- They intend to build the equivalent of two new conventional nuclear reactors by 2035 (presumably meaning something like 2000 megawatts of generating capacity, but it could come from small reactors).
- They intend to build the equivalent of 10 new conventional reactors by 2045.
The government has not yet announced what sort of funding model will be used to get the new reactors built.
Thing with Nuclear is its long term. It's 10 years to plan (theres always some customisation), fund, develop and train then another 5-10 before you move to profitability. Then through the life cycle there's constant government scrutiny and regulation before a complex decommissioning process that is pre-paid. This doesnt fit well with political election cycles.
Solar and wind are winning not because they are cheaper or more balanced for the grid but because you can buy off the shelf components, install them quickly and make it to profitability sooner. There's just a whole lot less time and risk.
I do agree wind and solar are cheaper presently. But this is primarily because they're being deployed in the context of supplementing a fossil-fuel backed grid. Provisioning more wind and solar starts becoming much dicier when you start saturating the grid during hours of peak production. In theory, negative electricity prices will prompt people to provision storage and capture the free (cheaper than free!) energy. But in practice, energy storage at grid scale is expensive and there are much better uses for batteries - chiefly in electric vehicles.
Nuclear, on the other hand, is one of the few carbon-free energy sources that is non-intermittent. The only others are geographically limited: hydropower and geothermal power.
What makes sense for Sweden may not make sense for the vast majority of energy production in the world.
It makes a lot of sense for Sweden to buy nuclear, even if it is exceptionally pricy and slow to deliver, if they don't have better options. But the fraction of the world population in that situation is not large, either, so we shouldn't extrapolate from Sweden to too many other places.
1/ no new nuclear reactor since 1985, despite hydro being the best existing storage system for nuclear (hydro resources there are fantastic), and hydro remaining there the main source of electricity
They will not and cannot win until we have cheap, highly dense, efficient power storage. That is, unfortunately, at least 20 years off (if we're lucky).
They will continue to be an important part of our energy ecosystem, and we should aggressively build them out, but we still need the fundamental power solution.
Fortunately we do have cheap, dense batteries that are being deployed on a massive scale with new solar.
The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance
It is no longer 2003. By 2030 it's likely that annual world production of battery storage will be 20-30 TWh. Today, we are getting close to 1TWh production per year.
Edit: just for example, take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits. There are multiple GW, currently, much more in the pipeline, and prices still have a long ways to fall on battery installations (grid assets are usually measured by power, to convert to energy multiply by 4 hours:
> Installed battery capacity increased from 153 MW in 2019 to 3,518 MW in 2023. Interconnection agreements have been signed for an additional 7,945 MW of battery storage through 2024, allowing batteries to play a growing role in daily power needs in the near future.
"The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance"
I don't see anyone making this weirdly-specific claim. However, it's widely acknowledged that sufficient battery storage to guarantee national grid-wide power on-demand, sufficient for a modern industrial economy, is not currently feasible, in both economic and practical terms.
What you say is "widely acknowledged" is in direct contradiction to what is actually getting deployed on the grid. And what you say is a "weirdly specific claim" is also a surprise to people.
If a large chunk of current grid investment in Texas, profit-drivej by independent investors, how could it not be feasible to continue this level of investment? Especially when costs are falling dramatically and production capacity for batteries is just getting started and is scaling at a tremendous rate that will result in a complete excess of battery capacity within the time period that we could only build a thousandth of the same amount of nuclear wattage?
Among the blockers are (1) economics and (2) availability of raw & finished materials. This is all in the public domain, if you go looking for the numbers.
I’m not saying your claim about the rapid pace of building out battery storage is false - your claim is true. However, there is no currently-feasible way to run an advanced industrial economy on intermittent energy sources backed by chemical batteries. It may become technically feasible at some point in the future (never bet against human ingenuity in the long run), but it’s technically and economically impractical right now.
Not sure what you mean by blockers or "impractical right now" but at best that's "we haven't built the mines or factories, yet." Which is not in any way a fundamental blocker on our ability to build what we want to build.
There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic:
Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept.
So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.
Your link talks (theoretically, not practically) about 100% RE by 2060! Do you understand what “currently” means?
You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China).
So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.
> Fortunately we do have cheap, dense batteries that are being deployed on a massive scale with new solar.
I would not consider that cheap. I would not consider that highly efficient. It is a step in the right direction, but it's not enough
> The idea that we are not currently, today, deploying massive amounts of batteries everywhere with today's technology is just plain ignorance
Nowhere did I say we weren't. They just simply aren't good enough for our needs. We can't get there without this intermediate step - and it _is_ doing good and helping humanity. But we're simply not there and won't be for at least a decade.
> take Texas's grid, which is one of the few places where storage is allowed to compete on its own cost merits
You mean the Texas grid that keeps failing and sticking people with $1000 monthly power bills? Not a great example lol
The first two Swedish nuclear plants won't come online for at least 12 years, and the next eight aren't scheduled to be operational until 2045. That's 22 years in the future.
Personally I think your timeline for storage is going to prove wildly conservative (we already have 5GW installed in CA, China is building capacity exponentially.) But even if you're right: these nuclear plants are going to come online right at the moment when storage makes them economically obsolete.
Exactly. And their construction will have pumped 25% of the CO2 in the atmosphere they were supposed to prevent during their lifetime. Nuclear is a really bad idea if construction takes that long.
Space in the cities is premium. Space in rural areas is not. I really don't think space is the problem, mass producing maybe, but otherwise have a big powerbank in every basement and you are done.
This is right. For grid connected storage, two things matter: 10-year total cost, and durability. At least a 30-year design life. (Well, reliability matters too: that 's implicit.)
Volume and mass are just whatever they are. They don't matter.
Besides that most areas aren't in the risk of flooding, there is litte preventing you to water proof your batteries to the point that submerging them into water has no ill effects. The housing of the batteries usually is water-proof anyway. Just look at all the Teslas driving through deep water.
Oil tanks for heating are a huge problem with flooding though, as they tend to leak oil into the environment.
imo that's outdated mantra repeated while we are just getting there.. but anyway: as is any nuclear 10 year planning now 20 years out then in reality, at least here in the west.
Genuine question. What kind of solar/wind installation could generate 2GW of power on demand (including when no wind or sun) and how much would that cost? is it even feasible with actual technology?
2GW of batteries attached to solar installations, spread over multiple sites, is quite common in 2023. What do you mean by "what kind"? Its just the normal kind.
If there's no sun, how long can the battery deliver? And if there's too much sun, where's the extra power dissipated? I'm wondering if it's possible to provide a service equivalent to a nuclear powerplant today, and if so, how much it costs.
The thing is, the question doesn't really make sense. Yes you could design a closed system of solar production and battery storage, which delivers power 24/7. But that is not reasonable. Solar is only one part of the electricity supply to the grid. Wind is another. Add to that water, biomass, etc. and you have multiple sources which complement each other. You would need battery storage only for those remaining amounts of electricity which cannot be served by the combination above. And this amount is easily an order of magnitude (or more) lower than a solar+storage system alone.
This also heavily depends on your local climate. The closer to the equator you get, the more a solar storage only needs to supply energy over the night. There a solar+storage only grid would be the no brainer.
The question makes sense. When people claim that wind + solar wins over nuclear. They compare apple and orange. Nobody is able to explain what wind/solar (+ other renewable) installation is doable right night in Sweden (not near the equator), that would provide the same guarantee as a nuclear powerplant: 2GW of power, all year long. Or at least any time when the people need that power and there hasn't been sun/wind for a while.
This is not specifically for Sweden, but if for some reason you want to imaging a single unit that produces continual output (which is not a desirable operation mode for any grid asset in the modern world), then imagine a solar installs distributed over a geographic areas with 18+ hours of storage at the desired power output. That's the overall design. People don't build that way but they could if they wanted.
Right now, batteries deployed on the grid cost $300-$500/kWh, and typically LFP batteries are designed to last for 5000-7000 cycles, and will have warranties for 15+ years. This places the cost of storing a MWh at between $42/MWh and $100/MWh. Solar costs vary based on location, but range from $20/MWh to $80/MWh. For places with high seasonal variation, sizing the install for daily storage, using the seasonal minimum of input, in some areas might double or triple the cost for a particular season. Nuclear costs vary widely by construction competence, but in the largely incompetent west costs are going to be far north of $150/MWh.
So for most areas, most of the time, solar+storage is going to be far cheaper than nuclear. But low insolation or high latitudes might make solar+storage more expensive than nuclear.
In the future, nuclear's prices will continue to rise very slowly, and solar and storage prices will continue to plummet at ridiculously fast paces. This is why solar and storage are winning.
For industrial processes that need heat, the storage options become even cheaper. And if the industrial site can be put somewhere with half-decent solar insolation, then the solar power can be directly connected without going through the grid, which means looping off that $60-100/MWh that utilities charge for the very very expensive grid transmission. We are just at the start of industry realizing what is possible with distributed renewables and thermal storage, and there is potential for drastically cheaper energy for energy intensive industry that be built at new sites.
This is why solar and storage are "winning" even if nuclear might be better for Sweden. And with the ever increasing deployment of EVs, people are going to be parking multiple days worth of their home's energy needs in their garage. People will soon realize just how cheap storage is, and how perhaps even their vehicles will act as grid storage, even if it's only though charging at selective times when energy is cheaper.
And if there's too much sun, where's the extra power dissipated?
You can just open the circuit to disconnect a solar panel from the external load. The panel will get slightly warmer in full sunlight when it's not connected to a load, but there's no harm to it. Since there is no rotating mass or hot steam with accumulated energy in a solar farm, you can shut it down completely in seconds if necessary. Solar PV can safely go from 100% output to 0% faster than any other electricity source.
China has 50GW of pumped storage and another 89GW under construction. There are larger battery storage projects overseas, but you’ll have to look them up yourself.
They want their trains to run or electricity in their hospitals, even though they's no sun/wind for a several days. Unless your renewable installation can provide that, it's not comparable to a nuclear plant and solar/wind doesn't win. The best example of this is Germany who is one of the worst CO2 emitter in Europe despite their huge investment in renewable.
Right now solar and storage are eating into the most economically-profitable generation. That means we’re seeing deployments of storage that shift supply a few hours into the high-demand evening period. This will work well in places that get a lot of sunlight or that have lots of sunny days or highly-connected grids (Europe is in the process of building HVDC links to North Africa for this reason.) What’s going to happen is that this low-hanging profitable fruit will be plucked first, and then as storage costs decrease (happening quickly as we speak) we’ll see a second layer of multi-day and seasonal storage get deployed. The problem for nuclear is that (1) this construction will eat a lot of the most profitable generation opportunities, and (2) nuclear takes so long to build (and has such a long payback period) that any new plant will arrive just as storage gets cheap enough to make it unprofitable.
Nuclear electricity is rather expensive.
Are you sure the demand forecast someone calculated cannot be meet by ramping up hydro? Or importing electricity?
