You can bank on energy consumption rising year over year for the next lifetime or so. We have completely run out of low hanging fruit in terms of cutting back like moving from incandescent to LED lighting, installing heat pumps to replace resistive heaters…ect. Solar, wind and other green sources ARE very much the future (assuming we want to have a future at all), but their variable output doesn’t mesh super well with how electrical grids are handled today. Batteries and other storage options are no where near ready and may never be for grid scale. This is where nuclear shines, that steady trickle over many, many decades as a bridge to a future with a redesigned distribution network and other technologies we can’t even conceive of yet. The thing is it’s a long term play, there’s a massive upfront cost and the people involved the project today may not even be alive or seeking any sort of political office in 20 years when it’s completely validated. Even if these plants can’t get online fast enough to meet the peak demands in the near-term, there’s nothing stopping them from scaling out solar and/or wind farms to pick up the slack.
You’re thinking too small with LED lights and heat pumps.
Overall energy consumption still has a long way to drop if we continue to electrify transport. Oil is consumed very inefficiently in internal combustion engines and electric motors are far more efficient. That’s even before you account for the energy consumption of refining and transporting oil, all of which would vanish. Even if you just took oil out of the ground and pumped it into a furnace to generate electricity, then use that electricy to move everyone around, we’d drop our consumption significantly.
The setup with have now is desperately inefficient.
I guess I could have stated the form of energy I was talking about a little more clearly. That’s actually mostly in agreement to what I was referring to though, as we move from fossil fuel powered transport to EVs, we’ll see that demand shift and drive electrical consumption up dramatically (even if the total joules of energy required decreases from a physics perspective). Yes, internal combustion is inherently very, very inefficient but it just takes HEAPS of energy to move 3,000+ pounds (1,350+ kg) of anything and all of that will be coming from the mains rather than an oil rig. That’s why we (not just Sweden, all of us humans) need to increase our electrical generation capacity and modernize our distribution networks.
Environmental experts had criticised the government announcement, saying the new reactors would be too expensive and not meet needs fast enough.
Sure, that’s the logical analysis. Is there an opposition and argument?
The new right-of-centre coalition has said that new reactors are essential to ensure the shift to a fossil-free economy, promising generous loans.
Ah, yes, “it doesn’t matter that it’s a solution fit for a different problem, we want to subsidize our buddies’ companies and get a kickback” should have been the expected right-wing criticism in retrospect.
For all of the base-load talk, this is the real reason people are pushing nuclear.
The projects always go over budget. They always go way over time, too. Both of these things are good for the banks who loan out the billions to build new plants. And they know that if the company goes bankrupt the government will subsidize it.
Nuclear is just not economical enough to be part of a sustainable energy system.
During the time when Sweden built the current nuclear reactors, some where built in just a few years. Sweden had experienced people back then that knew how to build them. We don’t have that anymore. Pretty much no one has.
We also had less examples of issues we need to be prepared for.
One thing people always get wrong is that they assume Fukushima wasn’t build to withstand tsunamis and how stupid that supposedly was. But it was built to withstand tsunamis. Up to 9 meters of height, which was 50% more than the largest one they had on record. And it’s not like they had other projects to look for to figure out that a 50% margin of safety was too little for this. Turns out, it was. So now, you want to build at least 100% margin of error in tsunami areas, something you couldn’t have known before.
And that’s just one example from one rather specific type of engineering during a construction process that isn’t even specific to nuclear power. And as accidents happen (see for example Admiral Cloudberg’s excellent air crash investigation series!) we figure out more and more things we need to engineer against to prevent this in the future. As a result, what we build nowadays is orders of magnitude safer than what we did in the past. But it also means that building it has become a huge obstacle, if for no other reason than the sheer number of things you need to be aware of, abide by and track during construction and planning.
Fukushima was not a failure of engineering or proper safety measures with construction. It failed because they were old plants that hadn’t been maintained properly and were in disrepair.
So no, the margin of safety was not too little. The “lesson” learned from the Fukushima Daichi reactor flooding was about proper maintenance and funding.
That’s the fundamental problem with nuclear energy. Where there are corners, they will be cut.
Turns out, it was.
It’s actually a bit worse than that.
