Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is history now.
I think it's a waste that we've not maintained the reactors well enough to still have them able to run at a profit.
And generally that we've (the government, both sides) haven't done anything about it in the last 10-20 years when they had a chance to invest in alternatives (whether building new nuclear or other types of energy sources).
If it's just a matter of taxes then I'm sure it would be easy for the new government to remove them and start back up the old reactors - but obviously that's not the plan. Most likely it's all quite complex and lots of factors leading to this outcome.
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.
Anyway, what you asked for; here are the high level notes of the insanity. There are lots of insane but largely inconsequential things that I won't focus on.
Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Because of that: Shuts down functioning nuclear power plants "in the name of the environment".
Attempts to replace plannable nuclear power with wind power. ("It produces the same number of GWh annually.")
Ridiculous. Of course they do.
You want nuclear power. They don't. That's why you call them insane.
Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The Swedish green party rejects nuclear. The parent commenter hasn't expressed a rejection of renewables.
Anyway, one can perceive a rejection of a particular energy source as "insane", especially if they are a green party who claim the rise in CO2 levels is the world's most pressing crisis.
And because these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices with unemployment as a result, thus both undermining employment and welfare, it actually violates what the winning proposal stipulated in the referendum.
Furthermore the tax on nuclear power was massively increased three times as consequence of influence of the two green parties, Center party and the Green Party, 2006, 2008 and 2015, and the same time subsidizing renewables, thus making nuclear power not economically sustainable. There was even a referendum in parliament about these latest shutdown with only one vote difference. No, it was intentional.
No they have not. Sweden has been a net exporter of electricity every year since 2010. There is no electricity deficit in Sweden.
Prices have increased because we've become more integrated with the European electricity market. Not because electricity production is lower or more expensive. The energy companies make unprecedented profits because they are able to sell cheaply produced electricity at expensive rates.
The last year prices have increased because of the energy/economic warfare waged between the EU and Russia.
The idea that a couple of Swedish nuclear reactors could alter the whole European energy market significantly is ludicrous.
A 1980 referendum where the three options were
1. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible.
2. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible. Work on reducing electricity use (by e.g. stopping new homes from being built with electric heating), invest in renewable power, and nationalize power generation to be able to control its future.
3. Decommission the nuclear power within 10 years.
So, it's no wonder that "Decommission the nuclear power" won that referendum. Anyone who brings up this referendum as a reason to decommission nuclear power 40 years later is being disingenuous.
We've had to ask you this repeatedly. That's not cool.
No option available to continue with nuclear power
> The Moderates, the People's Party and the Social Democrats held separate negotiations to formulate a joint yes option with the implication that the reactors would be allowed to be used during their technical lifespan, which was estimated at 25 years. These negotiations finally broke down mainly because the Moderates could not accept the additional proposals: that the state or the municipalities would own the nuclear power plants and that so-called surplus profits from private production of hydropower would be withdrawn through taxation.
Translated from:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkomr%C3%B6stningen_om_k%C3%...
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 nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.
The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.
In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.
Electricity demand will increase as that takes over for other energy uses that will be collapsing.
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 different source. That does barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.
Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.
Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.
In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.
There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
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 appliances and measured their reliability.
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)
This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics. Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.
Worse case scenario is the government has to subsidize the power station, best case is it helps prevent serious economic issues by providing power.
We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-tops-france-e...
This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".
The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.
If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.
Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch.
On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.
The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.
Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.
https://birdwatchingbuzz.com/do-windmills-kill-birds/
Interestingly the article claims that the power lines that connect the wind mills kill more birds than the wind mills themselves.
But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/margrethe-vestager-eu-german...
Nuclear is NOT liable for a major nuclear disaster. No insurance would cover it. So I don't know where you got your knowledge from but it is not based on fact.
Edit: OK I should have been clearer. They are liable like everyone else. They have (unlike solar installations I suspect) strict liability which means the damaged person does not have to prove fault. However, the amount of liability is limited (in time and amount) and the state takes over. This is what I was referring to with they don't have liability (admittedly incorrect the way I wrote it).
Source:https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
The article you linked says that TEPCO paid out USD ~65 billion after Fukushima, but it was insured only for USD ~804 million.
