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Environmental experts have criticised the Swedish government's plan to build at least ten nuclear reactors in the next twenty years
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- Authors
- Miranda Bryant
- Published
- Aug 10 2023
- Word count
- 599 words
I dunno. As an environmentalist myself, nuclear is certainly not the worst idea to meet energy generation and with general climate instability "Just build more wind and batteries!" seems terrible tunnel visioned to me.
Yes, the tax payers are going to foot the bill for things, same if they were building wind turbines instead. The question was meeting the energy needs for the country.
These public discourses on energy policy are always overly simplistic.
For Sweden and Finland and other Nordic countries the latitude and the weather needs to be taken into consideration when planning out the energy mix.
It’s dark and very cold for a long time of the year, and on the coldest days there’s no wind.
The nightmare scenario is a situation where it’s cold and not windy in Finland, Sweden and Norway, as well as having a few nuclear reactors out on maintenance. That was a possibility that could have happened last winter, which would have caused rolling blackouts.
The Nordic energy market is joined with the rest of Europe, but transfer capacity is limited. It’s even limited between the north of Sweden and the south, and in Norway too.
Electric consumption in the winter is roughly twice that of the summer, so the base load changes a lot between the summer and winter. Right now a lot of the excess is covered by co generation (I.e. electricity as a byproduct of district heat), wind, and stored hydro.
Long term co generation will go down, so something will need to replace it. There’s no more hydro to be built. Nuclear is an option but any new nuclear capacity also needs to have some backup. In Finland this has been hydro, but with our new nuclear plant part of our import capacity is reserved to cover in case it scrams.
This is not even touching upon the issues of switching cities from coal heated district heating to heat pumps.
This is a multi faceted problem that isn’t solved by any one energy production method.
Wind, solar and batteries are fine, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the power that nuclear can generate. If we really want to get away from using fossil fuels, nuclear will have to be part of the solution. Just building solar panels everywhere isn't the solution.
Nuclear is the way to go, at least until fusion is actually viable. These environmentalists are missing the forest for the trees. Same folks that encouraged Germany to close their nuclear plants down which led to significant reliance on Russian gas
Let's be clear here. The path forward is a combination renewables & clean energy including Nuclear. It is not the panacea that will save us by itself.
If we went all in on nuclear, why could it not be the only solution that would save us?
Because nuclear power plants have their own challenges.
For one, they require fuel (Uranium), which is harder and harder to get. With about 10% of the world's current electricity demand being generated by nuclear power plants, the mineable supply of uranium lasts for roughly 400 years. This sounds like a lot, but with more nuclear power plants, this obviously reduces. With the ongoing electrification in Europe and rising demand for electricity, we could be looking at a supply of 20 to 30 years if we massively choose to elect nuclear as our main electricity source.
This also gives rise to political issues. Most of Europe's uranium is mined in pro-Russian Kazakhstan which would bring back Europe's dependency on Russia. With China getting a hold of Africa, and Canada mainly supplying to the North American continent, the only other realistic supplier is Australia.
Other options are available: mining from seawater. However, this is a technology that still has to be developed, tested and commercially rolled out. Its main downside is that it massively increases the operational expenses of a nuclear power plant.
And therein lies another problem. Building a nuclear power plant in Europe requires capital investments of over 10 million euro per MW at the moment. These costs are likely to go up, rather than down. This results in a price of 100 to 150 euro/MWh if the power plant can operate at base load for most of its technical life span (50 years). And that is based on easily mineable uranium.
However, wind turbines on land have a price of 50 euro/MWh, wind at sea at 80 euro/MWh and in North-west Europe, solar does roughly 60 euro/MWh (and as low as 20 euro/MWh in the south). These sources have relatively low capital investments (1 million per MW but also easier to invest in due to smaller unit size) and therefore will find non-government investors. But due to their very low operational costs, they will (almost) never shut down.
The result is that wind/solar energy will push nuclear out of the Merit order in the market, requiring nuclear to operate at a loss during those hours and must increase prices to 500 euro/MWh or higher during 'dunkelflaute' (no sun, no wind) to ensure financial stability.
This in itself may result in large consumers of power to shut down their operations. We have seen this happening in 2022 when gas prices in Europe were high. With the reduction in electricity demand during dunkelflaute, the need for nuclear power in the first place is diminished.
To state that nuclear is the only solution that would save us is, to be put lightly, wishful thinking. Wind, solar and hydro are already playing a significant part in the European energy infrastructure and are starting to get to a point where they dictate the market price.
