You can bank on energy consumption rising year over year for the next lifetime or so. We have completely run out of low hanging fruit in terms of cutting back like moving from incandescent to LED lighting, installing heat pumps to replace resistive heaters…ect. Solar, wind and other green sources ARE very much the future (assuming we want to have a future at all), but their variable output doesn’t mesh super well with how electrical grids are handled today. Batteries and other storage options are no where near ready and may never be for grid scale. This is where nuclear shines, that steady trickle over many, many decades as a bridge to a future with a redesigned distribution network and other technologies we can’t even conceive of yet. The thing is it’s a long term play, there’s a massive upfront cost and the people involved the project today may not even be alive or seeking any sort of political office in 20 years when it’s completely validated. Even if these plants can’t get online fast enough to meet the peak demands in the near-term, there’s nothing stopping them from scaling out solar and/or wind farms to pick up the slack.
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For all of the base-load talk, this is the real reason people are pushing nuclear.
The projects always go over budget. They always go way over time, too. Both of these things are good for the banks who loan out the billions to build new plants. And they know that if the company goes bankrupt the government will subsidize it.
Nuclear is just not economical enough to be part of a sustainable energy system.
During the time when Sweden built the current nuclear reactors, some where built in just a few years. Sweden had experienced people back then that knew how to build them. We don’t have that anymore. Pretty much no one has.
We also had less examples of issues we need to be prepared for.
One thing people always get wrong is that they assume Fukushima wasn’t build to withstand tsunamis and how stupid that supposedly was. But it was built to withstand tsunamis. Up to 9 meters of height, which was 50% more than the largest one they had on record. And it’s not like they had other projects to look for to figure out that a 50% margin of safety was too little for this. Turns out, it was. So now, you want to build at least 100% margin of error in tsunami areas, something you couldn’t have known before.
And that’s just one example from one rather specific type of engineering during a construction process that isn’t even specific to nuclear power. And as accidents happen (see for example Admiral Cloudberg’s excellent air crash investigation series!) we figure out more and more things we need to engineer against to prevent this in the future. As a result, what we build nowadays is orders of magnitude safer than what we did in the past. But it also means that building it has become a huge obstacle, if for no other reason than the sheer number of things you need to be aware of, abide by and track during construction and planning.
Fukushima was not a failure of engineering or proper safety measures with construction. It failed because they were old plants that hadn’t been maintained properly and were in disrepair.
So no, the margin of safety was not too little. The “lesson” learned from the Fukushima Daichi reactor flooding was about proper maintenance and funding.
That’s the fundamental problem with nuclear energy. Where there are corners, they will be cut.
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Yeah well… Nuclear is too expensive and now I heard another rethoric on how renewables are not making enough profit to be worth it for the big companies. We’re going in circles before these people admit that coal and gas won’t be replaced by anything.
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But miraculously that isn’t the case of renewable? Let me lough.
In the last ten years solar power has gone down in price by 80% and is now producing more power than nuclear.
Plus when you buy a solar panel it starts making money immediately, unlike a reactor that doesn’t make money for 10-20 years after it starts up.
Then why is Germany opening coal mines?
Because they won’t have new nuclear plants online for a decade at least and because Putin invaded Ukraine and cut off their natural gas supply
Too bad for the climate I guess
The right choice. Nuclear would be a great solution if we went all in 40 years ago. But we didnt and now we need a solution as soon as possible, not in 15 years to build a plant or in 25 years when it breaks even, now.
It takes just 6 months to build a 50 MW wind farm https://www.edfenergy.com/energywise/all-you-need-to-know-about-wind-power#:~:text=Wind farms can be built,last between 20–25 years.
Sweden uses 130 TW/h per year (130000000000 KW/h) as of 2020 https://www.iea.org/countries/sweden
and about 25% of that is fossil fuels. as of 2017 https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/fossil-fuel-consumption
So they would need to replace 32500000000 KW/h per year to get off fossil fuels
But KW/h/y is dumb so lets just make it KW/h
3710045
Then make it MW (yes I know I converted from TW to KW to MW.) so
3710 MW needed to replace fossil fuels.
So they would need 74 50MW wind farms to match that.
If they wanted to do that in 10 years to be faster than building a single nuclear plant, they would only need to be building 4 farms concurrently.
and about 25% of that is fossil fuels.
Sweden uses essentially no fossil fuels in the grid - it’s basically hydro, nuclear and wind for all of it. The small amount of fossil fuels used is stuff like burning plastics, and one oil plant that is turned on once in a blue moon when there’s an energy crisis. It’s national news when they turn that one on, and it’s considered a huge failure every time it happens.
The real figure for fossil versus non-fossil energy in Sweden is 2% fossil versus 98% non-fossil, with hydro being the primary energy source (35-45%), followed by nuclear (30%) and then wind (20%). Source, in Swedish: https://www.energiforetagen.se/energifakta/elsystemet/produktion/
A few errors
- 130TWh is the final electricity consumption, not the generation. Since Sweden is a big net exporter of electricity, there is a big difference
- I’m not sure what macrotrends refers to by “Fossil fuel consumption”, but it’s pobably referring to raw energy rather than electricity (which doesnt consider conversion efficiency)
- In reality, sweden uses almost no fossil fuels in its electricity mix, and that is in large part due to nuclear
- KWh and KW, not KW and KW/h
- In your calculations you failed to account for capacity factors. Wind plants have average capacity factors of about 42% in sweden, so the capacity would need to be over double the consumption, even ignoring the variability of consumption and production
Nevertheless, I do agree that Sweden doesn’t need more nuclear. It already generates some of the cleanest electricity in the world and I’d imagine fossil fuels are really only used for peak load.
Thank you for the corrections!
I mean let’s be honest here, there’s no way they did this because of an underlying police change.
I suspect they rather looked at other western countries trying to build large-scale projects and noticed how absurd the idea of building one nuclear reactor without a 15y++ delay was, nevermind 10 of them. Quietly drop it before someone checks whether it’s even doable. 😅
Source: Am German, we are experts on letting our complicated building projects run completely overbudget and take multiple times as long as projected.
That’s a so stupid take it’s hilarious. It’d be a nice world if ecofanatics were spending half their energy against coal instead of fighting nuclear.
Good. This entire thing was beyond stupidity.