Naturally what happened is that the government didn't want to be without electricity, so to prevent bankruptcy TEPCO was nationalized. This is the typical scenario for nuclear power: profits are privatized while losses are socialized.
Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.
I should have said they will not insure fully for the consequences of the disaster, in particular not long term effects. Nuclear has limited liability and does not need to cover the full cost of a disaster.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-sec...
1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.
2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).
3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/vattenfall-vill-forlanga-re...
That was an interesting referendum. There were 3 options to vote for:
1. Nuclear power would be phased out
2. Nuclear power would be phased out, with added support for low income groups
3. Nuclear power would be phased out in 10 years
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Swedish_nuclear_power_ref...
I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors.
I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.
Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.
The cost to the developer of deploying new solar / wind to a grid may become more favourable, but they're selling in to a market that reselles to retail / commercial clients, who will, inevitably, pay more over time.
I think what you're argument should be is that new nuclear would result in end-users paying more than they would for new renewables.
I'm mostly convinced where you, or anyone else, lands on the matter, is heavily biased by preconceptions...
and generally tend to think we have the resources to do a many-pronged approach, and that success is less technology dependant and more dependant on the competence of governments and bureaucracies, and the people who constitute them.
So in fact my cost, as a consumer, is lower than it was.
You clearly wish this were not so.
"Subsidies to nuclear had varied between €3.2bn and € 4bn between 2008 and 2019 but surged to (€6.3bn) in 2020 due to payments for early closures of nuclear power plants."
"In line with anticipations in the Commission Study, the financial aid to renewables in the EU27 is increasing at a low pace since 2015 to reach €78bn in 2019. Our preliminary estimations show a slight reduction in 2020 to around €77bn. Among the 14 identified subsidy instruments, the feed-in-tariff and feed-in premium schemes remain by far the MS preferred tools to promote RES technologies. They represented 79% of the total RES subsidies, i.e. €61bn in 2019"*
They don't account for theoretical subsidies of money, as then there would be more money in subsidies than there would be money. The theoretical subsidies that currently goes into fossil fuel to pay for global warming is reaching the point of infinitive money in the case that global warming goes beyond the tipping point. Theoretical subsidies are fun thought experiments but they aren't very valuable, as is infinitive money.
The report do account for decommissioning subsidy if there is actually government money going into the hands of power plants owners.
I would love renewables as much as the next guy but there's simply not a chance that Sweden could sustain a winter with the current supply. Importing helps with survival but the prices are insane, since their neighbors are cold as well. Dispatchable or baseload energy is necessary, and thus nuclear is the only option. Sure, it's more expensive than solar panels midday in the desert, but the comparison is irrelevant.
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.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/svenska-kraftnat-miljardinves...
Yes, the north is oversupplied, because they have most of the hydro. Remember though that hydro is a form of storage, so even if the transmission capacity was higher, it'd deplete faster. I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I highly doubt that transmission alone can solve the issue long term, even less so the short term ones. Again, dispatchable and/or baseload energy is a MUST. And the people who yesterday sold solar dreams are today selling energy storage dreams. It's the same great story, but it doesn't exist. Nuclear exists, and it's carbon neutral. It's better to start now, then to not start at all or resorting to oil/gas.
There is one good short-medium term effect of the government change, for nuclear. Maintaining and/or restoring the existing reactors could be done much faster than building new ones. Not all reactors in Sweden are operational today.
Here in Finland we do.
Only government subsidy is helping with the insurance.
I see this manipulative arguement used all the time with lithium mining.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
"No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastructure for fossil-free energy.
And there is a challenge. Given the estimated required number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) of different vehicle class, it is clear that there are not enough minerals in the currently reported global reserves to build just one generation of batteries for all EV’s and stationary power storage, in the global industrial ecosystem as it is today."
Also moving pulling back this debate to more general topics:
1.We don't need to replace all cars, many older gas powered cars will still be on the road for a long time which buys time for points 2-4
2. There are other types of batteries, like NiMH, which don't contain lithium. Although these aren't as efficient many hybrids use them, I think the new Mavrick hybrid does (or some truck hybrid)
3. There could be new battery technology that will be invented
4.New technology has helped Tesla make more energy dense batteries and have them last longer
A 2016 model s with the 70kwh battery pack has a 200 miles of range
A 2022 Model s performance with a 98kwh battery pack has a range of 326 miles (this is a touch comparison because the new performance has much more power)
sources: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15104936/tesla-model-... https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
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 its lifetime with technologies in the pipeling that will push this to 400GJ. This silver usage is going down faster than production is increasing. There will be a huge surplus of copper from this source.
