If Sweden did an honest investigation and found that renewables would be more costly and take longer, let em get nuclear.
Bullshit. Renewables are cheap as chips.
Think of a traditional power plant. There are 4 main cost catagories: Construction, Maintenance, Fuel, Demolition.
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In a traditional plant, over the life of the plant Fuel will by far be the biggest cost.
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For renewables, Construction, Maintenance and Demolition cost more (issues such as remote locations, weather, smaller generators means more generators which increases the mean time to failure) however they have ZERO fuel cost.
Renewable generation is profitable as fuck, moreso than nuclear. Your average wind farm pays itself off in less than 5 years.
This is a right wing government backing the interests of fossil fuels, by implementing policy that delays any meaningful reduction in fossil fuel use.
Sweden already has a significant surplus of electricity production, to the degree that we are one of the largest exporters in the EU and have had several bouts of negative spot prices this past summer.
However, we also have an effect deficit for the colder part of the year. Two-thirds of simulations by SVK (our national power distributor) find that the peak-load hour during the winter 26/27 will have a deficit equivalent to three gen-II nuclear reactors running at 100% (10’000MW), and 10 continuous hours of blackouts due to power shortage. This is during the coldest part of the year when solar is ineffective, and additionally is often combined with high-pressure fronts, which means low wind speeds.
In Sweden upwards of 75% of homes get their heating from electricity, and potentially a full day without power in temperatures of beyond -30°C would literally mean people freezing to death.
Our power bill for December was 800€, and we both have geothermal heating and reduced our indoor temperature significantly, averaging 14-18°C indoors for the month. This was more than January, February and March combined. Meanwhile, the bills for all summer months put together (May, June, July and I expect also August) cost less than the bill for April (100€).
The most viable short-term solution they’re looking at is (unfortunately) reopening old oil plants from the 60s & 70s however, this might not be possible either, due to newer EU legislations. Bringing them into compliance in time could cost 100’s of millions of SEK, which ironically is more than the “prohibitively expensive repairs” that the previous gov:t cited when they shut down 4 nuclear reactors 2015-2020.
Link to article for the doubtful - It’s in Swedish, so you’ll have to use a translator.
Assuming you’re telling the truth that there’s a massive shortfall in December already (a provable lie ) then you are suggesting the solution for an urgent shortfall of around a TWh per year is to build 10GW of nuclear plants which will be ready in 2045 for €300 billion and run them at an operating loss for 10-11 months per year.
This in order to provide low grade heat which could be stored in a district heating system for a few dollars per kWh for a total cost of about 3% of your suggestion or even in batteries for about 20% of the cost (which would also run at a profit the rest of the year and make the hydro go further).
Nuke shills say some colossally stupid things, but this really takes the cake.
Since you couldn’t be arsed to check for yourself before throwing out baseless accusations, here’s a translation of a relevant part from the linked article. I doubt you’ll read it, but it’ll be here for anyone else that stumbles across this thread.
The past winter was at times dramatic, for example when several nuclear power reactors were shut down for repairs. But thanks to the fact that mainly households had previously reduced consumption clearly in step with the rampant electricity prices, Sweden managed to maintain the power balance even in the worst hour, the so-called peak load hour.
“But if we had maintained the consumption, we would have had to cut down.”, says Lowina Lundström, Division Manager Systems at Svenska kraftnät.
The electricity had not been enough
At that time, the import would not have been enough to cover the electricity demand during the peak load hour on December 16, 2022, between 09:00 and 10:00. The import was then at a maximum of 3,290 MW, approximately equivalent to three nuclear power reactors, which was the highest level to date.
(Svenska Kraftnät a.k.a Swedish Power Grids is our national power distribution agency)
Btw, your source is 4 years out of date, and accounts for neither daily nor hourly power balance.
Here’s an up to date source on monthly power balance.
Here’s a report on peak loads in various northern european countries.
Here is an actual relevant source on the topic (again, in Swedish).
The above figure is taken from this report by SVK.
For renewables, Construction, Maintenance and Demolition cost more
This is less true as time goes on. CCGT and coal has substantial overlap with all-in cost of firmed PV and onshore wind just in terms of capex and FOM. Nuclear O&M overlaps with all-in cost of wind or PV (although not the latter in sweden).
SMRs (most of the proposals to reduce cost) are also substantially less efficient than full sized reactors and the high grade Uranium or Uranium in countries you can pollute without consequence is mostly tapped out so prices are increasing (currently about $3/MWh for full scale or $6/MWh for an inefficient small reactor). By the time an SMR finally comes online, just the raw uranium will cost as much as renewables, let alone the rest of VOM (which is still a minority of O&M which is far, far less than Capex).
Anyone suggesting new nuclear should be regarded as either someone lying to maintain a nuclear weapons program, a scammer, or a russian agent trying to sell dependence on rosatom.
The first is potentially defensible, but they could also not lie instead.
This is a right wing government backing the interests of fossil fuels, by implementing policy that delays any meaningful reduction in fossil fuel use.
Simply incorrect and ignorant and I could leave it at that.
But I won’t so here:
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Nuclear is carbon neutral
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The majority of Swedens energy production is still renewable and will continue to grow
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Nuclear is absolutely necessary for load balance
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Current nuclear plants are nearing their end of life and needs to be replaced
- I’m not critising nuclear for not being green.
- Renewables should grow (they’re profitable), but there should be further incentivised growth to help reduce reliance on fossile fuels more quickly.
- Yes, nuclear is brilliant for voltage and frequency stability. Large turbines have momentum in their spinning mass, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed. However there are other options, eg rotating stabilisers, often used on very large ships but land installations are now being made also. These can be built without the nuclear red tape.
- Replacing existing nuclear plants is always a decent thing to do. You skip over many of the hurdles by building on the same site under the same nuclear permits. However taking money away from renewables to pay for this is questionable at best.
I think Sweden does have some geographical complications, along with a lackluster transmission network. These are much harder to get private investment for. However if there was a decent transmission network then there would be more utility of renewable generation in the north as well as the capability for import of energy from neighbouring countries or even export when Sweden has an excess.
Putting my balls on the table, I reckon if Sweden put all the money they’ve got in nuclear into transmission first and then renewables, I reckon they could switch off more fossil fuels more quickly.
The points I listed are the strongest arguments to expand nuclear power which both the left and right of Riksdagen generally agrees on.
So how this is a right wing conspiracy to further the fossil energy industry as you point out is still to me a mystery, that’s all you need to explain.
i heard that nuclear still kind of heats up the earth since its not outputting what has been put in by the sun before. Supposedly thats a problem since space is a good insulator.
have you ever been in Sweden? it is a a rocky mountainous and mostly dark region. they only renewables that they can easily manage is geothermal and iirc they do not have the correct crust for it
According to another comment they have plenty of renewables up in the north but only use about 30% of that capacity. So it seems the main issue is with the transmission network for the country, its ability to get power from one place to another.
Instead of investing in 20 year nuclear power plant plans, they should be looking at accessing and expanding the available renewable generation in the short term.
