this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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It's a waste spending time and money on nuclear today. Building a nuclear plant takes a decade and costs more than renewables. Better to go all in on renewable sources, especially wind and solar power.
Sweden, like many other countries, already experience a huge interest in, and investments and production of renewables. Why not build on that? It's less expensive, has faster time to market, and results in a more resilient power grid when large single points of failure can be avoided.
What is sorely needed in Sweden is making it easier to getting approval for building wind turbines, especially at sea where noise and light pollution is a non-issue, and power grid improvements to support distribution from these new production sites. One area where government support could be really useful is investing in large scale energy storage to be able to deal with peak load.
The power grid and stockage capacity aren't quite ready yet for 100% renewable. There's already a 5 year backlog (and growing) to connect new renewable projects and it's only going to get harder to manage as share of intermittent renewable increase.
Baseload power will be needed for a long time to complement intermittent renewable, better nuclear than coal and gas.
We need to go 0 carbon yesterday. If you can assure me that in the 12 years it'll take to build a nuclear plant we can have built an equal GW-amount of stable renewables that can serve the same area with the same 100% uptime, sure. But every moment we rely on any amount of oil/gas/coal to cover the renewable gaps is another moment we won't get back in the fight against effectively permanent climate change.
Just like with literally everything else involved in the climate change equation, we needed to have been phasing out oil/gas/coal for nuclear 10-15 years ago. But because we dragged our feet and listened to the pleasing lies from the fossil fuel industry, we're fucked now. We're just fucked. Our kids are fucked, our grandkids are fucked, but maybe we have a chance to un-fuck the future for our great-grandkids, but only if we stop dicking around and actually DO SOMETHING EFFECTIVE. Like ditch all the fossil fuel plants right the fuck now. Can renewables completely replace all the fossil fuel plants? No? Then we need fucking nuclear.
So how does it go in that equation, that you need to wait for 12 years until you have the nuclear plant built, with having 0 fossil energy replaced until then?
In the meantime you can scale Solar and Wind, where you continously can build it up. Also at much smaller costs, so you can build three times the raw power, that you could with the nuclear plant. Also you create an incentive, to not just think in terms of creating a supply that meets the demand, but also to adjust the demand to the supply, which is perfectly possible and a hardly tapped potential. Mostly because it requires the demand side to stop being comfy and actually improve their energy usage.
I agree, that we need to be effective. And it is more effective to have replaced much more energy supply in a shorter timeframe, while also getting the demand to adjust, than to wait around for 12 years, until then being able to replace the equivalent in oil or coal plants.
I agree that the world need to go greed several years ago, we are past of no return and are just breaking before the crash, now it's only how hard we will hit the bricks.
But Sweden is a tiny county compared to other countries and ain't the problem when it comes to the climate change, sure everyone should draw their straw to the ant hill, but prolonging 12y in Sweden isn't the problem, it's the bigger counties that need the big changes..