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Sweden All In On Nuclear Energy, Dumps Renewable Target
(greeninvesting.co)
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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Exactly. We need it quickly.
Renewables are here now and can be deployed quickly. Nuclear takes time and is often heavily delayed and over budget.
We need nuclear as well, but we need renewables first, to build capacity as quickly as possible. We need a huge excess of renewable capacity, to account for times when the full capacity isn't available. We shouldn't expect to be using the full capacity at any time.
Once we've phased out fossil fuels, then nuclear will be important. But right now nuclear only serves to sustain our dependency on fossil fuels.
Care to elaborate on this?
The two largest economies with the low reliance on fossil fuels for energy (Sweden & France) get significant portions of their energy production from nuclear power. Iceland relies on geothermal, and the others (Tajikistan, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Norway) have lots of hydro capacity, which are all excellent, but also largely dependent on geography.
I don't have figures to hand, but I'd gladly dig into them with you, if you have suggestions.
Sweden does have some amount of fossil fuel generation. The article claims 3 nuclear plants provide 30% of the country's needs right now, and says the target being set is for 10 new nuclear plants over the next 20 years. In 2045 (~20 years), demand is predicted to be double that of today.
If we assume all current nuclear plants will close and all new plants will be 20% larger, that means these 10 new nuclear plants will fulfill 60% of predicted demand in ~2045. Again, I'm happy to review actual numbers - I imagine most if not all of these 10 plants are at least in early design proposal stages, so there are some actual MW numbers to be crunched.
I think keeping Sweden's nuclear at about 30-40%, while investing more into a large excess of renewables, would allow fossil fuels to be switched off more quickly. This would still mean investment and growth in nuclear, with maybe 5 or 6 plants (if the 3 existing plants have to close), but would get rid of fossil fuels more quickly.
In maybe 10 years' time, with fossil fuels well and truly on their way out, that would be a better time to expand nuclear.
Our world in data has excellent stats on the topic, and I am quite familiar with the electricity production of Sweden (my home country). Excepting 2003 and 2010 (both quite cold winters) the share of electricity from fossil fuel sources has been sub 5% since 1997. Thus, for my own country I tend to look more at the share of all energy that comes from fossil fuels (currently 26%) rather than just electricity, but below is a chart detailing the shares of electricity produced by each category.
As you can see, investments in wind have been massive, adding 30 TWh of production (~15%) since 2010. However, in the meantime, nuclear energy has not only been neglected, but actively dismantled. Since 2010, some 15 TWh of production has been removed from the grid. Whilst this isn't an issue in isolation, import demands for electricity from continental Europe have increased noticeably during the same time period. In 2010, we had net 0 power flow, whilst 2021 saw a net export of ~16TWh (mainly to a country that completely dismantled their fleet of nuclear reactors instead of their coal power plants and shall not be named)
What this means is that in a decade, with a population increase of 10% and a GDP increase of 20%, electricity availability has actually declined, which is becoming a serious problem now that some of the most energy intensive areas of society are starting to electrify in earnest (transports and heavy industries).