In Germany, the right parties did block any project that had the smell of environment protection. And the pseudo-green clowns are no game changer.
Well now, that depends on what country you are in. In the US for example health care and military most definitely are for-profit exercises.
In the context of Sweden though, with social health care, and a modest military your question makes more sense. And of course as long as it has govt funding it doesn't need to make a profit, or even break even.
Once you look to private capital though, investors expect that capital to generate a return.
Assuming no govt subsidy yo provide that return, it has to come from an excess after operational expenses. (aka profit)
Profit imposes discipline on consumption of the product. River water is classically treated as "free" which leads to great waste in agriculture and horitculture.
Requiring a resource to be sold at a profit ensures it goes to where it is most needed, and that it is used efficiently.
But your priors are different. The US is a very solipsistic society, which means that the quality of care that an individual can achieve always trumps the median health of the entire population: everyone is conditioned to believe that they will be the ones to achieve the highest rung, and those who don't manage it deserve their lower quality of life.
If you're trying to say that a power station run purely for profit would mean the ultra-wealthy in society would have good power while everyone else can suffer with the crummy leftovers..... I think it's time you gave up.
If we subjected solar and wind to the same level of regulatory burden (as in: ensured that they would have the same level of expected harms/deaths/accidents as nuclear), they also would be completely unprofitable.
If we subjected all our generation to the same regulatory burden, nuclear would be profitable again because our power would be drastically more expensive.
Sure nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks. But there's still a strong argument to be made that nuclear is still over-regulated relative to its risks. It has the lowest death toll per watt of electricity produced of any generation source, even including Chernobyl. Furthermore, US plants built during periods of more relaxed regulation haven't seen much in the realm of harmful mishaps. Three Mile Island is a testament to safety measures - it turns out building a big concrete condom over your reactor helps contain meltdowns.
>> nuclear's regulations should be proportionate to its risks
to some extent this I what's happening now. If a wind turbine (or indeed whole wind farm) catastrophically fails then you can clean it up in a matter of days or weeks. The range of potential damage in space and time, is very limited.
By contrast catastrophic nuclear failure leads to immediate damage over a far larger area, and spans a much longer time (like hundreds of years. )
One can quibble about deaths from chernobyl but it displaced an entire city and rendered a substantial chunk of land unusable for centuries.
So I would argue that thd regulations are completely in line with the risks, as they stand right now.
To the contrary, nuclear contamination can be cleaned up. Fukushima's exclusion zone was completely lifted after 11 years [1]. Pripyat was a planned city, built for the specific purpose of supporting the Chernobyl plant and it's workers. It remains unremediated because there's no incentive to clean it up, not because. Nuclear power has a smaller death toll per megawatt hour than wind, orders of magnitude less than hydropower and biomass [2].
While I personally think nuclear is overregulated, my point wasn't even that you need to decrease regulation. I was just pointing that if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated, since they both kill more people/MWh generated than nuclear does.
> if current nuclear regulations demonstrate how safe we think our power generation should be on a number of fatalities per MWh basis, then wind and solar (and everything else) are under regulated
I don't think everyone agrees that fatalities per MWh is the right metric.
You'd want to include cost in a similar way to medicine and other engineering areas do.
Doing X (new medical procedure, changing a road intersection) would save Y lives for Z cost.
If the cost Z is low you can shift resources to it from areas where cost Z is high per life or QUALY (quality adjusted life year) saved and overall save more lives.
Yes exactly. Nuclear regulation has had diminishing returns on safety for probably 50+ years. Are newer nuclear designs safer than they were in the 80s? Yes. Are they _enough_ safer to justify the increased cost relative those older designs? Almost definitely not. In the same way, we _could_ make wind and solar and coal etc. as safe as nuclear currently is. But it would _dramatically_ increase costs. That was my entire point. Nuclear is only not profitable because it's competing with generation technologies that are not required to meet the same safety standards.
The US nuclear regulatory regime _explicitly_ does not include costs when determining if a new regulatory rule is necessary. Any amount of safety at any cost is always justified. No other generation technology has that mindset.
Note that the deaths for nuclear energy include only radiation related deaths, whereas the accidents for solar and wind include "mundane" accidents like workers falling from heights. Nuclear power plants have their own non-radioactive accidents, though, like this one:
(5 workers killed at Mihama nuclear power plant due to accidental steam release)
I have not seen any comparison that tries to sum up non-radioactive accidents for nuclear power and incorporate them in the deaths-per-TWh rate for nuclear power. The number will still be lower than anything based on combustion, but at these very low numbers it could make a meaningful difference in the relative rates.
This was the first publication I found from a google scholar search (there are others as well)[0]
Nuclear has far fewer fatalities, but it's accidents are also dramatically more expensive. Although both nuclear and hydro are having their numbers mostly driven by a single catastrophic event (the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China and Chernobyl), so how one feels about this whole analysis is going to depend on how likely one thinks future catastrophic events are to be. The numbers are so low that it's hard to come up with very rigorous estimates.
I personally think that catastrophic accidents on the scale of Chernobyl are as close to impossible these days as makes no difference. I'm not even too worried about Fukushima level events (which was not particularly deadly but was very expensive)
However, I have to admit that my opinion on that isn't really backed up be empirics, as is always going to be the case with rare events.
-edit- yeah after further investigation, according to their "learn more about this data" button, the original source for that data is two publications, the one I linked, and the 2007 paper. The 2007 paper is primirly about comparing nuclear to fossil fuels, and mostly from the perspective of indirect effects from CO2. I'm skeptical of it's claims, as that's a bit too roundabout. The one I linked above is direct effects only (except that it includes cancer deaths from nuclear accidents), which I think goes too far in the other direction. I'd personally include deaths from particulate emissions from fossil fuel generation, but that has no bearing on the comparison between nuclear and wind/solar.
I don't know how they ended up with the plot they display given the sources that they have, but I trust the graphs in the 2016 paper more, which show much larger effects.
In any case, it's certainly not true that there are no credible sources backing up the claim. One can dispute it, I'm sure, but there are credible sources backing it up.
Except there isn’t a reason to do this. Solar panels do not have radiantion leaks. Wind turbines do not meltdown. Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste.
Nuclear being much more heavily regulated is due directly to it’s intrinsic dangers.
The reason we care about those things is that they kill people. It turns out that, even with those things, nuclear kills fewer people than everything else. Wind turbines kill people other ways. Hydro dams literally have the record for the single most catastrophic energy related disaster in the 1975 Banqiao Dam failure. And even dams that don't fail are so much worse for the environment that I can't even explain it. Dams on the west coast are probably the single biggest reason for the collapse of west coast salmon populations (among countless other species). Dams are an ecological disaster even when they are working perfectly. Nuclear at least has to fail before it causes major issues.
For some reason, this seems to have omitted solar power from the list of examples of technologies that have a higher body count than nuclear power. In the meantime, let's examine how many cities have needed to be evacuated due to the catastrophic failure of solar plants.
You're probably joking, but solar installation killed my uncle's employee (he had 3), which made him sell his installation business (he still has 2 solar farms I think).
I'm pretty sur solar kill more per generated MW than wind.
The main difference is that solar/wind only kill or inconvenience/maim blue collar workers. It's like chemical spills in North America, you only hear about it if it inconvenience white collar or large owners, if it's only 30k blue collar workers, it'll hardly make national news.
>Hydro damns don’t need millennia long storage plans for their waste.
Damn ;), but they "waste" the lakes downstream by making them shallower by siltation over decades, not millenia, and "waste" the ecology and biology upstream by flooding the valleys they dam.
You do realize that nobody dies during the operation of a solar farm? Yes people fall off roofs during installation, but effective regulation for that is far cheaper than you would think.
Storage at anywhere near relevant scales is anything but moderate. To put this in perspective: The USA uses 12,000 GWh of electricity every day. The world uses 60,000 GWh. The amount of storage required depends on how much overproduction we have, and the tolerance for blackouts. But many estimates arrive at around 1 day's worth of storage. But even that is likely and underestimate [1].
This is part of why plans for a primarily renewable grid assume that hydrogen or some other heretofore untested system will fulfill the overwhelming majority of storage. Because none of the existing electrical storage mechanisms are sufficient for grid-scale storage.
Many people think we need a season's worth of storage. So by that measure a days worth of storage is moderate. And unlike a season, it is possible to have 12 TWh of storage within a decade or two. It'd be nice to have cheaper storage, but even 12 TWh of batteries plus sufficient renewables is cheaper than nuclear.
No, 12TWh of batteries is not feasible. The entire world produces about 400 GWh worth of batteries per year. And bear in mind that 12 TWh is a day's worth of electricity just for the US - the global figure is 60TWh. Furthermore, as transportation, heating, and industrial processes are electrified that's going to drive that 12TWh figure up even higher. Only about half our fossil fuel use is due to electricity production. And again, remember that electric vehicles are going to consume the lion's share of battery production,.
1.2 Twh of capacity but only ~400 GWh of actual production. Don't confuse figures on production capacity with figures on actual deliveries. Capacity is often 2-3x higher than actual production figures: https://cdn.ihsmarkit.com/www/images/0722/global-battery-cel...
Actual production figures are what determines the supply of batteries available, not what the factories hypothetically could produce if they had unlimited inputs. Your factory could make 1000 GWh of batteries per year, but if you only have enough input materials to build 500 GWh then that extra capacity is useless.
I don't think this paper completely refutes the commentor you responded to, since it does not include nuclear power (current or projected future capacity) in its analysis.
It is unclear if nuclear would fill the gap they calculated.
It's even simpler than that: solar, wind, existing hydro+nuclear, short term storage, and natural gas is enough to bring us to net zero.
Wait, you say, natural gas? But natural gas is dirty. Well, in the US if we could magically remove all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions except for the natural gas power plants, we'd be at net zero right now.
You might want to pause and re-read GP's comment. It seemed clear to me that GP was saying that solar and wind are winning over nuclear, because of the special challenges that nuclear represents. While I agree with many of your points, it doesn't strike me as crazy at all to say that wind and solar are winning v. nuclear. Of course, whether they should be is a totally different question.
Nuclear is the worst companion to Solar+Wind. Why? Because nuclear is limited in regulation capacity (you need to keep the output at at least 40%) and also extremely expensive when not running at high capacity.
Nuclear is a fine alternative to solar+wind but it is a poor complement since you need some dispatchable generation with either: solar+wind because they are intermittent; and nuclear because it is essentially constant baseload and demand varies throughout the day.
I think nuclear is cool tech but am doubtful it will play a big role in most countries since renewables are so much cheaper (1/3rd the price, so you can overbuild substantially) for getting to 90% emissions free generation.
>I think nuclear is cool tech but am doubtful it will play a big role in most countries since renewables are so much cheaper (1/3rd the price, so you can overbuild substantially) for getting to 90% emissions free generation.
