot dump 50°C hot water into rivers without consequences, and very far reaching consequences at that. They are already very very borderline, because we are talking about something slowly creeping towards 30°C already, in large quantities.

Which also means you have to plan accordingly for all the new nuclear power plants, otherwise you are building a new ruin, pretty much. For the "near" future you can assume the dry and hot periods will continue like that, which means that long term projects like nuclear power plants have to be planned accordingly. Considering the accelerated progress of climate change that should include a lot of risk "buffer", if not a different approach to deal with the cooling water, for example.

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

#470

Post by tored »

adrianN wrote: post #381
tored wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the direction the world is going, the breakdown of globalization, every country will be required to be self sufficient.

Lucky for Sweden then that they already are?

Not self sufficient enough and also depending on weather.

There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.

Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.

But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.

Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.

The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.

It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.

Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.

This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.

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