When the said plant project started over 10 years ago, I was an opponent of nuclear power, participating in demonstrations etc. Nowadays I'm really thankful for the new plant, as every non-fossil energy source is absolutely crucial, not to mention my electricity bill. Actually nuclear has the lowest carbon footprint, and a big advantage of being able to deliver very stable power output. The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course, but we just have to to accept them in the current situation of global warming.
Started over 10 years ago is an understatement. It was supposed to be finished over 10 years ago. First the Berlin airport, now this and James Webb Space Telescope: are we really just going to finish our collective homeworks?
Yeah, the final permission for the project was granted in 2002, almost 20 years ago. So I was also 20 years younger. You know, after certain age everything feels "just few years" ago.
There was also a generation gap between the earlier builders of nuclear plants and now these. Lots of knowhow was lost as we paused building nuclear for a long time. I hope we can now keep on building new plants, riding on the wave of experience from the recent projects and keeping it alive to make future builds cheaper and faster.
The worst part is that some of this know-how might've been the stuff that makes the plants safe, an accident at a newly built plant due to this would be a death-knell to the industry and our hopes of clean energy.
Also in this theme, even if material science has advanced I'm a bit curious as if it has really advanced enough that people trying to promote building molten salt breeders over and over again (that's the ones that are highly corrosive iirc? if not insert the ones with practical problems).
I'm not very worried about the safety aspect, as the safety features are probably among the most explicit parts of the design. These are carefully designed, modeled and simulated and are also the focus of the regulators. Moreover, there hardly has been a lot of room for commercial nuclear designers to the software development-like approach of trying, failing and trying again. Maybe the early experimental and weapon related reactor designers worked like that at some point? These days safety is the first priority for designers and operators alike. One example illustrating the thinking is the EPR core catcher: while the active safety features in EPR mean it's possibly the safest reactor type ever built, there are provisions to minimize enviromental release of radioactive materials in the case of catastrophic failure.
I think such design things overall is what's needed to make things safe for the environment all around, but if there was stuff that was known to designers 40-50 years ago that wasn't properly logged "and lived within the walls" then we might encounter minor failures (that in worst case could lead to major ones).
Reading about many of the early accidents in military and early nuclear industry, I'm not too sure that there wasn't quite a bit of "trying and failing" going on back then, and while that culture is not up to the NASA standards we see in space flights we've also seen how some of their contractors got slower and slower to the point where they lost the ability to finish things in time (and as time drags on the repeating of mistakes will come up again).
It's rarely simple/honest misestimations with large government contracts though.
There is just too much money to be made for the corrupt people to stay away.
The honest and good offers are rarely taken, because they've realistic estimations - the dishonest one's only care about getting the contract, not finishing it... So they'll make the much better offer. And once work starts, the corruption keeps spreading. Everyone on every layer knows how unlikely their charges are going to be contested, so everyone just charges more for the same work, siphoning money from the project.
I'd consider that a cultural issue, because people at large have really started to only think about themselves and no longer identify with their work ethic. Which is understandable because the employers generally treat their employees like disposable tools.
I don't think there is any straightforward or easy solution, and it can get much much worse too. Just look at china's production issues for inland products, esp. food and consumable products.
> The challenge with waste storage and other risks are real of course
But the “challenge” with waste storage is a big lie.
The French have all the waste ever generated by their nuclear program sitting under the floor of a single room. The quantities of “waste” generated by nuclear plants are not really meaningful even over long time horizons.
Yeah the risks are really low. Basically you would have to dig down there for any risk. The risk simulations they did for it are hilarious to read
This is the worst case scenario they thought about
> Posiva on arvioinut ydinjätteiden pahimpia mahdollisia seurauksia. Skenaariossa ydinkanisteri syöpyisi puhki tuhannessa vuodessa lasketun sadantuhannen vuoden sijaan ja samanaikaisesti sitä ympäröivä savipuskuri katoaisi selittämättömästi. Lisäksi pohjavesi kulkisikin ylöspäin ja paikan päälle rakennettaisiin kaupunki. Ihminen, joka eläisi kehdosta hautaan saastuneimmalla neliömetrillä ja söisi vain sillä kasvanutta ruokaa ja joisi saastuneinta vettä, saisi vain kolminkertaisen säteilyannoksen Tampereen Pispalassa nyt asuviin ihmisiin nähden.
Rough translation
> Posivat has estimated the worst case scenarios. In the case the vessels would corrode in 1000 years instead of the calculated 100000 years and the clay barrier would "disappear" (nobody knows how it would do that) and the ground water would move upwards (it moves down in that area) and someone built a city above it and ate from crops grown on the worst possible radiated land they would get 3x the lifetime radiation does of someone living in Piispala, Tampere
That's not necessarily the case. In Europe after Chernobyl, radioactivity accumulated in cow's milk via grass contaminated with strontium. Children were particularly at risk because strontium is absorbed into growing bones in a similar manner to calcium. Even a low-level of radioactivity in that context can be harmful.
> "Approximately 1.01 million cubic feet and 40 thousand curies of low-level radioactive waste were disposed of in 2020"
It’s worth noting that even a million cubic feet isn’t a big quantity, this is something one guy with an excavator could feasibly bury. (Not that we should actually pursue the guy-with-excavator disposal strategy)
It's 28317 cubic metres or 500 residential swimming pools, 4 by 7 by 2 metres. By contrast 250000 cubic metres of concrete went into OL3[1]. This is also low level waste such as Fukushima rubble. For reference the UK has LLW in storage amounting to 14700 cubic metres or 17800 tonnes by mass, with an activity of 11 terabecquerels.
These are the estimates for decomissioning of all the Olkiluoto reactors[2]:
"The amount of decommissioning waste is around 32 000 m3, generated from Olkiluoto 1 and 2 mainly during 2068-2076. The amount of Olkiluoto 3 decommissioning waste is estimated to be around 11000 m3 before packing and generated during 2079-2085. Additionally there will be approximately 2000 m3 of waste from the spent fuel interim storage decommissioning to be generated around 2100."
It's not even an actual "waste". Given a proper nuclear cycle and a proper diversity of reactors, you can both extract precious isotopes and reuse "waste" as fuel for another kind of reactor.
AFAIK, Russia, for example, had got extremely good at cycling nuclear materials. I assume it is due to the fact that after Chernobyl they were actually forced to invest in nuclear energy due to safety reasons, rather then abandon it.
Uh, there's plenty of spent fuel components that aren't fissile. It's not a perpetual motion machine. So to say that it's not "actual waste" is rather unhelpful.
A breeder reactor can extract fifty to a hundred times more energy from nuclear fuel than the reactors we're currently using. What's left after the breeder is through has relatively short half life and needn't be stored "forever".
All that a breeder does is that it consumes U238 in addition to U235 (in much higher quantities than a non-breeder, of course). I don't quite see how this changes the amount of actual waste per unit of energy generated. Which means that a breeder will decrease the amount of uranium that you need to mine, but that's about it. Your "soup" of fission products will be very similar between Pu239 and U235 fission, so what you're saying about "what's left [having] relatively short half life" works for current non-breeder reactors as well. And activation products I imagine are almost the same. (Why wouldn't they be?)