Renewables (wind/solar) could be free and they wouldn't be able to support a modern economy - that's the problem. It's why wind/solar, today, do not even power a small city, much less a nation.
> Renewables (wind/solar) could be free and they wouldn't be able to support a modern economy - that's the problem. It's why wind/solar, today, do not even power a small city, much less a nation.
No energy source will support an entire modern economy, but like nuclear they can supply the majority of electricity for one.
>but like nuclear they can supply the majority of electricity for one.
OK ... If you want to claim that the future is wind + natural gas/coal - go ahead, but that's not what the public is being told. The public is told that wind/solar can replace fossil fuels, and they can't.
Here's the reality:
If you have nuclear, you don't need wind/solar - at all. In fact, you will not be able to use wind/solar, because nuclear can't be easily spun up and down to deal with the wind/solar intermittency. In your France example, wind/solar is pointless.
If you have hydro, and you have enough of it, you don't need wind/solar. If you don't have enough hydro, you need natural gas though you can optionally throw in wind/solar. Once you hit your geographic hydro capacity, the only way to increase is to build out your natural gas/coal infrastructure (regardless if you throw in wind/solar in there)
If you don't have nuclear, and you don't have hydroelectric, then wind/solar will not be able to replace fossil fuels. You will be forced to build out coal or natural gas infrastructure (or burn wooden pallets), as your Danish example shows.
- Portugal, which is blessed by geography that gives it access to hydro, but because they don't have enough, and they built out their wind infrastructure, need significant natural gas capability: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-elec-by-source?coun...
I agree that wind/solar and nuclear are alternatives rather than complements. This is why I think little nuclear will end up being built outside countries like France which are all in on it.
As the cost of generating electricity from gas is mostly the cost of the gas its perfectly reasonable to have those gas plants built and operated 10% of the time so long as the total system cost is much lower than building nuclear.
There's an arguable case that for 100% carbon-free electricity (rather than 90% carbon free) the economics of nuclear are potentially viable, at least for places like northern Europe where you can't just build a huge amount of solar and 24 hours of battery storage.
But it seems far more important to decarbonise the grid as fast as we can and that means building lots of cheap renewables. Nuclear is simply too expensive and too slow to build. Which is a shame because it is cool tech!
Closing existing nuclear plants like Germany has done is an absolute disgrace. We should keep existing plants open for as long as possible.
And of course, if anyone can figure out how to build nuclear cheaply then build a bunch more. Then maybe they will replace the renewables currently being built as they end of their service lives.
> but if you have sunshine all year round it’s easily doable.
That sounds great for everyone living in Spain, Italy and Greece, as well as New Mexico, Arizona, Southern Cali Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. I guess everyone who lives north of thst is just SOL then.
Lithium ion battery are far less destructive than the iron mining used to build the rest of a car that they go into, but good luck getting the concern trolls about supposed lithium mining problems to acknowledge what it takes to build the rest of the car...
Yeah it can provide for your household lighting, but what about all the energy expenditures that go into the house via material means? Can you produce aluminum at scale? Or fertilizer? How much energy is used to produce a computer? And in most mass processes a loss or reduction in power input is a huge deal and results in production shutdowns that require far more than just turning a switch back on to restart.
That battery is for load shifting from peak times to off-peak times and also to provide bridging power while other generators start up. If you want reliable purely green power, you need a lot more battery. For longer term storage, pumped hydro seems to be the only option for now.
I agree it's doable by some rich and Niche individuals, but it's not socially scalable, let alone efficient.
Of course with enough money you can put in three times the panels you need on average to account for winter days. Similarly, you could put in a week's storage battery in case a nasty storm comes through.
"no grid-scale battery technology to remove this fatal intermittency problem"
Where is the bottleneck with mass producing batteries, that don't need rare elements, like saltwater batteries?
Surely it is not cheap either, but it is working technology, cannot burn, nor contaminate entire landscapes if something goes wrong.
"Today there isn't even a small city anywhere in the world actually powered solely by solar/wind"
Because of economics and not really factoring in external costs, fossil fuels are simply cheaper. But it surely can be done with current tech. And El Hierro, a canarian island, is pretty close:
Hydroelectric energy storage is geographically limited and quite hard to develop. You need an elevated reservoir sitting next to a river or body of water in order to fill and drain it (look at the photo in your link, to see the kind of specific features required [1]). You can find academic articles proclaiming the vast potential of hydroelectric storage. But those are just running algorithms over terrain data, without consideration for accessibility to proximity to places with energy demand. Developing Tibet's hydroelectric potential isn't exactly feasible.
So when humanity eventually runs out of fossil fuels and uranium ores, we're just going to go back to the pre-industrial era?
You can build an entirely solar/wind-powered storage and distribution center capable of putting out 1 GW of power 24/7 with modern PV panels, wind turbines, battery storage, hydrogen storage, etc. It's entirely feasible, and although costs for such a system are high (comparable to that of a 1 GW nuclear power plant), those costs are steadily falling and the long-terms costs are much lower as you don't need to acquire uranium fuel or store the hot waste.
I think the point being made is that without grid scale storage, wind and solar are not full solutions and not comparable to nuclear energy. Grid scale storage capacity will come, but it's not here yet.
But we (well, some of us) have that. Norway has 87TWh of pumped hydro storage that discharges at a rate of 32GW - it would take 3,5 months to empty it completely.
> So when humanity eventually runs out of fossil fuels and uranium ores
Worrying about running out of uranium (and the subsequent plutonium) is on the same level of worrying about what to do when the sun goes supernova. Both are problems on century long timescales.
They're offering $37 billion in loan guarantees, which means that if a private party agrees to take the money and build the nuclear power plant but then defaults on the loan (i.e. if they can't sell the power from the plant at the repayment rate, I suppose), then the government is stuck with the whole bill.
Even that apparently won't be enough to bring in the private contractors, however:
> "Guarantees are very important, but that won't be enough," Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said. "For this type of infrastructure it is going to require the state to take part and share the risk."
I'm not sure what that means, the loan guarantee already seems like quite a risk. Are they going to go for nationalization of the power sector or something like that?
> I'm not sure what that means, the loan guarantee already seems like quite a risk. Are they going to go for nationalization of the power sector or something like that?
Seems large parts already is nationalized. Vattenfall is a huge power company and is owned by the Swedish state.
Extra weird considering 1) the link didn't work for me, 2) parent is a cyber security expert and his cyber security posts look to be mostly open and when not have more details before the paywall. Why is the thing you're not an expert on the thing that's paywalled...
Nuclear energy is a pretty sophisticated topic and I'll be honest, as someone with a degree in physics, who has worked on radiation shielding, and worked at DoE labs (in CS, not physics or engineering, but I was talking to those folks quite a lot given my background and worked on analyzing data), I'm not even confident enough to put my face to my statements. I'm not putting my credentials to boast, but to say that this is a threshold for "unqualified."
It's just too easy to get something little wrong which makes your whole belief collapse. I can tell you, I even see people on the pro-nuclear side make a lot of blunders that have meaningful changes (I've even seen this in shielding even when I have slides showing Geant4 simulations and the results are expected from the math). Nuclear is a pretty tough topic and requires a lot of nuance. Climate even more so. I know a lot of people have strong opinions on these topics but I hope those opinions also do not come with high confidence. A paywall to me suggests higher confidence. Plus is a weird move to advertise your substack. Advertise your domain expertise! That's your quality content.
Gen3+ reactors are vastly safer and simpler than those that came before it, yet hardly anyone has started building them (China is the furthest ahead last I checked, building AP1000 reactors). Safe and abundant electricity is possible, but we have to invest in it.
I think, equally as important as investment, is reducing third-party obstructionism. Environmental justice and anti-nuclear activists Continue to thwart these kind of projects with frivolous lawsuits.
That's absolutely how they work if you bring a frivolous lawsuit you will end up with more trouble than you bargained for. There may be fines involved, you may have to pay the party that you sued, you may have to pay their costs for representation and so on.
A lawsuit that you lose is fine, one that is frivolous really isn't, in those cases even the attorneys may get sanctioned (by the judge, or, less commonly, by the bar to the point where if they keep it up they may end up being disbarred).
For the legal definition of "frivolous", yes. For stuff like asking for additional EPA assessments which change nothing, but add another year and cost $$$, not so much.
If you look at the outcomes of the assessments, they add zero value. They are intentionally designed to waste time and money.
As an example, the nuclear storage facility was delayed, and ultimately cancelled, because the geologic analysis had only established the stability of the ground for the next 800,000 years, and the lawsuit demanded that it be extended to several MILLION years into the future. ...and they WON.
No, NEPA only requires you to gather the environmental impact data. There is no obligation to act on it in any way. It commonly gets used to request for more data to be gathered and delay projects further and use this as a bargaining chip or to sink the project entirely by creating costs for the project owner.
Not Exactly. When it comes to a government action, if an attorney sues under environmental justice laws, and they win, the government pays their legal fees. The lawyers are incentivized to file suit. Very much like the bogus prop 65 industry.
So, the government does something unlawful and then the government pay the legal fees that the citizens have incurred to stop the government from taking unlawful actions?
What is the problem exactly? Costs are often awarded in many jurisdictions.
The penalty for frivolous lawsuits is usually to pay the legal expenses of your opponent. This is an effective penalty to deter people trying to make money from filing frivolous lawsuits. It is not an effective penalty for filing frivolous lawsuits to delay projects.
It will be years before the lawsuit gets to that point, and if you are willing to trade money for a delay, the prospect of having to pay 2x the money for the same delay is hardly a deterrent.
> It is not an effective penalty for filing frivolous lawsuits to delay projects.
Again: it is your opinion that these are frivolous lawsuits, and that's fine. But there are probably just as many (or more) people that think that they are not.
A frivolous lawsuit is one that does not have merit, has no facts supporting it and usually isn't intended to be won. The lawsuit itself is the goal. These don't qualify as far as I'm concerned. Not even close.
Disclaimer: I worked in the nuclear engineering industry in the '90s.
Move to Houston next to numerous chemical plants that blow up from time-to-time and let me know how those utopian talking points without regulation works out.
The problem isn't NIMBY's or regulations, it's insurance costs.
Fortunately for nuclear, liability is tightly capped by the Price Anderson Act and the DOE will do basically any loan to get new nuclear off the ground.
By changing the topic and pointing to an irrelevant article, I take it that the claim about lawsuits is recanted and that no, you don't know of a single lawsuit at all?
That article has nothing at all to do with Vogtle or Summer, has zero concrete claims, and is at most speculation about how things might be different in the future, and how some vague approaches might be used to make sure the nuclear industry fits in to some hypothetical and similarly vague push for vague values.
I find it very odd how nuclear advocates cannot provide evidence for their claims, and often change the point.
Honestly, I find it kind of rude that you claim to be providing one thing but then provide something completely unrelated, and act as if you actually did have evidence for your claims. It's extremely damaging to discussion, why should I trust anything you say from here on out if you are so unreliable? It's a huge problem that I run into with nuclear advocates, creationists, and anti-vaxxers. There's dedication to the causes but no dedication to conversational norms or even the basic standards of honesty.
