Yeah, if you decide to ramp up nuclear now, you’re only going to see the results in 10 years. Nothing is stopping you from continuing to add wind, solar and stuff like home/grid batteries in the meantime. Pretty sure Sweden has plenty of hydro storage options as well, which can be easily used to regulate the fluctuations wind and solar give you.

Two things that are relevant is that Sweden is very, very dark during the winter which reduces the profitability of solar and also that it’s extremely difficult to get approval for wind turbines right now.

Municipalities have the power to veto building projects and almost all of them choose to block wind power installations. Wind turbines generate sound, both audible and infrasound (which can disturb sleep), and are sometimes considered a bit of an eyesore which can both reduce the value of properties near them and make people less inclined to move to that region which reduces tax income for the municipality. This could be offset by taxation of the wind power, but currently all taxable income from wind turbines go to the state instead of any of the local governments.

There was recently an inquiry into how to make municipalities more likely to approve wind power construction and the restriction that the government gave them was that they were not allowed to suggest tax revenue being diverted to the local government. Which was the only suggestion that they said would be effective.

So… yeah.

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:

1. Nuclear is carbon neutral

2. The majority of Swedens energy production is still renewable and will continue to grow

3. Nuclear is absolutely necessary for load balance

4. Current nuclear plants are nearing their end of life and needs to be replaced

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.

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

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It’s takes 10-15 years to make a new nuclear plant. If you choose nuclear without renewables you would have to burn so much fossil fuels while waiting for your nuclear power to become ready that the human race would be extinct before you have a decarbonized energy grid.

a fully nuclear grid is way less viable than a fully renewable one

Going ‘all in’ on something usually means neglecting everything else.

This would be a stronger argument, if it wasn’t 20 years old already.

I disagree… the biggest “issue” I have with “renewables” is the storage problem… That 20 years gives you time to figure out something while reducing the carbon output

But that’s just the generated per kwh cost, not taking into account when the energy is generated. To compare a full renewables grid to a renewables nuclear mixed grid you need to take into account massive energy storage systems and their inefficiencies and possible material shortages. We can’t just compare the currently favorable cost per kwh without taking into account problems as we scale into less reliable energy sources.

France, with all it’s maintainance disasters with their nuclear reactors shows us yet another problem: how to properly cool the water for the generator? With sinking fresh-water levels in rivers and fastly rising water temperatures nuclear reactors become less reliable. Wind and solar output on the other side will in an ironical way get a little more reliable, as there will be more of both.

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One of the problems that we have is that a big chunk of the country for a month don’t have a single ray of sunshine due to polar nights. The problem is that that is when it’s complete darkness leading up to the point and going out of it takes time as well so solar is not an option at that time of the year. On top of that most of the land is “disputed” by indigenous people (don’t mark my words it’s a very touchy subject I don’t know how to express it better) or it’s a nature reserve area so wind farms are out of the question. So the only thing we have left is hydropowered electricity which isn’t clean at all as it destroys the natural course of the river up stream, destroys the river beds down stream and extremely reduces the fish populations as well as any greenery relying on the reliability of the rivers.

With that said if we simplify it a bit about 46% of Swedens total energy production comes from the northern hydroelectric plants and wind farms and because of lacking infrastructure it can’t be transferred efficiently to southern Sweden where most of the consumption is happening. Of these 46% about only 30% is currently used but more companies have decided to establish their production in thr northern region due to the surplus of energy in this region.

Southern Sweden on the other hand gets a lot of their energy from unreliable wind farms as well as nuclear energy. However due to the layout of the land hydroelectric is only viable in some places which have already been exploited. We can only install so many wind farms until it affects quality of life to the people and animals living nearby. On a good day southern Sweden is having a net zero energy production and consumption. Those days are fewer and further in between. Currently since closing a reactor two years ago we have had to reinstate an oil burning facility as well as buying unclean electricity from abroad to keep up with demand.

So investing in nuclear to stabilise the production is one of very few options we currently have.

It’s either that or moving either part of the population or factories to the northern part which is not really viable or sustainable eitherm

What does a sinking oil tanker have to do with anything? That’s just whataboutism. Nuclear waste, nuclear disasters and sinking oil tankers are all bad.

“Radiations” can absolutely “erase life”. You don’t think radiation can kill living things? That statement makes it clear you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Besides, It takes 10-15 years to make a new nuclear power plant. If you really care about sinking oil tankers and climate change you’d realize that we don’t have that much time.

Any oil tanker sinking is a worst disaster than the worst nuclear accident ever was

You are delusional.

A nuclear power plant is not a bomb

I never said it was. A nuclear disaster is much worse than a bomb on the long term. A bomb causes immediate destruction and fallout which clears in a few years at most. A bomb like Hiroshima, which is by atomic bomb standards a very “dirty” bomb, gave a radiation dosage of about 360 mSv to survivors 1 mile from the epicenter. The radiation went down to 1/1000 in 24 hours and 1/1000 of that within a week.