The silver is recyclable.
The uranium will require special storage for millenia or reprocessing at a cost not even massively subsidized programs are willing to bear.
The solar energy can be stored in a battery made from sodium, carbon, iron and aluminum. This is basically the composition of dirt. These are being mass produced now and full industrialisation of the supply chain is expected by 2024.
The nuclear reactor requires large quantities of zirconium, molybdenum, chromium, silver, cadmium and many other rare metals. Much of this is radioactive waste at eol.
The nuclear reactor requires more steel than the solar panel requires silicon, and more concrete than the solar panel requires glass and concrete.
A uranium mine can provide nearly as much energy from PV as it does via fission, and will soon produce more. Let that sink in for a bit.
It suffices that readers know they are being trolled.
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.
Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)
We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?
Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.
Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.
This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.
In short, this is not a zero sum game.
Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.
Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).
Take the hydro which is currently doing baseload, convert as much capacity as possible to peak loads. And replace the lost baseload with new Nuclear.
That way you can unlock even more capacity for more solar and wind (well... that far north, it will be mostly wind)
However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.
The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.
Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.
People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.
All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.
Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.
There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.
Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.
But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.
Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.
The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.
It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.
Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.
This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.
Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic
Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)
Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)
Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.
And before that you set the lithium battery straw man. Read no further. And you are talking about missinformation.
The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1].
A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries.
In which case, I'll bite: what then?
1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery.
There are few countries with better opportunities for renewables than Sweden.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but so is wind for Sweden. We already have a lot of wind but high pressure areas with little wind do exist, even in winter. Nuclear looks kind of good from that point of view, but I strongly feel that Sweden is way too small of an actor to buy reactors on her own, and should actually co-order reactors with other countries, getting the costs down (maybe not even costs, but risks. There have been a lots of bankrupted players in nuclear lately).
However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.
The remaining problem is building factories for electrolysis equipment. Building factories takes an appallingly long time. But the problem is only of time, not technical maturity.
Not in northern Europe. For example at the southern most point of Finland there is 3 months in the year when solar produces less than 1% of its name plate capacity. It does get slightly better in the southern part of Sweden but still not that great.
Around Mediterranean is where solar starts to get really good though the Africa side of it is even better.
On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.
The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.
There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.
You also don't need to build unlimited hydro plants.
And they only have to pay to shut it down if a future government forces it to shut it down before the plant stops being commercially viable.
The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
Or, how would you like to provide me loan guarantees? They won't cost you anything. Right?
They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan. And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.
Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make. There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.
> They don't cost the government anything unless a power plant fails and defaults on it's loans. And even the it's not the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between what the bank can recover and the cost of the loan.
I can't believe we are having this discussion on HN. Are you seriously implying loan guarantees are free?
> And if the project got anywhere near completely, there should still be a nuclear power plant.
Except that is not guaranteed. Historically speaking nuclear power plants have been going massively over budget. So the one thing that seems guaranteed is that the government has to guarantee even more loans.
> Given that one of the bigger risks to nuclear power plans are changing government regulations, it's actually a pretty low risk loan guarantee for the government to make.
Point me to any case where changing government regulations were a significant risk for nuclear power plants. The main risk is that the build goes massively over budget (like what is happening with pretty much every build in recent history), which will make it much more difficult to recover the cost.
>There is a decent chance they will never have to activate the guarantee.,
So if that is the case why do they need it? Private investors should be all over it. The reality is, the risk is high for questionable return. That is why they need the government to step in.
Loan guarantees are actual money, especially if the builder defaults.
> The main purpose of both guarantees is to make it much easier for nuclear reactors to get commercial funding from private banks.
So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
Well-run governments can borrow money much cheaper than private actors. Lower interest rates means a higher chance of success for a long-running project.
And in most default scenarios, the government wouldn't have to pay the full $40 billion. Just the shortfall between the foreclosure sale price and the remaining loan amount.
