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Who said we need to put the solar cells in Sweden? We could put them anywhere. Sweden is already producing enough low cost energy to meet its needs, only prices are high because we are exporting it to other countries willing to pay. If Sweden wants to invest in power for export, we could make that investment anywhere.
In the direction the world is going, the breakdown of globalization, every country will be required to be self sufficient.
Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
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Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#382Meanwhile in Germany: https://switzerlandtimes.ch/world/german-greens-remain-firm-... Welcome to The new dark ages in Germany. Leading politicians even do not have any higher education: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricarda_Lang It’s scary how these people decide about topics they have no idea about.
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Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#383Earlier 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?
how did people build nuclear reactors in the 50s then? Calder Hall was run for 50 years, well past its 20 year expected lifespan. they shut it down because they thought coal, oil and gas would be cheap forever. the gen2 reactors were even better and more efficient. gen2 reactors like the rbmk are still running today and producing economical and safe power. why would nuclear power today be more expensive, take longer…
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to both sides, the electricity prices at the time when the decision was made was very different from today. We had prices in the south of sweden 2020 that was as low as around €0.02 per kw/h, compared to over €0.3 in 2022, and in 2020 the price trend was looking to be going downwards. If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclea…
To be fair electricity prices vary throughout time. Basing a long term decision on a short term price is foolish. Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the…
Honestly what we really need is something that we can pump that power into (not a battery - something productive I mean) so we can keep those reactors at higher efficiency levels. I do not know what that is but surely vast amounts of extra power could be used for something useful no? Research? Cleaning the air? Hot tubs for Walruses?
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in the cult of "living in the present, where one part of the world has experienced one of the severest droughts in the history of mankind, and the other the worst floods". Recently I joined a second cult called "it's only going to get worse". So what the heck, we've got money and time for expensive solutions that take forever to finish.
> where one part of the world has experienced one of the severest droughts in the history of mankind, and the other the worst floods". Nothing happening today, extrapolated out to 20 years with the most severe climate models, will be severe enough to cause the "end of the world". Anybody who's telling you we'll have total societal collapse by 2042 is out of touch with reality. The only way for things to go that badly…
It will get worse. Billions of people will be directly affected.
Soon, they will try to make their way to countries that are still kind of functioning (because they are rich), where people that are most responsible for climate change will label them "economic migrants", and say they don't have a right to come.
So yes, there will probably be a planet, just not one that will be very pleasant for living. I don't think we have time for solutions that have failed to deliver for decades, need subsidies to be built, maintained and even shutdown, and take forever to get completed.
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Enjoy paying for storage. At least in the US, even if we get storage down from $438/kWh (Jan 2022 grid-scale storage costs) to $200/kWh, consumer electricity prices are expected to rise somewhere between 1400% and 2200% per kWh, and total cost estimates to switch the entire US's power generation + distribution to pure renewables + storage, while maintaining current production and availability levels, are over $430tn,…
Storage cost is falling even faster than solar PV or wind ever did.
I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach.
That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh.
Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which would result in prices going up in the North. Ready to see why people would work against it.
Could theoretically send wind power north when available, and send hydro south when it's not. Glad we are doing nukes though.
Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
.. Last I read even the automotive industry had trouble sourcing batteries. Would be interesting to know how many minutes(seconds?) of electricity we could store in all batteries produces last year should we go all in. This at least battery storage seems naive at such scale.
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Re: Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
That depends on which renewable you're talking about.
Wind and solar both. Which of those is cheaper varies with circumstance.