The diesel generators flooded and that’s why the plant failed. The generators were asininely low; one was even in the basement. And yet it was built to code - the code simply had an oversight, as they often do. They could have built for 100 meter waves but if the design didn’t require sufficiently elevated generators, this was still going to happen.
The generator failure was known pretty immediately iirc but here is a source from USC (2015).
I knew a guy who worked at a hydro plant in a relatively remote area who gave up his car and walked a narrow, winding, mountainous road to work every day after the accident. He did so for years and may still do so. One man making what protest he can against our reckless growth. The accident rejuvenated the anti-nuclear sentiment all around. But the right-wing government has been working for years to counter them and is now planning new reactors. I don’t consider myself anti-nuclear but I think they are the wrong tool for the job. I’ve been ranting for years and now we are out of time. Plus regulation upheld by complex governments will suffer when society goes through a major simplification event (due to climate change). I already find building them in the Ring of Fire to be questionable, even with strong regulations.
We also don’t have 20 years to slash emissions to pre-industrial levels!
Yeah well… Nuclear is too expensive and now I heard another rethoric on how renewables are not making enough profit to be worth it for the big companies. We’re going in circles before these people admit that coal and gas won’t be replaced by anything.
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In the last ten years solar power has gone down in price by 80% and is now producing more power than nuclear.
Plus when you buy a solar panel it starts making money immediately, unlike a reactor that doesn’t make money for 10-20 years after it starts up.
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Because they won’t have new nuclear plants online for a decade at least and because Putin invaded Ukraine and cut off their natural gas supply
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The right choice. Nuclear would be a great solution if we went all in 40 years ago. But we didnt and now we need a solution as soon as possible, not in 15 years to build a plant or in 25 years when it breaks even, now.
It takes just 6 months to build a 50 MW wind farm https://www.edfenergy.com/energywise/all-you-need-to-know-about-wind-power#:~:text=Wind farms can be built,last between 20–25 years.
Sweden uses 130 TW/h per year (130000000000 KW/h) as of 2020 https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden
and about 25% of that is fossil fuels. as of 2017 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/fossil-fuel-consumption
So they would need to replace 32500000000 KW/h per year to get off fossil fuels
But KW/h/y is dumb so lets just make it KW/h
3710045
Then make it MW (yes I know I converted from TW to KW to MW.) so
3710 MW needed to replace fossil fuels.
So they would need 74 50MW wind farms to match that.
If they wanted to do that in 10 years to be faster than building a single nuclear plant, they would only need to be building 4 farms concurrently.
and about 25% of that is fossil fuels.
Sweden uses essentially no fossil fuels in the grid - it’s basically hydro, nuclear and wind for all of it. The small amount of fossil fuels used is stuff like burning plastics, and one oil plant that is turned on once in a blue moon when there’s an energy crisis. It’s national news when they turn that one on, and it’s considered a huge failure every time it happens.
The real figure for fossil versus non-fossil energy in Sweden is 2% fossil versus 98% non-fossil, with hydro being the primary energy source (35-45%), followed by nuclear (30%) and then wind (20%). Source, in Swedish: https://www.energiforetagen.se/energifakta/elsystemet/produktion/
A few errors
- 130TWh is the final electricity consumption, not the generation. Since Sweden is a big net exporter of electricity, there is a big difference
- I’m not sure what macrotrends refers to by “Fossil fuel consumption”, but it’s pobably referring to raw energy rather than electricity (which doesnt consider conversion efficiency)
- In reality, sweden uses almost no fossil fuels in its electricity mix, and that is in large part due to nuclear
- KWh and KW, not KW and KW/h
- In your calculations you failed to account for capacity factors. Wind plants have average capacity factors of about 42% in sweden, so the capacity would need to be over double the consumption, even ignoring the variability of consumption and production
Nevertheless, I do agree that Sweden doesn’t need more nuclear. It already generates some of the cleanest electricity in the world and I’d imagine fossil fuels are really only used for peak load.
Thank you for the corrections!
But KW/h/y is dumb so lets just make it KW/h
It’s kW, not KW/h.
explain?
32500000000 KW/h per year
That's 32500000000 kWh/y = 32500000000 * k * W * h / y = 32500000000 * k * W * h / (365 * 24 * h) = 32500000000 * k * W * h / 8760 / h = 32500000000 / 8760 * k * W * h / h = 3710046 * k * W * 1 = 3710046 kW(You actually corrected yourself later when converting to mW.)
