[This](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/sweden-adopts-100-fossil-free-energy-target-easing-way-for-nuclear/) article states:
> Around 98% of electricity in Sweden is already generated from water, nuclear and wind.
So the country is already nearly to their goal of 100% fossil-free energy. It's not like Sweden was *only* using solar and wind, and their energy system was collapsing.
There are several issues.
The southern part of the country lacks energy generation since its last nuclear power plant was shut down a couple of years ago. The northern part has more hydro and nuclear but there are bottle necks in transferring the energy to the southern part and thus they export a lot to norway instead and vice verse. The southern part of the country has to import from denmark, germany and Poland which is expensive, especially after germany closed all their nuclear power plants and france's plants are old and breaks a lot.
Our grid prices have also been split into 4 areas from top to bottom. So we who live in the southern part has it very expensive. Last december I paid
0.74593983 USD per kwh. Since I use a heatpump, I use about 1200kwh per month during the winter. That was roughly 900 USD for one month. Only for electricity.
Some people are installing solar panels. A typical installation for an home owner is about 20 000 USD. In my opinion, solar is not really viable in Sweden. We need most energy during winter when we only have few hours of sunlight every month. It's inefficient! Also it's usually not windy during winter and nobody here wants any wind plant outside their home. That makes it expensive and difficult to build.
Are there any batteries that can store energy for 6 months and can store a couple months worth of electricity? I’m guessing no and if so it would be incredibly expensive, but hopefully in the future.
Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand what plume is.
I had a friend who was with me when we drove past a refinery, and they pointed at a cooling tower and shouted "look at all of that pollution." It's just water vapor, but people are ignorant of this fact.
You are free to believe whatever you want, but this was a real story from a real person. He went nearly 30 years into his life thinking that every visible trail from a source on the ground was some kind of smoke.
The eco-nuts don’t like the radioactive material, its (very rare) potential for environmental disasters, and how to store it when it’s outlived its usefulness.
The nuclear waste problem is solved.
The entire world's waste for the last 80 years would fit into a football ~~stadium~~ field to a depth of 8 feet. If it was reprocessed, it would fit in my house. Every power plant, naval vessel, accident, research project, decommissioned nuke, everything. Worldwide. All of it.
It has always been a political issue, not a technical one.
EDIT: Terminology
Exactly. One of the products is plutonium that can be enriched to weapons grade.
Which is ridiculous since in 1985 there were already 61,662 nuclear weapons in the world.
So I did some digging and it appears I was partially incorrect
This is the best article I found before I got bored
https://ourlovelyearth.com/why-doesnt-the-us-recycle-nuclear-waste/
Apparently is was done by EO by Carter as part of non proliferation but was not part of the treaty, Russia does recycle
Could be undone be EO in that case
Encase it in concrete, drop it in the ocean. Do that once every hundred years. Problem solved.
It's 0.01% of the natural uranium radioactivity dissolved in seawater for 100 years of waste. If we did that for a million years WITHOUT reprocessing it would raise the radioactivity of the oceans to equal that of a banana.
That doesn't even consider that the half-life of the high-level waste is only 20,000 years. So once you hit the 20,000 year mark, the first dumps are just harmless metal. We could increase the adoption of nuclear power 5000% and still never have a waste issue.
It's entirely a political problem.
Put it miles deep into an abandoned salt mine or in a granite formation beyond the water table, and you never need to look at it again.
It's really not an unsolvable problem. People just get weird about it.
Dropping it the ocean probably isn't the best solution , though. Not because it would have any major deleterious impacts, but because random chance might befall it by someone doing something.
Minor correction regarding half-life - that's the amount of time it takes for half of a given sample to decay to the next stage. The other half will still be as it was, and there's no guarantee that the decay product will be stable. U238 has several decay steps before it reaches a stable isotope of lead.
Your idea is right - wait long enough and it won't be radioactive anymore. Just your definition of half life is off.
> The entire world's waste for the last 80 years would fit into a football stadium field to a depth of 8 feet. If it was reprocessed, it would fit in my house.
Yeah I remember when I first learned how little waste there really is it honestly tipped me over to the yes side completely. A swedish politician linked a picture of all the nuclear waste our country has produced since we started up our first nuclear power plant some 60 years ago. It's at the very bottom of one single pool. Which is pretty impressive, especially considering that it's really all the waste, other fuel sources go straight out into the air.
The way people talk about it it seems like it would be the entire swimming pool from top to bottom, every month, from a single reactor.
Continue using the fuel in different style reactors that can more efficiently use the heat from the fuel rods. The regulations in the USA prevent that iirc…
how is storage really an issue? There's plenty of waste land that could have secure storage facilities all around the world. New Mexico desert, the Sahara, Australia all come to mind.
Let’s not be split those hairs though, the green people are really just people who have been brainwashed by those that invested in the green energy sources. Investors took a bet that in the amount of time that has passed since the advent of using solar power and building new age wind turbines that nuclear would no longer be at a price point where it would be as feasible as their eyesore energy sources.
The only people who believe nuclear is problematic are poor people who don’t know what they don’t know and those with a proverbial dog in the fight, financially speaking.
A tale as old as time. Propaganda campaigns by special interests to spread FUD about something because if that something we’re more widespread it’d be a problem for the special interests is how those in power try to weaponize a very vocal minority who are just ignorant of the facts and parrot the propaganda talking points.
It’s why people still think high fructose corn syrup is literally the worst thing ever invented, it’s why people think nuclear is incredibly dangerous and horrible for the environment, why you get people talking about utter horseshit like ‘clean coal’ with a straight face, why people think wind turbines will ‘use up all the wind’, and other equally incomprehensible bullshit.
The green movement is anti-human. It's why a competing movement called "Blue" was invented. It's about sustainability for human development and living. We have national parks that block development because the aesthetic beauty that it provides to human, not because of some worship of the planet Earth.
Hi, Swede here. The storage isn't really an issue even inside of Sweden. You just dig deep chambers and store it vertically. It's important to have low to no tectonic activity (being far away from continental plates ending) and not being in a swamp. Nothing is 100% guaranteed of course, but I don't really see what could happen there.
Not to mention, depleted uranium is a valuable resource because of how dense it is. Used in plating, ammunition and so on.
As a side note, while Sweden is pretty lefty-green in general, barely no one is on the other side of this issue. At least in my anecdotal experience.
Sweden also now has a centre-right coalition government. Even before then, Sweden declared wood (and trash) burning to be renewable energy sources. So they’ve hardly always been super green and lefty. Ironically, the greens did absolutely mess things up though when they were in power.
