30 ms·

The new coalition government has pledged $40B (approximately the market cap of Twitter, heh) in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction. They have also

by tpmx 4y ago

The new coalition government has pledged $40B (approximately the market cap of Twitter, heh) in loan guarantees for nuclear power construction. They have also pledged to create legal guarantees that future politicians will not be able to shut down functioning nuclear power reactors without suitable monetary compensation to the owners/operators of these reactors. In addition to this, they are commissioning an urgent study on how to rebuild Ringhals 1 and 2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringhals_Nuclear_Power_Plant, about 1 GW each), two nuclear reactors that were prematurely decommissioned by the previous social-democratic government and shut down about 20 months ago. Personally I'm really happy; I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. The first reactors built will be modern but traditionally large. From then on: There has been a lot of interest in small modular reactors (SMR) from the political party that is driving all of this, and they actually got the nationally owned energy company Vattenfall to begin building prototypes at Ringhals a few months ago. In summary: Lots of champagne bottles popping tonight in Sweden in the homes of clean nuclear power proponents. We have been waiting for this for a very long time. Cheers!

_Microft 4y ago
Are the economics of nuclear power somehow more favorable in Sweden? That seems to be the major issue elsewhere from what I understand.
- tpmx 4y ago
  No, not really. It makes a lot of sense in all stable countries.
  - markvdb 4y ago
    There is no such thing as a stable country on the time scale required for nuclear energy safety. That requires decades. Humanity cannot provide that. Enerhodar is not the only example. World war two ended roughly 77 year ago. The US civil war was less than 160 years ago.
    - _Microft 4y ago
      Enerhodar is the town in which the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located (only because the name of the town might not be as well known as the name of the power station). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
    - inglor_cz 4y ago
      Maybe the problem is requiring insanely high levels of safety from the nuclear industry, way higher than realistic in the current world that can and does kill people in myriad non-nuclear ways. For example, I am willing to bet that nuclear-related deaths in the Ukrainian war will be a minuscule percentage of the total loss of life caused by said war.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  They aren't better in Sweden. The right's support for it is not really related to the costs. I'm personally curious how it's going to pan out considering the right-wing parties claimed they'd be against state subsidies.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The single most reliable feature of all right-wing parties is that they are against state subsidies unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets. They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
    - ETH_start 4y ago
      "unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets" This is ridiculously biased and not a constructive way to deal with political disagreements. All political factions engage in rampant cronyism. To think it's confined to one faction is unbelievably naive. Where do you think left wing parties receive the bulk of their campaign contributions from? It's members of public sector unions, who receive trillions of dollars in tax dollars every year in Europe.
  - otikik 4y ago
    Look at it this way: The army is publicly supported. Do you think they are against the army? Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.
- aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
  the mayor issue is the coal/gas lobby, just look how europe was lobbed to the point that natural gas is somewhat "green", but nuclear is bad to the point some countries don't even have one nuclear power plant.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    - HyperSane 4y ago
      This is such BS.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        You assert that renewables projects do not start producing power before completion? I can cite hundreds that have done. I have never heard of a single nuke plant that produced before it was completed.
        HyperSane 4y ago
        I was referring to the absurd claim that the oil and coal industry is pro-nuclear. If it wasn't for anti-science "environmentalists" we could have replaced ever single coal and gas power plant with nuclear by now.
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      This is total BS. The fossil fuel industry has been sabotaging nuclear power for 60 years because, untill recently, it was the only threat to their profits. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossil-fuel-fight-against-nuclear-0205171.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossi...
- weberer 4y ago
  Well solar is pretty much useless at these high latitudes. I believe the sun doesn't rise above 7 degrees in the winter in Stockholm. Though Sweden is blessed with mountains, so they can get significant energy from hydro. Here in Finland, Nuclear is the only real answer going forward.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Power generation should be publicly owned, private ownership of such critical resources inevitably creates moral hazard.
- elihu 4y ago
  I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).
  - the-smug-one 4y ago
    If anything's good about renewables is that they can be quite small scaled. I think it's cool that I can be an energy producer just with my roof, plus decentralized generation = better security.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There is plenty more good about renewables. Being the cheapest source of power that has ever existed is good, too.
      - gtvwill 4y ago
        Speed of deployment + complexity (bugger all) + safety of deployment (passive product v product that can root entire ecosystems) + ongoing maintenance means solar>nuclear any day. Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        That depends on which renewable you're talking about.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Wind and solar both. Which of those is cheaper varies with circumstance.
cjblomqvist 4y ago
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.
- tpmx 4y ago
  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.
  - cjblomqvist 4y ago
    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.
  - pokepim 4y ago
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Demonstrably insane? Please be serious. 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.