You're talking about fast-neutron reactors, not about breeder reactors. Fast-neutron reactors can split certain actinides that thermal reactors won't split, but a fast-neutron reactor doesn't have to be a breeder and a breeder doesn't have to be a fast-neutron reactor. In fact, when it comes to fast-neutron reactors, a burner (which consumers fissionable actinides you put in it) is the exact opposite of breeder (which produces more fissionable actinides than you put in it initially). Not quite sure how you mixed that up.
AFAIK most fast-neutron reactors can be used as both burners and breeders depending on loaded blanket. The same neutron flux can be used to split actinides and transform U238. The planned BREST reactor is a good example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BREST_(reactor)
What? Different blankets simply produce different results. Load blanket with mostly U238, irradiate it with fast neutron flux for a bit, and finally radio-chemically process the result to extract useful fission elements for new fuel rods to be used in thermal-neutron reactors. Load blanket with waste (stuff which you got after removing Uranium and Plutonium from spent fuel rods) and keep under fast neutron flux for some time and in addition to a bit of energy you will get radioactive, but relatively short-lived waste since almost all actinides will be destroyed.
Then you're reconfiguring a breeder into a burner. You don't have both at the same time.
But I have to say that the part where you concentrate a substantial mass of an unholy mix of medium-lived actinides to be burned into a fairly large structure seems kind of scary. I'm not sure I'd like to work in that part of a nuclear fuel processing plant. Fortunately it's almost certainly an academic question because the probability of this coming into fruition is very low nowadays.
>Then you're reconfiguring a breeder into a burner. You don't have both at the same time.
My point was what the same fast reactor can be used as both breeder and burner without specifying "at the same time". And I am pretty sure (though not 100% confident) that you can mix both breeder and burner rods, thus changing breeder/burner ratio at will.
>the part where you concentrate a substantial mass of an unholy mix of medium-lived actinides to be burned into a fairly large structure seems kind of scary
Yeah, fuel and waste handling is probably the most difficult part of a breeder/burner system, not the reactor itself.
Well, I didn't dispute any of these two. I'm just not sure how one can claim that a breeder's spent fuel "has relatively short half life" when the actinides from a breeder (such as Pu239) have medium half life and a breeder is specifically designed to produce them in substantial amounts, higher than the original load of fissile material.
The most radioactive fraction has relatively short lifetimes. (There is only so much energy that can be radiated out.) Even the Elephant's Foot in Chernobyl is much less radioactive now, mere 35 years after the accident.
The less radioactive fraction will indeed stay active for thousands of years, but its level of radiation will be closer to natural sources than to an atomic bomb.
There's a sour spot of isotopes with half-lives of 1-100 thousands years, these are still very radioactive but will not decay in any forseeable future.
How can you be so sure about that? We have like waste from max 40-50 years now sitting around and the problem is still unsolved. I doubt that civilisation can manage to manage this waste for 100'000y to come.
Even in a weird scenario where we don’t start recycling our nuclear “waste”, storing 100000x the current amounts would not present a particularly huge challenge.
The really radioactive stuff (fission products) is basically gone after 300 years. The longer-lived stuff (transuranic elements: plutonium etc) could in theory be recycled and burned up in another reactor, though this probably won't happen in practice. It's not as scary as the fission products though: it's less mobile, less bioavailable, less radioactive, etc. Still definitely a hazard, but a lower grade of hazard.
The waste will be radioactive for 100000 years, but it will not be dangerous for that long. Low levels of radioactivity is not a problem. It takes a much shorter time for the waste to reach the same level of radioactivity that the original ore that we dug out of the earth had.
It's sitting around. Solid. Inert. Meanwhile there are gigatons of CO2 released to the atmosphere every year that causes an extremely acute global problem and we have no idea what to do to that either.
My post was not about CO2 (the fact that I hate that we emit way too much that I remove some via Stripe Climatr). Sitting nuclear waste still needs to be maintained for centuries to come and we still have no solition for that.
The challenge is a lot smaller than it is generally made out to be. Nuclear waste has a weird decay curve due to the absolute mess of isotopes it contains. That means it is insanely radioactive at first, but also decays very quickly. After a while, only the long-lived isotopes are left, but they are also not very radioactive.
We tend to conflate the two, and assume that the waste is both highly radioactive AND long-lived, but this is not the case. It is highly radioactive for a reasonable amount of time, and then low-level radioactive for a really long time.
The challenge is only how to handle it while it is incredibly radioactive, but the timescales involved are not at all impossible to deal with. Once it has cooled down, just leaving it buried is perfectly fine. There's very little long-term risk.
(Let's say, as an oversimplification, that the time of high danger is maybe two hundred years - a long time to be sure, but not unprecedented in terms of large-scale engineering projects. Around that time, the radioactivity starts dropping very sharply.)
The challenge even at low radioactivity is materials for containment. If containers are damaged by the waste, as they likely will be over long durations, than refreshing the containers is insanely complex and fraught with hazards.
It's almost as if you could benefit of thinking about second-order effects instead of following ideology blindly. Unfortunately nuanced discussion and thinking seems to be out of fashion.
Original estimate for the start of electricity production was 2009. Full-scale commercial production is now on track to start in mid-2022. This project has been absolutely harrowed by a seemingly infinite string of delays, and is now believed to be one of the world's most expensive construction projects ever undertaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#...
Not very surprising when you see that Areva/Framatome was involved :^) /s
All jokes aside, having worked for a manufacturer of nuclear equipment, delay are usually the result of two factor: One is that the sales department of the companies involved are "very optimistic", and by that I mean, they ask engineer to do an estimation for the time/cost of designing/manufacturing one part, and then ask them to slash it by half (talking from experience, sadly, ...). They want to make sure that they get the contract so they make unrealistic proposition and then make sure that the contract is made so that they can still profit when the project will take twice the time and money.
The second is the level of standard for this type of construction and equipment which is, thankfully, extremely high. A single small scratch could mean that you had to scrap and redo a lot of part of a thermal exchanger or tank. So, even the tiniest of manufacturing defect, or even slight damaged made when testing of moving the piece, can mean months of delay to redo and qualify the piece.
Here they also sold a novel design, Olki 3 ate most of the construction teething issues (though flamanville hit its fair share as well), Taishan seems to have gone better as they entered service in 2018 and 2019.
Construction and operation teething issues are nothing surprising, but Areva was definitely… way over-optimistic about the EPR.
I still can’t believe they advertised a 4 years plan when the first N4 (previous generation) took 12 years to build, and needed an additional 4 before it started operation.
Hell, going down the list of reactors on the wiki, even the 900MWe class never went from first stone to operation in 4 years, the shortest looks to have been Blayais 1 which took a hair short of 5 (January 1st, 1977 to December 1st, 1981), and taking somewhere between 5 and 6 was much more typical for the 900MWe class. The P4s were a bit worse (7-9) and the N4s were way worse (the shortest time between build start and start of operation was Civaux 2 at 11 years, the Chooz reactors took 16).