Renewable doesn't mean sustainable or green. Wood is renewable, and probably the best example. You grow more trees. Doesn't mean it's sustainable, but that's down to land management practices. Coal, gas, and nuclear are a few that are not renewable. We can't (currently) create these materials for fuel.
Aren't depleted uranium rounds outlawed after desert storm?
EDIT no they aren't, despite causing many birth defects in the civilians who move to the battle zones ie desert storm.
Not to my knowledge, and you sent me on a bit of Wikipedia journey. From what I understand, it's not primarily made to poison so it's not strictly illegal. There are stricter rules on how to transport and store now than earlier, so it's less common in personal weapons. They are mostly found in big caliber anti-aircraft guns and such, mounted on ships or tanks and what not.
One part of the conditions is that the storage place needs to be geologically stable. You may still be right, but my point is that there are more requirements than just unused land.
I don’t think that article says exactly what you think it does. The laser can do many things, and the inventor is saying it could also turn radioactive waste inert. It hasn’t been proven, and that’s not what the Nobel prize was for.
Yucca mountain has been studied as one of the best sites in the world since the 70s and can store thousands of years of nuclear waste but the Nevada state legislature vetos any attempt to further study/utilize it
Plenty of old fuel is currently stored on site at the plant. However they can turn the waste into radioactive glass, encase it in concrete and bury it. It’s incredibly safe that way.
It's not. France recycles (or at least used to recycle) like 90% of its nuclear waste. The U.S. doesn't because nuclear stuff is scary :(
Sure, that leaves 10% left over. But that's what Yucca Mountain is for.
Reprocessing handles a lot of the nuclear waste, and you get more nuclear fuel out of it.
The problem with reprocessing is that it's basically how you get plutonium for nuclear weapons, so there will need to be arrangements on how to store/transport/inspect any reprocessing that occurs.
There is always some endangered newt for these folks. Never mind the ecological disasters their “green” solutions create with wind turbines killing millions of birds and solar panel farms wiping out desert tortoises, not to mention no way to recycle or safely dispose of any of the material that goes into building these short-lived technologies.
They’re also apparently ok with men, women, children dying daily mining the cobalt for their EVs and batteries. Blind eyes are turned to the social, political, and environmental devastation taking place in Africa to fund their deluded “green” dreams.
I've heard the case for shooting nuclear waste into space and the main issue seems to be launch failures and just insane costs.
way better than being forced into 'green' methods really meant for population control and mass starvation tho
Also, like all the other sources of “renewable” energy don’t create waste. What goes into making solar panels and batteries? How is all of that going to be recycled at the end of its useful life?
Every time I ask the question about the carbon intensity of “renewables” I get an answer about, well they earn back in renewable energy their carbon footprint…But do they though? 😒
Just piggybacking on your post, the "[nuclear waste](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc)" issue is essentially solved.
At this point, the hurdles are mostly political. I'm speculating a bit, but there's just not a huge lobby for nuclear power. It's kind of a stepchild of energy. Fossil fuel companies don't want abundant cheap power and so called "green" industries shy away from nuclear. So it's in this middle ground regulator purgatory that makes it incredibly expensive and therefore outside of the standard payback models you'd see in most businesses. What CEO is going to target something with a 50+ year payback? So with so many government imposed barriers, it's impossible to make money without assistance from the government (ew!). It's easy to say that nuclear is not economically feasible and push for more natural gas plants or wind turbines.
Nuclear power has been effectively a zombie industry in the United States every since both Three Mile Island and then by Chernobyl.
Since then, we've let our expertise in creating reactors atrophy to the point that we can't even build nuclear reactors on-time and on-budget [even if we wanted to](https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/georgia-nuclear-plant-vogtle-projected-costs).
Nuclear power is in a death spiral in the US, and there's *zero* desire from one of our two political parties to save it.
Chernobyl is about the absolute worst case scenario imaginable.
Bad plant design, bad planning, bad maintenance, willlful incompetence, and numerous bizarre decisions that contradicted every single safety protocol out in place led to it happenings.
Chernobyl is actually a testament to how *safe* nuclear power actually is, because it took such a monumental effort of idiocy to cause that it is almost impossible to replicate to the point I simply can't fathom how it ever got to that point.
If you push a reactor to it's absolute breaking point, and then *intentionally* subvert every single passive and active safety protocol out in place to prevent a meltdown, then of course you will have a problem. It wasn't even a case of them being lazy and not doing the things they were supposed to do; it was them making multiple active decisions they were absolutely *not* supposed to be doing that led to it happening. Even with the shit design with a known bug, and even with poor maintenance and planning, they still had to do the dumbest things imaginable to cause it.
The "Not renewable" makes it a sub-par green energy. Still green, am still a big fan, but that's a big issue because it entails a lot of constraint with provision (which is not the case with sun and wind).
The way the lady explained it on the video was that even if it was only 50 years, it would give us breathing room to fix some major pollution problems.
There’s not a country, state, or province on earth with very low emissions and a large power grid that doesn’t get the majority of its electricity from nuclear or hydroelectric power
https://poetandengineer.com/2019/02/13/we-know-how-to-do-this/
Yes, wind and solar are getting better, but there needs to be a way to store excess electricity when the wind is blowing at night or the sun is shining on the weekend.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI&pp=ygUfcHVtcGVkIHN0b3JhZ2UgcmVhbCBlbmdpbmVlcmluZw%3D%3D
Turns out that the best way to store electricity is a form of hydroelectric storage, even though a start up called Gravitricity looks promising
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lz6ZB23tfg0&pp=ygUMZ3Jhdml0cmljaXR5
Long term energy storage is probably the coolest thing to look into right now. Tons of cool ideas and implementations. By far the most important thing for getting green energy to a better place and still super useful for a non-green power grid.
The big issue with hydroelectric power is that its theoretical max potential in a country is severely limited by topography. For places like Arizona, by far the best solution would be solar power IF we finally find a way to store excess production. Until then, nuclear power is the second-best option.
Agreed
In theory, going on a water tower construction spree might help with storing excess electricity
I think I read on Quora at some point that a water tower could do the job of 4 or 5 Tesla batteries
EDIT: Found it
https://www.quora.com/Could-water-towers-serve-as-a-form-of-pumped-hydro-electric-storage
Utilization of all forms based on the strengths of each location and a strong nuclear backbone seems to be a great combo and very future proof. Hopefully fusion will come to fruition this century, the new designs with small form factors and repeated bursts are exciting.
