Honestly I don’t care if it’s solar, wind, geothermal, biofuel, or nuclear, as long as it displaces fossil fuels. And it’s feasible on a very near time scale.
If Sweden did an honest investigation and found that renewables would be more costly and take longer, let em get nuclear.
We need an “all of the above” approach. This fight between nuclear and renewables is just stirred up by fossil fuel interests. Either is good. Both is good.
This isn’t an “all of the above approach” though, it’s a “cancel the short term plans and pretend we’re going to do something later” approach.
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.
Mines take a lot longer than 10 years, as do power-plants (the whole thing starting at permit submission and ending at last reactor coming online). 2045 is optimistic.
Yeah, 10 years was a best case scenario, where you basically already have the plans drawn up and are ready to build. Not sure what your point about mines is, I’m assuming they’d be importing uranium?
Still requires expanding uranium production somewhere, and likely also buying from Russia.
Yeah, the Russia issue is kind of hilarious. You’re trying to reduce fossil fuel use so you’re not dependent on Russia for energy, so instead you’re going to use nuclear, which uses fuel rods almost exclusively refined by Russia.
Not sure if new mining would be needed, but I guess that depends on what happens in Niger.
Why are people in this thread acting like the intent here is to cut renewables? The target was deemed unrealisitic to hit andr raised concerns about reliability.
They are simply removing potential future renewables that have not been paid for or even ordered yet from the agenda and replacing the planned supply with nuclear, which is carbon neutral and requires less workers maintaining larger fields of solar and wind, two types of power that are not reliable during a Scandinavian blizzard… Something Sweden has to consider among many other things
I can’t find any indication that they’re changing their target…it’s just going from “100% renewable” to “100% fossil-fuel free”.
Sounds like a win-win to me, Outdated Nuclear fission reactors are among the safest and cleanest forms of energy to ever exist, to say nothing of modern designs and theoretical ones that at the bare minimum could fill in the gap until Fusion becomes economically viable or manage some kind of orbital/space based solar collection grid.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
It’s a negligible amount of heat. Something like 0.000001% of the greenhouse effect from fossil fuels. Almost unmeasurable.
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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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the wind mills would be in inaccessible areas so you are better to just go with nuclear and invest in transmission from settlement to settlement instead to the turbines
Yeah 100% agree with you. I’m surprised that this is the case given the 2045 time scale but we’ll have to wait a couple of decades and see how it pans out I guess.
I don’t get why people here are so hyped. Why is it a good thing to completely dump renewables?
It’s just the target being dumped. We can’t go 100% renewable and have nuclear. So by expanding nuclear the target has got to go. Renewables will still be expanded in Sweden.
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Completely replacing fossil fuels is not here right now, it’s not cheap, and it’s not highly profitable.
This is almost completely wrong
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They produced an excess of energy with renewable. For how long? What energy are they importing when they’re not? What fossile energy are they using to provide when they don’t? What about countries farther than 100km extremely windy sea?
Why should nuclear and renewable be opposed btw?
What fossil fuel will they import in the next 10-20 years that it will take to make the nuclear plants?
Nuclear and renewables shouldn’t be opposed. Ideally we would have both. The problem is we needed to stop burning fossil fuels a long time ago so we don’t have another 10-20 years to keep burning fossil fuels while we wait for nuclear plants to be made.
The fossil fuel industry knows that if we take the nuclear ONLY route that we will continue to burn their fuels for decades longer. So they lobby to support that option, hoping that a lot or some of the nuclear plants will never even get finish like we’ve seen happen so many times.
In addition to that, countries don’t have infinite money to spend on energy. So any amount of the budget spent on nuclear will mean less spent on solar and wind. Solar and wind are the only sources that can be deployed fast enough to allow us to avoid extinction.
It doesn’t take 20 years to build a nuclear power plant.
But it’s been 20 years Germany decided to get away from nuclear energy, and now they are the proud biggest co2 emmiter in Europe. And now importing fossil fuel from the US to power their energy. How many more years do you think it would take to power Germany with renewables when they were so determined to leave nuclear for the sake of ecology?