It is a multifaceted problem. Often it comes down to:
1) There is no established community / trade to build and maintain nuclear energy on a industrial stage. I live in the neighboring country (Norway), and the nuclear energy community here is pretty much 100% academic. There's are nuclear engineering, tech, etc. programs, so in the start we'd have to import almost all the workers - all while starting our own programs.
2) It's a very long-term commitment, takes what, 10-15 years from shovel in ground to energy production? Compare that to wind energy and similar. The countries that really need energy, are needing it now.
3) Many countries have long-term plans for energy, which were formed decades ago. This is the case of my country - they analyzed nuclear energy back in the 70s, and deemed it not suitable. They are still, almost 5 decades later, parroting the same strategy. "We will focus on renewable hydro, wind, and solar energy, and concentrate funding to those sources"
4) There's a non-trivial amount of political opposition - even though new tech is much, much more safe than the older plants. Nuclear is still big and scary, and some parties will vehemently oppose it - no mater what facts or findings you present to them. And it is very much a NIMBY thing...even those that want it, become a bit hesitant when it comes time to plan for places to put the plants, if it turns out to be too close to home.
Gen3+ reactors are expensive as well. And nuclear is the only energy source where price is increasing per kwh[1] very likely due to increased safety requirements. And in 15 years, I think nuclear will be completely unsustainable specially if we could invent better batteries in 15 years.
Can I ask, pointblank, what is the most serious argument against nuclear and can it be mitigated either at all or in part to the extent it is defacto practical for universally-lateral domestic energy purposes?
Besides safety concerns, the biggest impediment to nuclear is simple economics. These are massive, capital intensive projects, with very long timelines. I wish I could dig it up easily but in the nuclear thread the other day an engineer posted an interesting retrospective analysis of what sort of engineering projects were likely to go massively over time and budget. Guess what was at the top of the list.
While nuclear proponents would like to place blame solely on what they consider excessive regulation or by demonizing environmental activists, the reality is that investment dried up for nuclear because the bean counters saw the ROI and timeline was bad compared to alternatives.
When you ask this same faction how to fix that they'll say small modular reactors, etc. That would be great if it existed. It doesn't. People have been trying to make it work for decades, NuScale the latest. I was bullish on NuScale when they started; it really looked like they'd cracked the code. Now they're floundering too.
I would be ecstatic if someone creates these great SMR's that are economic, but I'm not holding my breath.
There's no doubt nuclear needs to be part of the future energy mix, but the idea that all we have to do is get aggressive with nuclear and our problems are solved is navie nonsense imo.
>When you ask this same faction how to fix that they'll say small modular reactors, etc. That would be great if it existed. It doesn't.
So I guess the dozens of military nuclear submarines and a dozen or so advanced aircraft carriers in the world are powered by unicorns and leprechauns?
I don't know the advanced mechanics of navy reactors, but something that generates 165 megawatts, while fitting inside a 360-foot-long, 35-foot-wide tube and still leaving room to house 130 people comfortably along with all their life support for weeks seems pretty usable as a small reactor. (the A1B reactor on the latest USN carriers takes things up to 700MW of thermal power.)
The US Navy's demand for reactors is insensitive to cost. The tactical considerations of needing to refuel only once per decade (and in the case of subs, being quiet) outweighs all other factors. What works in the context of the navy doesn't really have a bearing in the context of commercial power generation.
And you're saying there's no means by which more economical versions of these could be built? With virtually all technologies, even complex, difficult ones, commercialization does create cost-cutting innovations. A modular, compact version of USN carrier/sub reactors without the worries about noise or extremely long refuel cycles seems feasible if the fundamental technology is already there and waiting to be (I hate this tech phrase so much but here it goes)... "disrupted"....
But the problem is that we know how to make reactors more economical: you make them larger. Maybe some smart people will find a way to bend the curve; I wish them luck. However, be careful in assuming that the aforementioned "cost-cutting innovations" via commercialization represent a free lunch. The sad fact is, most of the cost-savings from commercialization come from reducing the quality of the product, which is the one thing we don't want to compromise on when it comes to nuclear reactors.
To state the obvious, navy reactors do not have to be economical. No one is saying it’s not possible to build small reactors, it obviously is. just not for a cost or cost per watt that anyone is prepared to pay.
Isnt this kinda shit wht multilateral treaties and international agreements exist to address?
Do they just need a tad more leverage in material terms to ensure future moron governments' feet are held to the fire to the extent they cannot escape rare or what do you think is the ideal enforcement mechanism?
Safety, waste, public opposition don't really rate as the reasons that we are not seeing more nuclear. It's just super hard to build and tends to make utilities go bankrupt. So if you're a utility CEO putting in an order for a nuclear reactor is basically suicide.
The private nuclear industry is utterly reliant on government support, because there is no such thing as a profitable nuclear power plant at current energy prices.
* fissile waste that lasts centuries (or more)
* potential for meltdown or other accidental release of radiation
* major military target, a threat not just for loss of generation but
for deliberate release of radiation (by attacker)
> Safe and abundant electricity is possible, but we have to invest in it.
We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years. In my country nuclear (which we have none of) is just a dream, but often pushed with those having an agenda against renewables to muddy the discussion.
Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro. As in the price a consumer would have to pay per kWh. Not sure if that even takes into account the massive government subsidies to build it.
> We need the energy now, though, not in 15+ years.
Well we will also need it in 15+ years.
The best time to plant a tree is 15 years ago, and that will still be true in 15 years. The world (hopefully) isn't going to blow up within the next 15 years, so there's no reason we shouldn't consider 15-years investments anymore.
Fossil fuels reserves are going to collapse in the coming decades; even if solar energy prices keep falling, it won't be enough to compensate; any given country has a fixed capacity for hydro power, and it's rather small.
Right now nuclear may not be the cheapest options. But in 15/30 years we're going to desperately wish we'd explored absolutely every realistic option we had.
Germany added more than 10GW of solar alone this year, next years number will be probably significantly higher. That easily equals 1 nuclear power plant, even if you calculate extremely pessimistic. By going with solar (and of course wind), Germany adds the equivalent to a nuclear power plant every year to the grid. In a few years, even the equivalent of several nuclear power plants. Amongst all other advantages, that is significantly faster.
(Not even looking at China, they add more solar as the rest of the word combined)
Yes, I don't disagree. But with a finite amount of money, it's often not possible to do both. Nuclear has a huge risk (as in project risk, not thinking about safety) and a long lead time. It's no wonder why other options consistently get prioritized.
There are only so many rivers you can dam, so much surface you can put solar panels on without taking away from agriculture, etc.
And a full-renewable approach also has huge risk, it relies on storage technology getting much better in the future, otherwise you need either fossil fuels or nuclear to cover dips. Diversifying probably makes sense.
Any semblance of carbon capture is going to need copious amounts of the most cutting edge nuclear energy we can think of. Breeder, thorium, MOX fuel, etc. Having an edge on that is going to be worth a lot in 20 years.
Why? Carbon capture seems to fit renewables much better.
Carbon capture economically speaking doesn't make anything desirable. We're essentially throwing money at making a problem go away, it's pure spending. So the cheaper, the better, and the sooner the better. Everything else is irrelevant.
So solar and wind are probably are a better bet, and intermittency/storage doesn't really matter.
> Fossil fuels reserves are going to collapse in the coming decades
Source? Quick internet searches seem to say we have more than 50 years left of coal, oil, and natural gas that we know we can extract. And that will expand as we find more and get better at extracting it.
To be clear: we do need to dramatically reduce our fossil fuel usage. Just saying that, so far as I can tell, we're not going to run out of anything in the next 30 years.
It costs money to extract those reserves. It even costs money to maintain existing wells that have already been dug. If prices drop below a certain level, those reserves won't ever be accessed.
> Calculations I've seen also places the cost of nuclear far above our hydro.
It's by far the most expensive power source in common use, and becoming less competitive with other sources every day [1]. This is quite a surprising choice for them to make in 2023.
Hydro: 40 øre/kWh
Windmills on land: 40 øre/kWh
Solar on ground: 63 øre/kWh
Windmills in ocean: 69 øre/kWh
Solar on big roofs: 76 øre/kWh
Nuclear: 78 øre/kWh
Coal: 126 øre/kWh
Do those nuclear costs include all real decommission costs (check the difference between budgeted and real costs thanks to the UK running case), real complete and sure waste disposal costs, provisions/insurance for accidents... ?
We need it now and in the future. Cleaning up many industries amounts to increasing energy expenditure in order to turn pollutants into benign side products. There is no reason to expect our energy demands to go down and every reason to think they will continue to rise in massive amounts. Especially if you expect the poor countries to continue to industrialize and modernize.
*WR plants take too long to build, tie-up too much capital for too long without ROI, and have messy logistics.
It's fast and cheap to deploy zillions of solar panels. It takes a bit longer to truck in the massive components of wind turbines and do a site install. We're already at 30% renewable production of all electricity worldwide. There isn't a compelling rationale for needing nuclear energy, more often it's individuals fixated on it because they want it. Business people or a nonprofit running an energy utility will look at the possibilities and the opportunity costs, and find nuclear isn't a very good fit given the alternatives apart from rare circumstances.
We need the energy in 15 years as well, maybe even more than we do today.
Renewables is just a fancy term for "energy whenever the sun shines or the wind blows". This is factually not always the case. We need energy that is available regardless. And that's where fossil fuel and nuclear excels. Fossil fuel's downside that it kills ~3 million people per year. Nuclear's downside that it scares (not kills) ~3 million people per year.
We could certainly add more combined cycle natural gas turbines to existing plants to meet demand in geographical regions that are unsuitable for wind and solar. Those generators are (comparative to nuclear) fast and easy to onboard to the grid, with (comparative to nuclear) far less safety considerations
They said that back in 2008 too. We also need the energy in 15 years. Of course nuclear will be costlier than your already provisioned hydro. Hydro is low hanging fruit and has already been mostly tapped out where possible.
The Swedish government initial stance was that the market should completely bear the burden of the costs for nuclear energy. Though they had to walk that back because Vattenfall clearly pointed out that unless the government goes in with subsidies they won't do it. The government had earlier proposed the equivalent of ~40 billion euro in credit guarantees, but that wasn't enough.
So now the goverment and vattenfall is working out an agreement where the state takes part of the risk (and profit, if any).
Coming from a right-wing government that has ideals of a market based economy, it's ... counterintuitive that this is the way they want to do it.
Sounds like exactly what happened in the UK. New nuclear was proposed in 2010 by the newly elected centre-right led coalition government, with the aim of it being privately funded.
Since then subsidies have been agreed but costs continue to skyrocket. Only one plant is under construction and the time to operation has shifted from 5 years to 10 years.
