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Sweden’s parliament has voted to change its 100% renewable target to a 100% fossil-free target, leaving the door open for nuclear.
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Good. Hopefully nuclear fission will buy us enough time to get nuclear fusion working and energy will be a problem of the past.
We have several private companies pursuing fusion now (such as Tokamak Energy) so hopefully one of them will pull a SpaceX and break the stagnation. STEP and ITER look promising in any case.
The big problem with nuclear power (other than the disposal of nuclear waste) is the time and money it takes to build the damn reactors. Even if they decided to build one right now it would still be decade or more before they were producing power (taking into account the planing and approval process). In that time you could have constructed several alternative energy farms, battery storage and distribution infrastructure. In addition, several generations of solar, wind and storage technology will have occurred potentially making nuclear power even more unattractive.
Man Sweden has so much potential for actually clean energy…
Indeed it does but before you shut reactors down you need to have enough clean energy supply so you don’t face black outs every winter.
Wow. That would suck. Especially as noone has any solution for the problem of safely storing radioactive waste. Running nuclear power plants makes us create a problem many generations after us have to deal with.
Nuclear waste remains a problem largely for political reasons. The engineers know how to deal with it: You can burn it to make more power. Fully burned nuclear fuel stays dangerously radioactive for a couple hundred years. It’s no harder to deal with than any other moderately obnoxious industrial waste.
One of the ways the anti-nuclear movement really screwed us was by freezing most nuclear technology development in the 1980’s. The so called Gen IV Reactor designs are mostly design ideas that had been proposed by 1990 and some still haven’t even had a demonstration plant built even though most of them largely avoid both the major safety and waste issues that are the major complaints against nuclear.
Sweden tried and failed running 100% renewable energy and ended up threatening blackouts the last few winters, asking people not to hoover and to stop wasting electricity. In the end fossil energy from Germany and Eastern Europe was bought.
At the current rate we’re not leaving our future generations much either, and as it stands Sweden can’t produce 100% renewable energy which is a problem we need to solve before we shut down the Swedish power plants. Nuclear might not be the best alternative, but it’s way better than fossil.
Thanks for the background. If they already have the nuclear power plants in place, it is totally reasonable to keep them running a bit longer until the problems with renewable energy are sorted out.