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It’s been 20 years that Germany decided to stop nuclear energy. They’re burning coal and gas since then, and it got us an energy crisis last year. It’s not faster to deploy renewable.
Mean time to build a nuclear power plant is 7.5 years btw. Not 20. But I’m sure 20 is a lot better for the narrative.
Scotland could provide enough renewable energy for the whole of the UK. The only reason the PM says they need more fossil fuel is that his family entered into a billion pound contract with BP.
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If we don’t replace fossil fuels now we go extinct. It’s really that simple.
Humanity won’t go extinct because of it, modern society is the one who will suffer.
I didn’t say that.
I was responding to TWeak who’s entire sentence was wrong.
Completely replacing fossil fuels is super expensive right now with renewables, and it’s not profitable.
Idiotic straw men about assuming order of storage rollout aside. Replacing just that portion which is profitable right now will lower emissions over the next century than stopping and building nuclear instead.
That is almost the complete opposite of what TWeak said lol
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.
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a fully nuclear grid is way less viable than a fully renewable one
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because nuclear power plants are very slow to regulate, which you need to be able to do in a power grid.
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even france barely uses the load-following mode on their power plants and instead use gas power plants because its increadibly un-economical. and yes you cant control the weather which is why renewables are more decentralized and widespread. its literally a non issue.
Being able to pay even more than running at full power would cost to throw some energy away isn’t power regulation and doesn’t at all explain why france produces 10-20% of their electricity via dispatchable sources even on a warm summer night where demand is around half of their nuclear fleet’s alleged capacity.
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It means your gas shares will pay dividends for a few extra years.
People here have better reading comprehension apparently and know that dumping a 100% target doesn’t mean dumping renewables.
Going ‘all in’ on something usually means neglecting everything else.
Imo, renewable should still be the target, nuclear should be the bridge towards renewable until it’s feasible enough
Building a stop-gap that will be ready 20 years after you get to the main destination for 10x the price isn’t a bright move.
This would be a stronger argument, if it wasn’t 20 years old already.
The best time to ignore the nuke shills and build wind and solar was the 1940s when both wind and solar thermal were proven economically and fission hadn’t happened yet.
The second best time is now.
The best time to ignore the nuclear scare mongers us whenever they open their ignorant mouths.
You’re confusing tired contempt with fear.
No, you definitely have an irrational fear of nuclear power.
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
Battery storage is already cheaper than nuclear.
…no it won’t because the new nuclear will generate nothing for 20 years. Whereas the renewables will reduce some carbon, even if we pretend that storage is both unsolvable (as opposed to already cheaper than nuclear) and necessary in a grid that’s already 40% hydro.
Which is exactly what they’re doing if you read the article.
Hell yeah, tell me the best future isn’t nuclear power and electric rail like an old space Lego set.
Nuclear’s probably not a great long term choice since it’s a lot more expensive than renewables.
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.
You will need long term storage in both cases. Nuclear can’t act as a peaker because you can’t quickly ramp up or down the generation. Nuclear can only perform as baseload which, in theory, could be provided by a renewable energy mix if the install base is high enough.
I don’t disagree with your point that it isn’t a simple direct comparison but any sensible energy mix will still require storage. I find it difficult to see the economic case for nuclear if renewables can be installed in sufficient quantities, given that nuclear is roughly 4 times as expensive as solar and wind.
Nuclear can only perform as baseload
That’s only true for NPPs built decades ago. Modern designs can also do load-following power. For peaks you have renewables, of course, they complement each other. Diversity makes a healthy grid.
Niclear has high investment cost and very low production cost which incentivises runnig at max output for as long as possible. This might block out renewables from the grid if their production cost is higher and make it less profitable to build them. So its really not a Symbiosis between nuclear and regenerative
The plants that can allegedly do this almost never do, and most of them have had maintenance issues which cost more to fix than replacing them with renewables.
