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 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.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of
nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!
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.
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 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.
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.
It's not complex really. It was made unprofitable with every tool available with this as the goal. There have been much public celebration from the green party, they are proud of the outcome.
Yeah… it tends to get uneconomical if you slap a huge special tax on it. A nuclear specific “effektskatt” was added in 2015, this is the real reason that they prematurely shut down the reactors (which would have been running until the mid 2020s).
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 history now.
so they get compensated if they have to close it even so the government payed them to build it. this sound like a bad deal. Tax payers pay for the whole thing and the owner gets even more money if they have to close it for whatever reason.
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.
Its all built on very old thinking. Nuclear may have been a good idea in the past, but with the rapid reduction of cost of renewable, especially solar, its no longer worth considering. Building a plant takes a decade, and a decade from now the difference in cost will be even greater. Nuclear will look like huge waste of money then.
No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates.
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.
I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).
There exists a group of folks who claim nuclear isn't green and is going to 'kill the planet'.
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.
Funnily the rhetoric of nuclear proponents is always exclusively aimed against renewables not fossil fuels.
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.
They aren't better in Sweden. The right's support for it is not really related to the costs. I'm personally curious how it's going to pan out considering the right-wing parties claimed they'd be against state subsidies.
the mayor issue is the coal/gas lobby, just look how europe was lobbed to the point that natural gas is somewhat "green", but nuclear is bad to the point some countries don't even have one nuclear power plant.
Well solar is pretty much useless at these high latitudes. I believe the sun doesn't rise above 7 degrees in the winter in Stockholm. Though Sweden is blessed with mountains, so they can get significant energy from hydro. Here in Finland, Nuclear is the only real answer going forward.
The idea of nuclear power is good. The facts of nuclear power are much less good. It is not too much to ask that lifecycle costs and safety get addressed. For example, the French success with nuclear power looks much less successful due to decommissioning costs coming in at a multiple of estimated costs. The French low-balled their estimates, to be a fraction of estimates by Germany and UK. Which estimates do you believe?
I'm also a proponent of nuclear, but modern nuclear power plants seem to take 15-20 years to construct and typically go 10s of billions of EUR over budget. So one does not simply "build a reactor".. look at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in UK.
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.
Twitter, something so “valuable” which offers virtually nothing of value to humanity. If twitter was turned off there would be some whinging for a week on some other platform and then it would be forgotten…
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 to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.
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. :)
So how are they able to transfer electricity to Finland, Poland, Germany etc but not from north to south sweden?
Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.
Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.
And Denmark and Germany in turn are very connected to countries reliant on French nuclear power. Only half of French nuclear power plants are currently running.
Wouldn't this be affected by the EU principle of paying energy at the highest cost of production? [0]
Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?
In the south of Sweden there is a general shortage of energy to the point where reserve energy operators have to jump in to supply energy. Those are basically the most expensive energy production you can have. In addition there is a speculative market so available energy production can be bought at one price point and then sold at a higher, making the speculative provider a even higher "cost of production".
If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.
New export cables will be ready the day these would come online, if the ever come online. Decoupling the SE4 and SE3 regions from the European energy market will never be a sustainable solution due to the possible arbitrage.
> For example, in order to address this there is a oil power plant operating basically 24/7 and does so very profitably even with high oil prices.
This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.
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 increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.
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.
Germany also is just a transit country, producing more electricity than consuming. The problem is that half of Frances nuclear power plants aren’t running of which also surrounding countries like Italy are usually reliant on.
In order to inform the conversations in these comments here are some predictions on Nuclear vs Renewable usage in the UK grid from the National Grid's (UK energy grid transmission network owner + operator) Future Energy Scenarios report - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263951/download
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.
Electricity prices should include all the negative externalities such as pollution, carbon dioxide, destruction of habitats, geopolitical dependence on Russia etc.
Electricity, like an increasing bunch of other things, is part of the infrastructure. The amount and different levels of infrastructure pretty much define "civilization", do away with infrastructure and your civilization is done for. Which also means that the way a civilization treats its infrastructure tells you a lot about this civilization.
If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.
Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.
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).
Here is the full agreement from the new coalition in power. Below "3. Reformer som ska genomföras i projektet". I am very happy with these reforms, it looks like exactly what is needed.
The only green solution to our current energy problem is more nuclear power plants. We have to stop relying on coal, wood, oil, gas and the rest of the “dirty” materials.
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?
Geothermal doesn't really work for most places, since you'd have to drill down for tens of kilometres to get the required temperature. If you can use it then great, but it's a rarity.
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
Oh wait! And will stop working if your rivers should run dry, as happened in France this summer.