Also the project taking this long caused further delays. For example Siemens finished their work on the turbines a long time ago but had to basically rebuild the whole damn thing because it just sat there for more than a decade.
This is due to turbines being designed to spin constantly not sit still for years.
They started building it before detailed design was done which is always the case with construction projects but they really misjudged how early they could start. As a result, whenever they had to stop to review an element of the construction plan or detailed design, they had to idle the entire trained workforce. Since you can't just hire nuclear trained welders etc off the street in Finland, these people were paid but doing nothing during that time. Contrast with China where this happened with their EPRs, they are building lots of other nuclear plants to they just put the labour force on buses and moved them to other projects for a few months. Obviously that makes a big difference.
All those construction problems are pretty nerve wracking to read about. It seems that the major risks of these plants has shifted from operational hazards and design flaws to possible construction faults.
> The waste heat, an output common to all thermal power plants, which heats the cooling water (at 13 °C) is utilized for small-scale agriculture before being pumped back to the sea. The power plant hosts the northernmost vineyard in the world, a 0.1 ha experimental plot that yields 850 kg Zilga grapes annually. Another use is a pond for growing crabs, whitefish and sturgeon for caviar.
Hmmm not sure these paranuclear farm products will sell all that well…
Sadly, these singular wines produced in Finland are not available for the mass market - they are for the nuclear power plant employees and partners only. Other than that, the water from the secondary cooling circuit that is used for the vineyard is perfectly safe. The secondary circuit cools the primary circuit, which has itself low activity, and there is really no way the radition could ever escape to the secondary circuit.
Pretty sure the wines would be extremely popular, as it is the only of its kind (vineyard) in the whole country - even if some portion of the public would never drink a wine produced at a nuclear power station site. But according to the sources I was able to find, the process for getting all the food safety certifications for a commercial operation is just not the worth the effort at the small volumes they are able to produce.
On my list of things I'd like to buy just for fun. Nuclear certificates (like green certificates but proving my electricity comes from a nuclear power plant is also on that list), as is stuff from Lithuania these days.
It wasn't for political reasons at all. The reactor design - EPR - was specifically designed to be a large reactor[1].
Paradoxically this large-reactor approach was intended to reduce costs but has spectacularly failed to do so with cost overruns of factors of 3 (in this case) and over 5 (from Flammanville).
I'm doubtful of that. One big root cause for most of the delays is the fact that no new reactor projects were started in a long time before this one, in Western regulation regimes. Due to this, a lot of cumulative experience was lost from the industry and the designs become outdated. For example all the previous designs relied on relay based automation, which is no longer available. Add to that the increasing demand of safety, necessitating way heavier structures and yet again obsoleting designs.
I would think building another one like this should be less of an ordeal. Too bad the sister project at Flamanville was started too early after this one to benefit from the lessons learned.
No it's almost a rule to build reactors in pairs. That way when you maintain the other, the other still outputs energy. When the decision was made Green Party was in the cabinet and they had made a promise not to build any more nuclear power. So a compromise was made and to actually meet the energy demands of the Finnish industry, the biggest possible reactor was chosen.
I'm not disputing that there were politics involved in choosing to build one instead of two reactors. What I mean is that the many of the big challenges facing this project were not particularly connected to the power of the unit. Any size of a reactor would have had the challenges with strict regulation, new type of automation, lack of experienced personnel, etc.
In Finland (and a lot of other places) building the reactors as pairs is not that necessary due to large fluctuations in the power consumption over the seasons. Basically you just do all the maintenance/refueling during the time of the year with least electricity demand (summer in Finland)
> One big root cause for most of the delays is the fact that no new reactor projects were started in a long time before this one
There have actually been quite a few new reactors brought online in the past two decades in France, the UAE, Russia and Belarus. This is a brand new design though, and construction was started in multiple countries at similar points in time.
Only France of those is under the Western regulation, and even though they did bring a couple of reactors online in the beginning of 2000s, those projects were started at least 30 years ago, using designs from before that. Hence, for example the burden of verifying that industrial digital automation can be made nuclear regulation compliant lied on the EPR project.
Given that it has cost around $11 Billion and has taken 13 years, but has around a 60 year life span (much longer than older ones) and then the costs with decommissioning, how long will it take to be economically worth it? (let alone make an operating profit or be environmentally beneficial)
Assuming electricity cost $110 MWh and OPEX of the reactor on the level of $25 MWh with 90% capacity factor without accounting for interest (since it's near zero nowadays), it will take slightly more than 10 years for the reactor to pay for itself. Realistically, with decommissioning I would say it will be 15-20 years. So in addition to positive impact on economy due to lower electricity prices and improved reliability, for at least 40 years it will produce a pure profit. Also in reality it probably will operate for 80-100 years.
For Hinkley Point C, another EPR we have the following, a guaranteed strike price of $140/MWh.
EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices),[25][83] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021[77]) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[25][83] High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.[86]
In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'.[87][88] In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'.[9]
Note that in my comment $25 MWh was only about OPEX (fuel cost, personnel, etc.), while your cost includes CAPEX, interest, and probably payments to a decommission fund. The number is based on 2013 estimate of the US Department of Energy (IIRC at the time it was $23 MWh), so it may be indeed different for ERP. Though if it's sufficiently higher than OPEX of the old US reactors, then I would say there is a problem with the ERP design.
I was answering the GP question with a rough estimate based on simplistic calculations, not building a full blown business model for the reactor in question.
Well, saying it's an easy profit for 40 years seems like a too certain conclusion then?
On a yearly basis these are the average wholesale prices in Finland:
2020 - €28,02 /MWh
2019 - €44,04 /MWh
2018 - €46,80 /MWh
2017 - €33,19 /MWh
2016 - €32,45 /MWh
2015 - €29,66 /MWh
From that we can see is that the average price during the years was about equal to the OPEX we've seen from several sources. Other years you might make some back compared to OPEX.
$0.11 kWh seems pretty conservative given current trend in energy prices. Just looking at the cost here in south of Sweden, it is set today at $0.47 kWh. It won't likely stay there for long (temperature/wind conditions, oil/gas prices, water reserves), but if we use the estimated cost for the next few years it is unlikely (according to prices for long term agreements) that the price will be on average below $0.2.
Always two sides of the coin. These are the average spot prices the last couple of years in SE3.
2020: $0,024 per kWh.
2019: $0,045 per kWh.
2018: $0,050 per kWh.
Nuclear are $0.13 - $0.204 per kWh to build. Therefore, even with these fluctuating prices you would need to make back the average loss of the year during a few short spurts, not looking likely that.
The monthly average spot price in Finland has not been that low during the winter in Finland in any of those years.
Also there is no way OL3 actually costs that much to build. Lets say it runs at 90% of max output on average it gets you ~14 000 000 MWh of electricity per year and with 60 year planned lifetime that comes to 840 000 000MWh of electricity produced.
