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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.
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.
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.
In a traditional plant, over the life of the plant Fuel will by far be the biggest cost.
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.
Imo, renewable should still be the target, nuclear should be the bridge towards renewable until it's feasible enough
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.
Hell yeah, tell me the best future isn't nuclear power and electric rail like an old space Lego set.
One of the biggest problems that we have today when it comes to energy production (and a whole lot of other things) is putting all our eggs in one basket. Well how the fuck does this change anything?
I am not anti-nuclear, but dumping ALL renewable targets is moronic. Now you've simply replaced one egg for another egg, but it's still just ONE egg. A stable energy portfolio is diversifying your sources.
The article doesn't say if they intend to have 100% nuclear or if they dropped the target of 100% renewable to have a mix with more nuclear
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.
We do, but enviromental regulations pushed through during the past two decades is essentially preventing any new or expanded hydro projects. In fact, a lot of smaller hydro plants are instead being demolished due to being incompatible with these laws.
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.
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.
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.
Great news. A zero emissions electricity grid requires nuclear, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future; new battery techs are not there yet, and other non-intermittent sources like geothermal are too small scale and/or geographically specific. An irrational aversion to nuclear power has been a big obstacle to decarbonization, so every step in this direction is to be celebrated!
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 !