Modern designs can also do load-following power.
I think this is a maybe in terms of what the grid needs. Will be great if nuclear is built that genuinely supports system demands.
Diversity makes a healthy grid.
Couldn’t agree more.
It’s good that they can do it. Even better if they don’t need to.
With 100% renewables you would need almost 100% storage and potentially for multiple days, with a nuclear baseload you’d only need storage for the peaks, you could even use excess renewables to charge up the storage for these peaks.
What do you mean with 100% Storage? And why would you need it for multiple days if you have a grid that transports energy all around the continent and in future possible worldwide?
I guess we can talk about transmission then, yes if you can get enough renewable energy across a continent then in theory you can transmit it to where it is needed, however you would need a LOT of transmission capability that is not currently available. The current interconnects can handle an impressive amount of load but you’re not going to transmit enough power for all of sweeden from spain. There are some massive transmission projects underway that should help address this but they’re still not going to be enough to cover a 100% outage for most places. So a cost analysis would have to be done to determine if massive transmission projects are better than building nuclear plants. Keep in mind, these same transmission lines can transmit nuclear power as well so they should be built regardless of what energy source you use.
What do you mean with 100% Storage?
you would need a LOT of transmission capability that is not currently available
can be build faster and cheaper than nuclear, doesn’t need fuel and needs to be build anyway. We get the cheapest, strongest and least dangerous grid if we invest in more renewables, storage and better transmission. And that’s something we can get done fast and start harvesting the profits in a few years.
Entirely unsubstantiated. Renewables require storage only for the peak demands, otherwise, they function as a baseload, provided that there is a sensitive balance of wind and solar power generation installations.
Not sure about the 100% point but you will certainly need long term storage which is an unsolved problem. A point I wanted to make was that with enough renewables installed you have the baseload. You would also have an excess of production at peak times that would be useful to store long term.
My personnal view is that a sensible energy mix should have some nuclear but I don’t think it is the key to solving our future energy requirements and should be minimal as it isn’t good value.
If you want 99.9999% uptime with no backup then the nuclear fleet will need months or years of storage due to the prevalence of correlated unplamned outages.
Back in reality, a good enough renewable system with >95-99% uptime has less than 10% of the storage that will be found in the accompanying country’s EV fleet. Even if you are too allergic to nuance to understand the real solution for the remainder, simply planning a renewable rollout and assuming existing fossil fuel peakers for down periods over 12 hours will take 20-100 years to release as much carbon as delaying one of the years waiting for late, over budget nuclear reactors.
Even if you are too allergic to nuance to understand the real solution
And thus you have shown that your mind is made up and no amount of evidence will sway your decisions. Good day.
I’m plenty open to evidence, it’s just every time I look at some it shows a new lie that nukebros tell. Every single talking point isnutter bullshit to the pooint where if you look it up you find that nukes are significantly worse by whatever hair-splitting metric is being used ti try and distract from their main downsides.
There is a fully renewable solution for the 2-5 >100 hour events a year where battery storage is unsuitable, but it requires holding more than one thought in your head at a time (thermal storage, dispatchable load and w2e is one combo).
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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Yeah, let’s see how that one goes. Let me venture a guess: huge time and budget overruns with the taxpayer picking up the tab.
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Renewable energy is cheap because it’s plentifull when you don’t need it. Bravo. Meanwhile Germany produces 3 times more co2 than France thanks to ecologists banning nuclear energy. Bravo.
Renewable is also enormously subsidised.
And meanwhile France on average buys electricity from Germany because the German shit works (including the renewables) and the French nuclear plants are more often off than on.
Talk about reliable energy…
And there is always sun or wind somewhere.Hahaha that is a so comically hypocritical stance I’m not even sure you’re serious!
Just read and inform yourself for once in your life :)
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“typically aren’t subsidised these days”. I’d like to know where you live. Because I’m pretty sure energy production is heavily subsidised, monitored and managed by governments in most places in the world.