Meanwhile pretty much all private sector interest in investing in nuclear seems to have dried up.
We seem to be instead putting all our eggs in the SMR basket hoping that there’ll be the economies of scale to make it viable.
There are some reasons i could think of that should make the tax-payers subsidise nuclear investments.
Sweden's competitive advantage during the 1900s was cheap energy. And we have some important industries that rely on it. Steelworks and papermills. If they would have to close down because they can't (unfairly) compete with cheap energy, it may have a big effect on the Swedish economy.
It may also be that businesses will not do the same risk/reward calculation as a country/taxpayers. They are simply not optimising for the same thing.
Vattenfall invested heavily (hugely) in German brown coal, then shelved it. Swedish tax payers effectively accelerating German energy off brown coal. In the greater scheme of things, not sure what to think of it, but as an investment, it was pretty bad.
Yeah they also invested in Dutch natural gas which was a catastropic deal.
I think the relationship between the government and Vattenfall is heavily regulated so that they can't micromanage and have to set high profit goals for the company. It is probably required so that it does not interfere with market economy.
They might have invested in nuclear if they didn't buy coal, couldn't have that.
Also, I think the largest cash deal in Swedish history is something that is just moving along together with the new coffee machine for the lobby, without political oversight.
The decision also went by the prime minister, although he at first disputed it:
Perhaps relevant background, the HN posting on Oct 14, 2022 titled "Sweden’s incoming cabinet says new nuclear reactors will be built" has 539 comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33208156
For Sweden not that much. Sweden was always an energy exporter and not really depending on Russia.
Neighbouring countries such as Finland have been more dependant on Russia and the imports from Sweden have increased because of cutting the Russian gas. This has had secondary effects on Sweden by increasing the electricity price.
>Neighbouring countries such as Finland have been more dependant on Russia and the imports from Sweden have increased because of cutting the Russian gas.
Eh. Natural gas accounted for less than 5% of Finland's total energy consumption before Russia cut off the gas pipelines. And this was before Finland got a new floating LNG terminal (January 2023) and the new 1600 MW reactor came online (April 2023).
The alternative ("we will tell you what is good for you") led to Canadian cities looking like a time machine to the 90s.
As a voter and not a member of the elite, I prefer having trains built and new cities expanded for our growing population, rather than incantations being offered to irrational secular gods ("the markets") and the constant shrinkage of beds in our healthcare system.
1. promise something with a simple message that is an oversimplification to get enogh voters.
2. Do it because you promised the voters. Even if it is a bad idea and will not lead to good results.
The abstract idea of a (democratic, elected) government is parental, it is supposed to run a country to better the lives of its citizens. Whether some of the people that gain power in government are even adults is debatable though.
The agreement is neither bi-partisan nor contains anything guaranteeing a massive expansion. The article says that if private companies wants to build nuclear reactors they will be able to lend money from the state and also be shielded from (some or all) of the risk. So when the projected cost of the reactors double then triple and the whole project gets delayed a decade or more you can guess who will foot the bill. Sucks to be paying tax.
Fortunately, private investors aren't that interested. They don't want to waste one billion of their money even if the taxpayers waste nine billion of theirs.
Someone should build a factory which builds small nuclear plants. These one-off nuclear plants are just a distraction. The ultimate solution is to make floating and 99% automatic nuclear plants. This makes it possible to mass manufacture them in a massive factory with low unit costs, ship them all over the world, and run them scalably with low operating costs. Make millions of them. Include waste-management solution as a service.
There’s reasons nuclear plants has always been built as huge monolithic structures. Power production scales with containment vessel volume, but many of the costs scale with the area.
It’s inherently cheaper to build big.
Small modular reactors is a huge bet that if you really manage to scale up production to huge numbers, it’ll offset the inherent cost disadvantage with building small reactors. It remains to be seen if that’s the case. I’m quite sceptical, but worth a shot.
This is the gist of the whole thing. The conventionally repeated argument is that bigger is better, but I'm not sure if that's true, all things considered. I don't think it is.
I think that mass manufacturing unlocks a cycle of cumulative improvement through rapid iteration, which eventually leads to way lower costs per energy production capacity. However, scaling energy production profitably requires that energy consumption is scaled as well, i.e. there needs to be new applications which consume a lot of energy, and in general people should be encouraged to use as much energy as possible.
Small modular reactors is what we need most. Wind and solar covers most land based electric needs, but a small modular reactor is still the only feasible answer for ocean shipping I've seen. (sail boats do exist, but they have many disadvantages vs an engine)
No way are we giving nuclear reactors to container ships. It makes more sense to build big, safe nuclear plants near airports and ports to manufacture fuel from air using the nearly limitless power from the nukes.
The US Navy fields dozens of nuclear vessels. Has since 1954. No meltdowns. Only two ships ever lost, and not due to reactor issues. Subs can go for decades without refueling.
Also note that the potential for catastrophic meltdown / contamination is proportional to how much fuel you have on board. If you only have ~3 months fuel for a 20MW reactor, then it's not like a 3-mile-island or Chernobyl situation. There are plenty of modern reactor designs that don't turn into a giant cloud of radioactive smoke under duress, but shut down relatively calmly and safely.
If you can resurrect a prime Hyman Rickover and put him in charge of the world's shipping fleet, I would consider retracting my statement. Though even if you did, I think he'd agree with my assessment.
You'll note the Navy does not run nuclear for ordinary surface vessels, just carriers and subs. You should think about that more before suggesting we nuclearize freakin' container ships.
That's mostly because smaller ships don't need as much power as a sub or carrier. The wattage required for a large container ship is about on par with the reactor for a nuclear sub.
No, it's not just that, it's because having nuclear on a ship has massive downsides in terms of cost and risks. There's a reason the only other ships that use them are icebreakers.
This is sort of how France's nuclear industry works. They made dozens of on-land plants, all based on the same design. The design is something like 50 years old now, but the result was extremely economically competitive and reliable, since the parts were interchangeable (so they could benefit from economies of scale), and workers and training were transferable between plants.
As I understand it, the US has never built the same design more than once (or maybe a few times), so each plant has to be engineered and manufactured from scratch, and all the training, logistics, maintenance schedules, etc, are one-off projects.
That's the motivation behind small nuclear reactors (SMRs). Compared to the larger models, these are more "set it and forget it" type of systems, and with it comes the ability to build them much more rapidly than a traditional plant. Check out NuScale Power's VOYGR SMR, as they are pretty far along in the process.
NuScale is cool, but their reactors don't float. Floating is necessary so anyone can just order one and get it shipped, just by pressing a button on their website. And building on land requires all kinds of permissions.
Most of the world is landlocked, besides, you're not going to dock your precious nuclear plant in the middle of a busy harbor one accident, tsunami or other event away from a serious problem. Big reactors have both an efficiency and a security benefit over smaller ones.
But they're still not cost effective which is why the biggest question with nuclear plants always is 'how much subsidy can we get'.
Tsunamis are chaotic in nature, you can't really know ahead of time what kind of Tsunami's are possible just like we don't really have upper limits on what ocean waves can be like. All we have is evidence from those events that we've observed. The ocean is an incredibly destructive environment, hard to appreciate from a land based perspective. Ships are basically in continuous maintenance to keep them working and anything that isn't made of a rust proof material is in for a very rough time.
Reactors on various vessels have entirely different working parameters from those on shore and there the consumer is right next to the reactor. But in the case that you sketch you'd have a floating reactor tied to a stationary power grid that somehow is resilient to the worst that the ocean can throw at it. I just can't see that working, even in the short term, let alone over the service life of a typical nuclear reactor.
Ship-borne nuclear reactors have been used for emergency power, but that's not a structural solution and it is also a very expensive one (compared to land based generation that power is quite expensive). So as soon as possible the emergency use is discontinued and it's back to land based solutions.
Off-shore windpower shows the complexity of ocean based power generation quite well and they have a much simpler safety situation, maintenance schedule, degree of complexity and so on. And even there the challenges are far more serious than the land based equivalent.
But the economics are not comparable to those of anchored turbines (either off-shore on on-shore). Likely something similar would hold for nuclear power, that off-shore nuclear power would by default be far more expensive than on-shore nuclear power and that is already economically not feasible without massive subsidies.
I know very little about nuclear plants, but ignoring the usual risks, could it be anchored to the sea floor? Is the floating element necessary? Would there be cooling advantages also?
One idea is that the reactor is small and mass produced, not the power plant! So at a site similar to one where you have 2-4-6 big reactors now you would put 5-10-15 SMRs, with a similar large scale infrastructure (HV grid, transformers, security, water treatment, maybe cooling towers, etc.), but you can get going sooner as the reactors are standardized, with type-permits ready, which helps in the design and paperwork of the complete site, and the site might be able get going sooner at lower capacity, starting to generate revenue earlier.
I think it is actually pretty interesting. I wonder if there could be enough passive cooling to simply dump the reactor core in the case of overheating, providing a failsafe against potential meltdown.
Why? Just make sure that they are fail safe and too big to steal. You could melt a couple down each year intentionally just to prove how safe they are to the public and test them
Yes, and I'm saying the commenter is simply ignoring the problems. They aren't just social. A nuclear reactor is something that must be controlled and secured, period. That's not because of social pressure, that's because of the reality of the technology. It's insanity to think otherwise.
Well sure, if we can make completely safe in a completely uncontrolled environment(floating in the ocean), small, mass producable by automation and operated with no staff fission reactors, everything would be fine.
Currently any one of these features is either still in its infancy or not even being attempted at all. Expecting a reactor with all of them to show up in time to compete with renewable and conventional nuclear seems fanciful at best.
I don't understand how starting to build nuclear reactors at this point in time makes sense when it takes over 10 years for them to become productive and they are now already more expensive energy sources when compared to solar and wind.
Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny?
So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point.
The grid is really delicate. You need just the right amount of power to keep it at 50Hz. Too little, brownouts. Too much, overload. So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. :-)
Almost more important than the power generation in many countries these days is the grid. With no grid, or a poor grid, or a grid that can’t store energy, you can build all the wind you want: but you can’t bring it online.
> The median approval time to connect to the grid for a new US power project has climbed by 30-days/year since 2001; and has doubled since 2015, to over 1,000 days (almost 3-years) in 2021. Wind and solar projects are now taking longest to inter-connect, due to their prevalence, lower power quality and remoteness.
> Around £200bn of renewables projects are facing waiting times of 15 years to come online, jeopardising plans to create a net-zero power grid by 2035.
> They have expressed concerns that wait times of up to 15 years have made it difficult to attract investment as the UK competes with the $369bn (£295bn) US package of climate subsidies.
> So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar.
But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1]. This makes it a poor companion to renewables.
[1] Except for the couple of weeks a year when it's down for maintenance, refueling, or its river's water has gotten too hot or there isn't enough of it, then the output is zero. Actually, it's negative because you need to provide it with energy or it self-destroys.
Yes, you need a quicker power source to balance, and Sweden got that with the hydro power.