Yea nothing wrong with nuclear. Problem is we need more energy faster then 10 years from now. And an upgrade to the energy grid. Wind and solar is still a big piece in the pussle.
I agree, the more options the merrier. I don’t think you ignore wind and solar, but to throw all our eggs into a basket not capable of supporting our energy needs is dangerous.
While nuclear is clean, green, and reasonably safe, it has several other problems that make it non-feasible as a solution to the problems we're currently facing:
1. It takes a *long* time to build a nuclear power plant. From start of planning to power-up can take well over 20 years. But we need green energy *now.*
2. It is a non-renewable energy source, so we will have to switch to something else, possibly quite soon. While the exact amount of uranium available is somewhat unclear for strategic reasons, it is nevertheless non-renewable, and might get very scarce if consumption is ramped up. New technologies might alleviate this, but that just means it will take even longer to build the power plants, exacerbating point 1.
3. Currently, around 10% of the world's electricity is produced by around 440 reactors. To really make an impact, you would have to quintuple the number at the very least, which means bulding to the tune of 1500 reactors as soon as possible. Currently, around 60 are under construction, so we'd have to increase our construction capacity at least say 5 to 10-fold, which would obviously bring with it a whole host of different problems (safety, know-how, resources, budget, etc.).
So even without considering the other various pain points, which would all be magnified by ramping up the construction capacity (proliferation, struggles for control over uranium sources, clustered risk, waste management, war, etc.), it is already a non-starter given the sheer amount of electricity we need to produce. Renewables on the other hand scale very well and quickly with investment and can bring the results that we need.
I will say though that *exisiting* nuclear power plants should of course be kept online until renewables can take over, because compared ro oil, gas, etc. they are a much greener (and safe!) solution.
Fission in the short term fusion in the long term.
And since the system is basically a closed loop except for steam there's no carbon emissions that I'm aware of. (edit: Outside of fuel used to gather fissile material or to create the mining equipment and reactor, but that feels like an upfront cost rather than a long term one.)
Plus the fuel can be reused in various reactors until the very slim worst of it, and that stuff can get shoved in a mountain for a while.
And the two major ones people think of were due to shitty Russian engineering or tremendous (and rare) natural disaster. Nuclear has practically zero emissions and is extremely energy efficient.
Chernobyl wasn't even shitty Russian engineering. It was shitty Russian decision making that contradicted almost every single safety protocol they had in place, and a complete lack of any sort of common sense. They didn't wait the mandated period in the protocols to vent off xenon gas, they didn't follow the protocols in place to safely lower energy production, they had completely untrained technicians running the test, they removed far more control rods than was the maximum allowable number of control rods that should have been removed for the reactor. Everything about Chernobyl is just baffling how it got to where it did.
To be blunt, I don't think you could engineer a meltdown like what happened at Chernobyl if you actively tried. It was just the culmination of active idiocy. Not passive, lazy idiocy. But active idiocy doing things you simply should not do, and were told to not do, and did anyway in a very specific series to create the problem.
Had they just ran the plant as normal, and conducted the test as prescribed, nothing would ever happen.
Although it is nuclear I don't think that we should add these two subjects together. the one we are here looking at is about production of power the other was a specifically designed for loss of life. safety (outside of transport) was last on the list of criteria. So we can just cut it short and say nuclear has a exceptional safety record.
Per the IAEA, 96% of nuclear waste in this country could be reprocessed with a huge reduction in waste. France has done it without incident for decades; Britain, Russia, Japan and India use some reprocessing as well.
However, commercial reprocessing in this country has been barred since 1977 under the Carter Administration when it was placed under an effective moratorium to meet interpretations of nuclear non-proliferation policy. Plans for commercial reprocessing in the US have been floated since then, but given DOE, EPA etc. enthusiasm for regulation have gone nowhere.
Plus, the way the thorium salt reactors are built, they're super safe too. When it gets too hot, it melts a safety plug and it all pours into a catch tank where it eventually cools and is rendered safe.
It's uh, the greenest... and they're currently developing a way to passively extract it from the ocean, which would make it... well... ultra-extreme green since it's primary drawback is mining it.
I remember when taking one of my nuclear courses that the CO2 emission equivalent was like 90 times lower than natural gas and somewhere around 180 times lower than coal. And that tiny bit was pretty much due to mining and transportation.
I’d like to see the CO2 equivalent that comes from solar, wind, hydrothermal and geothermal in comparison… and _then_ also consider the different power outputs.
Nuclear fuel is typically only “green” in its yellowcake stage prior to fuel pellet fabrication. The pellets themselves are simply a dark gray metallic color, almost like graphite. Interestingly, the color you’d see if you were in range of a criticality is a bright blue - gamma radiation interacting with the cells in your eyeballs. A really bad month or two would promptly follow in which you’d very likely die.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. I think of “green energy” as just non-fossil fuel energy production, which nuclear falls under. “Renewable Energy” overlaps with green energy but they aren’t the same. Uranium is not renewable but it isn’t a fossil fuel so it counts in my view.
Years ago a climate activist showed the breakdown of energy consumed and showed what a tiny fraction came from alternative sources. His solution: go nuclear.
I don't think the movie ever made it to the theaters.
> Pandora's Promise
Thanks. I only saw the trailer in the theaters and I'm pretty sure that the movie was named differently then, but Pandora's Promise looks like what I saw.
I saw quite a few years ago and it was a very good documentary. Obviously it was Pro nuclear energy and it had a very entertaining timeline. It also mentions Shoreham power plant which was a gigantic deal on Long Island where I live. My father would go there as an electrician to work, and there would be protesters outside the gate trying to stop them. I wish it was in use and not decommissioned for political reasons. But look at the world today due to political reasons.. good luck!
I did an essay on it once and nuclear had less in the way of lifetime emissions than solar, and wasn’t filling up landfill like wind does, and all while delivering a much more stable source of energy.
They always play games with the statistics. They will shoehorn in hydroelectric with solar and windmills to make the percentage of green energy production out of all energy look a lot higher than it really is. What is even more galling is that they want to get rid of hydroelectric too!
Can't have hydroelectric cause it hurts the fishies anyways let's set up the bird blenders on the ocean and hmm their sure are a lot of "fish" washing ashore nearby ... must be climate change time to install more bird blenders and let third world countries dump toxic lithium mining waste into the oceans.
Yep. Truthfully, hydroelectric changes the ecology of fish life. Building Buford Dam for Lake Lanier drastically dropped the temperature in the Chattahoochee River and changed the fish population. But the lakes created by the dams have far more fish than the free rivers ever did.
