• @[email protected]
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    212 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      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.

    • Richard
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      62 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        Climate harm is a matter of degrees, I think.

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

      • Exatron
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        72 years ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      262 years ago

      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.

        • @[email protected]
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          242 years ago

          The difference being that when you’re 10 billion into a renewables project, you usually have SOME generation already, whereas your nuclear reactor isn’t doing shit until it’s fully completed.

          I don’t mind nuclear, but the fact is that the reactors take decades to build, whereas renewables can be deployed far quicker. Going all-in on nuclear, and then twiddling your thumbs for 10-15 years while the reactors are built doesn’t sound like a great idea.

        • TWeaK
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          132 years ago

          Erm, how many renewables projects are many years late? How many of them have taxpayers picking up the tab?

          Renewables are cheap and quick to build, and turn a huge profit. Granted, that profit isn’t passed down to the energy consumer, but that’s an issue with the way electricity is sold to consumers. Most countries have a complete disconnect between the market for generators and the market for consumers, so the price of electricity on the consumer market will only go up even if the costs in the generation market go down.

          On the generation market, nuclear electricity is more expensive than renewable electricity. Nuclear electricity is also heavily subsidised, while large scale renewables typically are not these days (because they’re profitable on their own).

          • @[email protected]
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            82 years ago

            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.

            • Beemo Dinosaurierfuß
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              82 years ago

              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.

                • Richard
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                  12 years ago

                  Just read and inform yourself for once in your life :)

            • TWeaK
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              52 years ago

              France invested in nuclear hard at the right time. Things aren’t the same now. Germany fucked up and switched various things off (coal and nuclear) too eagerly, without encouraging enough development to replace it first.

              Renewables typically aren’t subsidised these days. They’re profitable in their own right. You don’t even need to subise them, expanding capacity through the planning process will encourage their development - however subsidies could encourage even more.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                “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.

                • TWeaK
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                  22 years ago

                  I’m in the UK, and I’ve worked building wind farms for the last 8 years. The contracts are obviously quite nuanced and varied, and any business is going to do whatever it can to get grants and such to increase their revenue, but most of the ones I’m familiar with include payments by the wind farm to the local community.

                  England doesn’t just not subsidise them, they’ve actively banned new onshore wind farms for the last 6 years - the main development has been in Scotland. This ban came in with an end to subsidies, and as a result a lot of the smaller installs (eg 1-3 turbines) stopped being built, and the return on value investment to be at scale (10+ turbines ~3MW each or higher). The downside to this is that you have fewer community projects, in favour of larger, typically foreign owned power plants. There’s also a lot less venture capitalists building wind/solar farms and then selling them on immediately on completion (which is probably a good thing).

                  My favourite little wind farm was entirely community owned in Wales, just 2 turbines. They have school kids visit up there and they modified this exercise bike with a dynamo to power things like a light bulb, fan, USB charger and inverter for AC, so all the kids can see how hard they have to peddle to make the electricity. When they opened the place they had a local rugby player kick a ball over the blades lol. This was one of the last built with subsidies, but all of the money from the electricity generated goes back into the local community.

                  As for energy production being monitored and managed, somewhat. The distribution and transmission operators have decent information, but not in depth down to the generators themselves. It’s all typically privately owned through multiple entities and the government doesn’t have a huge amount of oversight - at the end of the day they have to listen to the experts, and the experts work in the private sector for the power companies, not in government.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

  • starlinguk
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    12 years ago

    Here’s me thinking I’d left the nuclear shills behind on Reddit. Nuclear is expensive, takes forever to build, and produces unacceptable waste. Renewables are much cheaper and MUCH quicker to implement.

  • Aesthesiaphilia
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    1342 years ago

    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.

    • TWeaK
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      432 years ago

      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.

      • nicman24
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        62 years ago

        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

        • TWeaK
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          102 years ago

          According to another comment they have plenty of renewables up in the north but only use about 30% of that capacity. So it seems the main issue is with the transmission network for the country, its ability to get power from one place to another.

          Instead of investing in 20 year nuclear power plant plans, they should be looking at accessing and expanding the available renewable generation in the short term.

          • nicman24
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            22 years ago

            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

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          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.

          • Aesthesiaphilia
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            12 years ago

            It’s a negligible amount of heat. Something like 0.000001% of the greenhouse effect from fossil fuels. Almost unmeasurable.