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Ah yeas, stupid ecologist Merkel and her nuclear hate.
Thanks fully the green minister habeck extended the plants for 4 great more months this year.
10 reactors? How long is that gonna take to build? A single reactor can take at least 8 years. So hopefully they aren’t ditching renewables all together. You can build a lot of solar and wind farms in those 8 years.
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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
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Currently we sell the surplus in the north to Finland and Norway as well as to Denmark and Germany in the south when we are over capacity.
What we would need is a better connection between north and south but that hasn’t been a priority until now and it’s 30 years too late.
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They are though. Focus on fossil fuels now and promise nuclear later - thats the plan.
Hopefully not as long as offshore wind farms. If Swedish laws regarding os wind are similar to Danish, it’ll easily take 9-10 years from decision to actually begin building.
Downvote me all you want but nuclear is not a long term solution. Short term at best.
It’s relatively clean compared to fossil fuels but it has several critical flaws on the long term.
For starters, it produces extremely toxic waste which we have no idea how to get rid of besides burying it and forget about it. Everytime someone mentions this all we hear is “we can create x method to dispose of it cleanly”. Right, but while we develop X method that shit keeps piling up. And when X method fails to work as we intended “oh, well, just keep bury it and lets start thinking about Y”.
And the biggest problem is this. Nuclear is actually relatively safe since the security regulations are (or should) be very strict. But all it takes is one bad enough disaster. Disasters like Chernobyl had the potential to leave half of Europe inhabitable for centuries. But, hey, as long as the regulations are strict and we have equipment and procedures that manage the human error we would be fine, right? Not really. Murphy’s law. The worst scenario will happen eventually. A obscure bug in the security systems, an unexpected natural disaster, war or terrorism. There’s always a failure point. In other energy types, we can manage that risk. One very rare disaster is not enough to make it not worth it if the good outweights the bad. Not in nuclear energy. Only one disaster can be potentially catastrophic and outweight all the good it made for decades or even centuries.
On the long term it is just not worth it. On the short term…it’s a gamble.
You are clueless about how nuclear wastes or radiation work. Any oil tanker sinking is a worst disaster than the worst nuclear accident ever was. A nuclear power plant is not a bomb. Radiations are not a magic disaster that erase life.
Meanwhile co2 is an actual life extinction threat, and Germany opened coal power plant to compensate for nuclear energy. What a great move ecologists! Bravo !
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.
Germany did nothing but burn coal and gas in 20 years since they’ve decided to leave nuclear energy. Is that your plan?
Radiations don’t erase life. Beaches would be full of dead bodies otherwise and you wouldn’t eat bananas. You have no clue about radioactivity obviously so you might as well trust people who do.
Germany did nothing in the last 20 years? Are you high. Did you even think about looking up how the energy production changed during that time?
“Radiations”
Ahahahah!
Regardless of how wise it is to use nuclear energy, we can all deduce, from your replies, that you know jack shit about what “radiations” actually is.
Is that something about how English language is so specific? It always come back to that when facts can’t be disproven.
Then please illuminate how high energy radiation is not dangerous. I do not believe that you can do that, as you appear to never have attended a physics or biology class in your life
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.
You have 0 clue about radioactivity, how dangerous it is, how it works or even what it is. You are comically ignorant! You’ll certainly tell me that chernobyl killed more people than Hiroshima and nagasaki bombs now?
Everyone needs its scarecrow I guess. Beware of bananas btw, those things are radioactive too.
You failed to address any of my arguments. You only attacked me and put words in my mouth. I see no point to keep answering you.
Bananas are not radioactive, as they do not contain a significant amount of radioisotopes that emit high energy ionising electromagnetic radiation or alpha/beta decay products.
Ignorance again! Or is it hypocrisy? What is significant? What is radioactive?
It is probably the only thing that can really buy us time. Sure we cannot dispose of its waste currently, but it buys us time to find a way. We will find a way to solve the waste issue. Besides, the waste produced is actually quite little, and we do have great solutions for storage. As for your second point, Chernobyl could have been an even worse disaster indeed, but it is a plant built in a time when it was fashionable to built bigger and larger plants. Today, the strategy is to built the plants smaller, making the impact of such disaster also smaller.