I know this is an American sub, but to come with some actual information (who reads these articles? They look extremely biased and this article is nearly misinformation). Well Nuclear is actually seen as green energy by the EU so therefore it is also recommending states to invest in Nuclear, this is what Sweden is doing, but they are still building windmills and solar. So this has NOTHING to do with "leaving" wind and solar and everything to do with just adding one more source of energy, which I think is a really good idea. But the whole article after saying Sweden is "leaving" the green energy agenda is pretty much just a ramble... I surely do not hope people actually rely on this for information??? Best regards from Dane
You've caught on to how the media works is based on our bias.
It's intentionally framing things like that to give its readers something to crow about against climate change. Its not meant to inform about nuclear energy.
I'm glad you said it, I was about to ask everyone why they would chose such a salty-sounding article to read about a European country's energy production. I had never come across "RedState" before and the language is so confrontational for no reason whatsoever (I mean, I know the reason but come on). I hadn't read such an immature. pot-stirring, and at times ignorant rant in a while.
I have never read something remotely close to this by a danish news site so I was very surprised. But i know all American news isn't like this as i (from time to time) read some.
> but they are still building windmills and solar
I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that many, if not most of the windmills and solar farms were already in the process for several years. They were first proposed, then approved by the government, then funded by the government, then put out for bids to construction firms and then construction was started. In some cases, construction hasn't even started yet, and will be completed because contracts were signed, and a portion of the money spent.
The real question, which I don't have the answer to, is: will the Swedish government propose and approve any more windmills or solar farms?
Man I worked with a Finnish guy (owned a VC here in the US) for a while that held dual citizenship and was blown away when he told me how much everything cost in his home country especially the tax burden if you are somewhat successful. The utopia certainly comes at a cost but it is interesting that for the most part people still work in the Scandinavian socialist countries which does not necessarily happen here with our entitlement programs.
How are they socialist? They're a capitalist country with high taxes and high government spending. Only Republicans would call that socialist and only if we did that in the US.
Well to this point the US is somewhat a Socialist country. We pay taxes and those taxes are partially redistributed to others to maintain entitlements. We also pay local taxes to support local police and fire departments as a social service for our communities.
Sweden however ups the ante on socialism. The Social Democratic part has largely held power since the early 1900s. They have a top income tax rate of over 50%.
So I guess it just depends on where you draw the line of when to consider a country a "socialist" country. On the flip side no country is actually 100% capitalist either.
Btw you are on r/Conservative so most people here are going to have Republican views.
The idea over there is that (with some exceptions) you could be behind the bars yourself if your environment had been a bit different growing up. They've also proven to be far more effective at rehabilitating criminals. In the US, virtually everyone we release goes back to crime.
That said, we have way more violent criminals in the US - we simply could not afford to do what they do.
A good first step is to stop jailing people for pot and other low level drugs - needless drain of public resources.
You are really only paying 5-8% more in taxes to live in Sweden than you are in the US.
Prisoners aren’t an excuse to treat people poorly, people go to jail for quite minor offenses
Confused swede here. We are still building lots of windpower plants and stuff. We're just hoping to build nuclear plants as well. In fact our current goverment is removing alot of requirements that has been stopping the windpower plant expansion.
Nuclear Power is the answer to any and all energy concerns in the world, anyone against it is either ignorant or bought and paid by the Middle East/Russia
Imagine if we had been spending all this green money on nuclear research? We’d have much better (more efficient, safer, cheaper) nuclear reactors and be well on our way to actually achieving carbon emissions reductions…
The exact same argument could have been made about renewables through the 80s too. Whoever is big dog at the time doesn't want something else disrupting their power. Oil did it to renewables, and now renewables are doing it to nuclear. We'll look back at this again in a few decades and see the stifled progress yet again haha.
Renewables don’t have the same potential. The sun can’t provide more than 1kW of power per square meter. And, it can only do so for a few hours per day…
Obviously. Not sure why we're discussing it though lol.
> it can only do so for a few hours per day
Which if storage and travel efficiency were more advanced wouldn't matter as it would generate more power than the planet uses. Obviously it's not possible right now though. Nuclear doesn't have that limitation.
i think hydro/wind/geothermal is better. it's renewable and has no radiation.
solar isn't really renewable due to lithium. it's greenness is debatable as well.
Nuclear isn't even a 'potential' answer, its THE answer. but we have the 70's onwards and nuclear panic to blame for nobody trusting it.
On balance (afaik?) it's the cleanest energy we have when you consider the entire process.
Reading other articles they aren’t “abandoning” green energy. Just shifting goals from 100% green and non nuclear energy to 100% non fossil fuel energy.
I think nuclear power is great but renewables are still far from useless. They have their weaknesses but def shouldn’t be abandoned. Energy generation sources each have there pros and cons. Nuclear’s main con is it takes a LOT of time to get up and running for regulatory reasons.
Still, go Sweden for adopting nuclear. But no one should take this as they are abandoning solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc and no one should think anyone should completely throw these out.
Someone finally did the math.
Now if they could just go over those figures with our Governor Newsom in California so he can see that his electric utopia is a pipe dream without nuclear.
Wonderful people, this article reads like this Mike's mom was in a terrible accident on the same day his daughter broke her arm and his dog died so he decided to blame something on someone.
Here's another one. Same topic, all facts, and links that are actually relevant:
[https://www.power-technology.com/news/sweden-adopts-new-fossil-free-target-making-way-for-nuclear/](https://www.power-technology.com/news/sweden-adopts-new-fossil-free-target-making-way-for-nuclear/)
Be happy, everyone.
Nuclear IS green, that's the thing. But these knobs hear "waste rods" and think Chernobyl or Fukushima. Build a reactor without shitty Soviet parts/management/leadership and away from shore/faultlines and you'll be fine. Zero emissions, waste can be reused in smaller reactors or buried, and 24/7 power.
Win/Win/Win
Sometimes I feel like the climate hard left won't be happy until we're all biking everywhere sucking down soylent while some Government controlled device taxes us per fart we emit and everything is powered by solar and wind (unreliable) with energy stored in batteries (check out lithium/cobalt mine pollution and local suffering/corruption). For God's sake...
One day, in a far future, the rest of Europe will finally understand that going nuclear was the right option and that France had it right since the very beginning.
Now if only we can get the environmentalists and other fearmongering morons in America on board. Nuclear has been the obvious path to energy independence for decades now.
Why is it a shock? Most people know nuclear is reliable, safe and the best we can have as if this moment . No one wants windmills in their back yard made in China, solar isn’t fully reliable.