        • TWeaK
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          142 years ago
          1. I’m not critising nuclear for not being green.
          2. Renewables should grow (they’re profitable), but there should be further incentivised growth to help reduce reliance on fossile fuels more quickly.
          3. Yes, nuclear is brilliant for voltage and frequency stability. Large turbines have momentum in their spinning mass, when loads are switched on and off they keep spinning the same speed. However there are other options, eg rotating stabilisers, often used on very large ships but land installations are now being made also. These can be built without the nuclear red tape.
          4. Replacing existing nuclear plants is always a decent thing to do. You skip over many of the hurdles by building on the same site under the same nuclear permits. However taking money away from renewables to pay for this is questionable at best.

          I think Sweden does have some geographical complications, along with a lackluster transmission network. These are much harder to get private investment for. However if there was a decent transmission network then there would be more utility of renewable generation in the north as well as the capability for import of energy from neighbouring countries or even export when Sweden has an excess.

          Putting my balls on the table, I reckon if Sweden put all the money they’ve got in nuclear into transmission first and then renewables, I reckon they could switch off more fossil fuels more quickly.

          • @[email protected]
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            42 years ago

            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.

            • TWeaK
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              42 years ago

              The fact that left and right wing parties both currently (in the middle of soaring energy prices and a cost of livings crisis) agree with measures that support fossil fuel interests does not change the fact that the Swedish government (which is currently right wing) is implementing policies that benefit the fossil fuel industry.

              Also, I question the nuance in that - I’m sure many in the left that support nuclear investment, but are less happy about renewable targets being scrapped.

              However I apologise if I came on a bit too hard with it being a left vs right wing issue. It’s wealth vs society.

      • Ice
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          Assuming you’re telling the truth that there’s a massive shortfall in December already (a provable lie ) then you are suggesting the solution for an urgent shortfall of around a TWh per year is to build 10GW of nuclear plants which will be ready in 2045 for €300 billion and run them at an operating loss for 10-11 months per year.

          This in order to provide low grade heat which could be stored in a district heating system for a few dollars per kWh for a total cost of about 3% of your suggestion or even in batteries for about 20% of the cost (which would also run at a profit the rest of the year and make the hydro go further).

          Nuke shills say some colossally stupid things, but this really takes the cake.

          • Ice
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            62 years ago

            Since you couldn’t be arsed to check for yourself before throwing out baseless accusations, here’s a translation of a relevant part from the linked article. I doubt you’ll read it, but it’ll be here for anyone else that stumbles across this thread.

            The past winter was at times dramatic, for example when several nuclear power reactors were shut down for repairs. But thanks to the fact that mainly households had previously reduced consumption clearly in step with the rampant electricity prices, Sweden managed to maintain the power balance even in the worst hour, the so-called peak load hour.

            “But if we had maintained the consumption, we would have had to cut down.”, says Lowina Lundström, Division Manager Systems at Svenska kraftnät.

            The electricity had not been enough

            At that time, the import would not have been enough to cover the electricity demand during the peak load hour on December 16, 2022, between 09:00 and 10:00. The import was then at a maximum of 3,290 MW, approximately equivalent to three nuclear power reactors, which was the highest level to date.

            (Svenska Kraftnät a.k.a Swedish Power Grids is our national power distribution agency)

            Btw, your source is 4 years out of date, and accounts for neither daily nor hourly power balance.

            Here’s an up to date source on monthly power balance.

            Here’s a report on peak loads in various northern european countries.

            Here is an actual relevant source on the topic (again, in Swedish).

            The above figure is taken from this report by SVK.

            • @[email protected]
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              52 years ago

              So the problem was nuclear being unreliable, and you can’t comprehend the idea of picking the worst recent year before dropping demand due to covid (or clicking on the year dropdown or hitting the hourly output).

              • Ice
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                2 years ago

                The capacity factor for nuclear power in Sweden (including losses from curtailment) was 83% of installed capacity during 2022, which exceeds the global average for that year (80%), by comparison wind had a capacity factor of 26% for the year. Hence, the issue is not reliability, but rather a lack of capacity. 1700MW (20%) of nuclear has been decommissioned since 2018 (which is why those stats are entirely irrelevant to the current situation). Hence that a the unexpected outage of a single reactor (1160 MW or 17% of total capacity) could have such a large impact.

                Even with that outage, nuclear power remained the energy source with the greatest capacity % during the 22/23 winter (80%), despite being lower during peak demand. “Kärnkraft” is nuclear power.