> So ask yourself why will commercial funders not give money to the builds, while they are perfectly happy for solar/wind?
First, Solar/wind projects are typically smaller. Less risky to do hundreds or thousands of small projects, spread out over country (or world). The chance of all the projects defaulting at once are small.
Second, one of the biggest risk to nuclear projects are government related. The risk that they might introduce expensive new regulations. Or that the general population (who are typically anti-nuclear) might vote a new anti-nuclear government into power. By having the current government guarantee the loans, future governments will be motivated to not mess with them.
Third, you can't always trust commercial funders to do what's best for the nation, especially from a national security perspective. They might (for example in Germany) decide to rely on cheap natural gas imports from Russia as the primary source of energy, assuming that Russia will always be a stable source of energy forever, and would never start randomly invading it's neighbors.
Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.
At the size of a 100MW+ generation facility, you need government sized budgets and timelines.
The argument should be about whether or not those subsidies would have been better spend elsewhere.
I'd probably argue subsidising local wind / solar (plus storage), and local manufacturing of same, would be better, even though I tend to argue nuclear is a reason option some of the time.
Nukes have been heavily subsidized forever, but prices have only ever risen.
I daresay you have paid quite a lot less for a GB of SD card storage each year.
Trolling is unwelcome here.
Those groups buy power from electricity retailers.
Show me an electricity retailer who has deceased prices in the past 10 years.
I was thinking more about pollution or nuclear waste management. A coal plant that just buys coal at market prices and sells electricity at market prices isn't paying for externalities unless they're taxed on CO2 and particulate emissions.
They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
This is ridiculously biased and not a constructive way to deal with political disagreements.
All political factions engage in rampant cronyism. To think it's confined to one faction is unbelievably naive.
Where do you think left wing parties receive the bulk of their campaign contributions from? It's members of public sector unions, who receive trillions of dollars in tax dollars every year in Europe.
Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.
Enerhodar is not the only example. World war two ended roughly 77 year ago. The US civil war was less than 160 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
For example, I am willing to bet that nuclear-related deaths in the Ukrainian war will be a minuscule percentage of the total loss of life caused by said war.
The fossil fuel industry has been sabotaging nuclear power for 60 years because, untill recently, it was the only threat to their profits.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossi...
It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
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?
In 2015, lawmakers made it mandatory to reduce Nuclear energy to 50% of existing installed capacity. So, pretty much all changes of mind post that point mean that previously shelved projects are re planned with FROM scratch with the new market rates.
The money that will be spent on these new reactors would buy a hell of a lot more wind power than these nukes could produce. But money for renewables would not go into the pockets of right-wing blueblood Swedes, which seems to be what matters to the incoming government.
When the nukes are mothballed early, every kWh they ever produced will, instantly, have actually cost much more than had been reckoned, as the fixed costs are amortized over fewer total.
Storage is technically trivial. Building it all will be a big civil engineering job, but we have plenty of civil engineers.
Those do exist, but I'd estimate 90% of the world don't have them.
In your fantasy land a housing crisis is impossible!
The decent answer is that housing will be built there are enough construction materials to build them from. So a housing shortage will never happen.
What, Britain has housing shortage? Did they run out of clay to make bricks? Did they run out of buyers? Did they run out of money, while housing prices rose 10x? Did they run out of Land while 97% of the land is not built on? what could it be?
The most expensive serious storage solution is LiIon, and even that's merely the same cost (or at least, the bell curves of their prices mostly overlap) as an equivalent nuclear reactor.
(I'm deliberately ignoring any claims about future battery costs; while I'm expecting them to come down, they don't need to in order to make this argument).
citation needed.
• LCOE for nuclear, analysis based on new nuclear worldwide but priced in Euros, €67-€82/MWh, (2020): https://energy.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2020-10/final_repor... page 40-41
I thought this should be clear to everyone today, when energy price whent up 10x because yoy can print euros but can't print jeoules of energy or natural gas.
Renewables and nuclear use different resources and manufacturing capacities.
> 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.
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 normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh.
And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power.
PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
"Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors."
So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich. Then we shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. It didn't really work.
They even have cold temperatures to boost power plant efficiency and make district heating very useful.
Insufficient detail.