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…
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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.
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Except this is wrong. Wikipedia cost of electricity by source shows 81-82$/MWh for nuclear, 67-146$/MWh for offshore wind. Solar is 31-146.
A notable fact is also that renewable supporters are very often very against nuclear energy, and very much on favour of turning it off at all cost. I know no nuclear energy supporter who is against renewable energy.
If the goal is to remove fossil fuels from energy, some people should really stop fighting nuclear energy at all cost like they did for 40 years.
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As quickly as possible is not the only parameter. Consequences is an important one too. We can technically turn off half the grid right now, but there would be severe consequences to that.
Smart grid is a cool thing, but we are far from it still if it needs to work from renewables only.
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A low carbon energy source is useless if it cannot cover peak loads, which are now being covered by fossil fuels. Years of greenie obstructionism now means that the nuclear plants that would have been built are now missing, and the solutions offered by the anti-nuclear lobby seems to be “let them have energy poverty, brownouts and outright blackouts are not our problem”. This will happen once coal and oil plants shut down, renewables alone cannot cover the demands, especially at peak load.
Such an absolutely brainless response. Of course renewables alone can cover the demands, and they’re our only option since nuclear energy is inherently dangerous, extremely expensive and damaging to the environment and climate due to the immense amounts of concrete required. Furthermore, grid-level storage is a made up problem with regard to renewables, we could easily cover peak demands by expanding hydroelectric pump storage systems and reservoirs, and potential new battery solutions would make this even less of an expense.
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.
Peaker technology is best replaced by batteries. Powerwalls and V2G has already been shown to dramatically reduce brownouts and need for Peakers. You need to educate yourself a bit. It’s not 1995 anymore.
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https://electrek.co/2023/01/03/neoen-announces-tesla-megapack-project/
Come on man, it’s not 1995.
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You’re just wrong. Battery systems smaller than this have already paid for themselves reducing brown outs and dramatically reducing or eliminating the need for peaker plants, which are always the worst for the environment. This is only about scale and the cost of batteries has dropped dramatically just in the last few years. Again, it’s not 1995.
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Facts are facts bra. The technology is there, it’s proven, and only getting better and cheaper.
Dosent sweden already have a fairly high and fairly stable energy production through their hydroelectiric power plants . Wouldnt it be better to just build more of those.
I’m not sure the situation in Sweden, but usually the easily developed hydro sites have already been built, and any remaining sites will be quite expensive compared to power generated. Additionally, climate change can threaten the reliability of hydro as snowmelt and precipitation become more unpredictable. Also, they generally have a fairly large negative environmental impact aside from climate change.
I’m sure there are some projects that will pencil out but probably not enough to decarbonize the whole energy grid.
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.
Swede here.
Just clarifying some things.
Sweden is not dropping renewable energy. We are (at least for now) going to include nuclear energy among the other alternatives such as water, wind and solar.
But here’s one of the problems we are trying to solve with nuclear power:
Sweden is a major producer of high quality steel and we have set a target to become CO2 free in 2045 when it comes to steel production.
Currently the steel production in Sweden is responsible for 5500000 metric tons of CO2 per year and we have plans to go 0 CO2 by 2045.
To be able to do this we need, just for the CO2 free steel production, 70 TWh per year.
In 2020 there were 4333 wind turbines 26TW of electricity in Sweden. While you might think that we’d just build 9000 more it will not likely not solve the main problem with wind and solar power production: reliability.
So either we continue using fossil fuel to produce steel or we don’t. It’s as easy as that.
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Didn’t expect the current government to get something right. The funny thing about the right is that they at least support nuclear. Probably for the wrong reasons.
People are too optimistic about renewables. The world has a limited supply and if the richer countries keep competing over it when will the poorer nations ever get the chance to ditch their coal and oil?
