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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

#231
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous government didn't stop the shutdown planned 40+ years ago (due to a national referendum), in part because the owners (Vattenfall) said it's not economically feasible to run them anymore without subsidies. It's complex.

The previous anti-nuclear social-democratic government together with the demonstrably insane "green" party installed a board in the state owned power company Vattenfall that after a while managed to sort of claim that it wasn't economically feasible to run the nuclear plants, with the new heavy taxes the social democrats had put in place on nuclear power production. Yay? Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully his…

Demonstrably insane? Please be serious.

Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.

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

#232
post #104
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables don't give you baseload power. So renewables + nuclear is a good balance.

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.

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be contradicting yourself, but I imagine you don't think you are, so you might want to elaborate.

He is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines. Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines. On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a differen…

True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.

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

#234
post #199
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Energy use in Sweden peaks in the winter, and especially a few extremely cold days. The sun literally doesn't rise in the northern parts, and the coldest days have almost no wind (and frankly it's not very strong overall either). This and last year, Swedes are stocking up on firewood, and it's not for cosplaying reason. Several knowledgeable people predict rolling blackouts this winter. I would love renewables as muc…

The "northern parts" of Sweden are, by report, already massively oversupplied with hydro power. Starting nukes with the hope of power in ten or fifteen years will not help keep anybody warm in the meantime. Transmission lines ought to be quite a lot quicker to complete.

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

#235
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decent answer is, simply, that storage will be built when there is enough renewable capacity to charge it from. Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.

What is this trivial energy storage tech I've never heard of?

Pumped hydro, probably. There are implementation details that make it tricky in practice, but those are less technical and more political in nature.

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

#236
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The previous anti-nuclear social-democratic government together with the demonstrably insane "green" party installed a board in the state owned power company Vattenfall that after a while managed to sort of claim that it wasn't economically feasible to run the nuclear plants, with the new heavy taxes the social democrats had put in place on nuclear power production. Yay? Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully his…

Demonstrably insane? Please be serious. Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.

I sadly am.

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

#237
post #12

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

What is Germanys dystopian madness?

Shutting down one of the cleanest and safest sources of electricity (nuclear fission) in favor of a natural gas enabled renewable grid with natural gas primarily supplied by Putin.

Nuclear fission is clean energy.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think most reasonable people count biomass in with renewable (at least not large scale biomass). e.g. this website https://grid.iamkate.com/ has biomass in "other" along with nuclear and pumped hydro storage.

Biomass literally grows on trees. It's by definition renewable.

The wood pellet power used in the UK is pretty sketchy.

Even in the best case, when you cut down a tree, burn it, and plant a replacement you've still released a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere. So carbon in the atmosphere will be raised for 20-50 years.

When people have looked into the source of these wood pellets the claims of the pellet companies often don't line up with official records - like saying they didn't log an old-growth forest, when they held the logging license at the time it was logged. Or claiming they only use sawdust and low-quality wood, when their output volume is much greater than the amount of low-quality wood you'd expect [1].

And supposedly the trees get replanted - but the company doing it got paid when the pellets were delivered. If in 5 years time they decide to do something else with the land, they can do.

The government turns a blind eye to this to hit their 'renewables' targets.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-63089348

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

#239
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demonstrably insane? Please be serious. Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.

I sadly am.

Can you explain why?

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

#240
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intermittency is one of the most difficult parts of building a majority renewable grid. Dismissing the biggest challenge in building a renewable grid as trolling is not a good look.

Quoted post unavailable.

> because simple technical measures mitigate it.

And what simple technical measure mitigates it in a cost effective manner? Hydroelectricity is one, but it's geographically dependent. Sweden already has about 30% of it's electricity coming from dams, but it still needs to built more nuclear plants to fulfill it's demand. And most countries have even less hydroelectric generation than Sweden.

Besides hydroelectricity, there's batteries which are not able to be built at scale. Then there's experimental solutions like compressed air, chemical storage, or giant flywheels. But none of those have been deployed commercially and thus there's no real-world cost history.

Proclaiming that the solution is simple, yet neglecting to actually specify it is not an effective way to make the case for storage. If you want to make the case for a plan to provision storage, make it and we can discuss that. But apparently, the solution is apparently so simple it defies explanation. How convenient!

Well in that case: we don't need fission, renewables, or storage. I know of a fusion breakthrough that will make electricity to cheap to meter! And it's so obvious I don't need to explain how it works, and anyone who doubts me is a troll.

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