With your numbers (the low end $0.13 per kWh) it would come to ~100 billion euros building costs which is roughly an order of magnitude more then reality (somewhere between 5.4 to 12 billion to be paid by TVO once all the lawsuits are settled)
At the end of the day with operational and decommissioning costs the overall lifetime costs will go up obviously but I doubt in the tune of over 1 billion per year to reach your estimate costs.
Also getting the profitability number of OL3 is really difficult due to TVO not actually selling any electricity directly to the public/pool but instead at cost to the investors of each reactor. Some of it going directly to Fortum or Helen who just sell it to whoever but some of it goes to the big paper companies who use it to run their factories.
TVO is a "mankala-periaate" company which I can't really find a good english explanation of but basically it is a company that sells all of its product to its owners at cost allowing multiple players in the field to share a single supplier while stills staying in control of the supply chain.
Hinkley Point C another EPR is right in that range with the fixed strike price being paid by the consumers at £106 per MWh, or $0.140 per kWh. The nice thing about nuclear and average prices is that unless nuclear is ran at about 100% all the time your initial investment takes even longer to pay back, so comparing directly to a yearly average price fits their use case.
EDF has negotiated a guaranteed fixed price – a "strike price" – for electricity from Hinkley Point C of £92.50/MWh (in 2012 prices),[25][83] which will be adjusted (linked to inflation – £106/MWh by 2021[77]) during the construction period and over the subsequent 35 years tariff period. The base strike price could fall to £89.50/MWh if a new plant at Sizewell is also approved.[25][83] High consumer prices for energy will hit the poorest consumers hardest according to the Public Accounts Committee.[86]
In July 2016, the National Audit Office estimated that due to falling energy costs, the additional cost to consumers of 'future top-up payments under the proposed HPC CfD had increased from £6.1 billion in October 2013, when the strike price was agreed, to £29.7 billion'.[87][88] In July 2017, this estimate rose to £50 billion, or 'more than eight times the 2013 estimate'.[9]
Again none of the electricity from OL3 is sold directly to consumers so there is no strike price to think about. Instead the investors pay whatever the "at cost" price happens to be to run the plant. Also TVO does not have that much debt as most of the money for the reactor came from the investors (debt they took not TVO)
Also the current price for the plant is 5.7 billion euros (in the last "official" statement from TVO). It might go up to 7 to 8 billion after the lawsuits etc. Basically the plant was built at fixed cost contract with the builders (Areva and Siemens) taking a huge hit but that is not TVOs problem.
The biggest investors in OL3 are paper companies more interested in some guaranteed max price than paying the least by getting as much of their electricity from their own production (the nuclear plants by TVO, their own hydro, etc). Basically they want to be able to say 1 year in advance that paper/paperboard will cost X without taking a huge hit when fulfilling their contracts due to electricity price jumping up. If they happen to find cheaper electricity from somewhere else then it is just a happy accident and more profit for them.
Basically OL3 got built as the investors were so happy with the previous 2 reactors at the site so I would think they know how to do it in a profitable way.
SE3... Funny choice. The electrical zone in Sweden with the highest amount of nuclear. At this hour about 70% of the power comes from nuclear, 15% from hydro, and about 3% from wind. SE4 in south of Sweden has 0% nuclear, and is the zone with the highest energy cost and with the highest production from wind.
In reality, a significant fraction of the cost comes from interest. Sure, the 1-month LIBOR rates may be 0.1% nowadays, but construction started in 2005. The 10-year treasury rate in 2005 was closer to 5%. Nobody would be willing to lend money for the construction of a plant like this for anything less.
This is why I wrote that realistically it will be closer to 15-20 years. There are other factors which are not considered in my simplistic calculation.
I am not sure if it is just a bit.
Gas supply in Europe is having issues:
- Gas supply from Algeria via Morocco is closed.
- Russia is sending less gas as usual (and profiting from it).
Demand from gas in Europe remains the almost the same, but supply isn't.
- Force long-term contracts to be tied to spot prices instead of oil.
- Do not fill storage assuming lower prices in autumn.
- Intentionally delay certification of a pipeline from one of your main suppliers.
- Act very surprised when the aforementioned supplier does nothing to stop spot prices explosion due to the external circumstances and even fans the flames a bit.
- Make questionable remarks which accelerate the rise of gas prices even further.
- Demand (sic!) from the supplier additional gas not covered by existing contracts, even though it's clearly not in his interest.
Do you really think that Nord Stream 2 AG lawyers are that stupid? Note that the application was filled in June 2021, BNetzA begun certification procedures in September 2021, and only almost two months later (suddenly!) they have found that you need a German company. Ok, let's say that BNetzA indeed was simply not familiar enough with the new legislation passed by EP in May 2019 and by Bundestag in November 2019 (sure, you need almost two whole years to read it reaaally carefully). Also let's forget that those changes to the Third Energy Package were effectively aimed only at Nord Stream 2. And while we at it, also let's forget about the really questionable Baerbock's declarations (Minister for Foreign Affairs). But now we have an official statement from BNetzA what in the best case scenario certification will not end until summer of 2022. In other words, it will take the maximum possible time allowed by the procedures, meaning that the properly working pipeline will not be used for almost a whole year.
So if this does not look to like an intentional delay, then I don't know what to say.
> Do you really think that Nord Stream 2 AG lawyers are that stupid?
Nord Stream 2 AG is a subsidiary of state-owned Gazprom. They probably think that if they put enough political pressure, they could negotiate an exception.
Finland also has the unique problem of most of the imported electricity having to come through Sweden and the national grid of Sweden is not up to the task (one of the reasons for really high electricity prices in Finland at the moment)
It depends on future interest rates and electricity prices.
Assuming a fixed interest rate of 5%, construction costs including interest is about $16 billion = €14 billion. Assuming an availability of 95% (maybe unrealistic for a brand new reactor) it will generate 13TWh/year. Assuming an electricity cost of €100/MWh (higher than usual but lower than current extreme prices) and a marginal cost of €26/MWh, the income/year is €0.99 billion. From this you have to deduct the interest of the loan of about €0.70 billion. So for the first year you have €0.29 billion in profit that you can use to amortize the loan.
So when the plant becomes profitable is highly dependent on what future interest rates are and how high future electricity prices will be. While current interest rates have been very low for the past few years, it may be very hard to get an investor to lend you money for a nuclear plant for only 5%. A discount rate of 7% or even 9% is often used for many commercial projects. Using those rates Olkiluoto 3 will never generate any return (barring insane electricity prices).
Between none and very little, unless you are seriously suggesting building new gas power plants.
Neither solar nor wind works during these cold winter days when power usage is at its highest. There’s nowhere to build new hydro. Coal is being banned.
Note that due to the fixed-price nature of the original supply contract, the total cost of the plant was "only" €5.7B ($6.4B) to the owner/operator (TVO).
The $10B-$11B is the estimated cost to the plant supplier (Areva NP/Framatome), i.e. they made a huge loss.