The hydro power is not enough as base power for the large cities in the south, on the other hand, in part because in part the capacity is not enough, and in part because how the extremely long transport lines from the far north (where the hydro power is located) to the major cities in the south are a serious bottle-neck. Increasing their capacity (across up to thousands of kilometers) isn't easily done in a few years even.
The thing is though, a lot of heavy industry is built in the North to take advantage of the cheap power there. Shoring up the grid connections would increase the electricity rates in the northern region, due to competition from the South.
Which is why you need gas turbines for minor fluctuations.
Buuut if you don't have any nuclear it's gas all the way.
EDIT: and yes, if the hydro is far away, it doesn't help much. Besides hydro also depends on weather, although on periods about 10 years or so. But when just once you don't have enough water then what?
>But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down. It wants to run at mostly constant output[1]
Modern reactors can actually ramp up for down pretty quickly, as far a the grid is considered. That is to say, they can go from 50% to 100% in an hour or two.
However, you want to run them mostly constantly because once you build them, they are basically free power.
Besides, Constant power IS what you want for a "stable base load". You can start and stop solar and wind basically at the push of a button for very rapid response.
The point of Nuclear or fossil fuels with respect to the grid is reliability.
> You can start and stop solar and wind basically at the push of a button for very rapid response.
No, you can't do that with solar and wind, that's the whole point. Sure, you can choose to waste the renewable energy when it's in excess, but you can't conjure it when it is not.
If you want a grid that has a significant renewable percentage, you don't want stable base load plants, you want power storage, peaker power plants and demand scaling in response to supply.
Cue someone scoffing and saying, yeah, exactly, that's why we don't want any significant amount of renewables on our grid -- Fine! At least that's honest.
lets be clear, for your a grid, you have a base load that is basically constant, and then variation on top of that. You can think of as a base load and a variable load of another similar magnitude.
The ideal source for base load is something that has an uptime as close to 100% as possible.
Variable load is obviously the tricky part, because that is where you want storage to time shift, overbuilding to deal with seasonal changes, and build redundant peaker plants. This is the really expensive part, far more expensive than building nuclear
> But nuclear isn't very good at quickly and continuously ramping up and down
In terms of kW/min change rate faster then most gas peaker plants used all over the world.
It is a totally different question if that is economical (the costs of a nuclear plant don't really change much when running at 20% or 100%). So most operators run their plants at maximum if possible just like what wind/solar do when it is windy/sunny. France is the big exception to this due to how large portion of their production is nuclear they have to follow the load with some of the reactors.
Yea. You need to constantly produce the same amount of power that is being consumed, or you get a fall of the frequency in the system. Wind doesn't care about that. You don't need to look long at a graph showing the typical power production of wind vs something like nuclear over a day, to see that wind power is not only extremely unreliable. It also requires massive balancing measures from the other power types in the mix, which is sometimes easier said than done.
You definitely want to let the wind power mostly "top up" the mix, and not constitute major parts of it, unless you have tons of something else to balance up the fluctuations with (related, nuclear is not great for balancing this, as it can't typically change output quickly, but is great as the base load, just as the parent comment says).
Speaking of topping up which I agree with, I think it bears saying here that today with unexpanded nuclear in Sweden, wind accounts for only about 20% of energy production. Or if only including renewable sources NOT including nuclear, wind still only accounts for about 30%.
Nuclear power "only" accounts for 29% of total production. Wind and especially offshore wind has huge potential to expand, but the government has taken an obstructionist stance towards that mode of power production. It doesn't make sense cutting wind subsidies amounting to a few billion while guaranteeing 400 billion to nuclear investments.
There has already been challenges in balancing out the extreme fluctuations from wind with the current amount (leading to the need to start gas turbines which were meant for emergency power multiple times over the last few years, and even oil plants), and expanding it would only make this worse, as there would not be enough easily balancing power sources close by (hydro can be used to balance to some extent, but are hundreds to thousands of km away, with limited capacity in the extremely long power lines, meaning that it can't account for all of that).
Not quite true as the power meant for emergencies has not been
activated. Oil power plants has been in use because oil prices have
been low while electricity prices have been high. That the price of
electricity fluctuates is a feature of the system not a drawback
because it shapes consumer demand according to availability.
The balance is built into the system. When elecricity prices are low
wind power just disconnects generation capacity, while nuclear has to
sell electricity for negative prices.
Firstly, the fluctuations happen on a timescale (hours, not days) where price fluctuations don't really have a chance to influence behavior via the market (which is mostly dealt with the day before). In particular heavy industries which are the bulk consumers, can't typically change their production plans on the hour, while on the other hand a wind front might arrive one hour late or early, causing a huge deviation in the production plan, that must immediately be balanced.
And this leads to the second point: There needs to be enough of available balancing power to be able to handle even the worst such deviation to keep the balance, as otherwise a breakdown of the whole system can happen, which would take days to restore from (yea, you can do emergency operations like closing down industries or apartment areas to keep the system from breaking down, but that in itself can have huge economic consequences if nothing else).
Why wouldn't price fluctuations influence consumer behavior?
Electricity is purchased in bulk in Nord Pool whose prices fluctuate
by the hour. Consumers, who account for 58% of production, certainly
regulate their consumption based on prices. Even industries do and
there have been several high-profile examples of paper mills reducing
their production due to high electricity costs. Wind availability and
temperature is what determines electricity prices, neither of which is
particularly hard to predict.
Regarding your second point, this is handled via imports and exports
and standby capacity. The Nordic power grid is getting denser which
reduces the chances of catastrophic failure. While the Swedish
right-wing press has predicted brownouts and "electricity
ransoning" ever since the right-wing party made more nuclear part of
their election platform back in 2020 (what a coincidence...),
those dire predictions has not come true.
I think society will have to adapt to wildly swinging rates. Earlier in history, per minute metering was just not possible, but today it is. It's time we make use of that.
> Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny?
Battery storage can fill the gap. This blog post makes a good argument why battery storage and over provisioning of renewables could solve this problem - https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/grid-storage-b.... In addition it doesn't include dynamically controlling demand (for example not charging EVs when demand is high).
> So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point.
Sweden doesn't appear to use coal as baseload. The UK did, but managed to replace most of it with gas, wind, solar, reduced demand and increased imports (https://www.mygridgb.co.uk/historicaldata/).
The kind of storage we would need in the Nordics is around 1 week of total consumption. That is roughly how long the longest really cold windless periods last in the winter (basically a large high pressure zone parking itself over the area and they can be big enough to cover pretty much all of Sweden) and sun is kinda bad during the winter this far north.
In the north thermal energy storage is a viable solution, and those can store energy for months. You can dump heat into them in summer and still pull from it in winter.
Since heating is by far the biggest consumer of energy in winter, just taking care of that with stored thermal energy will deal with a big fraction of the energy storage needs.
We are talking about 2 to 3 million MWh for Sweden alone (~120 million MWh yearly consumption so in reality probably a bit more then that as the consumption is higher in the winter).
The largest battery based energy storage in the world is 3000 MWh so we just need to build thousand of those (or a 1000x larger one). Good luck with that.
The largest heat storage under construction is 90000 MWh so that is a step in the right direction but still falls short by around 35x and even more if we have to turn that heat into electricity (While a lot of this consumption is district heating it is not all of it. And a large chunk of new district heating is just massive heat pumps)
And now that you have built these tools to make wind/solar work you have to factor the price of these into the price of wind/solar and suddenly they do not look that cheap when compared to nuclear. This is why the government and Vattenfall in Sweden want to build more nuclear.
Realistically the only cost effective energy storage on this scale we have available is hydro and pretty much all the places where it is cheap in Sweden have already been built.
In general I think Sweden is on the right track. They have a lot of wind and are building a lot more of it. They can also build more nuclear at the same time.
Though Sweden (just like here in Finland) are slowly reaching the point that when it is windy the wind farms don't really make much money as the price on the spot markets is very close to 0 so we also need a lot of new intermittent energy consumption (industrial processes that can be slowed down/ramped up cost effectively, make hydrogen, fill the heat storages with heat pumps, etc). This is the place where batteries can play a big role by being able to "move" this electricity into the future to a moment where there is more consumption/less production.
I don’t think solar is as bad as you think it is during winter. During a stationary high pressure, you’ll have clear skies. Solar cells are more efficient when cold, and in fact in warmer countries the heat of midday can make them so inefficient that solar panels generate the most power in the morning and late afternoon.
It is bad due to the short days and low angle of the sun.
For example in Stockholm you get around 6h of daylight. Malmö (can’t really get further south than that) a bit over 7h.
Basically the northern most point of mainland US is a lot further south than the most southern place in Sweden. Thinking about how good solar panels are in the winter in Anchorage gives you some idea (which has slightly slightly shorter days then Stockholm at around 5h30min at their shortest)
6 hours of daylight, then you need to over-provision the solar so you can charge 18 hours worth of batteries in that time. This is still cost competitive with nuclear
Basically if we are lucky we hit 5% of a typical summer day for an hour maybe two. As the days are less then half as long you end up with ~1% the production vs summer.
But in reverse the panels are really good during the summer as the days are very long. This is why people bother installing solar here.
Our (Swedens) base load is mostly nuclear and hydro currently, the capacity generated from each type can be viewed live at https://www.svk.se/kontrollrummet
But we have multiple large industries starting up in the coming decades which will require substantial power, while at the same time electric vehicles are slowly but surely becoming mainstream, further straining our grid.
Increasing nuclear is a great (and necessary) decision, it's just a shame the decision wasn't taken 20 years ago.
Yep, this (EVs with bidirectional charging) is something we have to do, as it could be used to balance the grid when necessary, diminishing the need to spin up fossil fuel power in these circumstances.
Unfortunately most EVs don't have the hardware to be used as batteries through their Type 2 (Mennekes) connector, as it requires a built-in inverter that just isn't there.
There are some new products (e.g. [1]) coming out that uses the CCS2 port on the car, providing the necessary inverter externally, which would enable older EVs to be used as batteries for grid balancing or other similar uses.
No, they don't. The French grid wouldn't have made it through 2022 without a lot of imports from Germany, as too many reactors were down for maintenande. They found a fault which concerned most reactors of that type. On top of that, in the summer the cooling of the reactors is a growing worry with raising temperatures. Of course, you could decide to sterelize the rivers used for cooling. Alternatively, you have to throttle the nuclear output.
* Annual grid-scale battery storage additions went from 0.76 GW in 2016 to 11.21 GW in 2022. I couldn't find the GWh figures, but this is a fast ramp up.
* "In September 2022, India released its draft National Electricity Plan, setting out ambitious targets for the development of battery energy storage, with an estimated capacity of between 51 to 84 GW installed by 2031-32."
* "In December 2022, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency...announced funding support for a total of 2 GW/4.2 GWh of grid-scale storage capacity, equipped with grid-forming inverters to provide essential system services that are currently supplied by thermal power plants."