You'd need to compare levelised costs, and work out whether government subsidies for this-or-that technology resulted in gains and loses that were better or worse than whatever else governments might have spent money on.
There's a good argument to be made that cheap-to-the-end-user electricity is a net good for society, because they can then spend that money elsewhere rather than on boring old electricity.
Besides all that, nuclear needs a lot of cooling capacity, and that's typically come from rivers / oceans, which, if I recall correctly, some rivers in France where recently too warm / insufficient flow to meet nuclear cooling demands.
So nuclear isn't always a good fit for many reasons, but may be a good fit for many other reasons.
Arguing about how efficient subsides are vs other spending ignores the option to not spend the money and have consumers directly pay the bill. This normally results in greater efficiency because consumers can chose to say lower the thermostat and spend money on something else etc. People will argue for subsidies to deal with externalities, but markets can equally respond to simply taxing those externalities.
Oh, and the war in Ukraine does not show the glaring weakness of 'Unplanned economy' and just choosing the cheapest supplier?
Subsidies and incentives do not a planned economy make.
Folks in the west seem to have taken the failure of hofhly corrupt planning system of USSR as an indication that they dont need to do any thinking or planning at all.
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 just really hard to improve on the feedback loops of market economies without running into diminishing returns.
The market has no concern for our survival, and by extention it's own survival, past 1/2 quarterly reports
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?
You couldn’t arbitrarily start a business without permission. Rulers would limit who could say sell salt and permission it’s self was quite valuable. Think Arrakis being handed over in Dune, only one house had the right to mine spice and that would change based on politics not just competence.
And that’s just the start as slavery, guilds, gender, etc all limited markets.
Throughout history you can track a huge wealth boom whenever places opened up their markets. England’s wealth traces back before the industrial revolution to the early dissolution of serfdom relative to most places. It was actually far more influential than inventions like the early steam engine.
So let me get this argument straight: 1. Slavery and serfdom are bad for the economy. We are talking pure economics, not morality 2. Markets have freely sold and bought slaves for thousands of years 3. Slavery predates the concept of a government, it predates writing and predates ancient egypt 4. Abolition of slavery required intervention of government and violence
5. Therefore you have just made a pro-regulation argument while arguing against government. You cannot claim that unregulated markets magically and efficiently organise economy towards it's most efficient state.
The same situation applies to child labour. The exact same situation arised with health and safety. The exact same situation arises with our markets selling precision weapons to bloody dictators that use our weapons against us.
So we have 4 spesific cases of markets delivering rettible outcome and not a single counterexample from you for marktes delivering optimal outcome.
This is part of a long term global trend which relates to the overhead of slavery and then serfdom. Serfdom outcompeted slavery in Europe because it was simply more efficient, and Serfdom in turn failed for the same reason.
Child labor was more an outgrowth of the industrial revolution which initially reduced the need for complex skills or physical strength. Kids going back thousands of years would help with harvesting etc, but it was also common practice to pay tradesmen to take on apprentices because child labor was effectively worth nothing when averaged across a year.
It was only when jobs got ultra specialized that child labor became valued. Though eventually flipped back where collage students are talking unpaid internships because Google etc has no use for their services. Obviously collage students can do some forms productive labor, but ignoring the law what can 10 year olds do? Acting and here it’s surprise surprise perfectly legal in western countries for 10 year olds to actually work. Suggesting it’s more a question of economics than morality.
There was no problem with nuclear cooling demands, the problem was if the nuclear plants put more heat into the rivers, it would be bad for the wildlife living there.
Just this summer the French had to shut down half of their nuclear reactors because of the heat
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/03/edf-to-redu...
This is mostly an issue for ("partially") landlocked countries. Those french reactors use rivers for cooling. Also the summer period neatly coincides with the yearly maintenance period, so...
On the short term we might need something before those nuclear plants are up and running.
In my neck of the woods (50 deg North, not as North as Sweden), I get a reasonable amount of sunlight. Let's just imagine that 1/3 of the days during winter I get 5 hours of sunlight. I'm going to ignore electricity and just concentrate on heating, because heat is way easier to store. From my meter readings, in the depths of winter I seem to use an average of 2.2kW-worth of gas, most of which goes to the boiler for hot water and heating. Some of it would go to cooking, but I'm guessing not much.