… exactly as I intended
A kW/h would imply that the power changes by that amount every hour, while a kWh is the amount of energy spent in an hour
Oh yeah, lol, I blame Friday morning fatigue.
I mean let’s be honest here, there’s no way they did this because of an underlying police change.
I suspect they rather looked at other western countries trying to build large-scale projects and noticed how absurd the idea of building one nuclear reactor without a 15y++ delay was, nevermind 10 of them. Quietly drop it before someone checks whether it’s even doable. 😅
Source: Am German, we are experts on letting our complicated building projects run completely overbudget and take multiple times as long as projected.
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Being against coal and gas, I want the fastest solution that displaces coal and gas. That’s wind and solar in most locations. It’s not nuclear. Nuclear takes a long time to build, and while you build it you’re still burning coal and gas. Recent experience is that you take the original schedule / budget and multiply by 2 to 3, so that’s even more time you’re still burning coal.
Granted, if you already have nuclear, don’t decommission it, but don’t build more either.
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Sweden realized they couldn’t join NATO if they invited Chinese expertise to help build a nuclear power plant.
“Chinese expertise” building reactors like the ones in Finland, France and the UK?
- I don’t think it’s a problem for those NATO members.
- By the way those projects have gone, I’m not sure if expertise is the right word.
BOOOOO
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Good. Other renewables are more economic and dont produce waste we can’t store anywhere
The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. They say it’s carbon neutral, when it isn’t whatsoever. They dismiss claims of leaking nuclear waste barrels. They dismiss claims of irradiated waterways and towns. They dismiss claims of danger from meltdown, because obviously no nuclear meltdowns have ever occurred.
More economic means more profit. Profit, by definition is excess.
You’re advocating for paying more than what something costs to produce so someone richer than you can be even richer.
Smart man.
Perhaps it’s not so advantageous for the consumer, but for the people creating and supplying the power, it’s a home run.
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Because our conservative government sold out solar to china years ago
LNG deals falling through.
An electric grid based on renewables is a federated network.
Why anyone wants to put all the control and risk into one big nuclear company is beyond me.
What kind of risk are you talking about?
The electrical network connecting all your federated renewable infrastructures is managed by one entity already, isn’t it? That’s the same kind of risk you describe.
I get why people don’t like nuclear power and there are many valid arguments against it but yours is not
The overall grid is managed by governments cross countries in Europe. The production is not. While the producers do have an obligation to provide enough electricity at all times, the consumer is free to purchase the electricity from any distributor they want. This creates a free market for pricing while keeping the production regulated. For a small country like Sweden, producing everything in nuclear would destroy the market mechanism on pricing, leaving then with a monopoly.
The risks towards energy production are stuff like war, natural disasters and terror. All of which have been relevant within the last ten years somewhere in the world and increasingly so. The only way to maintain a functional distribution of electricity in these situations is to have the production de-centralised.
I’m all for wind/solar expansion, but we shouldn’t underplay the challenges of keeping grid stability with pure renewables with the technology we have available today. As it stands, I think it would be great and borderline necessary to also expand nuclear power production alongside renewables for now.
For a small country like Sweden, producing everything in nuclear would destroy the market mechanism on pricing, leaving then with a monopoly.
Nobody except for maybe our far right party SD is calling for this, and the odds of us going this far backwards is close to zero. The amount of nuclear production needed to render all other means of production up here obsolete and uncompetitive is insane.
I don’t have anything particular against nuclear as a source of energy. I just don’t think it can done fast enough and in an economically feasible way. Even if they do make more nuclear plants, they are going to need something else in the meantime before the new plants can be ready if the forecasted increase is to be trusted.
Most renewables can’t produce energy at a large scale on demand. Nuclear is the king of that domain. I don’t see the issue with plugging nuclear to that federated network in order to meet demand when the renewables can’t
I agree. Sweden already has 6 nuclear plants providing 30% of the energy. Hydro power is 50% Together this is more than enough to meet baseload demand.
I cannot comprehend how someone would think a dezentralized power network can be anything but a disaster waiting to happen. I would reckon even the crypto fanbois would figure out how bad an idea that would be.
And mind you, the type of power doesn’t matter in that case. If your network isn’t centralized (enough), you’re fucked.