A common counter-answer to the limited availability is 'fusion'. When I studied physics 20 years ago, fusion was the big promise and a lot of research was done. Only recently we can get more energy out of fusion reactors than we have to put in, and only for several seconds in an experimental setting. The one fusion reactor (ITER) that was supposed to prove the long-term viability of fusion is plagued by delays. Its original operation of 2016 has been moved to 2028. Fusion is nowhere near mature enough to solve our energy crisis.
The same can be said about the 'Thorium' argument. The only operational molten salt reactor (MSR) shut down in 1970 and was never in commercial use. While it demonstrated the feasibility of thorium as a fuel (which still required uranium or plutonium as a starter fuel), it was not practical for commercial use, for one because of the use of very toxic chemicals. Modern MSRs only exist on paper so far and may suffer from the same delays as fusion.
a small correction--the current known mineable supply lasts for roughly 400 years.
If prices rise and more companies become interested in working in this industry, then more prospecting will be done and more Uranium will become available. Remember what happened with oil & fracking in the USA?
This is exactly the kind of voice I was hoping to see in this thread. Thanks for taking the time.
Another argument (that you maybe kind of alluded to tangentially) is the size of each solar/wind/nuclear project. For renewables, individual units are much smaller and less complex. This allows us to (1) develop them much faster, as a prototype can be built in a year rather than 10; and (2) it allows us to get to those juicy economies of scale much easier. To get a nuclear industry into the region of economies of scale is a gargantuan untertaking. By now, solar and wind have massive economies of scale. Whenever humanity has used technology to solve a problem, it's almost always a reasonably simple solution replicated 1000s or millions of times; not an insanely complex one 10s of times.
Building solar and wind power is something we can do now, and in 3 years we'll start saving CO2. There's enough cheap storage options in the pipeline to not worry about it too much, with expensive ones already available. If we commit to more nuclear now, who knows when we'll start saving CO2. We need those savings yesterday.
Deuterium-tritium fusion also has the same problem of limited fuel that fission has only even more severely. ITER once operational is likely going to eat nearly the entire world's tritium supply by itself and making more is horrendously expensive and also politically sensitive since tritium is an ingredient making fusion weapons.
What I do know of fusion makes me think this is a bit of an overstatement. AFAIK, there's ways of lining the reactor space with lithium, such that it breeds tritium. The reaction would be self-sustaining then. It's a known problem, but not considered a show-stopper. Might delay introduction of fusion some, but what else is new...
I don't doubt that ITER might be tritium hungry, but that's hardly reflective of the future potential of the technology.
As for proliferation risks, I don't think there's a feasible way to non-proliferate fusion fuel. Deuterium is abundant, and lithium deuteride is viable fuel. The more reasonable way is to stop fission weapon proliferation, as the fusion fuel can't be ignited without a fission weapon. Granted, that means acknowledging that any current-day nuclear armed state could create fusion weapons, but again; I don't think there's a feasible way of stopping them anyway. Nevermind that a state with a capable nuclear program could probably breed its own tritium? Considering all you need is lithium and neutrons, I don't think this is an avenue of non-proliferation. Particularly considering, once we're at the stage of having fusion reactors, I'd think that makes fission plants largely redundant, meaning any uranium industry will basically appear unambiguously arms related. Side note, this segment about proliferation risks is mostly my own speculation informed by what I know of nuclear physics; grain of salt advised.
All of which is just minor nitpicking: I agree with Skyaero that fusion will not solve our current energy crisis and will not contribute to solving climate change; the timeline doesn't add up. That doesn't mean I think the research is a waste of time, but to me it sits in a different context: we will probably need fusion once we want to re-expand our energy footprint after the climate crisis has been largely solved, and/or when we want to expand beyond earth. Also a matter of plain old basic research. It's very much long-term thinking there, with no pressing need driving it, unlike everything climate related.
Maybe if we had committed really hard to fusion power research in the 60s or so, we would be on track to solve our energy crisis using fusion power. Or maybe we'd now be deep in the shit because it's still 30 years away and all those investments didn't go into renewables or batteries or energy efficiency, and now we'd be hosed without a viable path forward. Such is betting it all on one tech.
This article goes into some details of the issue:
It certainly could be a showstopper imo. But we'll see. ITER is supposed to put these tritium blankets to the test when it becomes operational, so we'll find out if they can indeed get the breeder cycle going.