So, if I wanted to collect that much heat from solar, assuming I get 5 hours every 3 days, I would need to collect 2.2×72/5 = 32kW while the sun is shining and then store it for use later. Sunlight is just over 1kW per square metre, so I'd have to have about 32 square metres of parabolic mirrors concentrating light onto a black water pipe. The South-facing side of my house is easily that big.
Then storing it. Water is extremely good at storing heat. Water stores 4194J for each kilogram for each degree centigrade in temperature. If I were to get five 2.4m×1.2m×10cm polyurethane foam insulation boards, I could build an insulated box capable of taking a 2000l hot water tank, which could be put in a shed or something. If that were heated to 90 degrees centigrade, it would be able to return 80kWh of heat before dropping to 55 degrees (which is the lowest acceptable temperature to run a heating system at, before you get Legionnaire's disease). The insulation would lose about 250W, which is small compared to the heat demand from the house.
Yes, there would be times when the stored heat runs out. A sensibly-designed system should hopefully be able to fall back onto the existing gas-fired heating when that happens.
So, these numbers are all very feasible. It'd cost a fair bit to achieve, but it would probably pay itself back within a couple of years, which is way quicker than PV. One of the key factors in that is efficiency and cost. Collecting solar heat is very efficient and uses cheap materials. PV is expensive and still not very efficient.
There are three main requirements for such a project: Enough sunlight when it is cold (and you can adjust the collecting surface area to compensate, so this basically means anywhere outside the polar circles). Enough space to put all the stuff (and as a corollary enough patience from family members to put up with it). And finally a suitable control system that pipes the heat around in an intelligent way, prevents the water tank being over-heated, falls back on gas when necessary, and satisfies the various building standards laws.
mantra is cheaper.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...
The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale.
You are exactly right - this is the only way.
They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane.
Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden
Build all the solar, wind whatever you want. Doing so while ignoring the low return on energy security alone is a fools errand.
I’ve sat through meetings where carbon credits have been touted as the greatest weapon to transition the world away from fossil fuels. Carbon credits.
I’ve heard very reliable stories from China about business entities solely set up to generate unbelievable volumes of carbon credits to take advantage of this accounting trick.
I think the opposition you see is to the counterproductive moves of the past two or three decades where enormous amounts of money have been thrown at present renewable strategies and the world is worse off from an energy perspective.
Surely, you know that wind power has had a lot of trouble expanding in Sweden due to huge opposition from every community against building wind turbines on their land. Everyone likes the idea of wind power until they try to build a huge turbine on their backyard.
Sun power, in Sweden, in winter, is clearly not going to cut it... even in the southern areas that still get a little bit of sun in winter, you don't get nearly enough power.
Hydropower is great and Sweden produces lots of it, but again, highly unlikely it can build new damns with the current regulations.
The only options left seem to be coal and nuclear. I hope you don't propose to just use coal.
Nuclear power, while expensive to build, is reliable and plenty. No one proposing that it should be one of the options for countries like Sweden is insane.
Couple that with off-shore wind in one of the windiest places on earth[1] together with solar during the summer wind lulls and you have all you need.
This is why storage is not being built in Sweden, energy is simply too abundant and cheap.
From this one can see how the idea that somebody will bomb out a nuclear power station somewhere in Europe gets non-trivial probability.
So nuclear power really cannot be safe when this planet allows crazy guys to gain enough power.
As for coal then consider that an electric car that uses electricity from a modern coal plant with over 40% efficiency generates less CO2 than a gasoline or diesel car.
So rather than building nuclear power, the states should invest to upgrade older coal power plants from their 30-35% efficiency to 40-45% and quickly phase out petrol cars while expanding on renewables.
This is an argument that ignores reality completely. How many attacks have there been against nuclear power plants by crazy guys even when we've had nuclear power throughout some of the most dangerous periods in history, including the Cold War and the current Ukrainian conflict?
Militarily they are a liability too.
To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.
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.
It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW.
40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source.
A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today.
The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.
We're talking about Sweden that has high amounts of hydro power available for storage.
https://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-pl...
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 for the owners/operators of these reactors.
In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. Cheers!
(Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.)