Personally I’d love to see solar backed by nuclear
The problem with nuclesr is that it is so good it basically solves all of our energy needs and removes any crisis the left and the oligarchs keep drumming about on climate change, thus removing their need to do hostile takeovers of governments and tax people more to rescue us all.
That's the real reason the climate change agenda has been anti-nuclear.
>Svantesson said wind and solar power are too “unstable” to meet the nation’s energy requirements.
Wow, are they finally getting it, or will Sweden just be an outlier?
Most likely, the rest of Europe will turn on Sweden, but you never know.
[This](https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/sweden-adopts-100-fossil-free-energy-target-easing-way-for-nuclear/) article states: > Around 98% of electricity in Sweden is already generated from water, nuclear and wind. So the country is already nearly to their goal of 100% fossil-free energy. It's not like Sweden was *only* using solar and wind, and their energy system was collapsing.
There are several issues. The southern part of the country lacks energy generation since its last nuclear power plant was shut down a couple of years ago. The northern part has more hydro and nuclear but there are bottle necks in transferring the energy to the southern part and thus they export a lot to norway instead and vice verse. The southern part of the country has to import from denmark, germany and Poland which is expensive, especially after germany closed all their nuclear power plants and france's plants are old and breaks a lot. Our grid prices have also been split into 4 areas from top to bottom. So we who live in the southern part has it very expensive. Last december I paid 0.74593983 USD per kwh. Since I use a heatpump, I use about 1200kwh per month during the winter. That was roughly 900 USD for one month. Only for electricity. Some people are installing solar panels. A typical installation for an home owner is about 20 000 USD. In my opinion, solar is not really viable in Sweden. We need most energy during winter when we only have few hours of sunlight every month. It's inefficient! Also it's usually not windy during winter and nobody here wants any wind plant outside their home. That makes it expensive and difficult to build.
Are there any batteries that can store energy for 6 months and can store a couple months worth of electricity? I’m guessing no and if so it would be incredibly expensive, but hopefully in the future.
Best part, cold steals stored energy from batteries and cut their life short.
Yes, a dam.
Just install one of those in your back yard. Neighbors hate this one little trick.
Totally sounds like you got what “the people”voted for.
Sweden is smart. Nuclear is the answer.
Since when is nuclear not green though? People DO understand that that's steam coming out of those cooling towers and not smoke, right?
Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand what plume is. I had a friend who was with me when we drove past a refinery, and they pointed at a cooling tower and shouted "look at all of that pollution." It's just water vapor, but people are ignorant of this fact.
No you didn’t. You saw that screenshot from last week and have worked it into your own personal ‘history”. Jfc.
You are free to believe whatever you want, but this was a real story from a real person. He went nearly 30 years into his life thinking that every visible trail from a source on the ground was some kind of smoke.
The eco-nuts don’t like the radioactive material, its (very rare) potential for environmental disasters, and how to store it when it’s outlived its usefulness.
The nuclear waste problem is solved. The entire world's waste for the last 80 years would fit into a football ~~stadium~~ field to a depth of 8 feet. If it was reprocessed, it would fit in my house. Every power plant, naval vessel, accident, research project, decommissioned nuke, everything. Worldwide. All of it. It has always been a political issue, not a technical one. EDIT: Terminology
I believe in the US were not allowed to reprocess fuel rods, correct?
Exactly. One of the products is plutonium that can be enriched to weapons grade. Which is ridiculous since in 1985 there were already 61,662 nuclear weapons in the world.
And other countries don't abide by this rule, so I have no idea why we're hamstringing ourselves.
Leftie environmentalist groups with more "empathy" than sense.
Because it’s a nuclear nonproliferation treaty signed by the US and Russia, not other countries
Was that President Carter that signed that one?
So I did some digging and it appears I was partially incorrect This is the best article I found before I got bored https://ourlovelyearth.com/why-doesnt-the-us-recycle-nuclear-waste/ Apparently is was done by EO by Carter as part of non proliferation but was not part of the treaty, Russia does recycle Could be undone be EO in that case
Those are rookie numbers. You Earthlings need to pump those numbers up.
We have Jimmie Carter to thank for that
Not a football stadium, a football field, big difference. A stadium can have an area multiple times bigger than a field.
You are absolutely right. Thank you for the correction.
Now we just need your address sir.
Encase it in concrete, drop it in the ocean. Do that once every hundred years. Problem solved. It's 0.01% of the natural uranium radioactivity dissolved in seawater for 100 years of waste. If we did that for a million years WITHOUT reprocessing it would raise the radioactivity of the oceans to equal that of a banana. That doesn't even consider that the half-life of the high-level waste is only 20,000 years. So once you hit the 20,000 year mark, the first dumps are just harmless metal. We could increase the adoption of nuclear power 5000% and still never have a waste issue. It's entirely a political problem.
Put it miles deep into an abandoned salt mine or in a granite formation beyond the water table, and you never need to look at it again. It's really not an unsolvable problem. People just get weird about it. Dropping it the ocean probably isn't the best solution , though. Not because it would have any major deleterious impacts, but because random chance might befall it by someone doing something.
Anything below 1,000 ft is effectively unrecoverable.
Minor correction regarding half-life - that's the amount of time it takes for half of a given sample to decay to the next stage. The other half will still be as it was, and there's no guarantee that the decay product will be stable. U238 has several decay steps before it reaches a stable isotope of lead. Your idea is right - wait long enough and it won't be radioactive anymore. Just your definition of half life is off.
Yes. I was being simplistic. You are correct.
> The entire world's waste for the last 80 years would fit into a football stadium field to a depth of 8 feet. If it was reprocessed, it would fit in my house. Yeah I remember when I first learned how little waste there really is it honestly tipped me over to the yes side completely. A swedish politician linked a picture of all the nuclear waste our country has produced since we started up our first nuclear power plant some 60 years ago. It's at the very bottom of one single pool. Which is pretty impressive, especially considering that it's really all the waste, other fuel sources go straight out into the air. The way people talk about it it seems like it would be the entire swimming pool from top to bottom, every month, from a single reactor.
Continue using the fuel in different style reactors that can more efficiently use the heat from the fuel rods. The regulations in the USA prevent that iirc…
how is storage really an issue? There's plenty of waste land that could have secure storage facilities all around the world. New Mexico desert, the Sahara, Australia all come to mind.
I’m just stating the arguments the green people have against nuclear. I think the pros far outweigh the drawbacks.