My knowledge is thin here too, so I can't offer any particular deep nuance agreeing or disagreeing. I agree though that basic research is itself justified and a virtue.
It's hideously expensive for starters. That's not to say it's unviable; where renewables aren't a good solution (e.g. because you have long months of calm-and-dark and storage isn't sufficient) a decent backbone of nuclear might be reasonable.
But beyond that, depending on a bunch of factors, mixing in some renewables, you might actually match demand better than nuclear. For example, there's a method of installing solar that peaks in the mornings and afternoons, which is exactly when power demand is highest. Adding a bit of such solar to nuclear is a no-brainer imo.
And then there's risk management: Nuclear tends to be a few big plants, which is already not great for risk. If you have 99% uptime on both your solar panels and your nuclear plants, in the solar case you can pretty much always expect 98.5% of power to be available, and 98% would be an extreme anomaly, simply due to the sheer number. Nuclear? Well, if the thousands of panels compete with, say, 10 nuclear plants, a single outage would put you at 90%, while a dual outage (which would be somewhat rare but not unheard of) would put you at 80%. That's starting to look bad. Add in that in a country like Sweden, distribution is not exactly trivial, so you can't use a reactor in the south to stabilize the grid in the north, so the pool of reactors you're working with locally is even smaller, making these outages much more risky. That most of the time, all 10 reactors are online doesn't really help, if the rest of the time your grid is close to collapse. Oh, and we haven't talked about correlated risks yet, where one fault (a discovered maintenance problem that exists in all plants, a design flaw, a lack of fuel,...) might lead to multiple shutdowns. (Edit: To clarify, this is talking about technical uptime, not that induced by e.g. sunlight hours. The latter is driving risk for solar/wind, of course, but that's often a very transparent part of the equation, while the uptime risks in nuclear are different and often overlooked)
Going all-in on one tech without reasonable backups means that one tech has to work.
@skyaero and @vektor covered it so well but I just want to add one thing and that's timelines.
Between both big oil and extreme environmentali anti-nuclear rhetoric over the decades considering nuclear there are huge educational hurdles to overcome when it comes to convincing the public at large to build near thier community.
Once you do get approval, which can take years, building the plant and bringing it online takes many years as well. All in it takes like 10 years and that's if you even get shovels in the ground in the first place.
We need to be rapidly decarbonizing our energy right now not 10-20 years from now. And with wind/solar that's possible.
(edit: I see vektor did cover this later in the thread now.)
I don't see why we can't do both? For decades people have been saying we shouldn't invest in nuclear because it takes too long. If we had been this whole time maybe we'd have a bunch of plants coming online now and the race to decarbonise would be much more manageable.
If we start now, then in 10-20 years we'll probably still be having this same tired debate of time to build nuclear Vs renewables. But if we've already built both the debate will be focussed on how much more of each we need to fuel the green hydrogen production and ev recharging demands. Rather than about which option is perfect for phasing out fossil fuels.
That's what I said in my original comment. The path forward is not just Nuclear or, renewables and (clean energy - Nuclear), it's renewables and clean energy.
I think there was a pretty big push to invest in nuclear energy in the last century. 60s to 80s if I'm not wrong, give or take, depending on country. That push has still left us with big problems, and it was very much heavy investment by big industrialized nations.
Compare with renewables, which have seen some nation-level investments here and there in 2000 or so, and 20 years later they're eating nuclear's lunch.
Personally, I think we've given fission power about enough of a fair shake for now. At the same level of investment, I think (hard to compare the investments made) I know which tech gives us more bang for our buck.
Which is what nuclear is exceptionally good at though.
It's endlessly frustrating how nuclear is so disliked as a carbon neutral option for high yield energy, nor does it replace wind or solar, it's an addition to it when wind or solar yields are fewer and inconsistent.
Lol no. If they're planning now, then by 2043, maybe. No one builds a plant in 7 years.
Seems like maybe they are getting faster?
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=215869#
Gut reaction to those numbers: 9 women can create a baby in 1 month. But it seems it's not quite that: Japan and Korea are just a lot faster. France, with tremendous experience under their belt, sit at 10 years, the US even beyond that. That's mostly an outlier though, as the US only recently completed a plant that was started in '73 (Watts Bar). That one though was plagued with among others, financial issues during construction and was not actively being built for most of that time.
Perhaps more comparable is this finnish one which was recently opened 14 years behind schedule.