    - 4y ago
traceelement 4y ago
so they get compensated if they have to close it even so the government payed them to build it. this sound like a bad deal. Tax payers pay for the whole thing and the owner gets even more money if they have to close it for whatever reason. I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors. I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates. Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
  - junofan 4y ago
    Source? Everything I can find counts PPAs which is… kind of a stretch.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      PPAs at inflated prices are absolutely subsidies. They impose inflated costs on users of the power, which is only marginally better than on the body politic at large. Or marginally worse, maybe. Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
  - MisterTea 4y ago
    > coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices. I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
Zigurd 4y ago
The idea of nuclear power is good. The facts of nuclear power are much less good. It is not too much to ask that lifecycle costs and safety get addressed. For example, the French success with nuclear power looks much less successful due to decommissioning costs coming in at a multiple of estimated costs. The French low-balled their estimates, to be a fraction of estimates by Germany and UK. Which estimates do you believe?
- DisjointedHunt 4y ago
  French politicians voted in 2015 to shut off all planned new nuclear investment in favor of transitioning to “renewables” It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
  - the_why_of_y 4y ago
    Perhaps the latest attempt to construct a new nuclear plant in France has something to do with it? Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022. Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues: In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... Perhaps if we account for an additional unexpected half year of delay for every year that passes, we might see it in operation in Spring 2024?
    - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
      Respectfully, it is because of the uncertainty in project approvals and financing to a large part. In 2015, lawmakers made it mandatory to reduce Nuclear energy to 50% of existing installed capacity. So, pretty much all changes of mind post that point mean that previously shelved projects are re planned with FROM scratch with the new market rates.
otikik 4y ago
Congratulations, I hope you guys are able to build them quickly. > I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.
- tpmx 4y ago
  While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh. And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power. PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
    - tpmx 4y ago
      Hello. "Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors." So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world! Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.
OrangeMonkey 4y ago
There exists a group of folks who claim nuclear isn't green and is going to 'kill the planet'. The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale. You are exactly right - this is the only way.
- gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
  - adastra22 4y ago
    Yup.
  - NoraCodes 4y ago
    I don't think that this is the general belief of most anti-nuclear activists, and certainly not most people who don't believe in nuclear as a solution. Many are concerned about waste disposal, accident potential, and proliferation. These are all valid concerns, even though their figures and arguments tend to be out of date.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ncmncm 4y ago
- cycomanic 4y ago
  Funnily the rhetoric of nuclear proponents is always exclusively aimed against renewables not fossil fuels. They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane. Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden
bigbacaloa 4y ago
"clean nuclear power" advocates should be made to visit Fukushima
- hasperdi 4y ago
  Yes, so they can learn what went wrong there and advocate "clean and safe nuclear power"
  - bigbacaloa 4y ago
    Clean and safe doesn't mean infallible. Problem with reactors is the failures are disasters of a very high level. Militarily they are a liability too.
medion 4y ago
Twitter, something so “valuable” which offers virtually nothing of value to humanity. If twitter was turned off there would be some whinging for a week on some other platform and then it would be forgotten…
nickez 4y ago
I'm also a proponent of nuclear, but modern nuclear power plants seem to take 15-20 years to construct and typically go 10s of billions of EUR over budget. So one does not simply "build a reactor".. look at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)
legulere 4y ago
$40bn would be enough for around 40GWh of wind power capacity which is around the same as total generation capacity installed totally in Sweden today. To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.
- AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
  Looking at the ratio between installed capacity and actual output of wind turbines, this seems like a faulty calculation. 40GW of installed wind capacity will get you a small percentage of 40GW of guaranteed output. Roughly as much as you get from the nuke. The surplus (when there is enough wind) has to be either burned off, compensated, or stored. Storage technology is nowhere near the scale that would be needed. Compensation is done typically using natural gas (see Germany). And burning off is what is done before the gas powerstations kick in. Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place. But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
  - legulere 4y ago
    The ratio of installed capacity and actual output is called load factor. It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW. 40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
    - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
      I'm not talking about the average load factor, but the minimum output of the installations. This varies from region to region. At e.g. https://www.smard.de https://www.smard.de you can easily see the range for wind in Germany. The recent data shows such a minimum at the Oct 12 mark. Anything above that needs to be accounted for. You can also very easily see how gas power stations kick in during lulls. Because that is how it is currently accounted for in Germany (plus the aforementioned burning off of excessive energy to deal with short term spikes etc). That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source. A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today. The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.
edpichler 4y ago
I am also happy and optimistic with the news, mate.

