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

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521–530 of 583 posts

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

#521
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another factor affecting the price is that, while there's a lot of hydropower generated in northern Sweden, there's not enough capacity for transferring energy to the south where most consumption is. The investors building industry in the north that can use cheap renewable energy don't seem to mind though. :)

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

Ideally you’d do both.

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

#523
post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Agree, off topic. Solidarity was in reference to other members of the union. Which I thought had some weight as to why the plant ran in first place. I’m not knowledgeable in this but since it affects me greatly tried to understand the problem in more detail last few months.

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

#524
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.

Looking at the ratio between installed capacity and actual output of wind turbines, this seems like a faulty calculation. 40GW of installed wind capacity will get you a small percentage of 40GW of guaranteed output. Roughly as much as you get from the nuke. The surplus (when there is enough wind) has to be either burned off, compensated, or stored. Storage technology is nowhere near the scale that would be needed. Compensation is done typically using natural gas (see Germany). And burning off is what is done before the gas powerstations kick in.

Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place.

But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.

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

#525
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…

That is not specially accurate. Sweden only import from the Baltic countries plus Polen 20 + 42 GWh but Sweden export to those countries 3229 + 2747 GWh. So the import per year is only 1% of the export. The total export from Swedens to all of its neighboring countries is 23712GWh and the import is only 2957GWh. So Sweden export much much more than it imports. So saying Sweden is just a transit land is not accurate.

Why the electricity is expensive is because the electrical grid is connected to northen europe and the expensive prices there makes the prices also goes up in Sweden because it is the same market.

https://www.scb.se/hitta-statistik/statistik-efter-amne/ener...

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

#526

Electricity should cost peanuts and that should the goal of every sane government.

It's easy to implement through regulation, just pass a law that says it costs peanuts. But this easily results in shortages (if production is unsubsidized) or tax hikes / lower living standards (if production or import is subsidized using money that could be spent elsewhere).

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

#527
post #12

Sweden is a small player in the EU but hopefully this will drive more countries away from Germany's dystopian madness

EU membership is pretty orthogonal to electricity markets and grid connections in Europe. For example in northern europe UK, Norway and Russia are connected to the nearby markets.

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

#528
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.

Solar is used in Sweden, and more being built (see eg https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/swedens-largest-s...)

It's true that in the winter it's a bit crap but in the summer the long days of the north are a boon. It doesn't need to be great in all times of the year to be "feasible" though since it's just one part of the production palette.

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

#529

The funny thing about a country like Sweden is that their energy problem is 100% based on energy exports to the EU market. Sweden produces way more electricity than it needs at any given time. During one of the latest “crises” a single company exported energy worth several hundreds of millions Euros to other countries.

Sweden also has an imbalance problem due to a lack of transmission capability. After shutting down nuclear plants in the south that kept the grid balanced, there are now times where the transmission from the north (where the hydro power is) to the south is at capacity. So the country as a whole has generation, but can't get it to where it needs to be.

Yes, there are problems with the infrastructure. Some predict the same thing that happens in the south of Sweden will start to happen in the capital region.

For those interested. An overview of the energy in Sweden. https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/Home.mvc?ResourceId=20876...

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

#530
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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Olympic Dam SA is the world's second biggest uranium mine. For every 0.6 kg of Uranium it produces, it produces 20kg of copper and 4.5g of silver. Monosilicon PV is made of sand, copper, silver and aluminum. A kg of uranium going through a pwr produces about 500GJ (with 3-10% of that being required for milling and enrichment). The 7.5g of silver in the ore that produced that kg of Uranium will produce about 200GJ in…

I was curious and searched uranium for breeder reactors: I see that 1KG of Uranium will produce 86000 GJ in a breeder reactor.
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