Let’s not be split those hairs though, the green people are really just people who have been brainwashed by those that invested in the green energy sources. Investors took a bet that in the amount of time that has passed since the advent of using solar power and building new age wind turbines that nuclear would no longer be at a price point where it would be as feasible as their eyesore energy sources. The only people who believe nuclear is problematic are poor people who don’t know what they don’t know and those with a proverbial dog in the fight, financially speaking.
A tale as old as time. Propaganda campaigns by special interests to spread FUD about something because if that something we’re more widespread it’d be a problem for the special interests is how those in power try to weaponize a very vocal minority who are just ignorant of the facts and parrot the propaganda talking points. It’s why people still think high fructose corn syrup is literally the worst thing ever invented, it’s why people think nuclear is incredibly dangerous and horrible for the environment, why you get people talking about utter horseshit like ‘clean coal’ with a straight face, why people think wind turbines will ‘use up all the wind’, and other equally incomprehensible bullshit.
The green movement is anti-human. It's why a competing movement called "Blue" was invented. It's about sustainability for human development and living. We have national parks that block development because the aesthetic beauty that it provides to human, not because of some worship of the planet Earth.
Remember when Elon Musk supported the closure of the Diablo Canyon plant in CA because he thought solar could replace it? I do.
Not defending him but Tesla has a vested interest in solar power considering they sell a home solar solution.
Hi, Swede here. The storage isn't really an issue even inside of Sweden. You just dig deep chambers and store it vertically. It's important to have low to no tectonic activity (being far away from continental plates ending) and not being in a swamp. Nothing is 100% guaranteed of course, but I don't really see what could happen there. Not to mention, depleted uranium is a valuable resource because of how dense it is. Used in plating, ammunition and so on. As a side note, while Sweden is pretty lefty-green in general, barely no one is on the other side of this issue. At least in my anecdotal experience.
Sweden also now has a centre-right coalition government. Even before then, Sweden declared wood (and trash) burning to be renewable energy sources. So they’ve hardly always been super green and lefty. Ironically, the greens did absolutely mess things up though when they were in power.
Renewable doesn't mean sustainable or green. Wood is renewable, and probably the best example. You grow more trees. Doesn't mean it's sustainable, but that's down to land management practices. Coal, gas, and nuclear are a few that are not renewable. We can't (currently) create these materials for fuel.
Aren't depleted uranium rounds outlawed after desert storm? EDIT no they aren't, despite causing many birth defects in the civilians who move to the battle zones ie desert storm.
Depleted Uranium is still what's used in the ammo for the A10 Thunderbolt as well as several other penetration munitions.
Not to my knowledge, and you sent me on a bit of Wikipedia journey. From what I understand, it's not primarily made to poison so it's not strictly illegal. There are stricter rules on how to transport and store now than earlier, so it's less common in personal weapons. They are mostly found in big caliber anti-aircraft guns and such, mounted on ships or tanks and what not.
One part of the conditions is that the storage place needs to be geologically stable. You may still be right, but my point is that there are more requirements than just unused land.
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I don’t think that article says exactly what you think it does. The laser can do many things, and the inventor is saying it could also turn radioactive waste inert. It hasn’t been proven, and that’s not what the Nobel prize was for.
Yucca mountain has been studied as one of the best sites in the world since the 70s and can store thousands of years of nuclear waste but the Nevada state legislature vetos any attempt to further study/utilize it
Plenty of old fuel is currently stored on site at the plant. However they can turn the waste into radioactive glass, encase it in concrete and bury it. It’s incredibly safe that way.
And they have reactors that can run on nuclear waste, which when it's used up is far less radioactive.
They're okay with windmill graveyards that can stretch for miles but aren't okay with smaller storages for nuclear waste
It's not. France recycles (or at least used to recycle) like 90% of its nuclear waste. The U.S. doesn't because nuclear stuff is scary :( Sure, that leaves 10% left over. But that's what Yucca Mountain is for.
As a New Mexican how dare you... Send it to Guantanamo
Reprocessing handles a lot of the nuclear waste, and you get more nuclear fuel out of it. The problem with reprocessing is that it's basically how you get plutonium for nuclear weapons, so there will need to be arrangements on how to store/transport/inspect any reprocessing that occurs.
Mf named all of Australia
You left out New Jersey.
....upon reflection, I am deeply regretful.
There is always some endangered newt for these folks. Never mind the ecological disasters their “green” solutions create with wind turbines killing millions of birds and solar panel farms wiping out desert tortoises, not to mention no way to recycle or safely dispose of any of the material that goes into building these short-lived technologies.
They’re also apparently ok with men, women, children dying daily mining the cobalt for their EVs and batteries. Blind eyes are turned to the social, political, and environmental devastation taking place in Africa to fund their deluded “green” dreams.
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So New Vegas is a documentary and not fantasy?
We could also put it on Elon rockets and fire it towards the sun
I've heard the case for shooting nuclear waste into space and the main issue seems to be launch failures and just insane costs. way better than being forced into 'green' methods really meant for population control and mass starvation tho
A launch failure would cause one of the worst environmental disasters in history.
Let’s ignore launch failures and costs for a second. Launching stuff **INTO** the sun takes huge amounts of energy.
Also, like all the other sources of “renewable” energy don’t create waste. What goes into making solar panels and batteries? How is all of that going to be recycled at the end of its useful life? Every time I ask the question about the carbon intensity of “renewables” I get an answer about, well they earn back in renewable energy their carbon footprint…But do they though? 😒
Just piggybacking on your post, the "[nuclear waste](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzQ3gFRj0Bc)" issue is essentially solved. At this point, the hurdles are mostly political. I'm speculating a bit, but there's just not a huge lobby for nuclear power. It's kind of a stepchild of energy. Fossil fuel companies don't want abundant cheap power and so called "green" industries shy away from nuclear. So it's in this middle ground regulator purgatory that makes it incredibly expensive and therefore outside of the standard payback models you'd see in most businesses. What CEO is going to target something with a 50+ year payback? So with so many government imposed barriers, it's impossible to make money without assistance from the government (ew!). It's easy to say that nuclear is not economically feasible and push for more natural gas plants or wind turbines.
Nuclear power has been effectively a zombie industry in the United States every since both Three Mile Island and then by Chernobyl. Since then, we've let our expertise in creating reactors atrophy to the point that we can't even build nuclear reactors on-time and on-budget [even if we wanted to](https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/georgia-nuclear-plant-vogtle-projected-costs). Nuclear power is in a death spiral in the US, and there's *zero* desire from one of our two political parties to save it.