Chernobyl firemen received 37 times the same dosage and the core kept emitting radiation to this day (though slowly diminishing) hence the sarcophagus.

Hiroshima was never even abandoned after the bombing. It is a thriving city today. Chernobyl and the surrounding regions had tp be evacuated and its access is restricted to this day. In the Russian invasion you had soldiers dying because they digged in contaminated soil. The melted core is, to this day, emitting deadly radiation and only the sarcophagus stops that poison from spreading. And it could’ve been much worse. And it will stay this way for centuries or even millenia. A breach in the sarcophagus is enough reason for panic. This was ONE disaster.

The current climate crisis is the result of over a century of CO2 emissions and multiple disasters. Chernobyl was just one and had the potential to turn half a continent uninhabitable. How many would we need to turn the planet into a wasteland in the immediate future?

I’m all to take measures to keep global warming in check but lets not burn the house down because the plumbing is not working.

It is probably the only thing that can really buy us time

That’s the only way it would make sense as a solution. It’s a gamble, but it’s a risk worth taking in the short term. But that only works with already built reactors.

We will find a way to solve the waste issue

“we will”, but we haven’t. We’re creating a problem now and leave the solution for later which is exactly what got us into this mess. Always kicking the can down the road.

Today, the strategy is to built the plants smaller, making the impact of such disaster also smaller.

Still potentially catastrophic in a perfect storm. Remember Chernobyl had multiple reactors (who kept functioning) after the disaster. That was only one. I don’t think downsizing would solve the risk but I hope I’m mistaken. Remember how we went into panic when the Russians entered Chernobyl or whenever we see news about Zaporozhia?

We haven’t seen yet the worst possible nuclear energy disaster. I fear we might not see many…

Irrational aversion to nuclear energy had countries stop building reactor for several decades, which lost the technical capabilities which now have to be reacquired.

The first reactor is hard to build and suffer delays and overcoats. The next ones are easier and cheaper. Like absolutely any other industrial project. Like renewable did over the last 20 years.

If you’re going to claim a response is brainless you should at least try not Maki a brainless response yourself. Nuclear isn’t inherently dangerous, and is better for the environment in the long term.

Climate harm is a matter of degrees, I think.

Why isn’t a few tons of concrete worth eliminating so many emissions?

i like these comments. just have to read the first sentence to know when the blud has knocked himself out of the conversation.

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Yeah afaik there are a couple of suitable places for more hydropower but no plans for more due to, like you said, local environmental reasons.

That said, sweden is basically already completely “decarbonized” (if anything can really be decarbonized), we only have a reserve oil powerplant that runs for maybe a couple of days each year (~9 days last year, though last year was especially bad). Sweden also generally has a pretty big net surplus (usually about 10-20% of production) of green power that is sold to the european grid.

Hard to take you seriously when you start your post misinterpreting my post to such an extent. The sun doesn’t produce electricity. The electricity we get from the sun is very much a limited supply. I’ll just assume the rest of your post is pointless to read.

Nuclear fission is actually by definition the least renewable energy source

But if you go according the strict physical principle every energy source is non-renewable

The sun fuses a finire amount of hydrogen, earth has a finire amount of latent heat, the moon a finire amount of gravitational inertia etc.

And there’s a little paradox if you think about it, how can fusion be non-renewable but solar, that use radiation from the sun fusion, be renewable?

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Coal exist in the earth because back then the bacteria who could break down lignin and cellulose hadn’t evolved, so dead trees had the time they needed to compress. There are such bacteria around now, though, and that means there will never be any new natural coal.

Will have more when the sun explodes.

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A thousand years is a massive over-estimate. Providing the 6TW or so of final energy with the stuff assumed to exist that’s vaguely accessible for costs that don’t exceed renewables’ total cost is well under a decade.

No breeding program has ever done a full closed cycle and even if it were to happen, the currently proposed technologies only yield about 50 years.

“Renewable” typically means renewable on human time scales, so fossil fuels don’t count.

Biofuel would be renewable.

If you consider fusion to be “nuclear”, that’s renewable. But yeah, not fission.

It is zero emission though.

It’s a little bit complicated and I don’t want to write a wall of text but: Waste fuel can be recycled, if your reactor has a breeding ratio higher than 1 then it has net positive production of fissile materials. Potentially all uranium and thorium of the planet could be used.

The argument being, if you consider the word “renewable” in the strictest sense, no energy source is renewable, entropy can only increases: solar depends by the sun burning a finire amount of hydrogen, geothermy depends by earth inner heat which is a finire amount ecc.ecc. The common usage of renewable is along the line of “immensely big proportional to human consumption” and in this sense there’s a strong argument to consider nuclear renewable.