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I don't understand how starting to build nuclear reactors at this point in time makes sense when it takes over 10 years for them to become productive and they a

I don't understand how starting to build nuclear reactors at this point in time makes sense when it takes over 10 years for them to become productive and they are now already more expensive energy sources when compared to solar and wind.

axlee 3y ago
On which planet is nuclear more expensive than the ones you mentioned?
jayski 3y ago
energy storage technology is still lacking. which means we burn coal or gas when the sun isn't shining.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Sweden with Norway should have enough hydro capacity, but it is not where demand is. So building nuclear plants in south where the demand is make lot of sense.
favorited 3y ago
The best time to build new nuclear plants was 10 years ago, the 2nd best time is today.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  40 years ago, but yes. If we hadn't stopped building 40 years ago the USA wouldn't be 1/5 nuclear, we'd be 5/5 nuclear.
  - fhub 3y ago
    Three Mile Island nuclear accident -> regulatory changes + drop in public confidence -> funding problems -> project delays and cancellations -> funding problems
    - augustulus 3y ago
      or alternatively 40ish years ago was when the capital-holders really got their claws back into Western governments. nuclear being broadly a public endeavour, it didn’t really have a chance
jen729w 3y ago
Base load. Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point. The grid is really delicate. You need just the right amount of power to keep it at 50Hz. Too little, brownouts. Too much, overload. So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. :-) Almost more important than the power generation in many countries these days is the grid. With no grid, or a poor grid, or a grid that can’t store energy, you can build all the wind you want: but you can’t bring it online. > The median approval time to connect to the grid for a new US power project has climbed by 30-days/year since 2001; and has doubled since 2015, to over 1,000 days (almost 3-years) in 2021. Wind and solar projects are now taking longest to inter-connect, due to their prevalence, lower power quality and remoteness. https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-time-to-connect-to-the-grid/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-... > Around £200bn of renewables projects are facing waiting times of 15 years to come online, jeopardising plans to create a net-zero power grid by 2035. https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-risks-derailing-net-zero-power-grid-vision/ https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-r... > They have expressed concerns that wait times of up to 15 years have made it difficult to attract investment as the UK competes with the $369bn (£295bn) US package of climate subsidies. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connection-delays-low-carbon-projects-ofgem-energy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connec...
- shinryuu 3y ago
  Sweden has a large amount of hydropower as baseload though.
  - samuell 3y ago
    The hydro power is located in the far north(west), meaning that there is a bottle-neck in the hundreds to thousands of km of transport lines needed to bring it to the big cities in the south. The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas. It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.
jksk61 3y ago
I don't understand why investing money in something that it is reliable and not requiring major reworks on the electric grid would be beneficial, incredible! I am more baffled than you. also, in case you didn't know sweden doesn't have a huge amount of sun (especially in winter), wind is more affordable but you can't rely on a unique energy source.
- SiempreViernes 3y ago
  The biggest source of power is hydro, and there are still some large unexploited rivers left. The best reason to build nuclear is you can keep neglecting the interconnects between north and south.
rbjorklin 3y ago
Due to being close to one of the poles it makes it so that the energy requirements are at its highest when solar produces the least. It is rare but not unheard of to have 0 hours of sun in December[1]. 1. Article is in Swedish: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/morkaste-manaden-i-mannaminne-ingen-soltid/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/morkaste-manaden-i-mannamin...
- Jolter 3y ago
  Luckily, solar panels will still produce electricity on cloudy days!
  - rbjorklin 3y ago
    While that’s true the article mentions that the definition of “hours with sunlight” they are using is when more than 120w per m2 hits the earth. Around where I grew up the sun would rise around 10AM and then set around 2PM. Not nearly enough to meet power demands.
olddustytrail 3y ago
Two reasons. Firstly, nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons. Secondly, because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends".
- doikor 3y ago
  > because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends". And yet Sweden is not giving any subsidies (at least for now) and thus no new plants have actually been seriously planned. The change here (going from 100% green to 100% fossil free) just means giving nuclear power access to the same subsidies green energy is receiving now with the important one being the government being a guarantor for some of the loans (25 billion SEK for this year). It remains to be seen if this is enough to actually get new projects going (probably not). > nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons. Sweden abandoned its (secret) nuclear weapons program in 1972 without managing to build a single weapon and it is very unlikely that they would be trying to get one now.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    Ah, in that case it probably won't go ahead. Nuclear is just too risky an investment for pretty much anyone unless you have government guarantees. With regard to nuclear weapons: most of what the UK produced actually went to the USA rather than its own program. Did Sweden do that, or is that still classified?
