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

bloomberg.com

511–520 of 583 posts

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

#511
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of nuclear power is good. The facts of nuclear power are much less good. It is not too much to ask that lifecycle costs and safety get addressed. For example, the French success with nuclear power looks much less successful due to decommissioning costs coming in at a multiple of estimated costs. The French low-balled their estimates, to be a fraction of estimates by Germany and UK. Which estimates do you bel…

French politicians voted in 2015 to shut off all planned new nuclear investment in favor of transitioning to “renewables” It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.

Perhaps the latest attempt to construct a new nuclear plant in France has something to do with it?

Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022.

Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues:

In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

Perhaps if we account for an additional unexpected half year of delay for every year that passes, we might see it in operation in Spring 2024?

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

#512

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.

If you use the ocean for cooling, that isn't an issue.

Can't tell if you are joking or not.

Ocean temperatures are already on the rise and causing havoc.

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

#513
post #499
post #25

A bit of context, the south area which this reactor is suggested to be built in has occasionally a 1000% electricity higher price from the northern regions. A big reason for this is that prices in the south is highly connected to markets that the south region is connected to, and those region are heavily importers of electricity creating a higher demand than there is available of cheap energy. For example, in order t…

This is only half the story. What is actually happening is that Sweden is importing expensive electricity from the baltics and exporting it to Germany. So even though the electricity is only in "transit" through Sweden, the prices go up in southern Sweden. Obviously everything is working as designed, but it does feel a bit unfair. To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must…

Germany also is just a transit country, producing more electricity than consuming. The problem is that half of Frances nuclear power plants aren’t running of which also surrounding countries like Italy are usually reliant on.

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

#514
post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markets existed for six thousand years, they predate ancient egypt. It is scientists and engineers who raised our standars of living, and they appeared recently. It is absolutely perserve for proponents of markets to take credit they do not deserve.

Take the invention of Penicilin, Alexander Flemming raised our standards of living while working at a public hospital. It was british and US governments who established mads manufacturing of it, not markets. The inventor never became a billionaire.

Most inventors never do.

Years mean nothing, you have to invest in decades.

And you still haven't addressed the issue of western co.panies selling weapons to regimes that want to see us dead - that's quite a critical flaw, don't you think?

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

#515
post #458
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…

Do you know if redispatch costs are included as part of your transmission costs and how much they are? Because if they are, then investing into the transmission lines can decrease transmission costs since the providers need to pay less for redispatch.

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

#516
post #25

A bit of context, the south area which this reactor is suggested to be built in has occasionally a 1000% electricity higher price from the northern regions. A big reason for this is that prices in the south is highly connected to markets that the south region is connected to, and those region are heavily importers of electricity creating a higher demand than there is available of cheap energy. For example, in order t…

From what I understand it's also (mainly?) because the southern areas pricing is very connected to Danish and German markets.

And Denmark and Germany in turn are very connected to countries reliant on French nuclear power. Only half of French nuclear power plants are currently running.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use the ocean for cooling, that isn't an issue.

Can't tell if you are joking or not. Ocean temperatures are already on the rise and causing havoc.

> Can't tell if you are joking or not.

I could say the same about your comment! The ocean is a big place with more than a billion billion liters of water, you can't meaningfully heat it up with a power plant.

With that logic, you couldn't build any power plant with air cooling either since it would heat up the air.

If you want to make a general argument against all power generation that's fine, but singling out ocean cooling specifically doesn't make sense - especially since ocean and air temperatures obviously affect each other.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.

> because people just shop based on price and features But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair? There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of applianc…

The Linus Tech Tips labs is already doing wonders in their market niche, I really really hope it all works out for them.

They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)

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

#519
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…

$40bn would be enough for around 40GWh of wind power capacity which is around the same as total generation capacity installed totally in Sweden today.

To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.

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

#520
post #210

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?

The main advantage of nuclear power plants is constant power output at basically zero emissions combined with a super small footprint. Having a constant power output is worth a lot, that's why it makes sense funding them. If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/

This book is from 2008, and, while reportedly very good for its time, now out of date.

https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...

In particular, nobody back then anticipated how quickly solar PV prices would drop.

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

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