> The EPR design has several active and passive protection measures against accidents:
> Four independent emergency cooling systems, each providing the required cooling of the decay heat that continues for 1 to 3 years after the reactor's initial shutdown (i.e., 300% redundancy)
> Leak-tight containment around the reactor
> An extra container and cooling area if a molten core manages to escape the reactor (see containment building and core catcher)
> Two-layer concrete wall with total thickness 2.6 m, designed to withstand impact by aeroplanes and internal overpressure
Projects like this are commonly used by opponents of nuclear energy to demonstrate that nuclear energy is expensive compared to solar/wind and thus should not be pursued. I wonder how fast the Hanhikivi plant will be built and how much it will cost in the end. Recent Rosatom's record is quite good, so hopefully they will be an example of economic feasibility of nuclear energy and that the nuclear expensiveness is mostly not technological, but an organizational problem.
Comparing nuclear with solar/wind has always been a false comparison. In order to make a fair comparison one would need to combine storage with solar/wind, and in latitudes for Finland this would mostly mean wind with storage capacity in terms of months.
The alternative is fossil fuels in combination with wind/solar, the most cost effective grid that currently exist. During optimal weather conditions renewables are the cheapest energy on the planet, and during non-optimal weather conditions fossil fuels is usually the cheapest energy that can meet demand.
Living in Sweden, I am slightly hopeful that the nuclear plant in Finland might reduce the need to run the oil power plant located in southern parts of Sweden. The oil power plant is the single highest contributor for carbon emissions in the south of Sweden, despite the fact that Sweden mostly operate on hydro and nuclear. 70 tons of oil per hour goes up in smoke in a time where the oil need to stay in the ground. More solar/wind will not have much of an effect on this oil power plant since it only operates during non-optimal weather conditions. Currently we are several weeks in with a weather of low wind conditions, with energy prices skyrocketing as a result. The Finish project had some good luck in term of timing by turning on the nuclear power plant right in the middle of exceptional high energy prices.
The thing is, solar/wind are getting cheap enough that it is becoming viable to just construct a massive overcapacity. Paying twice as much for your electricity to cover the OPEX of half your capacity idling 80% of the time is _still_ cheaper than going nuclear.
And, as you mentioned, having fossil in reserve for edge cases is definitely a viable option.
For solar you would have to build something like 100x or more overcapacity to get enough power for winter in Finland. Solar is effectively useless in Finland as it produces effectively nothing when we need it most (winter).
Wind can work but also partially has the same problem but to the same extent. Usually the colder it gets the less windy it gets. Basically in Finland during the winter it gets cold when there is no wind bringing warm air from the Atlantic (gulf stream) usually as a result of a high pressure zone parking itself over the country.
Fortunately, HVDC transmission lines have been improving rapidly in cost and efficiency, making power delivered from far south a practical prospect.
It does mean you depend on processes you have little say in. Somebody else specifies and builds much of the transmission line, and all of the generating capacity.
Well at the moment this is not true. Sweden can't even saturate the existing transmissions lines between Finland and Sweden as the national grid in Sweden is not in good enough shape and will most likely take over a decade to be properly fixed. (Basically the lines between northern and southern Sweden are not good enough).
This is one of the reasons why the electricity prices hiked up as high as they did here. Basically Norway and Sweden do have some electricity available for cheaper then running reserve gas plants in Finland but they can't get that electricity from the south all the way up north.
And being that reliant on another nation is not good for the national safety of a country. Imagine if a significant portion (like lets say 30%) of the electricity used in US came from solar farms in Mexico (or even further south being transmitted through multiple countries). This would make US economy and national defense really vulnerable (both require massive amounts of energy to really function)
In other words, as I said in the very post you replied to,
> "It does mean you depend on processes you have little say in. Somebody else specifies and builds much of the transmission line, and all of the generating capacity."
Wind turbines in cold climates also require deicing. If you don't deice them, the performance drops dramatically. Deicing takes power too though, a few percent of the total turbine output depending on how often it's needed and how much downtime the turbine has.
Fossil fuels are not a viable option. It is simply the seemingly cheapest option, sacrificing the environment for short term economic gain.
Overcapacity has its issues. It does not remove the dependency on fossil fuel, and you still need to have independently the same capacity in fossil fuel plants. A big part of the fossil fuel cost in term of economics is have them standby and operational, which today is paid primarily through subsidies. Having a bunch of wind turbines running at 20% efficiency while at the same time paying a fossil fueled power plant be ready to step is not cheap. Is it _still_ cheaper than nuclear? Hard to say. All the comparisons I have seen are done on the theoretical cost per watt produced, not what the grid costs to operate on a year to year basis in order to provide the service of a stable grid.
Looking at the day prices per local zone around Sweden and Finland, the prices goes down the closer you get to hydro and nuclear and goes up the closer you get to wind and fossil fuels, with as high as 10x. Economically that makes the case for wind + fossil fuels a bit harder to buy, through I am not blind to the fact that its previous generations that enabled it. Living next to wind+fossil fuel is right now very expensive, with industries moving north as a direct result.
The oil power plant you describe runs because it makes economic sense to generate electricity from oil and send it to Germany. There is no shortage of electricity (neither energy nor effect) in Sweden. The high prices are caused by gas shortages in continental Europe.
It has been a false comparison with nuclear too. Nuclear storage, processing remediation, etc. are either not mentioned at all or plainly wrong as they differ extremely from country to country and over time periods which are hardly calculable.
The fact that China, which is an absolute leader in nuclear power, wasn't able to scale up this energy source as fast as wind and (soon) solar (in terms of GWh delivered) and the planned 150 reactors will barely catch up with renewables speaks volumes.
I mean, it's a safe and environmentally friendly technology, but it just can't be built fast enough.
By leadership I mean that they're one of the few countries which in the last 20 years managed to consistently deliver new nuclear capacity on time and (roughly) within budget.
The US generally ranks first, but delivered what, one power plant in the XXIth century so far?
Just dig out the numbers and realize this project is as expensive and uneconomic as every other of our +50year history record before..
And as if this was the only problem and it hadn't a lot of huge others, nuclear proponents will use this now as an example how nuclear is the way out of the climate crisis, and how comparing nuclear with renewables is wrong..
No, the best future would be neither fossil nor nuclear.
Density doesn't matter very much outside of niche applications (e.g. submarines). It's not like very running out of space for power production. Cost is essentially the only metric that counts, and current nuclear technology is a bit on the expensive side. Maybe future reactor designs will drastically improve that, but with global warming we don't really have the time to wait for the R&D to be finished.
Now we bring another very specific for that location argument, while the general new consensus for here seems to be that is the ultimate solution to the climate crisis? The rhetoric strawman is also pretty cheap...
I haven't heard any reasonable immediately implementable numbers or solutions from the renewable proponents how affordably store enough energy to heat cold countries during months long winter.
The technologies I like provide solutions to the hard problems.
In Finland, the coldest weather is experienced when, during winter months, there is a persistent anticyclone parked overhead. Those can cover the entirety of the country, and inside them there is negligible wind. For example, on 8th of December it was -20°C, and the average output of wind power (nominal installed capacity ~2800MW) over the day was 330MW. The average output of grid-connected solar was <1MW (It's December in Finland, what did you expect?).
