The previous government didn't stop the shutdown planned 40+ years ago (due to a national referendum), in part because the owners (Vattenfall) said it's not economically feasible to run them anymore without subsidies. It's complex.
To be fair to both sides, the electricity prices at the time when the decision was made was very different from today. We had prices in the south of sweden 2020 that was as low as around €0.02 per kw/h, compared to over €0.3 in 2022, and in 2020 the price trend was looking to be going downwards.
If prices had continue to go down and let say had landed at €0.01 per kw/h this year than we would not be discussing nuclear power as much. It will be a gamble to say what prices will be in 1, 5, 10 and 20 years into the future, and any gamble involve a cost in one way or an other. The previous government made one bet, this government is doing an other.
The increase of energy prices in Europe doesn't seem to be short term anymore. It reflects a new geopolitical reality, that has almost zero hope of changing soon again. Sure, energy prices will decrease over time, but it will be a very slow process, until we get even in a similar region as a few years back. Governments will have to subsidize not just energy creation, but many more activities, unless we are ready to loose a lot of the wealth and equality we have left in the population.
Currently yes, but hydrogen is so easy to make from electricity that it predates sensible electrical generation methods by 43 years.
We didn't bother making hydrogen in large quantities because there was no point when we already had a convenient supply of a flammable gas, not because it's even remotely difficult.
It’s probably fair to say that energy demand over the next ten years will increase significantly.
The anecdotes of the end of Moores law that signifies the end of electronic efficiency through miniaturization alone and the increasing adoption of energy hungry devices for personal compute or lifestyle will certainly have a multiplicative effect over time as these trends make their way through society.
In such a scenario, it’s hard to imagine prices being the same if demand increases by even a single digit multiple of the present.
He is not contradicting himself. You have to remember the awful efficiency of thermal engines.
Primary energy demand will decrease because you do not lose 70% of the energy by simply cooling it like in steam turbine used by nuclear power plants or car engines.
On the other hand, electricity usage will increase because you have now replaced your 30-40% efficient engines with 90+% efficient engines, but from a different source. That barely have any losses from the primary energy input.
Since we should keep the oil in the ground that current thermal engines uses, the energy input will be from a different source when we change from burning oil to electrical engines. The primary energy input should be from the wind, sun, elevated water, nuclear bonds and geothermal.
The change from 30-40% efficient engines to 90+% efficient engines is if we burn the oil in a power plant. It is an improvement, but not a sufficient big one compared to actually keeping the oil in the ground.
You basically can't get 90% efficiency from burning oil in a power plant. E = 1 - Cold/Hot, where cold ≈ 300 K and hot ≈ 1300 K (gasoline-air fire), giving theoretical maximum efficiency of 77%. In practice much lower, what I've seen is just over 60% even in the best combined cycle power plants.
If you use some really high temperature chemistry, you can get to 5260 K from dicyanoacetylene in oxygen, which is 95%, but not gasoline. And dicyanoacetylene is a bit explody.
True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.
> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years
We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.
Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.
Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.
In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.
There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.
Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.
> because people just shop based on price and features
But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?
There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.
The Linus Tech Tips labs is already doing wonders in their market niche, I really really hope it all works out for them.
They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)
I guess part of the problem here is that everything changes so frequently. If technology moved so slowly that generational change in craftsmen was the major source of a change in quality, then you could actually use word of mouth and other external sources of information. Nowadays, the experience of a year or two ago really doesn't necessarily tell you much about the quality of the products that are available now.
The fact that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable. The other comment is probably more on point about conversion effeciency.
> that you can use combustion to generate electricity, means they are interchangeable
This is an accounting issue, not a question of thermodynamics.
Electricity typically refers to grid electric. We don’t count non plug-in hybrid electrical output as “electricity.” That’s how energy use can be stable while electrification increases.
I bet what is going on isn't that surprising to industry insiders, or the people who make profit-loss decisions about whether to fund power plants or not.
This is the issue with politics and the power market, the language gets locked into "what should we do" which is then interpreted as "well, the government should do it!".
The problem with nuclear power isn't what the government is funding, it is that the government is saddling the industry with enormous costs in attempting to meet an unrealistic safety standard that _nothing else_ is held to. I suspect solar farms would go bankrupt if their waste was held to the same do-no-harm standard.
If the government just let people build what they thought was best, and demanded a generic fact-based safety standard rooted in observed harms (ie, not the stupid linear model after Chernobyl or some arbitrary radiation exposure limit which is literally undetectable vs. coal killing people on a daily basis) then the market could just sort this out.
Nuclear was on the too-cheap-to-meter path until the bureaucrats turned up to help decide how to run the plants. And EU bureaucrats are particularly bad at managing fast paced technological change they have a multi-decade track record of failure at this point in exactly these two fields - technology and energy policy. China is eating their lunch. China! Authoritarian alleged communists! That is what policy failure in the EU has led to.
Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?! The whole let the current generation reap the profits and the market will magically figure things out got us into the current mess in the first place. The nuclear industry is not being held to higher standards relatively than other means of energy production. Wind farms must jump through significant buerocratic hurdles despite the fact that the potential dangers are massively lower.
To give an example of hurdles for wind power: there are some wind mills in the harbor region of Antwerp that aren’t allowed to generate power during the day because one time a single protected bird flew against the turning arm. They’re only allowed to use them when the birds are sleeping.
Are buildings in Antwerp allowed to have windows? This data from Canada in 2013 says for every bird killed by a wind mill about 1000 are killed by "Collisions with Houses".
> Yes let's just go free for all and the market sort it out. When was that a good idea when it came to safety critical infrastructure?!
On days of the week ending with "y". Private markets are the best way to feed people, clothe people, house people, entertain people and keep people healthy. By and large people don't willingly go with a public option in any of those categories if they have a choice. The electricity market is the same.
The evidence at the moment is that someone next to Fukushima when it went bad would be ... perfectly fine. No physical risk. Chernobyl wasn't as bad as a dam collapse. This was all with 1980s tech. The evidence here is that the risk is possible for a private party to handle. Rare evacuations aren't common enough to worry about and are a much smaller problem than making what is happening in Europe at the moment a regular risk.
Note that I'm calling for nuclear to be held to the same safety standards you've been exposed to for your entire life - my objection is that the standards for nuclear are unreasonably high compared to literally everything else.
1) the national referendum was held in 1980, not exactly a recent decision. Most people who voted in that referendum are probably dead.
2) The referendum consisted of four different choices, basically all voting options were a No to nuclear, the only difference between them is how slowly the existing plants should be decommissioned(slowest option won).
3) The majority owners of Vattenfall are the Swedish state and their leadership will say and do what the politicians tell them to say. I’ll bet you a beer that within 6 months they’ll be extremely pro nuclear, just how their new masters want them to be.
3a)
Looks like I was right, but it happened in less than a week not months. The CEO of Vattenfall wants to extend the lifetime for the operational Forsmark and Ringhals nuclear reactors up to a total lifetime of 80 years(!).
Personally I would prefer new reactors instead of keeping these relics alive, but Sweden has a limitation of maximum 10 reactors, complicating the construction of new reactors.
You have to bear in mind that the public was hugely against it. No political party dared to push for it, although negotiations were held.
> The Moderates, the People's Party and the Social Democrats held separate negotiations to formulate a joint yes option with the implication that the reactors would be allowed to be used during their technical lifespan, which was estimated at 25 years. These negotiations finally broke down mainly because the Moderates could not accept the additional proposals: that the state or the municipalities would own the nuclear power plants and that so-called surplus profits from private production of hydropower would be withdrawn through taxation.
It's not complex really. It was made unprofitable with every tool available with this as the goal. There have been much public celebration from the green party, they are proud of the outcome.
Currently no insurance is willing to insure against major disaster. So how are companies going to pay for it? You can look at the cash reserves and immediately see that this cannot be correct.
I should have said they will not insure fully for the consequences of the disaster, in particular not long term effects. Nuclear has limited liability and does not need to cover the full cost of a disaster.
Ok, seems the amount the companies are now liable for is actually capped at some number, which is a fair amount but still not covering a truly major incident. But the cap has gradually increased over time and is thus costing the electric companies more money.
A solar plant is certainly liable if accidents happen on its grounds. They don't need insurance against a major disaster like a meltdown because it can't happen.
Nuclear is NOT liable for a major nuclear disaster. No insurance would cover it. So I don't know where you got your knowledge from but it is not based on fact.
Edit: OK I should have been clearer. They are liable like everyone else. They have (unlike solar installations I suspect) strict liability which means the damaged person does not have to prove fault. However, the amount of liability is limited (in time and amount) and the state takes over. This is what I was referring to with they don't have liability (admittedly incorrect the way I wrote it).
The problem with nuclear liability is that there are potential accidents that are both extremely rare and extremely expensive. Such accidents have only happened twice. This creates some difficulty for calculating insurance premiums.
The article you linked says that TEPCO paid out USD ~65 billion after Fukushima, but it was insured only for USD ~804 million.
Naturally what happened is that the government didn't want to be without electricity, so to prevent bankruptcy TEPCO was nationalized. This is the typical scenario for nuclear power: profits are privatized while losses are socialized.
Yeah… it tends to get uneconomical if you slap a huge special tax on it. A nuclear specific “effektskatt” was added in 2015, this is the real reason that they prematurely shut down the reactors (which would have been running until the mid 2020s).