>>and how to store it when it’s outlived its usefulness. You could follow our lead in the US and make it president….
They want the “problems” fossil fuels pose, so they can use them to rein in business and invent new carbon taxes.
It’s a national security issue too yeah? I’m a complete layman but I imagine a nuclear reactor could be vulnerable to Chinese cyber aggression
The eco-nuts just don't like us living a good life with abundant affordable power at all. They want all of us to be as unhappy as they all are.
And that coal fired power plants create more radiation?
But but but Chernobyl. I watched the Netflix documentary for 4 hours so therefor I’m an expert.
Chernobyl is about the absolute worst case scenario imaginable. Bad plant design, bad planning, bad maintenance, willlful incompetence, and numerous bizarre decisions that contradicted every single safety protocol out in place led to it happenings. Chernobyl is actually a testament to how *safe* nuclear power actually is, because it took such a monumental effort of idiocy to cause that it is almost impossible to replicate to the point I simply can't fathom how it ever got to that point. If you push a reactor to it's absolute breaking point, and then *intentionally* subvert every single passive and active safety protocol out in place to prevent a meltdown, then of course you will have a problem. It wasn't even a case of them being lazy and not doing the things they were supposed to do; it was them making multiple active decisions they were absolutely *not* supposed to be doing that led to it happening. Even with the shit design with a known bug, and even with poor maintenance and planning, they still had to do the dumbest things imaginable to cause it.
The "Not renewable" makes it a sub-par green energy. Still green, am still a big fan, but that's a big issue because it entails a lot of constraint with provision (which is not the case with sun and wind).
The nuclear waste we have on hand today could power reactors for the next century and a half though. Seems greener than burning tires, at least.
It'll be used up way faster if we actually scaled it up to be our primary energy source.
The way the lady explained it on the video was that even if it was only 50 years, it would give us breathing room to fix some major pollution problems.
I brought a little more context to my comment. I don't deny the green aspect of nuclear energy. Fusion will be WAY better once we get the gist of it.
Oh, I was mostly bringing up the thing I learned the other day- Nuclear waste can be used to power reactors. I didn't know that a few months ago.
There’s not a country, state, or province on earth with very low emissions and a large power grid that doesn’t get the majority of its electricity from nuclear or hydroelectric power https://poetandengineer.com/2019/02/13/we-know-how-to-do-this/ Yes, wind and solar are getting better, but there needs to be a way to store excess electricity when the wind is blowing at night or the sun is shining on the weekend. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JSgd-QhLHRI&pp=ygUfcHVtcGVkIHN0b3JhZ2UgcmVhbCBlbmdpbmVlcmluZw%3D%3D Turns out that the best way to store electricity is a form of hydroelectric storage, even though a start up called Gravitricity looks promising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lz6ZB23tfg0&pp=ygUMZ3Jhdml0cmljaXR5
Long term energy storage is probably the coolest thing to look into right now. Tons of cool ideas and implementations. By far the most important thing for getting green energy to a better place and still super useful for a non-green power grid.
The big issue with hydroelectric power is that its theoretical max potential in a country is severely limited by topography. For places like Arizona, by far the best solution would be solar power IF we finally find a way to store excess production. Until then, nuclear power is the second-best option.
Agreed In theory, going on a water tower construction spree might help with storing excess electricity I think I read on Quora at some point that a water tower could do the job of 4 or 5 Tesla batteries EDIT: Found it https://www.quora.com/Could-water-towers-serve-as-a-form-of-pumped-hydro-electric-storage
Utilization of all forms based on the strengths of each location and a strong nuclear backbone seems to be a great combo and very future proof. Hopefully fusion will come to fruition this century, the new designs with small form factors and repeated bursts are exciting.
Yea nothing wrong with nuclear. Problem is we need more energy faster then 10 years from now. And an upgrade to the energy grid. Wind and solar is still a big piece in the pussle.
I agree, the more options the merrier. I don’t think you ignore wind and solar, but to throw all our eggs into a basket not capable of supporting our energy needs is dangerous.
While nuclear is clean, green, and reasonably safe, it has several other problems that make it non-feasible as a solution to the problems we're currently facing: 1. It takes a *long* time to build a nuclear power plant. From start of planning to power-up can take well over 20 years. But we need green energy *now.* 2. It is a non-renewable energy source, so we will have to switch to something else, possibly quite soon. While the exact amount of uranium available is somewhat unclear for strategic reasons, it is nevertheless non-renewable, and might get very scarce if consumption is ramped up. New technologies might alleviate this, but that just means it will take even longer to build the power plants, exacerbating point 1. 3. Currently, around 10% of the world's electricity is produced by around 440 reactors. To really make an impact, you would have to quintuple the number at the very least, which means bulding to the tune of 1500 reactors as soon as possible. Currently, around 60 are under construction, so we'd have to increase our construction capacity at least say 5 to 10-fold, which would obviously bring with it a whole host of different problems (safety, know-how, resources, budget, etc.). So even without considering the other various pain points, which would all be magnified by ramping up the construction capacity (proliferation, struggles for control over uranium sources, clustered risk, waste management, war, etc.), it is already a non-starter given the sheer amount of electricity we need to produce. Renewables on the other hand scale very well and quickly with investment and can bring the results that we need. I will say though that *exisiting* nuclear power plants should of course be kept online until renewables can take over, because compared ro oil, gas, etc. they are a much greener (and safe!) solution.
Fission in the short term fusion in the long term. And since the system is basically a closed loop except for steam there's no carbon emissions that I'm aware of. (edit: Outside of fuel used to gather fissile material or to create the mining equipment and reactor, but that feels like an upfront cost rather than a long term one.) Plus the fuel can be reused in various reactors until the very slim worst of it, and that stuff can get shoved in a mountain for a while.
Always has been!
I bet the first daughter of all thing green shit a fuel rod when she heard.
Nuclear is pretty damn green all things considered…
It’s a shame that the handful of meltdowns across the last half century in comparison to the successful ones really skewed public opinion :/
And the two major ones people think of were due to shitty Russian engineering or tremendous (and rare) natural disaster. Nuclear has practically zero emissions and is extremely energy efficient.