* "Automotive lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery demand increased by about 65% to 550 GWh in 2022, from about 330 GWh in 2021"
* "August 2022 and March 2023, major EV and battery makers announced cumulative post-IRA investments of at least USD 52 billion in North American EV supply chains – of which 50% is for battery manufacturing, and about 20% each for battery components and EV manufacturing."
These pages also list the challenges faced, so I'm not assuming it's a smooth road ahead. However, the trend is clear. Hopefully, technological improvements will continue and drive down costs further (I have no knowledge if this will happen).
I hope there's improvements in nuclear technology that allow for a faster, cheaper nuclear rollout and belief it has it's place.
But to return to original comment I replied that states
"we need something to replace coal...that thing can...only be nuclear at this point"
dismisses the increases in investment and production of battery storage.
That is not what base load is. Base load is about some power plants that needs days to weeks to start and stop. They are unable to follow load changes. You build them anyway because they cost much less $$$ to run, but you need non-base load to handle varying power demands as your base load doesn't throttle very well.
While wind and solar do not meet the definition of base load, they clearly are in the spirit of base load.
When doing wind and solar you need non-base load, not more base load.
This keeps being repeated but it's nonsense, there are many technical and economical ways to reduce the auxiliary baseload requirement to zero or very close to zero. These include: HVDC to couple geographically distant regions, storage, flexible consumption, reduction of baseload consumption, hydro power for baseload, pricing based on source etc.
The hydro power is located in the far north(west), meaning that there is a bottle-neck in the hundreds to thousands of km of transport lines needed to bring it to the big cities in the south.
The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas.
It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.
Sweden is 528 000 km² and there is part a geographical spread even into sea which use to have weather patterns not following those at land, part complemented heavily by hydro, and part large battery parks already in use to complement wind.
What kind of issues still remain after all these countermeasures? Still requiring countermeasures on the extremely costly scale of a massive nuclear expansion?
Sweden has often very long transport routes for the energy, meaning that it is still a big challenge to supply the big cities, especially in the very south, with stable power, as the long transport routes don't have capacity enough for the increasing demand from an increasingly electrified society (charging electric cars etc).
As other comments are on to, you can't rely on wind for base energy due to the extreme fluctuations in output. It isn't uncommon with a few days of basically no wind at all in the whole country, typically when it is at its coldest, with temperatures sometimes around -30 - -40 C in the north, and perhaps -10 - -20 C in the south. Then you gotta have stable energy, or people's lives might be at risk.
After doing all of that, your wind and solar are no longer cheap. The cheap numbers per kwh for wind/solar currently are under the assumption that you take the power when you get it.
It doesn't matter if it's more expensive. The question if it eventually gets more expensive than nuclear, an energy form Sweden/Vattenfall recently turned away from because it was not financially feasible anymore.
I've seen cited that the cheapest chemical battery storage is similar to the price of gas generation. If we're considering LCOE numbers, yes, that would be more expensive than nuclear then. Your local regulatory environment notwithstanding.
Three Mile Island nuclear accident -> regulatory changes + drop in public confidence -> funding problems -> project delays and cancellations -> funding problems
or alternatively 40ish years ago was when the capital-holders really got their claws back into Western governments. nuclear being broadly a public endeavour, it didn’t really have a chance
While that’s true the article mentions that the definition of “hours with sunlight” they are using is when more than 120w per m2 hits the earth. Around where I grew up the sun would rise around 10AM and then set around 2PM. Not nearly enough to meet power demands.
Imo it's a good bet for Sweden. They don't get as much sun as other countries. Providing the same energy as nuclear in a stable maner (when I say stable I mean more that 3-4hrs of backup from batteries) is hard with solar, wind sounds better but has downsides too. And also, why not both? Sweden is already among top cleanest energy countries. They can afford to make longterm bets in reliable nuclear energy. They already afaik almost finished their storage site. Maybe building more nuclear will make further building cheaper by growing expertise in this field, anyway, thing is, they can afford to think long term, it's up to other countries to decarbonize, like, say, Germany that refused to keep their nuclear on to make transition smoother and are bashing on France bc they have too cheap nuclear energy
Well, if post-Cold War globalized trade looks more like it might be regressing to a more fractured and unstable landscape, it would make sense to maximize one’s own readiness and make robust, safe investments that were previously hoped to be unnecessary.
In that context, spinning up local (and tightly allied) nuclear power might make more sense than it did in an idealized globalist world where you could trust that your investment in some North African solar array was less likely to be disrupted by some political realignment or exploited leverage.
If there was a solar/wind requirement that operators had to purchase the equivalent production to cover base load when not producing power, solar/wind wouldn't be nearly as cheap.
Solar is only one big volcano eruption away from potentially producing almost no energy for possibly months at a time[0]. It is good to diversify the energy mix, and nuclear is very robust.
I don't understand why investing money in something that it is reliable and not requiring major reworks on the electric grid would be beneficial, incredible! I am more baffled than you.
also, in case you didn't know sweden doesn't have a huge amount of sun (especially in winter), wind is more affordable but you can't rely on a unique energy source.
I keep seeing these two mixed together and it's unfair to wind.
Wind has proven itself and entire European countries have been able to run days on wind energy. With HVDC and energy storage wind alone could potentially cover more than half of our energy need.
I think someone mentions this every time nuclear power comes up.
It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy production. Nuclear still seems like it could be a reasonable/viable/necessary option for decarbonized energy production.
The realistic worst case is that we waste some money building nuclear power plants that operate at a loss and are potentially decommissioned early.
Assuming we collectively have enough money to also keep building wind/solar/etc (it seems like we do!), and the risk of failing to decarbonize remains catastrophic, it's probably a good idea to hedge our bets and try all the viable options.
My guess is that we build a few crappy nuclear power plants with poor economics, learn some really useful things in the process, and then build some better ones with much more favorable economics.
It would be beautiful if these costs led to safety and were justified.
Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist.
In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
> In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
And which they had bumped up a few years earlier so as to make -- claim it was, and apparently succeeding at fooling far too many people -- nuclear power "not financially feasible": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272
Sweden with Norway should have enough hydro capacity, but it is not where demand is. So building nuclear plants in south where the demand is make lot of sense.
wind and solar are geography locked, i don't think solar is efficient in winter of Sweden , also isn't as cheap if you sume the 9x battery storage that you need to be sure that you have enough energy, is harder to manage distributed energy pipeline, that why you make mix of mostly wind and solar and base of nuclear, if you want to go green.
Renewables have a ton of headwinds, from crippling labour shortages to needing to fight local opposition everywhere (as opposed to just in one place) to the simple fact that Conservatives have built brands on hating renewables.
People who hate the government have been successfully convinced to hate the one form of electricity that doesn't need the government.
Two reasons. Firstly, nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons.
Secondly, because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends".
> because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends".
And yet Sweden is not giving any subsidies (at least for now) and thus no new plants have actually been seriously planned.
The change here (going from 100% green to 100% fossil free) just means giving nuclear power access to the same subsidies green energy is receiving now with the important one being the government being a guarantor for some of the loans (25 billion SEK for this year). It remains to be seen if this is enough to actually get new projects going (probably not).
> nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons.
Sweden abandoned its (secret) nuclear weapons program in 1972 without managing to build a single weapon and it is very unlikely that they would be trying to get one now.
Ah, in that case it probably won't go ahead. Nuclear is just too risky an investment for pretty much anyone unless you have government guarantees.
With regard to nuclear weapons: most of what the UK produced actually went to the USA rather than its own program. Did Sweden do that, or is that still classified?
Sweden wasn’t (and still isn’t) part of NATO so they were making their own bomb for real.
Basically to the point that they had all the parts needed to assemble one and just needed a law change/approval the government to finish it (would have taken ~6 months of work)
Immediately negative comments every time nuclear is brought up on HN.
I just want to say two things:
Nuclear power has been incredibly advantageous for Sweden. Sweden was an early adopter and it worked out well for us. Average time to build a reactor here is less than a decade. Swedes are great at building large scale energy infrastructure.
Wind and solar are not very suitable here. The wind is too intermittent, and we are too far away from the equator for solar.
Doing electrician’s certification in Germany right now. And there is elephant in the room - energy demand can’t be met internally anymore. So politicians draw nice plans for smart grids and heat pumps with wall boxes that can be turned off remotely by grid operators. I really don’t know how it ends. Probably burning coal in Poland and begging France to provide enough nuclear energy.
>Doing electrician’s certification in Germany right now. And there is elephant in the room - energy demand can’t be met internally anymore.
I've heard that there has been substantial moving out of energy-intensive industries like aluminum from Germany because of this.
>So politicians draw nice plans for smart grids and heat pumps with wall boxes that can be turned off remotely by grid operators. I really don’t know how it ends.
Well, last winter wasn't as bad as expected/feared in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in terms of energy shortages. How is this winter looking?
Gas storage is at 100% right now, so no shortcomings to expect really. [1]
Building of renewables has been huge this year with 10.000 MW of new power generation in the first three quarters. Might still get a little bit higher with Q4/23 but as the whole year was expected with 9.000 MW in total those numbers look pretty good, with for example over 700k new solar systems across the country. [2]
I was looking into getting a new electricity rate for my parents and have prices have fallen steeply in comparison to last year. Prices per kWh are down from something like 45 cents to 30 cents for fully renewable energy. While that might be still more expensive than elsewhere I think that's a good price.
Little bump is that the Constitutional Court just ruled that money from the Covid-19 rescue packages, that was not used, might not be repurposed for fighting climate change. Obviously it's not like that money really _existed_ somewhere at all, but just moving it in the books was ruled not okay. We'll see what that leads too.
Companies moving out of Germany because of high energy prices seems like a poor excuse. Power for the industry was/is subsidized like crazy, that has been cut somewhat down so everybody pays a fair share.
For our company, that finally got things going. We're looking into modernizing our heating, utilizing heat recovery systems, switching all lights to LEDs (that alone is heavily subsidized, so not that expensive), putting up movement sensors to automatically turn off lights and installing even more solar panels on the roof. Numbers might look a bit worse next year due to those investments but it will help long-term.
In society there's just quite a bit of fearmongering going on and people always feel like they personally are fucked especially hard in these times. Like ten times harder than the neighbor whose name they don't even know.
I doubt that. Nuclear power plants provided rock solid baseload. It was always there. And now what? Coal and gas plants must be turned on to compensate missing generation capacity.
Yes, it was always there. Even when you didn't need it. That is why Germany used to export more electricity and France is very happy to be able to sell any unused capacity.
In the last year, nuclear capacity was only 5% of the peak loads, so didn't make much of a difference. Germany can cover it easily. Meanwhile, coal usage is actually down, as renewables are ramped up quickly again. Germany added the equivalent of more than one nuclear reactor in solar in 2023 alone, with the speeds increasing.
Yes, at times gas and for a while coal have to fill the gaps. But if those gaps get increasingly smaller, so does the amount of gas or coal used.