Anticyclones can remain in place overhead for weeks. The value often used to calculate the cost of renewable+storage is 3h. This is a reasonable value for California, where solar production correlates well with use. If you built the grid in Finland based on that, we would just die when it gets cold.
There are no renewables that work well in Finland. Water power is fully built out. Solar only produces power when we don't need it. Wind reliably does not provide power when we need it. Compared to renewable with enough storage, even with all it's overruns, OL3 is remarkably cheap.
But how much of the heating is, or needs to be, electric?
Many current heating fuels are fossil and not great either, but they can be replaced with renewable fuels which solves storage vs renewable-produced electricity.
That does seem to head for electricity based heating. But a web search lead to some (admittedly 6 yrs old) graphs that have electricity being in in 3rd place after fuel based heating solutions by energy use: https://www.stat.fi/til/asen/2014/asen_2014_2015-11-20_tie_0... - and hopefully those new houses are better insulated and use proportionally much less energy than the average housing stock, eg passive houses.
Do you propose to build so many nuclear plants that you can provide peak electricity including heating in cold winter months? Do you have numbers for that? (I imagine that'd be the most expensive solution ever, as nuclear plants are high in capital costs and you're basically proposing to have lots of nuclear plants that only run on very cold winter days.)
I guess what many nuclear proponents seem to forget is that you need flexibility no matter what source of electricity you have - because even if your plant runs 24/7 (which it doesn't), energy needs aren't constant.
Storing heat is not difficult. You just heat up water and put it in an insulated tank. Either steel, or dig a hole in the ground and insulate that, with a floating insulated lid. Once it's big enough, the losses are so low that you can use it for seasonal storage, and with solar to heat it up in the summer, it's cheaper than natgas. At least where I live.
Next year, I think, they're building a storage not far from where I live with 200.000 m³ capacity.
Nobody is using gas to heat anything in Finland. District heating is pretty much all some combination of waste heat from some other industrial process (including electricity production), coal, wood or peat. Some district heating scale heat pump and storage projects are in prototype phase but are meaningless % of actual usage.
For individual house heating it is some combination of pure electric, heat pump, wood and oil.
Gas in general is used very little for electricity here (only ~7% of total energy production) and gas cooking stuff is also relatively rare.
It is always easy to understand a nuke plant construction taking multiples of extra years and euros, when they are permitted at all: So long as it is not finished, the money can keep flowing. If it is ever done, the gravy train stops. Nobody actually involved wants that ever to happen. But if it looks like it will happen anyway, there is some advantage to actually delivering a working nuke plant before that. The trick is in identifying how late that can be.
If you get it too wrong, the money runs out without a working nuke constructed. That can be OK if enough money is extracted first, as in South Carolina, where they sucked out ?$30B without delivering a promised 2 GW plant. That ended up with criminal indictments, but only for a few people. Almost everybody got to keep the money, Carolina ratepayers of course excepted.
The same process is seen in metro transit projects. It is an interesting topic in governance design how to avoid starting the process. One essential component appears to be easily priced subunits, such as solar panels or wind turbines, and early production. It is not easy to do that, with a nuke, but we don't really need nukes. Sometimes we do need transit projects.
Definitely. Extra production will tip the scale of imports and exports so that the price in Finland will match most of the time whatever the price is in northern Sweden with its abundance of hydropower. OL3 will also probably lower prices in Estonia and Southern Sweden.
No way Russia is going to be a major trading partner for Scandinavia as long as Putin (or similar) is in power. They keep pulling political stunts with their exports, making them too unreliable for most businesses.
It’s not a coincidence that Russia is only around the 15th largest trading partner for Sweden.
Not sure how this applies, especially to Scandinavia. Sweden has lots of hydro, Norway has hydro, gas & oil.
Russia also needs European money, since most of their budget is energy export, that’s why even at the peak of cold war they kept selling gas to Western Europe. Sure, they can use gas to bully smaller countries and manipulate the gas market, but at the end of the day, they’ll keep the pipelines flowing.
This is not new either, Russia’s used gas to threaten/pressure their neighbouring countries for 2 decades now. Yet almost all of them have consistently reduced imports/exports with Russia.
>Russia’s used gas to threaten/pressure their neighbouring countries for 2 decades now.
Like the US uses financial system to threaten/pressure countries all around the globe since Bretton Woods? Every country has its own tools to promote its interests.
And funnily enough you often hear that Russia "pressures" countries in the form of simply demanding payment for already supplied resources, finding middle ground in the form of political solutions with countries unable to pay a fair market price, refusing to supply more than agreed by prior contracts, or simply by having a nerve to select a route for transportation of its resources.
A common pattern for Russia is announcing unplanned railroad/pipeline maintenance when a country makes a political decision that Russia finds unacceptable. Or cranking up gas prices at random. Also harassing ships that are laying undersea power cables with unannounced military drills.
>A common pattern for Russia is announcing unplanned railroad/pipeline maintenance when a country makes a political decision that Russia finds unacceptable
I don't see how it's relevant to the discussed gas topic, but I will play along.
How exactly is it fundamentally different from the numerous US sanctions? Also this "pattern" is far from being a Russian invention.
>Or cranking up gas prices at random.
How exactly does Russia crank those prices "at random" if they are mostly determined by long term contracts tied to oil prices? At least it was the model preferred by Russia since it's allowed to properly plan investments into infrastructure. And BTW this model is a European invention (see the Groningen principle) with a very good reasons behind it.
If you want "free market" spot prices, then supplier is in his full right to decide a price at which he's willing to sell his stuff (as well as a buyer has right to abstain from buying it), be it at random or not. Or do you think that other countries are somehow entitled to cheap Russian resources without striking a mutually beneficial deal? Though judging by some Western officials' statements, it looks like there is a lot of those who think that they indeed are.
And while we are talking about prices, it's quite interesting how European courts retroactively change mutually agreed contract conditions to make them "fair" at the expense of the Russian side. Though those changes has backfired quite hilariously in this season.
>Also harassing ships that are laying undersea power cables with unannounced military drills.
Again I don't see a connection to the gas topic. And I haven't heard anything about such events and a cursory search hasn't showed any news like this. Care to provide a link?
> I don't see how it's relevant to the discussed gas topic, but I will play along.
The topic originally was whether Russia could realistically become the main trading partner for Scandinavian countries and how unpredictability is the number one reason why it won't happen.
> How exactly is it fundamentally different from the numerous US sanctions?
This is just Russian whataboutism, this is not about the US.
EU has done a lot to limit Russia's monopolistic behavior in recent years, but not long ago gas prices in neighbouring countries could differ 2-3x because of political decisions and artifical contractual limits, not any market forces. To this day, Russia can manipulate gas prices by reducing their throughput, since they're still the single largest provider.
>The topic originally was whether Russia could realistically become the main trading partner for Scandinavian countries and how unpredictability is the number one reason why it won't happen.
Russia is a predictable Germany trading partner since Soviet times unless third countries get involved. You will not hear from German business that Russian side was unpredictable or irresponsible. You only hear it from third countries and politicians who actively interfere with "market forces".