It's interesting Europe is willing to spend billions of tax dollars on human rights like food, housing, medical care, and all sorts of social programs.
But not electricity. Any power plant not profitable will be shut down. No level of public investment will be tolerated.
The previous anti-nuclear social-democratic government together with the demonstrably insane "green" party installed a board in the state owned power company Vattenfall that after a while managed to sort of claim that it wasn't economically feasible to run the nuclear plants, with the new heavy taxes the social democrats had put in place on nuclear power production.
Yay?
Anyway, all of that insanity is thankfully history now.
You really can't make an assessment like "speaking half truths and most likely knows it" about someone's intent from their internet comments. The vast majority of commenters are just posting their opinions straightforwardly. They may be wrong, or half wrong, but that's not the same thing as deliberately being misleading.
No need for personal attacks. I'm not a sore loser.
I think it's a waste that we've not maintained the reactors well enough to still have them able to run at a profit.
And generally that we've (the government, both sides) haven't done anything about it in the last 10-20 years when they had a chance to invest in alternatives (whether building new nuclear or other types of energy sources).
If it's just a matter of taxes then I'm sure it would be easy for the new government to remove them and start back up the old reactors - but obviously that's not the plan. Most likely it's all quite complex and lots of factors leading to this outcome.
Edit: the Swedish green party has promoted renewable power and less dependency on Russian fossile fuels for decades. Not sure why gp calls them insane. Possibly because they consider the Swedish commitments to the Paris agreement important.
So this party gets about 4-5% of the votes. It's a tiny little thing, but they have had an almost catastrophic level of influence on Swedish policy because of even more stupid reasons.
Anyway, what you asked for; here are the high level notes of the insanity. There are lots of insane but largely inconsequential things that I won't focus on.
Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Because of that: Shuts down functioning nuclear power plants "in the name of the environment".
Attempts to replace plannable nuclear power with wind power. ("It produces the same number of GWh annually.")
> Key policy writers clearly don't understand the difference between energy and power.
Ridiculous. Of course they do.
> Shuts down nuclear power.
You don't know what you are talking about. It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power. A majority of the parties in the parliament has supported this for decades.
Despite that. The government hasn't actively closed down nuclear power. Shut downs have been decided based on the economics of running the plants.
And don't start about the "effektskatten" (a tax on nuclear energy in Sweden), it's older than the green party.
You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
> It was decided decades ago in a referendum that Sweden should move away from nuclear power
A 1980 referendum where the three options were
1. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible.
2. Decommission the nuclear power, as soon as it is socio-economically feasible. Work on reducing electricity use (by e.g. stopping new homes from being built with electric heating), invest in renewable power, and nationalize power generation to be able to control its future.
3. Decommission the nuclear power within 10 years.
So, it's no wonder that "Decommission the nuclear power" won that referendum. Anyone who brings up this referendum as a reason to decommission nuclear power 40 years later is being disingenuous.
My reason for bringing up the referendum was this: Gp insinuated the green party had somehow single handedly shut down Swedish nuclear reactors. This is not the case. The referendum shows scepticism towards nuclear has been the majority opinion in the Swedish parliament for decades. This changed only recently. The green party is one of several parties sceptical towards nuclear energy, they are not some kind of extremists.
The winning proposal of referendum about nuclear power in 1980 never said anything about when the shutdown should be, that was something the politicians added afterwards. What it said was that shutdowns should be done as long it doesn’t undermine employment and welfare.
And because these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices with unemployment as a result, thus both undermining employment and welfare, it actually violates what the winning proposal stipulated in the referendum.
Furthermore the tax on nuclear power was massively increased three times as consequence of influence of the two green parties, Center party and the Green Party, 2006, 2008 and 2015, and the same time subsidizing renewables, thus making nuclear power not economically sustainable. There was even a referendum in parliament about these latest shutdown with only one vote difference. No, it was intentional.
> these shutdowns have radically increased electricity prices
No they have not. Sweden has been a net exporter of electricity every year since 2010. There is no electricity deficit in Sweden.
Prices have increased because we've become more integrated with the European electricity market. Not because electricity production is lower or more expensive. The energy companies make unprecedented profits because they are able to sell cheaply produced electricity at expensive rates.
The last year prices have increased because of the energy/economic warfare waged between the EU and Russia.
The idea that a couple of Swedish nuclear reactors could alter the whole European energy market significantly is ludicrous.
>>You want nuclear power. They support renewables. That's why you call them insane.
Nuclear and renewables are not mutually exclusive. The Swedish green party rejects nuclear. The parent commenter hasn't expressed a rejection of renewables.
Anyway, one can perceive a rejection of a particular energy source as "insane", especially if they are a green party who claim the rise in CO2 levels is the world's most pressing crisis.