                So, in summary, you are either clueless regarding our situation in Sweden (I sincerely hope that is the case) or actively spreading misinformation (which would be the more unfortunate option).

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  Another bullshit attempt at paltering. Capacity factor isn’t reliability. Failing unpredictably when needed and when asserting that it will work then is unreliability. Your own assertion is that the need was for a handful of hours when the nukes failed.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      762 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          122 years ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            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?

            • @[email protected]
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              82 years ago

              Still requires expanding uranium production somewhere, and likely also buying from Russia.

              • @[email protected]
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                2 years ago

                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.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                Sweden has uranium reserves and produced it’s own uranium in the 60-s. Though I think laws currently prevent mining.

                • @[email protected]
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                  2 years ago

                  I’m sure they’ll take just as much care for indigenous reindeer herders when choosing where to poison thousands of km^2 of land as they did when using them for hostage shield politics to sabotage the wind rollout.

                  Or is an entire country supposed to run indefinitely on the single year worth of reserves already known?

        • @[email protected]
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          132 years ago

          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

          • Aesthesiaphilia
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            22 years ago

            I can’t find any indication that they’re changing their target…it’s just going from “100% renewable” to “100% fossil-fuel free”.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

      • Pelicanen
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        162 years ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      52 years ago

      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.

  • Arobanyan
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    22 years ago

    Heckin’ basedarino

    Wonder where they’re going to get all that fuel to power the reactors from lol

    Oh wait, that’s right, Middle-East and Africa like always, so piss all has changed 😂

  • @[email protected]
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    192 years ago

    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.

  • Carlos Solís
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    32 years ago

    At least I hope they have the good sense to build the plants somewhere relatively remote, just in case of a leak.

    • Carighan Maconar
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      62 years ago

      It’s sweden, if you pick locations randomly, chances are on your side that it’ll be insanely remote.

      • Carlos Solís
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        42 years ago

        Good to know! That means plenty of places that could be cordoned off in case of a Fukushima, right?

        • @[email protected]
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          42 years ago

          Tell me you know nothing about nuclear science without telling me

          (Simpsons doesn’t count as a credible source)

          • Carlos Solís
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            32 years ago

            I’m surprised to see so many people eagerly dismissing the chance of a nuclear reactor leak, even by accident.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              And what are those chances may I ask?

              Its like comparing a 1970’s shitbox car to a 2022 model and saying all cars are immediately gonna kill us.

              Really don’t think any nuclear reactor leaks are not accidents, hence why we have such amazing tech to stop it

              • @[email protected]
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                12 years ago

                Chances of a leak are roughly 100%

                Most sites are unusable for a few decades due to tritium leaks.

                Chances of an economy-destroying disaster on the other hand are much lower, but you didn’t ask that.

                • @[email protected]
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                  12 years ago

                  Odds of a leak are what?? Give me some of whatever youre smoking, unless you mean some backass “technically they leak runoff water” bs, cause reactors are currently the safest way to generate power, even beating the insanely small dangers of solar (which due to production requires more overall human risk)

  • @[email protected]
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    342 years ago

    Hell yeah, tell me the best future isn’t nuclear power and electric rail like an old space Lego set.

      • @[email protected]
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        322 years ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          82 years ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            2 years ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

            • DerGottesknecht
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              32 years ago

              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

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              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.

          • @[email protected]
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            62 years ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]
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                42 years ago

                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.

                • @[email protected]
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                  22 years ago

                  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).

            • @[email protected]
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              12 years ago

              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.

            • DerGottesknecht
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              52 years ago

              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?

              • @[email protected]
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                22 years ago

                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.

                • DerGottesknecht
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                  62 years ago

                  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.

            • Richard
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              32 years ago

              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.

      • Q ⠀
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        82 years ago

        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.

  • bangover
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    72 years ago

    For those advocating an all renewable energy grid. You cannot reliably power big industrial factories and infrastructure with renewables only. The answer NEEDS to be: nuclear as a base, and a heavy push towards decentralized renewable grid on top.

    • @[email protected]
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      22 years ago

      You can if you spend times on batteries/energy storage. The question is where the trade off is optimal.

  • @[email protected]
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    302 years ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 years ago

      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

  • @[email protected]
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    59
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    2 years ago

    Imo, renewable should still be the target, nuclear should be the bridge towards renewable until it’s feasible enough

    • @[email protected]
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      222 years ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        72 years ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
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          82 years ago

          …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.

        • @[email protected]
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          62 years ago

          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.