Russia has a fine relationship with Finland and luckily there are no middle-man between them. And as the Hanhikivi plant shows Finland is not paranoid about Russia either.
>This is just Russian whataboutism, this is not about the US.
No, it's a clear demonstration that Russian behavior is not unique, only the tool set is different. You don't hear much about US, EU, India, or China "unpredictability" when they apply pressure on other countries using their tool set, do you?
>not long ago gas prices in neighbouring countries could differ 2-3x because of political decisions and artifical contractual limits, not any market forces
Did Russia somehow prevented buying gas from other sources? But the problem was that alternatives were 5-10x more expensive. So you had either pay in cash the "fair" 3x price or pay 1x in cash and rest in non-monetary forms. Looks like a fine market to me with agents playing the cards they've got.
>To this day, Russia can manipulate gas prices by reducing their throughput, since they're still the single largest provider.
EU pushed for "market forces", it got them. Why are you not happy? Why are you act surprised that after you forced long term contracts to be tied to spot prices Russia does not want to supply more than it contractually obliged? It's a perfectly rational behavior for a market agent in current conditions. Especially so, when result of significant investments literally lies on the sea floor unused enduring politically motivated delays.
And where exactly does it mention "unannounced military drills"? Even if we are to fully trust the source (Latvian minister) a Russian ship was somewhere in the region and asked over radio some nonsense, after that it simply left. But, personally, I am quite sure that this story got significantly overblown by the Latvian side since I couldn't find an independent confirmation. All coverage gets back to Latvian ministers (either foreign or energy), which are quite known for being light with Russo-phobic declarations.
Now compare it to Polish boat literally ramming one of ships building Nord Stream 2 [0], Polish Navy "patrolling" [1] the same vessels, and Danish Navy "visiting" the area of the pipeline construction [2]. You may say that those claims are exaggerated or even lies, but at the very least they have photo and video confirmations, which can not be said about the Latvian story.
These days, ironically, Poland mainly burns Russian coal (EDIT erroneusly wrote "gas" initially).
After years of indecision as to what to do with Polish coal plants, they got too expensive and underinvested to produce the required quantities of coal. The rest is imported from the East.
So the whole "ah but we need coal for energy independence" is mostly a song and dance nowadays.
For imports, at just under 10%. For exports, Russia shares the 5th place with China at roughly 5%, behind US and Netherlands. This is still extremely low given the fact that it's the by far the largest neighbour in terms of economy and accessibility by cheap transportation.
For comparison, Estonia is 3.5% import and 3% export, but has about 1/50th the size of Russia's GDP and shares no land border.
Wholesale prices (at least in the US, not sure internationally) are determined by the highest bid for generation, so this depends on the cost structure of the highest cost generators.
Yes, but the effect size depends on the size of the electricity market area, which is a function of transmission capacity and agreements. In this case it seems the increased supply will be absorbed by a market area that spans multiple countries, so the price effect should be less than what you might guess from the relatively big local production capacity jump. Also there might be an incentive to expand the transmission capacity for export.
People have this weird tendency to equate “Europe” with Western Europe (or more accurately: EU + Switzerland + Norway (+ UK sometimes, since Brexit it depends))
It's not that weird that people shift the borders given that Europe is not a real continent but rather constructed around ideas of "Western civilization". Is using it EU + close allies model really worse than drawing a border at the point where there starts to be too much non-Christian influence to bare?
"Europe" is a name of Phoenician origin, much older than Christianity. It was already old when Classical Greece was young.
A lot of the modern confusion stems from the tendency of EU to refer to itself as "Europe" (see: European Council, European Central Bank, European Parliament etc.)
That might be the case in the 1980s, but later I believe another mindset prevailed: an ambition of the EU to actually expand to include entire Europe, or at least the non-Russian part thereof.
With Brexit, the complicated security situation east of Poland and the fact that the Swiss, the Norwegians and the Icelanders seem to be OK with staying outside, this ambition is no longer realistic to fulfill short- to mid-term, but it survives nonetheless.
Realistically, though, Russia would have to change a lot internally before joining the EU.
I am slightly more optimistic about Turkish membership, if Erdogan bites the dust and someone more Western-like (Imamoglu?) comes to power and rewrites the constitution again. Turkish industry is very much integrated into European supply chains.
"Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok" is a much older ideal, IIRC it has roots as far as in early 90s. And if you stretch it enough you can even trace it back to Charles de Gaulle. But for it to happen not only Russia has to significantly improve internally, but also EU itself has to be different. For starters it would have to be truly independent from the US influence and Brussel's grip on the union would have to be weaker. Russian political culture historically is very firm on being able to independently decide its own fate (and no, it's not a matter of "democratization"). Take the current EU issues with the Poles and multiply it a hundredfold to get a rough approximation of what the current EU would have with Russia.
Before 2007 (see the Munich speech) Russia sincerely tried to join the EU and the collective West. But the condition "proposed" at the time and attitude towards Russia fundamentally collided with that deep culture, resulting in the situation which we see today. If you want to learn more about it from a non-Western perspective, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ
Given the prominent role that Russia played in European history since the 17th century I find it really annoying to rule it out of Europe just because it wasn't in the American side of the cold war.
Russia is definitely part of the Western civilization by any means if you don't limit this definition to what happened during the second half of the twentieth century… What on earth would make Russia less part of “Western civilization” than Slovakia or Greece?!
I think Russia is commonly excluded from "Europe" simply because only a small part of it is in Europe and the rest is not. Bundling it in would've caused Europe overlap with Asia and that's just confusing.
The majority of the Russian population lives in Europe. It's a bit like saying that Denmark isn't really in Europe because most of its land area are actually Greenland. Yet nobody does that!
And the OP was not only excluding Russia from Europe in their post, but also Belarus which is unambiguously in Europe. It's a former part of the eastern block which is still under Moscow's influence so in must not be “Europe” because this word has been preempted by the American block.
In any history class about the history of Europe, you would have a hard time not talking about Russia…
Excluding Russia from Europe is a really recent trend actually, it appeared even after the fall of the iron curtain, during the late 90 s, early 2000s as an attempt to marginalize Russia.
Are you going to kick France out of Europe then? Because we've invaded our neighbors way more than Russians ever did. Heck, without the Russians Napoleon would probably have invaded England, achieving complete French domination over the continent!
You might think so but this is the nuclear energy industry - where building a plant typically takes at least a decade (or not-uncommonly 2 decades or more). In fact, this is currently the most modern production reactor design in the world.
It's an EPR[1] - a third generation reactor design. But so far it's been plagued by massive cost and schedule overruns and of the two reactors of this design to become operational, Taishan 2[2] has already been taken offline after less than a year in order to investigate problem with the fuel rods.
The Finnish Neo-Luddite / Green Party resigned from the government twice as a protest against permitting new Nuclear Power plants. And these are the people who are supposed to be solving climate change..
Net-exporter means very little when exporting renewables during optimal weather conditions and importing fossil fuels when the weather turns. Simply finding someone willing to buy excess power is very different from buying a finite (and very polluting) resource when demand exceeds supply.