How many countries have invested into production vs just out buying the poorer countries?
The intermediate solution to our problems will be a mix of nuclear and renewables. Being so against nuclear despite our massive issues with climate is a nice gamble people take on other people’s future.
We are both far from meeting current electricity demand even in the richest nations and switching away from oil in transport. We need multiple solutions. And as we have seen from the current energy crisis in Europe, no government or population is willing to have a discontinuous energy supply, something common in most renewables.
The world has a “limited supply” of renewables? I am sorry, but are you out of your mind? With renewables, we literally only passively use what the environment already provides. The sun radiates its light toward us for free endlessly and does not care for what we do, and the kinetic energy of the Earth’s winds that we use for power generation would otherwise destroy many livelihoods as deadly hurricanes or similar. We have a virtually unlimited supply of these sources, and renewables ARE the key to a greater autonomy of lesser developed countries, just BECAUSE they do not require the import or expensive extraction of fuel resources such as coal, oil or uranium. In fact, nuclear power plants are even more prone to a loss of geopolitical autonomy because of the need for uranium, which is costly to enrich and which you cannot get from everywhere. So, in summary, the situation is the exact opposite of what you’ve written.
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.
tf wrote that title… nuclear is defacto renewable
No, it’s zero emission but not renewable.
Nuclear fission is actually by definition the least renewable energy source. Even coal and oil are renewable on long enough time scales. But there will never be more uranium than there is right now.
We actually don’t have that much of it if we consider the long term future, only a thousand years or so. So nuclear is intended to be a bridge to eventual full renewable power generation and storage, an essential component in the present day but it’s still a bridge.
Another thing to consider is that nuclear is the only power source that works in deep space away from the Sun. So if we’re serious about exploring the solar system or further, we’d be best not to burn up all of our fissionable material right away.
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?
A bit of a stretch maybe, but I’m considering us to be discussing whether an energy source is renewable on Earth. The Sun is not renewable, but by the time that it’s no longer viable the Earth will be long gone as well! So as long as the Earth exists, I would say that solar PV and other solar driven processes like wind and hydro are renewable.
By these standards yes, deep geothermal and tidal are “not renewable” either.
but by the time that it’s no longer viable the Earth will be long gone as well
But that’s exactly the “problem”, there’s enough fertile material for potential millions of years of consumption, and that’s for fission alone.
I think the debacle is more because the definition of “renewable” is a little arbitrary than the dilemma if nuclear is renewable or not
I think we both agree on fertile material as discussed in another comment, the longevity issue is mostly with conventional LWRs burning up our fuel rapidly.
I’m just being pedantic about the sun, lol
That’s look like not renewable, but like “smaller resources cost”.
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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.
The process to produce coal is known for 100 years now. Its just not feasible, because no one needs coal. But its reversible. No one knows how to fuse uranium.
We actually know how. It’s the cycle of thorium. You make U233 from Th232.
I wouldn’t necessarily say never, it could potentially happen that a dead tree ends up in an environment that isn’t conducive to lignin-eating bacteria getting to it, and I would not be at all surprised if it has happened and may continue to happen somewhere in the world since those bacteria evolved, though they would certainly be exceptional cases and almost definitely not happening at any significant scale.
It’s also possible for those bacteria to go extinct one way or another. Again, not very likely. And if it did happen it would probably be due to some absolutely catastrophic disaster absolutely wrecking the Earth’s ecosystem completely in which case we’re probably not going to make it either, but hey, new coal!
Will have more when the sun explodes.
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You are probably refering to thorium-based nuclear power plants. Until this day, there isn’t such a power-plant in a production-ready state. Because it’s far from simple, not only because of technical challanges, but also potentially catastrofic environmental impact. I encourge you to read more if you are intrested.