    - doikor 3y ago
      Sweden wasn’t (and still isn’t) part of NATO so they were making their own bomb for real. Basically to the point that they had all the parts needed to assemble one and just needed a law change/approval the government to finish it (would have taken ~6 months of work) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_prog...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
imachine1980_ 3y ago
wind and solar are geography locked, i don't think solar is efficient in winter of Sweden , also isn't as cheap if you sume the 9x battery storage that you need to be sure that you have enough energy, is harder to manage distributed energy pipeline, that why you make mix of mostly wind and solar and base of nuclear, if you want to go green.
sva_ 3y ago
Solar is only one big volcano eruption away from potentially producing almost no energy for possibly months at a time[0]. It is good to diversify the energy mix, and nuclear is very robust. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Jolter 3y ago
  Meanwhile, Swedish nuclear plants seem to average at least one emergency stoppage per annum recently. If only it was 200 years between those!
  - alexanderchr 3y ago
    At least they don't all stop working at the same time.
MattGaiser 3y ago
Renewables have a ton of headwinds, from crippling labour shortages to needing to fight local opposition everywhere (as opposed to just in one place) to the simple fact that Conservatives have built brands on hating renewables. People who hate the government have been successfully convinced to hate the one form of electricity that doesn't need the government. That is a hard thing to get through.
akokanka 3y ago
Just a cover up to build more nuclear warheads. They are much needed to nuke Russia and China.
- Moldoteck 3y ago
  Nato already has enough of them, no? At this point increasing capacity means nothing
durandal1 3y ago
If there was a solar/wind requirement that operators had to purchase the equivalent production to cover base load when not producing power, solar/wind wouldn't be nearly as cheap.
Moldoteck 3y ago
Imo it's a good bet for Sweden. They don't get as much sun as other countries. Providing the same energy as nuclear in a stable maner (when I say stable I mean more that 3-4hrs of backup from batteries) is hard with solar, wind sounds better but has downsides too. And also, why not both? Sweden is already among top cleanest energy countries. They can afford to make longterm bets in reliable nuclear energy. They already afaik almost finished their storage site. Maybe building more nuclear will make further building cheaper by growing expertise in this field, anyway, thing is, they can afford to think long term, it's up to other countries to decarbonize, like, say, Germany that refused to keep their nuclear on to make transition smoother and are bashing on France bc they have too cheap nuclear energy
veqq 3y ago
Nuclear's cost drivers are entirely regulatory.
- nvy 3y ago
  For mostly good reasons, though. Safety systems are a cost center, but they'd have prevented Chernobyl.
  - veqq 3y ago
    It would be beautiful if these costs led to safety and were justified. Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist. In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
    - CRConrad 3y ago
      > In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year). And which they had bumped up a few years earlier so as to make -- claim it was, and apparently succeeding at fooling far too many people -- nuclear power "not financially feasible": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272
swatcoder 3y ago
Well, if post-Cold War globalized trade looks more like it might be regressing to a more fractured and unstable landscape, it would make sense to maximize one’s own readiness and make robust, safe investments that were previously hoped to be unnecessary. In that context, spinning up local (and tightly allied) nuclear power might make more sense than it did in an idealized globalist world where you could trust that your investment in some North African solar array was less likely to be disrupted by some political realignment or exploited leverage.
0xDEF 3y ago
>solar and wind I keep seeing these two mixed together and it's unfair to wind. Wind has proven itself and entire European countries have been able to run days on wind energy. With HVDC and energy storage wind alone could potentially cover more than half of our energy need. Has solar shown the same potential?
bvirb 3y ago
I think someone mentions this every time nuclear power comes up. It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy production. Nuclear still seems like it could be a reasonable/viable/necessary option for decarbonized energy production. The realistic worst case is that we waste some money building nuclear power plants that operate at a loss and are potentially decommissioned early. Assuming we collectively have enough money to also keep building wind/solar/etc (it seems like we do!), and the risk of failing to decarbonize remains catastrophic, it's probably a good idea to hedge our bets and try all the viable options. My guess is that we build a few crappy nuclear power plants with poor economics, learn some really useful things in the process, and then build some better ones with much more favorable economics.

