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

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

This is not in any way in contradiction to what I'm saying. In fact: this supports my case. Because the amount of nuclear power generation is down, prices surge. This is my point. Your point was the opposite, remember? More nuclar power will increase prices?

> 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)

If you read what I said, I said that nuclear power was artifically made inviable because of extra charges and taxes. It was perfectly viable and economically sound before these.

> 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?

Right, because the political climate is such in Sweden that there is risk in investing in this, there won't be any interest in investing in this area. I said this as well. A free market would work here but we don't have one. The reason for government guarantees at this point is as an offset to the perceived political risk. A nuclear powerplant is a 20-40 year investment and if there's a very large risk that a populist government were to negate this in 5-10 years, then noone wants to invest in it. This is where we are.

> 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?

Losses are part of the problem, yes more investment here is needed but this is not the biggest problem. Another commenter here mentioned the fact that because there isn't enough capacity to _receive_ the transfers, they can't be made. This is to do with the lack of inertial reserve(?) (svängmassa) after having switched off so many large powerplants over the years.

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

I'm going to have to call that 60% number.

The consequences are visual (i.e.: ugly), noice, birds as well as the fact that they are niether degradable nor recyclable because of the types of material needed. Do note, though, that I am in no way anti wind power.

> 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.

Right. So you need batteries, we need improved tech in that department, someone has to make them and this requires a number of let's call them "troublesome materials." "I just need to store that energy" is as reasonable a thought as: we just need to feed them, about starving people. That just-word there is quite powerful.

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

Well I am not one of them. You started out with the big I-word here and it is my honest opinion that it is better served the other way around, and for these reasons: a number of the problems we have in sweden with the power (and heat) generation is to do with the fact that we did turn away from nuclear power. The same can be said about Germany and both for the same reason: ideologically (or at least populistically) driven policies.

I'm not in love with nuclear power in the slightest. But it is one of the least bad solutions so we must really put away ideologically driven dreams and deal with reality. This is in regards to Sweden's current nuclear technology, which is to say, really old tech as it's basically from the 60:ies. Quite a lot has happend since and saying no to that without understanding the complexities and nuances to this and because Someone Puleaze think of the ch... environment? That's just poor judgement.

We have a large scale war in Europe now with Russia threatening with nukes. We have attacks by unknown actor that destroyed gas pipelines.

From this one can see how the idea that somebody will bomb out a nuclear power station somewhere in Europe gets non-trivial probability.

So nuclear power really cannot be safe when this planet allows crazy guys to gain enough power.

As for coal then consider that an electric car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant with over 40% efficiency generates less CO2 than a gasoline or diesel car.

So rather than building nuclear power, the states should invest to upgrade older coal power plants from their 30-35% efficiency to 40-45% and quickly phase out petrol cars while expanding on renewables.

Electricity, like an increasing bunch of other things, is part of the infrastructure. The amount and different levels of infrastructure pretty much define "civilization", do away with infrastructure and your civilization is done for. Which also means that the way a civilization treats its infrastructure tells you a lot about this civilization.

If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.

Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.

> Besides: Are they going to buy Uranium from Russia as the US are doing for their reactors?

Sweden has been anti-nuclear for several decades, and one of the laws that has been passed is to forbid Uranium extraction, even though Sweden has quite a bit in its soil.

So if this development is any sign, maybe they'll do away with that silly law as well and make it so Sweden doesn't have to buy it from someone else?

Also, Russia isn't the largest exporter of Uranium.

You mean Svenska Kraftnät (SVK) instead of Vattenfall, they're the ones making money from electricity distribution. Vattenfall is an electricity producer, it's not responsible for this kind of distribution across borders. It is responsible for some distribution within Sweden (regionnät), but there it is not the only player. SVK on the other hand is 100% owned by the state.