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
The main advantage of nuclear power plants is constant power output at basically zero emissions combined with a super small footprint. Having a constant power output is worth a lot, that's why it makes sense funding them.
If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/
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 to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?
I don't have a suitable answer to your question but I wanted to mention that I also wonder how come there isn't more discussion about implementing/improving tidal or wave power. There are numerous innovations that might be possible in the horizon, including possibly using fusion, but other alternate approaches such as decentralization and energy storage are also interesting yet seldom discussed.
Well, I agree with you that they’re expensive and take time to build, but they don’t leave that much waste compared to what we’ve been told and their materials have more or less the same problems as the ones from renewable ones (batteries, non recyclable blades, exotic materials for solar…).
I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs.
I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.
We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)
Readit News
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 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.
Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change.
The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago.
In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!
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.
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.
No option available to continue with nuclear power
https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kärnkraftsfrågan_i_Sverige
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...
Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully history now.
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.
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.
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.
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> 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.
mantra is cheaper.
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
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It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
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.
Completely unnecessary rules were put in place to create submarkets for north and south sweden, and it's these rules that disallow the transfer of the electricity. It's more profitable to limit production to keep prices high in sweden, then export and sell in other countries.
Hydro in sweden was overflowing and forced to produce more electricity in sweden during the fall, prices would be zero and even negative if supply and demand was actually in effect, but this would mean zero profits as well, so it's not allowed.
Unless the power plant would be able to flood the rest of the EU grid with cheap power to the point that the more expensive plants would be turned off, how would this prevent the price going up?
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[0] https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2022/08/09/watch-heres-ho...
If however there is a energy surplus in a region then two things happens. Reserve operators don't need to be used, and the speculative market risk holding energy that they can't sell, thus forcing lower prices.
This is not why the oil plant exists, it is an emergency plant. If it is running 24/7 then it does so because the oil plant is profitable. Not out of necessity.
This feels like your splitting hairs because the root cause is ultimately the same: if it wasn’t necessary then it wouldn’t be profitable.
To lower the prices in southern Sweden either southern Sweden or northern Germany must increase "plannable" electricity production to avoid expensive imports from the baltics.
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...
Short Version is here - https://www.nationalgrideso.com/document/263861/download
Pessimistic scenario: A mix of mostly fossil fuels (natural gas) and wind power by 2050.
For those interested. An overview of the energy in Sweden. https://energimyndigheten.a-w2m.se/Home.mvc?ResourceId=20876...
If you look at Europe, they messed things up big time. Firstly, running infrastructure like a company will never work, by design. So this whole privatization is a big sham to begin with. It is made worse by the fact that there cannot be a market as such, so they defined rules to create a market. Humans being exactly that are too stupid to include the human factor into rules, so this whole "market" is completely and utterly broken, and pretty much a money transfer machinery (like so many others) from the bottom to the top.
Which means in the end, while I can understand your idea/approach, but it will not solve the problem with energy cost.
https://kristdemokraterna.se/download/18.715f6f45183890627fc...
Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar or geothermal?
> Now why is it so great compared to, say, solar
Works at night, works in winter, doesn't take up half the country in surface area, has a constant output throughout the day, costs slightly less per kWh (may vary), provides waste heat that can be used for central heating, etc.
Now sure if you live on the equator where it's always sunny and happen to have a large reservoir nearby you can use for pumped hydro storage, then yes it's probably the better choice.
Oh and! May not be so easy to build, supposing not everyone loves the technology as much as you do. Google Wackersdorf.
Edit: of course, you assume you’d be able to run your power plants safely throughout their life span, even if cough a natural disaster were to occur nearby.
If you think that, let's say Germany, could generate all its electricity demand from renewables, then I'd recommend you to take a look at the following book (free): www.withouthotair.com/
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 to build, and be less safe than technology from the 1960s?
someone's not telling the truth in this story.
The fact that it is not evenly distributed is a real concern, though.
I fully support solar, hydro, geo, wind and any other more eco friendly ways, but they don’t generate stable electricity and with the needed capacities our modern society needs. I’ve read articles about different ways to store clean electricity and ways to convert coal burning plants with geothermal ones, but I feel that these are not enough.
We (as a planet) need a lot of clean electricity as soon as possible or we’re screwed :-)
Nuclear energy is expensive, nuclear power is cheap.
Or put another way: Sun shine at noon is free. Sunshine as midnight isn't.
Geothermal is not having a heyday because it depends on the same sort of expensive-to-operate steam turbines as nukes do, so is uncompetitive.
Anytime steam turbines have to compete with no steam turbines, the steam turbines tend to lose.
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