axlee 3y ago

On which planet is nuclear more expensive than the ones you mentioned?

jayski 3y ago

energy storage technology is still lacking. which means we burn coal or gas when the sun isn't shining.

Ekaros 3y ago
Sweden with Norway should have enough hydro capacity, but it is not where demand is. So building nuclear plants in south where the demand is make lot of sense.

favorited 3y ago

The best time to build new nuclear plants was 10 years ago, the 2nd best time is today.

jjoonathan 3y ago
40 years ago, but yes. If we hadn't stopped building 40 years ago the USA wouldn't be 1/5 nuclear, we'd be 5/5 nuclear.
- fhub 3y ago
  Three Mile Island nuclear accident -> regulatory changes + drop in public confidence -> funding problems -> project delays and cancellations -> funding problems
  - augustulus 3y ago
    or alternatively 40ish years ago was when the capital-holders really got their claws back into Western governments. nuclear being broadly a public endeavour, it didn’t really have a chance

jen729w 3y ago

Base load. Wind and solar are terrific but unreliable. What if it’s not windy or sunny? So we need something to replace coal, which provides the grid’s base load. That thing can basically only be nuclear at this point. The grid is really delicate. You need just the right amount of power to keep it at 50Hz. Too little, brownouts. Too much, overload. So you need a really really stable base load, and one that you can turn up a little and down a little whenever you want: to account for the wildly varying input from wind and solar. :-) Almost more important than the power generation in many countries these days is the grid. With no grid, or a poor grid, or a grid that can’t store energy, you can build all the wind you want: but you can’t bring it online. > The median approval time to connect to the grid for a new US power project has climbed by 30-days/year since 2001; and has doubled since 2015, to over 1,000 days (almost 3-years) in 2021. Wind and solar projects are now taking longest to inter-connect, due to their prevalence, lower power quality and remoteness. https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-time-to-connect-to-the-grid/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/renewables-how-much-... > Around £200bn of renewables projects are facing waiting times of 15 years to come online, jeopardising plans to create a net-zero power grid by 2035. https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-risks-derailing-net-zero-power-grid-vision/ https://www.edie.net/waiting-times-for-renewables-projects-r... > They have expressed concerns that wait times of up to 15 years have made it difficult to attract investment as the UK competes with the $369bn (£295bn) US package of climate subsidies. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connection-delays-low-carbon-projects-ofgem-energy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/16/grid-connec...

shinryuu 3y ago
Sweden has a large amount of hydropower as baseload though.
- samuell 3y ago
  The hydro power is located in the far north(west), meaning that there is a bottle-neck in the hundreds to thousands of km of transport lines needed to bring it to the big cities in the south. The capacity of these lines is simply not enough to supply the cities in the south with only hydro power base load, which is why Sweden had the four major nuclear power stations built in the south, in the vicinity of major urban areas. It was a really well thought out system, that has been degrading over the last years for political reasons.

jksk61 3y ago

I don't understand why investing money in something that it is reliable and not requiring major reworks on the electric grid would be beneficial, incredible! I am more baffled than you. also, in case you didn't know sweden doesn't have a huge amount of sun (especially in winter), wind is more affordable but you can't rely on a unique energy source.

SiempreViernes 3y ago
The biggest source of power is hydro, and there are still some large unexploited rivers left. The best reason to build nuclear is you can keep neglecting the interconnects between north and south.

rbjorklin 3y ago

Due to being close to one of the poles it makes it so that the energy requirements are at its highest when solar produces the least. It is rare but not unheard of to have 0 hours of sun in December[1]. 1. Article is in Swedish: https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/morkaste-manaden-i-mannaminne-ingen-soltid/ https://www.expressen.se/nyheter/morkaste-manaden-i-mannamin...

Jolter 3y ago
Luckily, solar panels will still produce electricity on cloudy days!
- rbjorklin 3y ago
  While that’s true the article mentions that the definition of “hours with sunlight” they are using is when more than 120w per m2 hits the earth. Around where I grew up the sun would rise around 10AM and then set around 2PM. Not nearly enough to meet power demands.

olddustytrail 3y ago

Two reasons. Firstly, nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons. Secondly, because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends".

doikor 3y ago
> because they're hugely expensive, they always require massive government subsidies, so are a convenient way to pipe taxpayer money to "useful friends". And yet Sweden is not giving any subsidies (at least for now) and thus no new plants have actually been seriously planned. The change here (going from 100% green to 100% fossil free) just means giving nuclear power access to the same subsidies green energy is receiving now with the important one being the government being a guarantor for some of the loans (25 billion SEK for this year). It remains to be seen if this is enough to actually get new projects going (probably not). > nuclear power stations are a convenient way to produce material for nuclear weapons. Sweden abandoned its (secret) nuclear weapons program in 1972 without managing to build a single weapon and it is very unlikely that they would be trying to get one now.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  Ah, in that case it probably won't go ahead. Nuclear is just too risky an investment for pretty much anyone unless you have government guarantees. With regard to nuclear weapons: most of what the UK produced actually went to the USA rather than its own program. Did Sweden do that, or is that still classified?
  - doikor 3y ago
    Sweden wasn’t (and still isn’t) part of NATO so they were making their own bomb for real. Basically to the point that they had all the parts needed to assemble one and just needed a law change/approval the government to finish it (would have taken ~6 months of work) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_program https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_prog...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

imachine1980_ 3y ago

wind and solar are geography locked, i don't think solar is efficient in winter of Sweden , also isn't as cheap if you sume the 9x battery storage that you need to be sure that you have enough energy, is harder to manage distributed energy pipeline, that why you make mix of mostly wind and solar and base of nuclear, if you want to go green.