Just because you can use the same fuel twice (or even 3, 10, 100, 1000 times) doesn’t mean it’s renewable. You can’t do that ad infinitum, at a certain point there will simply not be fissile material left in the spent fuel to use, and no more will ever be formed on earth (at least not in any meaningful quantities, I’m sure eventually fusion experiments or something may start spitting out uranium, but by the point we can do that at any meaningful scale we’d clearly have fusion pretty well figured out so fission would be a moot point.) What is here is what we have to work with until we start mining asteroids or what have you.
And on a much bigger timescale (and I’m talking the absolute mind-breaking cosmic sort of timescale that’s really kind of not worth mentioning because it’s so far out from our human frame of reference so I’m only mentioning it because it’s really cool to think about,) eventually all of the fissile material that exists in the universe today will cease to be all on its own whether or not we do anything with it as it decays into more stable elements. A bit more will be created along the way thanks to neutron stars and supernovae and such, but even that slows down and stops as we inch closer to the heat death of the universe.
On the other hand, given enough time and the right conditions, every ounce of carbon on this planet- plants, animals, plankton, plastic happy meal toys, could potentially become fossil fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, etc. and can keep going around the carbon cycle. Unfortunately that’s a process that can take thousands or millions of years and we use fossil fuels much faster than they can be replenished. Even if earth becomes uninhabitable and we have to all up and leave, the carbon in our bodies and whatever we take with us will end up in a new carbon cycle on whatever new rock we end up on, and can potentially keep going as long as we do.
Nuclear is cleaner than fossil fuels but is in no way renewable, no matter what tricks we use to get the most use out of it, there is a finite supply.
Fossil fuels are dirty and not really renewable on a useable timescale for us.
Renewables like solar, wind, and hydro will be a viable option as long as the sun is shining, the earth has an atmosphere, and there is liquid water. Technically there will come a day when those also run out on us but those are also kind of prerequisites for us to live here, so kind of a moot point.
And geothermal will potentially be an option as long as the Earth’s core stays hot, so hundreds of millions if not billions or tens of billions of years, which puts us in the sort of timescale where we have to worry about things like the sun turning into a red giant and engulfing the inner planets, so we’ll have bigger things to worry about than keeping the lights on.
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.
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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.
Calling an LWR renewable because somebody somewhere might run a closed fuel cycle eventually is like calling oil renewable because you can make hydrocarbons by electrolyzing CO2 and water.
It’s and absurd and ridiculous lie.
With the same argument calling solar and wind renewables just because, hypothetically someone somewhere can fully recycle turbines and panels without having to extract new raw materials is an absurd and ridiculous lie (?)
Except it has happened at least once at >99% yield.
And happens regularly commercially at >70% yield.
So you continue to repeat stupid and absurd lies.
Could you back your claims up?
Because in Europe and US the recycling rate if solar panels is around 10% and that without considering we might being miscalculating their real impact
Otherwise, first fast reactor has been built in 1946, we’re basically done and there’s absolutely no more industrial research needed as it happened at least once /s
You’re now trying to misdirect with an unrelated statistic. The current market saturation of recycling isn’t the amount of a panel that can be recycled.
Breeding some fissile fuel is not closing the fuel cycle. No reactor has ever prodiced the same material it ran on. Closed cycle nuclear is not even proof of concept.
Unfortunately most reactors are not breeders and we are trying our best to lock the waste away forever which ruins any chance of recovery when we finally do migrate to breeder cycles. I like to compare our current reactors to burning just the bark off of logs and then tossing the rest in a smoldering heap, with 95-99% of the energy still retained in the waste.
Breeder reactors would indeed extend the long term viability of nuclear fission immensely, we should be using them exclusively.
you do not need a breeder to recycle most of it. also that 95% is still there for future us to use when we are able to.
No it’s not. That’s just delusional. All the ideas of a sustainable uranium fuel cycle are based on non-existent technology. Uranium is a finite resource and we have nowhere near enough of it to power the world, even if you ignore all the other problems.
there is enough U238 to last until we get there. except if you think fusion is more than 500 years away (yes, that number is out of my ass)
U238 is not fissile so that’s not very useful.
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fucking based
