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Sweden’s parliament has voted to change its 100% renewable target to a 100% fossil-free target, leaving the door open for nuclear.
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The big problem with nuclear power (other than the disposal of nuclear waste) is the time and money it takes to build the damn reactors. Even if they decided to build one right now it would still be decade or more before they were producing power (taking into account the planing and approval process). In that time you could have constructed several alternative energy farms, battery storage and distribution infrastructure. In addition, several generations of solar, wind and storage technology will have occurred potentially making nuclear power even more unattractive.
Sweden has several power plants that are not running because the previous government tried 100% renewable energy and failed and ended up having to buy electricity from Eastern Europe to supply the country’s needs several years in a row. The electricity purchased was from coal, far worse for the environment than nuclear.
You can’t turn off reactors in a country before your production of renewable energy is sufficient for the country’s needs, but this is what has happened in Sweden looking back four years or so, and with every reactor shutdown more electricity from abroad has been required.
The current government is not talking about building new reactors, they are planning on opening up the reactors that the previous one closed down to make way for what they (previous government) failed to provide its citizens. Closing down before building is NOT the way to go.
I don’t think any of these statements are true, in particular the “failure” and import needs you mention. Sweden has been a net exporter for most of the past years and 2022 they exported most energy of everyone in the EU: Sweden remains Europe’s largest net power exporter.
And the current Swedish government are absolutely talking about new reactors:
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson (M) and the Minister for Civil Defence, Carl-Oskar Bohlin (M), promise that new nuclear power will begin to be built in Sweden before 2026.
Source: Ministrar: Påbörjar ny kärnkraft före 2026.
They also seem to be abandoning their previously communicated plans of opening old ones:
The Tidö agreement promises an investigation to review the possibilities for restarting the Ringhals 1 and 2 reactors.
But an internal memorandum written by SD’s top official in the steering group for Vattenfall testifies that KD refuses.
SD can drop the demand to restart one reactor - the party leadership is now being asked to act to save the other.
Source: Tidö-partier i strid om Ringhals – Ebba Busch vägrar återstart (KD and Busch hold the Minister of Energy, Business, and Industry position)
I admit I may be wrong regarding the plans of opening new reactors, but saying that Sweden is sufficient with its own energy production throughout the whole year and to not call the move to close down the reactors we had running a failure is just sticking ones head in the sand.
Sweden does indeed produce and export a lot of electricity, that is not a lie, but when the cold harsh winters roll around and our own usage skyrockets we don’t produce enough to even fulfill our own needs. Knocked out over a full year we produce more than we import, 25TWh net according to Vattenfall.
BUT:
En elimport som ungefär motsvarar vad tre kärnkraftsreaktorer hade producerat under en timme om de var i full drift. Så stort var behovet från utlandet när efterfrågan på el var som störst den gångna vintern, enligt Svenska kraftnät. Hade inte svenskarna dragit ner på förbrukningen hade det kunnat bli kritiskt. TT/Ny teknik https://www.nyteknik.se
Rekordstor import och sparande räddade svenskarna från elkris
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Indeed it does but before you shut reactors down you need to have enough clean energy supply so you don’t face black outs every winter.
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Sweden tried and failed running 100% renewable energy and ended up threatening blackouts the last few winters, asking people not to hoover and to stop wasting electricity. In the end fossil energy from Germany and Eastern Europe was bought.
At the current rate we’re not leaving our future generations much either, and as it stands Sweden can’t produce 100% renewable energy which is a problem we need to solve before we shut down the Swedish power plants. Nuclear might not be the best alternative, but it’s way better than fossil.
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Nuclear waste remains a problem largely for political reasons. The engineers know how to deal with it: You can burn it to make more power. Fully burned nuclear fuel stays dangerously radioactive for a couple hundred years. It’s no harder to deal with than any other moderately obnoxious industrial waste.
One of the ways the anti-nuclear movement really screwed us was by freezing most nuclear technology development in the 1980’s. The so called Gen IV Reactor designs are mostly design ideas that had been proposed by 1990 and some still haven’t even had a demonstration plant built even though most of them largely avoid both the major safety and waste issues that are the major complaints against nuclear.
Good. Hopefully nuclear fission will buy us enough time to get nuclear fusion working and energy will be a problem of the past.
We have several private companies pursuing fusion now (such as Tokamak Energy) so hopefully one of them will pull a SpaceX and break the stagnation. STEP and ITER look promising in any case.