And in all this we're only talking about construction; not all the boring work that happens beforehand. Planning, design, permitting. One of the reasons your article gives of why Korea is able to do this is prep work. Prep work that needs to be done, whether before or during construction.
Otherwise: I think the general trend is pointing the exact opposite direction: They're getting slower. Because we're not building these in series anymore, each project is also an exercise in building an army of skilled workers, from engineers to welders. Many of the quoted plants from the article are from the absolute beginning of the period considered in the statistics.
Then the fact that they're building 10 would indicate that they'll build that skilled base of workers, right? Unless they're building all 10 at once, they'll not only be building reactors but also building a work force that can do so again.
Actually good point. I missed that connection because my mind was stuck on how someone could say that nuclear isn't sufficient with yields.
So, 6 reactors -> 30%. So, assuming:
Then 16 reactors -> 80% by 2043. Increased wind energy production and other renewable energy sources could then make up the rest to meet the Fit for 55 plan.
So, this sounds superficially sensible.
What's unclear in this article is if it's possible and feasible or not for wind power to get Sweden to meet the Fit for 55 plan in place of nuclear power. edit: If the "only wind power" plan is cheaper and faster to implement, and it's determined to be reliable enough, then the critics would have a good point.
I really wish that news outlets would lay out the facts: "Here's plan A by this side; here's plan B by this side. These are the differences, advantages, and disadvantages."
The issue with wind is that you cannot rely on it for base load. I don’t remember the numbers off hand, but the Finnish fingrid that is in charge of the energy grid considers winds guaranteed production to be around 10% of its rated capacity.
Wind and solar are cool, but they require batteries to provide stable power. If the plan is a 100% renewable grid, the total cost of batteries at today's prices might make nuclear price competitive!
From the article Sweden needs to double electricity production by 2030 in order to meet electrification goals. So I would look at 6 reactors as 15% which makes 16 reactors 40% if all of them have the same output
Why would any nuclear reactors, much less 10 for such a small country be needed?
Wind and photovoltaic are seizing the day.
As the world has seen with Ukraine, having a nuclear reactor can be turned into a threat against you.
Nuclear power plants create such a staggering and consistent amount of energy relative to wind and solar that it's almost not even worth comparing. These plants can also have very long lifespans.
Sweden's dark winters aren't particularly suited to solar power. Wind (especially offshore) is always a good option, but it's not a stable energy source. You can only build hydro dams on so many rivers, and that creates a lot of localized ecological damage. Nuclear is the saving grace of the environmental movement because it can absolutely replace fossil fuels in stability and quantity with relatively few externalities (for various reasons, nuclear waste is not the major problem the media considers it). It also doesn't need massive arrays of battery technology that we cannot reasonably produce.
Realistically I would not be concerned about foreign destruction of a nuclear plant in Sweden. If you're talking about a literal war-bombing, I'm sorry to say that our choice of energy technology is less important than the enemy's choice of bomb technology. Anyway, they'd be better off sabotaging the grid in general.
Most of the fear-mongering over nuclear is based on myths, such as they can explode like an atomic bomb. People often bring up Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. This info is off the top of my head from years of reading about such incidents, but I feel it gets the gist of each situation correct.
-Three-Mile Island was a minor event compared to the other two. No isotope material escaped the plant, and it certainly did not explode. Much of the misinformation seems to come from the event's proximity to the film The China Syndrome as well as a general lack of understanding of nuclear power by the public and groups like Greenpeace. The TMI reactor was an already unsafe and obsolete Gen II design, one that did a poor job communicating vital information to the operators. This lead to a stuck-open valve in the cooling system that caused a partial meltdown by letting coolant escape the reactor.
-Chernobyl was a perfect storm of quite literally everything that could go wrong. Workers from a local coal power plant - untrained in any sort of nuclear plant operation - conducted a dangerous "safety test" that involved disabling every conceivable safety feature on a design known to be extremely flawed even before it was built. The Soviets made the situation worse by initially lying about it, then dragging their feet to do anything or say anything about it until it was impossible to ignore.
-Fukushima was the result of the plant being built in a known tsunami hazard zone, and the backup generators being placed in the basement of each reactor despite warnings they would flood during a tsunami. The switching stations required for these generators were similarly almost entirely unprotected against such an event. Both systems failed almost completely leading to the meltdown.
There's also the Windscale fire in the UK (1957), which similarly was caused by a poorly thought-out design and a general lack of understanding of the harm of radiation at the time, and the Kyshtym disaster in the Soviet Union, caused by extremely poor handling and storage of waste material.
