Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 583 posts

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

#501

Post by fulafel »

doikor wrote: post #458
ncmncm wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Transmission lines increase the end customer costs (a lot). They are necessary but you want as little of them as you can get away with. Obviously not having enough can also increase costs as you have to use very expensive forms of production to compensate. Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the to…

In the globalisation/market liberalism mindset it's traditionally considered good if places with high supply and low demand export to areas where products fetch higher prices.

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

#502

Post by nickez »

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…

I'm also a proponent of nuclear, but modern nuclear power plants seem to take 15-20 years to construct and typically go 10s of billions of EUR over budget. So one does not simply "build a reactor".. look at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

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

#503

Post by Isolus »

tpmx wrote: post #490
Isolus wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cited article says "a bridge for a limited transition period" and not "green energy". So no, they don't want to label it green energy, they only prefer it to other fossil fuels and nuclear but the goal is to phase out natural gas as well.

The DW headline is "European Commission declares nuclear and gas to be green". Is the state-owned DW/ARD not a trustworthy news source?

The article cites "gas and nuclear were labeled as "transitional" energy sources in the taxonomy".

So the news itself is correct but the headline abbreviates this very badly.

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

#504

Post by doikor »

fulafel wrote: post #501
doikor wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transmission lines increase the end customer costs (a lot). They are necessary but you want as little of them as you can get away with. Obviously not having enough can also increase costs as you have to use very expensive forms of production to compensate. Here in Finland the transmission costs before this current price hike were usually 50%+ (for me with my current fixed price contract they are around 60%) of the to…

In the globalisation/market liberalism mindset it's traditionally considered good if places with high supply and low demand export to areas where products fetch higher prices.

True but not when the upkeep of that infrastructure costs more than the profits you get from selling your high supply product in the far away high demand market.

Obviously with the current market prices the cost of the transmission capabilities is a rounding error but if we get back to the electricity prices of a year or two ago the costs of transmission could start to dominate the price again so you have to be careful about investments like this (just like you have to be with nuclear plants for the case that the price on the markets is goes permanently under your production costs)

And transmission capability upgrades are really long term investments. Sweden started lately to try and fix this issue. If that project finishes on time it will take 14 years to finish. These are the kind of timescales where building a new nuclear power plant can be a faster fix.

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

#505

Post by sunmag »

Gwypaas wrote: post #475
hnlmorg wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not really. It is part of the Swedish capacity reserve during winters, i.e. the national grid operator pays it to be in standby to ensure the reliability of the grid. Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market. A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plan…

While interesting its scope is in the typical Swedish narrow mindedness. Solidarity, the Swedish mantra, a very watered out word here. We are part of EU (Union) comes with some conditions or was it started just for sake of profit?

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

#506

Post by Retric »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #477
Retric wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of subsidies and incentives is to plan an economy. There are many different levels of panned economies. With say US food subsides and tariffs as a less extreme than Maoist China or the USSR, but they still have huge and well known problems. Messing with Food production has resulted in inefficiency, waste, pollution, corruption, etc but also overconsumption with it’s extremely negative health impacts. It’s j…

I think you live on a different planet - on this one our market is selling bloody dictators weapons and parts that they will use against us. The market has no concern for our survival, and by extention it's own survival, past 1/2 quarterly reports

Markets aren’t governments, but they have raised the global standard of living vastly beyond our ancestors. They all happily do long term planning, just look at VC funding for risky investments that won’t see returns for years.

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

#507

Post by cinntaile »

kalleboo wrote: post #493
cinntaile wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds strange, when there's a shortage of power, don't the higher electricity prices go mostly to the energy producers, in order to create incentive to increase production and start up more expensive generation forms?

That's true but the poster you replied to was talking about distribution so I assumed that was what you were talking about as well.

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

#508

Post by Gwypaas »

pelorat wrote: post #479
Gwypaas wrote: post #86

Typical right-wing reactionary environmental policy. When you do not have any climate-related politics to bring to the table, all you do is shout "nuclear" at the top of your lungs and tote it as the solution to everything climate. > Much of the resistance towards 100% Renewable Energy (RE) systems in the literature seems to come from the a-priori assumption that an energy system based on solar and wind is impossible…

Solar isn't economically feasible in Sweden. Too far north, too much snow, and during winter it's dark for months. Might work better in the far south, but not good enough.

That's why Sweden's solution must be centered around off-shore wind and dispatchable hydro together with solar in the summer.

Sweden is after all located in one of the windiest places on earth.

https://globalwindatlas.info/en

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

#509

Post by cinntaile »

sunmag wrote: post #505
Gwypaas wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. It is part of the Swedish capacity reserve during winters, i.e. the national grid operator pays it to be in standby to ensure the reliability of the grid. Its current operations are because even though it is an expensive oil plant it is profitable to run it for export on the European market. A Swedish professor in energy systems looked closer at the electricity export compared to the operation of the plan…

While interesting its scope is in the typical Swedish narrow mindedness. Solidarity, the Swedish mantra, a very watered out word here. We are part of EU (Union) comes with some conditions or was it started just for sake of profit?

A bit of a weird tangent, I don't see how this is related to the topic? A private company operates this plant, it will run the plant if it's profitable. It has absolutely nothing to do with "solidarity".

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

#510

Post by otikik »

tpmx wrote: post #140
otikik wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations, I hope you guys are able to build them quickly. > I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.

While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.

On the long term I was thinking more along the lines of aligning externalities and economy.

On the short term we might need something before those nuclear plants are up and running.

Post reply on HN