by tpmx 4y ago

_Microft 4y ago

Are the economics of nuclear power somehow more favorable in Sweden? That seems to be the major issue elsewhere from what I understand.

tpmx 4y ago
No, not really. It makes a lot of sense in all stable countries.
- markvdb 4y ago
  There is no such thing as a stable country on the time scale required for nuclear energy safety. That requires decades. Humanity cannot provide that. Enerhodar is not the only example. World war two ended roughly 77 year ago. The US civil war was less than 160 years ago.
  - _Microft 4y ago
    Enerhodar is the town in which the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is located (only because the name of the town might not be as well known as the name of the power station). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enerhodar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    Maybe the problem is requiring insanely high levels of safety from the nuclear industry, way higher than realistic in the current world that can and does kill people in myriad non-nuclear ways. For example, I am willing to bet that nuclear-related deaths in the Ukrainian war will be a minuscule percentage of the total loss of life caused by said war.
TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
They aren't better in Sweden. The right's support for it is not really related to the costs. I'm personally curious how it's going to pan out considering the right-wing parties claimed they'd be against state subsidies.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The single most reliable feature of all right-wing parties is that they are against state subsidies unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets. They are singularly skilled at directing subsidies reliably into their own pockets. Nukes and military procurement have worked well for that in past decades.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    "unless the subsidies are directed into their own pockets" This is ridiculously biased and not a constructive way to deal with political disagreements. All political factions engage in rampant cronyism. To think it's confined to one faction is unbelievably naive. Where do you think left wing parties receive the bulk of their campaign contributions from? It's members of public sector unions, who receive trillions of dollars in tax dollars every year in Europe.
- otikik 4y ago
  Look at it this way: The army is publicly supported. Do you think they are against the army? Problem is not public support, it's public support of the things they don't like.
aPoCoMiLogin 4y ago
the mayor issue is the coal/gas lobby, just look how europe was lobbed to the point that natural gas is somewhat "green", but nuclear is bad to the point some countries don't even have one nuclear power plant.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  - HyperSane 4y ago
    This is such BS.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      You assert that renewables projects do not start producing power before completion? I can cite hundreds that have done. I have never heard of a single nuke plant that produced before it was completed.
      - HyperSane 4y ago
        I was referring to the absurd claim that the oil and coal industry is pro-nuclear. If it wasn't for anti-science "environmentalists" we could have replaced ever single coal and gas power plant with nuclear by now.
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    This is total BS. The fossil fuel industry has been sabotaging nuclear power for 60 years because, untill recently, it was the only threat to their profits. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossil-fuel-fight-against-nuclear-0205171.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/V-Gloves-are-off-in-fossi...
weberer 4y ago
Well solar is pretty much useless at these high latitudes. I believe the sun doesn't rise above 7 degrees in the winter in Stockholm. Though Sweden is blessed with mountains, so they can get significant energy from hydro. Here in Finland, Nuclear is the only real answer going forward.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Power generation should be publicly owned, private ownership of such critical resources inevitably creates moral hazard.

elihu 4y ago
I think it's fine if governments pay for and operate power generation facilities, but at the same time I don't think private companies should be prohibited from building power generation facilities if they want to and they think they can do it better (provided they have to pay for externalities).
- the-smug-one 4y ago
  If anything's good about renewables is that they can be quite small scaled. I think it's cool that I can be an energy producer just with my roof, plus decentralized generation = better security.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is plenty more good about renewables. Being the cheapest source of power that has ever existed is good, too.
    - gtvwill 4y ago
      Speed of deployment + complexity (bugger all) + safety of deployment (passive product v product that can root entire ecosystems) + ongoing maintenance means solar>nuclear any day. Nuclear is over priced, high risk centralised power. Yuck.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      That depends on which renewable you're talking about.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Wind and solar both. Which of those is cheaper varies with circumstance.

cjblomqvist 4y ago

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.