Net-exporter is just a political tool to hide the aspect of dependency.
If France is dumping energy when there is an overall excess of energy in Europe, while buying fossil fuel energy during periods of high demand, then yes, it mean nothing even when France do it.
The reason why net-exporter does not mean anything is that the product people buy is not just the joules, it the service of getting the energy at the right time in the right place. Buying energy when the excess is so large that the price is close to zero is not the same as buying energy when supply is so low that people will do anything just to prevent a blackout. Net-exporter only has meaning if one buy and sell at the same time, and then only if the energy produced comes from the same type of energy, ie trading non-fossil fuel energy for other non-fossil fuel energy.
But compared to France, Germany's energy sector is much more diversified with the EEX as bonus. The pro-nuclear argument falls flat here by example as building new reactors takes too long to fight global warming and is much more expensive than investing into renewables. Which is what Germany does and will do even more with the new government. They'll also phase out coal completely. There is a law for that and it will probably even happen earlier with the new Government.
It won't happen earlier with nuclear kept alive and it wouldn't ever have happened as the reason for keeping coal alive is primary those jobs which get lost in already troubled regions.
Bringing up Germany in the nuclear debate is ridiculous. There is no useful argument for nuclear there but it still comes up over and over again. The main reason for that is Michael Shellenbergers Astro-Turf campaign which got loose on social media and which lead to hordes of knowing and not knowing participants who parrot those false and easy to disprove phrases which got prepared by Shellenberger and his "Institute". Not even HN is safe.
They actually were early adopters. As they often are.
Germany is part of the problem as long they are dependent on gas from Russia and a major contributor to global warming in Europe. Being diversified in how much fossil fuel they burn is not a good thing, no matter how much positive association one want to channel with the word "diversity". They either burn fossil fuel or they don't.
Fossil fuels need to stay in the ground and coal is the worst offender. Germany has caused more cancer deaths by using coal than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined, deaths that the German government should officially recognize. The government should issue an planned decommission of all existing fossil fueled power plants, with laws that prevent new ones to be built. Coal, oil, and natural gas.
Once they done that they can continue to be anti-nuclear if they want. How nations want to go forward in a world free of fossil fuels is their choice. They can invest in the yet-to-be-economic-viable green hydrogen plans, rust-batteries, lithium batteries or what have you. What they can't do is simply dumping massive amount of excess wind power to nearby countries in order to obscure the fact that they got a large fleet of fossil fueled power plants. The world doesn't work that way. They either burn fossil fuel or they don't.
> Germany is part of the problem as long they are dependent on gas from Russia
They (and the rest of Europe) will always depend on gas from Russia as there are many uses for Gas. Things which can't be replaced by nuclear. This is again something which is just another derailment within this topic.
FYI: France, THE nuclear nation now needs that gas because their rotting nuclear fleet is failing it's citizens...which is a winter tradition in nuclear France.
> Germany has caused more cancer deaths by using coal than Chernobyl and Fukushima combined,
Please spare me the theatre. Nobody needs that. Nobody who's against nuclear is pro coal and as I mentioned above: there is a law to phase out coal COMPLETELY! Imagine that. No coal at all. The current Government wants it by 2030. This is faster than you could build a single nuclear reactor.
> deaths that the German government should officially recognize.
What are you talking about? German government does recognize that. This is why the law is there.
This coal derailment is the most funny thing about this Astro-Turf campaign because it originated in the USA. A country which just last year had a president who talked about "clean coal" and does not have a law to phase out coal completely. So think again: why are you always talking about Germany?
> Once they done that they can continue to be anti-nuclear if they want.
Why should they? You can do both and this is what Germany is doing right now. Nuclear today has a negligible impact. We'd be able to turn it off tomorrow.
It has nothing to do with coal. The only reason coal is still there has been outlined in my previous comment. You chose to ignore that. What I got instead is more from the uninformed Astro-Turf. Are you even aware how embarrassing that is for you?
Please don't make light of people who died to an preventable disaster. Germany is releasing toxic air into the environment that causes cancers today. If nuclear plants was releasing their waste into the air, causing deaths around them, would you call that theater? I know people here would call it murder. A law to phase out existing practice of killing people in the name of energy is a very low bar in modern society, especially since the only reason is cost savings.
Whatabout USA. Whatabout china. Whatabout France. whatabout India. So much whataboutery. We have global warming! I really do not care about any whatabout. If a country is using fossil fuels, if they are continuing today with releasing toxic waste into the air, then they should be called out on it. Coal, oil and gas should not exist in the energy grid. If you have surrendered to the idea that gas must be burned for energy then you are not part of a future without fossil fuels, and long term that means mass extinctions, deaths, famine and ruin.
Its clear that you are turning to ad-hock attacks simply because you feel bad for supporting an industry built on death and destruction. Its typical when people feel shame. Maybe in the future you can join the movement that want to remove fossil fuels from the world. Until then all I can hope is that you will start to see the harm fossil fuels does to the world.
> Please don't make light of people who died to an preventable disaster.
As I have explained several times already, not a single death there has anything to do with nuclear. Germany would have exactly the same amount of coal plants with all nuclear plants still there.
> So much whataboutery
Funny since this post is about Finland and you prefer to talk about Germany while refusing to talk about X.
> Maybe in the future you can join the movement that want to remove fossil fuels from the world.
Oh so now you are part of a movement to remove fossil fuels? Why don't you applaud Germany for the law to phase out coal COMPLETELY?
My guess is: because you don't care at all. You just hopped on the Astro-Turf-train and faced with the facts, you chose to ignore those and scream even louder.
It is a desperate move by the fossil fuel industry to try convince the world that burning gas is the only way to save the planet, under the false pretense that other methods would take too much time.
The only people who advocate for natural gas is those that either is ignorant or has economical motives. Climate researchers know it, most people are aware of it, the facts has been know for several decades. Replacing coal with natural gas is not a solution.
Slowly phasing out coal will result in many more people that will die, blood that will be on the hands of the German government. I don't applaud when people simply plan to, at some time in the future, stop murdering people. Being slightly less of a murderer this year isn't something you get a medal for, stopping being a murder is.
Finland has researched and invested quite a lot in the ability to dispose of the nuclear waste in a way it's safe underground for the next 100 000 years.
The research includes extensive geological surveys and every possible simulation you can run on a cave system.
Beats hands down the option which would be to burn fossil fuels and let the planet enjoy the negative externalities (CO2).
There's a simpler solution for disposing (not storing) final nuclear waste: deep core drilling. You drill a 1m round hole 2km+ deep and dump shit there and fill back up. Unlike caves, natural or otherwise, on a properly selected site there is no possibility of things coming back up in millions of years. It's expensive, but not that expensive compared to the energy hitherto produced by the waste involved and eminently doable as it uses tech from the oil industry.
The main reason we don't do that is that most of the waste can be expected to be further used with future reactors.
Pretty standard for a big project to take twice as long as initially projected, no? This isn't exactly a SaaS startup where you can ship a spaghetti turd MVP to hit the deadline and fix later if you get traction