sva_ 3y ago

Solar is only one big volcano eruption away from potentially producing almost no energy for possibly months at a time[0]. It is good to diversify the energy mix, and nuclear is very robust. 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Jolter 3y ago
Meanwhile, Swedish nuclear plants seem to average at least one emergency stoppage per annum recently. If only it was 200 years between those!
- alexanderchr 3y ago
  At least they don't all stop working at the same time.

MattGaiser 3y ago

Renewables have a ton of headwinds, from crippling labour shortages to needing to fight local opposition everywhere (as opposed to just in one place) to the simple fact that Conservatives have built brands on hating renewables. People who hate the government have been successfully convinced to hate the one form of electricity that doesn't need the government. That is a hard thing to get through.

akokanka 3y ago

Just a cover up to build more nuclear warheads. They are much needed to nuke Russia and China.

Moldoteck 3y ago
Nato already has enough of them, no? At this point increasing capacity means nothing

durandal1 3y ago

If there was a solar/wind requirement that operators had to purchase the equivalent production to cover base load when not producing power, solar/wind wouldn't be nearly as cheap.

Moldoteck 3y ago

Imo it's a good bet for Sweden. They don't get as much sun as other countries. Providing the same energy as nuclear in a stable maner (when I say stable I mean more that 3-4hrs of backup from batteries) is hard with solar, wind sounds better but has downsides too. And also, why not both? Sweden is already among top cleanest energy countries. They can afford to make longterm bets in reliable nuclear energy. They already afaik almost finished their storage site. Maybe building more nuclear will make further building cheaper by growing expertise in this field, anyway, thing is, they can afford to think long term, it's up to other countries to decarbonize, like, say, Germany that refused to keep their nuclear on to make transition smoother and are bashing on France bc they have too cheap nuclear energy

veqq 3y ago

Nuclear's cost drivers are entirely regulatory.

nvy 3y ago
For mostly good reasons, though. Safety systems are a cost center, but they'd have prevented Chernobyl.
- veqq 3y ago
  It would be beautiful if these costs led to safety and were justified. Unfortunately that's nowhere close to the truth. If you look into it, you'll notice that you e.g. can't reuse a reactor design (after being safety certified) but must recertify the same design each time. Upgrades also require recertifying all parts. (You can also pause the certification process in certain geographies by suing for different types of environmental surveys, causing a new certification to start as the old one timed out.) As a result, we are all running old designs when far safer ones exist. In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year).
  - CRConrad 3y ago
    > In Sweden's case, in 2017 they at least stopped a special tax only on nuclear (which raised about 400 million euro equivalent/year). And which they had bumped up a few years earlier so as to make -- claim it was, and apparently succeeding at fooling far too many people -- nuclear power "not financially feasible": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38295272

swatcoder 3y ago

Well, if post-Cold War globalized trade looks more like it might be regressing to a more fractured and unstable landscape, it would make sense to maximize one’s own readiness and make robust, safe investments that were previously hoped to be unnecessary. In that context, spinning up local (and tightly allied) nuclear power might make more sense than it did in an idealized globalist world where you could trust that your investment in some North African solar array was less likely to be disrupted by some political realignment or exploited leverage.

0xDEF 3y ago

>solar and wind I keep seeing these two mixed together and it's unfair to wind. Wind has proven itself and entire European countries have been able to run days on wind energy. With HVDC and energy storage wind alone could potentially cover more than half of our energy need. Has solar shown the same potential?

bvirb 3y ago

I think someone mentions this every time nuclear power comes up. It seems to me nobody is completely sure what the future will hold yet, except that we need to decarbonize energy production. Nuclear still seems like it could be a reasonable/viable/necessary option for decarbonized energy production. The realistic worst case is that we waste some money building nuclear power plants that operate at a loss and are potentially decommissioned early. Assuming we collectively have enough money to also keep building wind/solar/etc (it seems like we do!), and the risk of failing to decarbonize remains catastrophic, it's probably a good idea to hedge our bets and try all the viable options. My guess is that we build a few crappy nuclear power plants with poor economics, learn some really useful things in the process, and then build some better ones with much more favorable economics.