tpmx 4y ago
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.
- cjblomqvist 4y ago
  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.
- pokepim 4y ago
- geysersam 4y ago
  Demonstrably insane? Please be serious. 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.
  - 4y ago

traceelement 4y ago

so they get compensated if they have to close it even so the government payed them to build it. this sound like a bad deal. Tax payers pay for the whole thing and the owner gets even more money if they have to close it for whatever reason. I don't think coal is the answer but germany didn't do enough for renewables during the last 10 years when we knew we would shut down the nuclear plants. So now evrybody uses bad management as pro for nuclear reactors. I think the reasons to shut it down are always overlooked and only the pros of nuclear energy are considered in those arguments.

ncmncm 4y ago
No civil nuke plant has ever been operated, anywhere in the world, without massive government subsidies, or by coercing ratepayers to pay well above market rates. Looks like the Swedish public will be on the hook for subsidies for decades more while the rest of Europe (France and Romania perhaps excepted) coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices.
- junofan 4y ago
  Source? Everything I can find counts PPAs which is… kind of a stretch.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    PPAs at inflated prices are absolutely subsidies. They impose inflated costs on users of the power, which is only marginally better than on the body politic at large. Or marginally worse, maybe. Much of the subsidies are the public picking up the tab for disaster insurance the operator is protected against needing to pay for. Of course no actual insurance company could afford to underwrite such a policy.
- MisterTea 4y ago
  > coasts on renewables at ever plunging prices. I hope they can coast through the winter using those renewables.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago

Zigurd 4y ago

The idea of nuclear power is good. The facts of nuclear power are much less good. It is not too much to ask that lifecycle costs and safety get addressed. For example, the French success with nuclear power looks much less successful due to decommissioning costs coming in at a multiple of estimated costs. The French low-balled their estimates, to be a fraction of estimates by Germany and UK. Which estimates do you believe?

DisjointedHunt 4y ago
French politicians voted in 2015 to shut off all planned new nuclear investment in favor of transitioning to “renewables” It was political incompetence that led to the French plants needing to have their lives extended MUCH BEYOND their expected lifetimes.
- the_why_of_y 4y ago
  Perhaps the latest attempt to construct a new nuclear plant in France has something to do with it? Construction on a new reactor, Flamanville 3, began on 4 December 2007.[4] The new unit is an Areva European Pressurized Reactor type and is planned to have a nameplate capacity of 1,650 MWe. EDF estimated the cost at €3.3 billion[4] and stated it would start commercial operations in 2012, after construction lasting 54 months.[5] The latest cost estimate (July 2020) is at €19.1 billion, with commissioning planned tentatively at the end of 2022. Oh wait, that was what Wikipedia said a year ago! Now it continues: In January 2022, more delays were announced, with fuel loading continuing until mid-2023.[4][5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan... Perhaps if we account for an additional unexpected half year of delay for every year that passes, we might see it in operation in Spring 2024?
  - DisjointedHunt 4y ago
    Respectfully, it is because of the uncertainty in project approvals and financing to a large part. In 2015, lawmakers made it mandatory to reduce Nuclear energy to 50% of existing installed capacity. So, pretty much all changes of mind post that point mean that previously shelved projects are re planned with FROM scratch with the new market rates.

otikik 4y ago

Congratulations, I hope you guys are able to build them quickly. > I think massive expansion of nuclear power is the only realistic way to fix climate change. While I agree on the overall direction of this sentiment I think nuclear cannot be "the" only way but "one amongst many" ways.

tpmx 4y ago
While wind and solar will help, nuclear is really the dominant part of the solution, because of it's ability to work independent of local weather.
- Retric 4y ago
  Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors. Running a nuclear power plant with a 40% capacity factor more than doubles the cost per kWh. You can look at Frances ~70% average Capacity factor in 2 ways either it’s a ~30% cost premium over most of the rest of the world on every power plant. Or more realistically ~40% of generation was at the normal ~92% CF, and every plant after that was at lower capacity factors until the final power plant was costing ~3X as much per kWh. And that’s with them having largely non nuclear countries to export power to on nights and weekends. The economics look even worse if every country try’s to scale nuclear power. PS: I respect Frances investment in subsidizing nuclear power, but it’s important to understand the underlying economics if you want to scale nuclear power. The best option for a cheap nuclear grid is massive amounts of cheap storage.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    Hello. "Nuclear has always had massive scaling issues because leaving base load power generation means ever lower capacity factors." So Swedish electricity generation used to be about 50% hydro and 50% nuclear. It worked really well for decades and made/kept us rich, despite our high salary costs due to the welfare state. Our industries had the benefits of very cheap and clean energy. The envy of the world! Then our stupid politicans shut down half of the nuclear capacity and tried to replace with wind. I honestly think that the root cause is that the individuals responsible for this did not understand the difference between power and energy. It obviously didn't work.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago

There exists a group of folks who claim nuclear isn't green and is going to 'kill the planet'. The alternative to nuclear is to either use fuels with a massive carbon footprint, or introduce a level of energy suffering on the population that is beyond the pale. You are exactly right - this is the only way.

gadflyinyoureye 4y ago
- adastra22 4y ago
  Yup.
- NoraCodes 4y ago
  I don't think that this is the general belief of most anti-nuclear activists, and certainly not most people who don't believe in nuclear as a solution. Many are concerned about waste disposal, accident potential, and proliferation. These are all valid concerns, even though their figures and arguments tend to be out of date.
- ncmncm 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 4y ago
cycomanic 4y ago
Funnily the rhetoric of nuclear proponents is always exclusively aimed against renewables not fossil fuels. They know if not for ideological/political reasons/influence no nuclear plants will be build because it is just too expensive. If I can build double (now, the difference is rapidly increasing) the capacity using wind or solar why should I build nuclear? People who propose to do otherwise are the ones who are insane. Just look at wind power in Sweden they only really invested in wind in the last 3 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Sweden

bigbacaloa 4y ago

"clean nuclear power" advocates should be made to visit Fukushima

hasperdi 4y ago
Yes, so they can learn what went wrong there and advocate "clean and safe nuclear power"
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
  Clean and safe doesn't mean infallible. Problem with reactors is the failures are disasters of a very high level. Militarily they are a liability too.

medion 4y ago

Twitter, something so “valuable” which offers virtually nothing of value to humanity. If twitter was turned off there would be some whinging for a week on some other platform and then it would be forgotten…

nickez 4y ago

I'm also a proponent of nuclear, but modern nuclear power plants seem to take 15-20 years to construct and typically go 10s of billions of EUR over budget. So one does not simply "build a reactor".. look at Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, Flamanville 3 in France and Hinkley Point C in UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(nuclear_reactor)

legulere 4y ago

$40bn would be enough for around 40GWh of wind power capacity which is around the same as total generation capacity installed totally in Sweden today. To me nuclear seems like a giant waste of money.

AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
Looking at the ratio between installed capacity and actual output of wind turbines, this seems like a faulty calculation. 40GW of installed wind capacity will get you a small percentage of 40GW of guaranteed output. Roughly as much as you get from the nuke. The surplus (when there is enough wind) has to be either burned off, compensated, or stored. Storage technology is nowhere near the scale that would be needed. Compensation is done typically using natural gas (see Germany). And burning off is what is done before the gas powerstations kick in. Personally, I would like people to just build wind capacity first and burn the surplus off if need be, until we have the storage in place. But calculations that rely on the assumption that installed wind capacity is somehow equivalent to the installed capacity of more reliable sources, doesn't help planning for the future.
- legulere 4y ago
  The ratio of installed capacity and actual output is called load factor. It’s typically 30% for wind power. That’s still 12GW. 40 billion should be enough for one Hinkley point C type reactor, having 3 GW capacity. Mind you that especially one nuclear reactor is not reliable either having to shut down for maintenance. France for example only gets a load factor of 77% out of their nuclear reactors.
  - AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
    I'm not talking about the average load factor, but the minimum output of the installations. This varies from region to region. At e.g. https://www.smard.de https://www.smard.de you can easily see the range for wind in Germany. The recent data shows such a minimum at the Oct 12 mark. Anything above that needs to be accounted for. You can also very easily see how gas power stations kick in during lulls. Because that is how it is currently accounted for in Germany (plus the aforementioned burning off of excessive energy to deal with short term spikes etc). That minimum is, at least for Germany, nowhere near 30% of installed capacity. It's just a few percent. And that's how 40GW are in reality just about one or two GW of guaranteed power. The rest will get burned off or you need a very flexible alternative energy source. A year ago I would have said that to be gas. Seemed like a good fit for wind. Had Germany converted all its coal and nuclear plants to wind/solar + gas, however, the current situation would be more dire than it already is today. The most reliable way seems to be to accompany wind with storage. A lot of storage. But that's a long term solution. Short to mid term you need alternative reliable sources. If you don't want to go with coal, nuclear is the only remaining option. So I can't blame the Swedes for going that way.

edpichler 4y ago

I am also happy and optimistic with the news, mate.