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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.
Nuclear is just not economical enough to be part of a sustainable energy system.
It’s chicken and egg. We have no experience building nuclear on budget because nuclear is too expensive.
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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.
Sweden realized they couldn’t join NATO if they invited Chinese expertise to help build a nuclear power plant.
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!
But KW/h/y is dumb so lets just make it KW/h
It’s kW, not KW/h.
explain?
32500000000 KW/h per year
That's 32500000000 kWh/y = 32500000000 * k * W * h / y = 32500000000 * k * W * h / (365 * 24 * h) = 32500000000 * k * W * h / 8760 / h = 32500000000 / 8760 * k * W * h / h = 3710046 * k * W * 1 = 3710046 kW(You actually corrected yourself when converting to mW.)
Since watt is joule per second, kwh per year is one kilojoule per second per hour per year.
Electricians have played us like fools
kWh is kilojoule per second times 3600 seconds or 3600 kilojoule. kWh/y is 3600 joule per year or 3600 kilojoule / (24*3600*365) ~0.1W
A kW/h would imply that the power changes by that amount every hour, while a kWh is the amount of energy spent in an hour
Good. This entire thing was beyond stupidity.
BOOOOO
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Good. Other renewables are more economic and dont produce waste we can’t store anywhere
More economic means more profit. Profit, by definition is excess.
You’re advocating for paying more than what something costs to produce so someone richer than you can be even richer.
Smart man.
Perhaps it’s not so advantageous for the consumer, but for the people creating and supplying the power, it’s a home run.
The nuclear lobby is alive and well on social media. They say it’s carbon neutral, when it isn’t whatsoever. They dismiss claims of leaking nuclear waste barrels. They dismiss claims of irradiated waterways and towns. They dismiss claims of danger from meltdown, because obviously no nuclear meltdowns have ever occurred.
An electric grid based on renewables is a federated network.
Why anyone wants to put all the control and risk into one big nuclear company is beyond me.
What kind of risk are you talking about?
The electrical network connecting all your federated renewable infrastructures is managed by one entity already, isn’t it? That’s the same kind of risk you describe.
I get why people don’t like nuclear power and there are many valid arguments against it but yours is not
The overall grid is managed by governments cross countries in Europe. The production is not. While the producers do have an obligation to provide enough electricity at all times, the consumer is free to purchase the electricity from any distributor they want. This creates a free market for pricing while keeping the production regulated. For a small country like Sweden, producing everything in nuclear would destroy the market mechanism on pricing, leaving then with a monopoly.
The risks towards energy production are stuff like war, natural disasters and terror. All of which have been relevant within the last ten years somewhere in the world and increasingly so. The only way to maintain a functional distribution of electricity in these situations is to have the production de-centralised.
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Most renewables can’t produce energy at a large scale on demand. Nuclear is the king of that domain. I don’t see the issue with plugging nuclear to that federated network in order to meet demand when the renewables can’t
I agree. Sweden already has 6 nuclear plants providing 30% of the energy. Hydro power is 50% Together this is more than enough to meet baseload demand.
I cannot comprehend how someone would think a dezentralized power network can be anything but a disaster waiting to happen. I would reckon even the crypto fanbois would figure out how bad an idea that would be.
And mind you, the type of power doesn’t matter in that case. If your network isn’t centralized (enough), you’re fucked.