If the plants are built on proper sites, looked after by people who know what they're doing and the designs are sound, there's very little to be worried about. Especially not some random moustache-twirling villain trying to blow them up like it was a James Bond movie.
sigh
No. It was the night shift doing a test they weren't familiar with.
The flaw wasn't known until the plant in Leningrad nearly died in the 70s. But it wasn't fixed because of Soviet ego about their atomgrads.
Did you get that from the HBO show or something? Because it's wrong.
No. I got it from the plethora of books behind me around the Chernobyl disaster, as well as reading Valery Lagasov's transcipts from his final memoires.
To me this seems to argue against nuclear since nuclear is not safe when managed poorly. Over the lifetime of 10 plants it is not a negligible risk that 1 will have some design flaw in combination with poor management at some point in time + bad luck. But, maybe the risk is super small now with more modern reactor designs.
Before making up my mind on if these should be built I'd like to see some estimates on the lifetime CO2 emissions of the plants in comparison with eg wind + batteries. Ten plants is a major investment so I hope someone actually does the math.
There's a reason that nuclear power plant workers are trained a certain way and why newer plant designs are tightened up.
Consistency. Nuclear power is always there when you need it, and you can't be as sure that the wind and sun will be. In the absence of significant advances in stored power technologies, everyone needs something to help balance the power grids' supply to the current demand. At the moment that's often coal plants, as they can be turned on and off. If we don't want coal, nuclear fills that need for adjustable supply.
You can’t be just nuclear either. Energy demand is not even across the day, or the seasons. You need your overall energy mix to be able to cover base load, the change in load during the seasons, as well as be able to handle situations where your biggest power plants suddenly are disconnected from the grid.
Nuclear is good for base load, but if all we had was nuclear, we’d be boiling a lot of water in the summer.
We still need green sources for hydrogen, to power large vehicles. Being able to ramp up electrolysis to consume excess nuclear/wind energy is about the greenest way to do that.
Will hydrogen electrolysis ever be cost effective? You lose a lot of energy in the chemical reactions, storage and transport of hydrogen is also not easy, cheap or safe.
For most trucking I’m sure will be electric, barring perhaps long distance. But even then what may end up happening is cab and driver switches.
The real use for hydrogen won’t be transportation, but as a replacement chemical for numerous different processes (e.g., steel, hydrocarbon production, etc).
That said, we already transport hydrogen and natural gas today, and while there’d be a scale-up learning curve, we would certainly be able to deal with it effectively in the future.
That, and it's also a useful (precursor of) chemical storage to prop up the grid. While converting electricity to H2 and then to NH3 or CH4 is fairly inefficient, those gases are simple to store at ridiculous scale. CH4 can for example be stored, without further investment, in the german natural gas grid, to the tune of 230TWh of energy.* How to convert that into electricity? Well, all those cheap natural gas power plants we already have.
This is expensive to use, but not too expensive to build, and it can store huge amounts of energy.
* Edit: That is almost one month of the total primary energy consumption of 13000PJ per year of Germany. There's a month of storage right there even if we electrified everything.
The high-density hydrogen tanks from Toyota show promise, and frankly existing designs for mass transport of hydrogen are no more dangerous than ones for lithium.
The thing is, for anything larger than a communter vehicle, be it dump truck, mac truck, or construction equipment, electricfication isn't remotely feasible. They take too long to charge, and the weight of the battery required cripples the capability of the vehicle, because it has less weight available for cargo. There are a number of major concerns that are brought up by professionals and ignored by laypeople.
Big vehicles like that will always require combustion, it's the only way to get the neccessary power density (and refuel speed) to be practicle devices. Natural gas and Hydrogen are the two best options, but they must be harvested from green sources to actually help with emissions (decomposition and electrolysis respectively).
Electrolysis is not effective when you're using fossil fuels to do it. It is effective when the power would be going to waste otherwise, like when the grid is overloaded. This happens all the time. It will happen more if our 'big three' are solar, wind, and nuclear. Nuclear power takes quite a long time to scale down compared to most other options. As mentioned in the article, the amount of nuclear power needed to compensate for the dark months in the far north would be going to immense waste in the summer. Using excess power to generate hydrogen from green sources is one of the best options available, in part because you're creating a useful good in the process. One that can easily be transported elsewhere in mass quantity avoiding many complex problems about distributing electricity long distances.