Ironically a significant part of the coal used in 22 was due to exports to France, as they had to deal with quite a few reactors being taken off the net for repairs.
This will, of course, also maintain a steady supply of fissile material for an independent Scandinavian nuclear weapons program if it is ever (re-)activated.
After the mess of Finland's Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3, I cannot believe that Sweden is proceeding so aggressively with nuclear power. Personally, I am a fan of nuclear power, but I find it hard to believe in 2023 this plan is better than an equivalent spend on wind power (and maybe batteries). Note: I did not mention solar, which will not be very efficient in Sweden.
I don’t have a source for any of this, this is more of a rant about what I’ve seen over an extended time in my home country. I hope it’s a helpful base to dig further from nonetheless, I’ve tried to focus on verifiable matters rather than basing this too much on just my annoyance with the situation, but it’ll definitely shine through.
Politics. The sitting government sees nuclear power and electric airplanes as the solution to all environmental problems.
Because of a referendum in 1980, Sweden stopped investing in nuclear power and the now ageing reactors are going offline. In Sweden’s historical power mix, it’s pretty much a direct split between hydro and nuclear, with hydro having to go offline during critical ice forming periods.
We’re looking at a future where more and more electricity is needed, in particular as the crucial steel production is electrified. The left with the green party in particular has long been opponents of nuclear power, so the conservatives and liberals based their environmental policy on its brilliance and historical value to the country.
The opposition to wind power in Sweden is surprisingly strong for a scarcely populated country with a long coastline and lots of elevation. A lot of that seem to do with the politically important rural population’s resistance to hosting noisy and view-intruding wind powerplants. On the other side of that, when looking at the sea, similar arguments are being used, but also defense-politics. The perhaps most obvious wind park area unfortunately lies in between Sweden and Russia.
Solar is seeing quite some deployment, in particular during the summer it can be quite effective, Sweden has more sun hours over the full year than some of our southern neighbors. The winter argument is used against overreliance on it, but it’s still seen as a good thing to install solar on the top of buildings and in other otherwise unused areas.
I’m a bit tired of this all, because it seems like the energy production discussion has devolved into a two-sided debate where the only thing that matters is whether you’re on team redgreen or blue. Whether or not nuclear power is a good idea or not barely matter.
Serious question - I read that Sweden has a lot of social issues right now, but then I see this "bipartisan" reform (is this word used in non-US politics?) of an important sector in a reasonable way.
Sweden has proportional representation, so any government action has multiple parties backing it. Largest party in Sweden has only 30% of the seats (and they aren't even in the government).
I think the multipolarity may be the key. In a bipolar world there must be a rift between the two and in some unlucky circumstances the rift can only grow and never heal.
Not much, this took decades to bear into fruition, it was only two years ago or so the biggest party was vehemently saying no to nuclear.
Expensive winters and the idea of green steel and the massive and likely unrecoverable expenses it brings requires massive amounts of power that just isn’t possible with any other means. If you want the green steel you need nuclear in Sweden, we just can’t put up tens of thousands of wind power plants to cover for stability and delivery.
This means something very different in most multiparty parliamentary systems. Basically as there isn't any single party with a majority every government is at least bipartisan (usually more like 3 or 4 parties). So technically "bipartisan" but quite misleading wording/title.
What actually is happening the new government changed some goals (100% green -> 100% non carbon producing) giving nuclear access to the same subsidies that wind/solar have. Most of those subsidies are in the form of loan guarantees and not really big enough so maybe more subsidies are needed if they actually want some new reactors (but not actually agreed upon yet)
I think mainly you simply have a very poor understanding of the curren political situation in Sweden and simply assumed this is a real reform or that it was decided in a reasonable way.
My usual comment, bury it deep with signs as we already do.
If we've lost the ability to read signs, we've lost the ability to dig deep and will never encounter it.
The risk of death from any form of nuclear waste is insignificant compared to fact we've already killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of people killed mining for fossil fuels through to those killed by extreme weather caused by climate change right now.
I'm interested in what the parent doesn't find convincing about this. Seems pretty straightforward to me. There's tons of isolated places we could put nuclear waste in the US.
> to those killed by extreme weather caused by climate change right now.
FYI, the number of deaths attributed to climate over the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019 dropped to a third[0], even as the world population more than doubled and atmospheric CO2 went from 325ppm to 410ppm at the same time. That's one-third of the absolute number of deaths, not one-third the rate.
This can be attributed to the increasing capacity of those in developing countries to deal with the vagaries of their natural environment, enabled by cheap energy from fossil fuels.
Obviously the issue at hand is that use of those fossil fuels has led to a huge unpaid debt (negative externality) in the form of compounding climate change.
But even without that, the number of deaths attributed to air pollution is estimated at 7 million annually. Air pollution pretty much all comes from burning fossil fuels. So you aren't counting right.
> THE U.S. GENERATES ABOUT 2,000 METRIC TONS OF SPENT FUEL EACH YEAR
This number may sound like a lot, but the volume of the spent fuel assemblies is actually quite small considering the amount of energy they produce.
> The amount is roughly equivalent to less than half the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
> And, the clean energy generated from this fuel would be enough to power more than 70 million homes—avoiding more than 400 million metrics tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
You say that you have yet to hear a convincing argument but have you been listening?
I don't know about you, but even a quarter the volume of an Olympic-sized swimming pool emitting radiation for hundreds of years is still a bit too much no?
Why? There are tons of no-go danger zones all over the world already. Creating some more for nuclear waste is a minimal tradeoff. It sounds like you simply don't want to be convinced. You've fallen for the propaganda.
"Breeder reactors could, in principle, extract almost all of the energy contained in uranium or thorium, decreasing fuel requirements by a factor of 100 compared to widely used once-through light water reactors, which extract less than 1% of the energy in the uranium mined from the earth.[3] The high fuel-efficiency of breeder reactors could greatly reduce concerns about fuel supply, energy used in mining, and storage of radioactive waste. "
In the US, spent fuel sits on site in cooling ponds, and has for decades. Spent fuel isn't much, about three cubic meters per year for a big plant. The larger volumes of nuclear waste are from contamination, like accidents, or just things that come into contact with radioactive substances. Low-level waste is more voluminous and generally less dangerous. It mostly does not come from nuclear plants, which are designed to not produce much waste other than the spent fuel.
This issue is pretty much a red herring. A coal-fired power plant produces thousands of times more radiation--in the form of radioactive fly ash--than nuclear plants do. Where is that stored? The air. In your lungs. People die from cancer by the hundreds of thousands because of it.
Switching to nuclear would reduce the amount of radioactive waste humanity produces, by a lot, and concentrate it in liquid and solid forms, that actually can be managed.
So there's your answer. Nuclear waste is solid, and it's not much. We can manage it. Is there an answer for the radiation from coal? Nope.
A coal plant makes as much waste in one hour as a nuclear power plant does over its entire lifetime.
If your entire lifetime was fueled 100% by nuclear energy, at the end of your life, the waste would be the size of a hockey puck.
The amount of waste is very manageable, because the volume is so small. Right now, all of the plants in the US just keep the waste on-site... for the entire lifetime of the plant.
Also, because of the natural uranium and thorium in coal, "the fly ash emitted by a power plant — a by-product from burning coal for electricity — carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." and "As a general clarification, ounce for ounce, coal ash released from a power plant delivers more radiation than nuclear waste shielded via water or dry cask storage.", both quotes from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-... .
Obviously the non-recyclable solids would be counted separately, and considerable. The average American uses more than their weight in plastic every year, and that is about 80% not recycled.
Yes, I am assuming the OP considered that in their energy calculations. Solid waste recycling is another issue we desperately need to address to be sustainable.
Ok, take some: France and some other countries are already reprocessing the waste into new fuel, abt 90%. Real waste is solidified to avoid spills with vitrification, easy to store, should be stored for just about 300 years instead of thousands bc of reprocessing. Similar thing can be done with breeding reactors. There are some operational. These basically can eat big variation of fuel including waste, the end product/waste is just like what France does with reprocessing. And at last, combine this with the new nuclear storage that Sweden has built. As result, you get a way to store safely nuclear waste that is solid, stable and will become more or less 'normal' in 300 years. And all of this with an extremely small footprint bc nuclear is so energy intense
Good for Finland, now does that scale to the rest of the world? What if there is a coup? What if there is war? what if we stop maintaining these places because of a government collapse?
Would you trust (as a random example) Egypt with the fate of the Mediterranean for all the future ?
I wonder if some country with lots of space (e.g. also Sweden) could build many nuclear reactors through a massive government investment and export it profitably across Europe and beyond?
1. In 2021, sweden produced 165TWh (using 139TWh) of electricity [1];
2. Sweden plans to build 2 nuclear reactors by 2035 [2] but it's not clear what the output of the new reacctors will be. 1GW seems to be typical [3]. Sweden's current six reactors produce about 50TWh [4] of power so about 8.33TWh each, which about maps to 1GW converted to TWh/year. So even in 20 years nuclear will still not be the majority of power in Sweden based on current production and usage growth;
3. These reactors (as per the Reuters link) will have their costs shared with the state. Not a single nuclear reactor has been built without government subsidies [5]. Why? Because it's still too expensive.
4. Part of the delay (to 2035) seems to be that no final decision has been made on design to use. Proximity to consumers is best for efficiency but faces opposition from people not wanting to live near nuclear power stations. Also, larger reactors, by definition, will have a larger mean transmission distance to customers just because they cover more customers. Proponents of smaller nuclear reactor designs ignore that these are fundamentally less efficient and none are commercially in operation, for a reason;
5. Costs of nuclear powers tend to be lower on initial capital costs but higher on operational costs. Nuclear advocates tend to ignore the latter. If addressed at all, it's argued that economies of scale will lower overall costs despite there being decades of building hundreds of plants and no evidence of that at all;
6. While the cost of climate change is of course high and needs to be addressed, no single fossil fuel plant has a catastrophic failure mode comparable to a single nuclear reactor. Actual disasters (eg Chernobyl, Fukushima) get written off as outliers or due to some other reason but the cleanup for Fukushima is in Japan so Soviet Union factors don't apply (and tsunamis and earthquakes happen so you can't ignore that eiher). The cleanup of Fukushima is going to take decades, has already cost $82 billion and the final cost may exceed $1 trillion [6]. For one reactor incident.
7. Nuclear is also pushed compared to renewables by their ability to produce base load. But do we really need base load? Not really [7]. It's really a function of having a large, interconnected energy grid.
Here's the corresponding Reuters article, which I could read in its entirety:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/sweden-plans-new-nuc...
Key points:
- They intend to build the equivalent of two new conventional nuclear reactors by 2035 (presumably meaning something like 2000 megawatts of generating capacity, but it could come from small reactors).
- They intend to build the equivalent of 10 new conventional reactors by 2045.
The government has not yet announced what sort of funding model will be used to get the new reactors built.