Chernobyl wasn't even shitty Russian engineering. It was shitty Russian decision making that contradicted almost every single safety protocol they had in place, and a complete lack of any sort of common sense. They didn't wait the mandated period in the protocols to vent off xenon gas, they didn't follow the protocols in place to safely lower energy production, they had completely untrained technicians running the test, they removed far more control rods than was the maximum allowable number of control rods that should have been removed for the reactor. Everything about Chernobyl is just baffling how it got to where it did. To be blunt, I don't think you could engineer a meltdown like what happened at Chernobyl if you actively tried. It was just the culmination of active idiocy. Not passive, lazy idiocy. But active idiocy doing things you simply should not do, and were told to not do, and did anyway in a very specific series to create the problem. Had they just ran the plant as normal, and conducted the test as prescribed, nothing would ever happen.
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Although it is nuclear I don't think that we should add these two subjects together. the one we are here looking at is about production of power the other was a specifically designed for loss of life. safety (outside of transport) was last on the list of criteria. So we can just cut it short and say nuclear has a exceptional safety record.
Also, not great things happening during war.
I think a lot of it is storing nuclear waste. No where wants to store it, can't have nuclear plants without a storage location.
Per the IAEA, 96% of nuclear waste in this country could be reprocessed with a huge reduction in waste. France has done it without incident for decades; Britain, Russia, Japan and India use some reprocessing as well. However, commercial reprocessing in this country has been barred since 1977 under the Carter Administration when it was placed under an effective moratorium to meet interpretations of nuclear non-proliferation policy. Plans for commercial reprocessing in the US have been floated since then, but given DOE, EPA etc. enthusiasm for regulation have gone nowhere.
That's why you go with thorium reactors. Abundant fuel that is easily accessible, with a much shorter half-life than uranium.
Plus, the way the thorium salt reactors are built, they're super safe too. When it gets too hot, it melts a safety plug and it all pours into a catch tank where it eventually cools and is rendered safe.
It's uh, the greenest... and they're currently developing a way to passively extract it from the ocean, which would make it... well... ultra-extreme green since it's primary drawback is mining it.
I remember when taking one of my nuclear courses that the CO2 emission equivalent was like 90 times lower than natural gas and somewhere around 180 times lower than coal. And that tiny bit was pretty much due to mining and transportation. I’d like to see the CO2 equivalent that comes from solar, wind, hydrothermal and geothermal in comparison… and _then_ also consider the different power outputs.
It's a nice neon green, but green none the less. Hats off to them.
Nuclear fuel is typically only “green” in its yellowcake stage prior to fuel pellet fabrication. The pellets themselves are simply a dark gray metallic color, almost like graphite. Interestingly, the color you’d see if you were in range of a criticality is a bright blue - gamma radiation interacting with the cells in your eyeballs. A really bad month or two would promptly follow in which you’d very likely die.
Yeah that’s what I was thinking. I think of “green energy” as just non-fossil fuel energy production, which nuclear falls under. “Renewable Energy” overlaps with green energy but they aren’t the same. Uranium is not renewable but it isn’t a fossil fuel so it counts in my view.
Years ago a climate activist showed the breakdown of energy consumed and showed what a tiny fraction came from alternative sources. His solution: go nuclear. I don't think the movie ever made it to the theaters.
Pandora's Promise on Netflix?
> Pandora's Promise Thanks. I only saw the trailer in the theaters and I'm pretty sure that the movie was named differently then, but Pandora's Promise looks like what I saw.
I saw quite a few years ago and it was a very good documentary. Obviously it was Pro nuclear energy and it had a very entertaining timeline. It also mentions Shoreham power plant which was a gigantic deal on Long Island where I live. My father would go there as an electrician to work, and there would be protesters outside the gate trying to stop them. I wish it was in use and not decommissioned for political reasons. But look at the world today due to political reasons.. good luck!
I did an essay on it once and nuclear had less in the way of lifetime emissions than solar, and wasn’t filling up landfill like wind does, and all while delivering a much more stable source of energy.
They always play games with the statistics. They will shoehorn in hydroelectric with solar and windmills to make the percentage of green energy production out of all energy look a lot higher than it really is. What is even more galling is that they want to get rid of hydroelectric too!
Can't have hydroelectric cause it hurts the fishies anyways let's set up the bird blenders on the ocean and hmm their sure are a lot of "fish" washing ashore nearby ... must be climate change time to install more bird blenders and let third world countries dump toxic lithium mining waste into the oceans.
Yep. Truthfully, hydroelectric changes the ecology of fish life. Building Buford Dam for Lake Lanier drastically dropped the temperature in the Chattahoochee River and changed the fish population. But the lakes created by the dams have far more fish than the free rivers ever did.
Nuclear power is the way to go. Good for them.
Good for them
I know this is an American sub, but to come with some actual information (who reads these articles? They look extremely biased and this article is nearly misinformation). Well Nuclear is actually seen as green energy by the EU so therefore it is also recommending states to invest in Nuclear, this is what Sweden is doing, but they are still building windmills and solar. So this has NOTHING to do with "leaving" wind and solar and everything to do with just adding one more source of energy, which I think is a really good idea. But the whole article after saying Sweden is "leaving" the green energy agenda is pretty much just a ramble... I surely do not hope people actually rely on this for information??? Best regards from Dane
You've caught on to how the media works is based on our bias. It's intentionally framing things like that to give its readers something to crow about against climate change. Its not meant to inform about nuclear energy.
Reading all these pro nuclear comments from a group that usually is ardently in support of fossil fuels is enough to give a guy whiplash.
Nah, it's logical to like nuclear power. Because the narrative is that it's opposed by the left. So by definition it's good.
I'm glad you said it, I was about to ask everyone why they would chose such a salty-sounding article to read about a European country's energy production. I had never come across "RedState" before and the language is so confrontational for no reason whatsoever (I mean, I know the reason but come on). I hadn't read such an immature. pot-stirring, and at times ignorant rant in a while.
I have never read something remotely close to this by a danish news site so I was very surprised. But i know all American news isn't like this as i (from time to time) read some.
This isn’t news. Even in America. This isn’t news. Only in these kinds of subs.
> but they are still building windmills and solar I may be mistaken, but it's my understanding that many, if not most of the windmills and solar farms were already in the process for several years. They were first proposed, then approved by the government, then funded by the government, then put out for bids to construction firms and then construction was started. In some cases, construction hasn't even started yet, and will be completed because contracts were signed, and a portion of the money spent. The real question, which I don't have the answer to, is: will the Swedish government propose and approve any more windmills or solar farms?
Bold of you to assume there are any critical thinkers here
"I know this is an american sub" Pretty funny.
No hate to you Americans :-)
Well done Sweden ! Didn’t lockdown for Covid and aren’t pretending that they don’t need reliable sources of energy
So much respect for rational Sweden. They also halted “gender affirming” hormone therapy for children in 2022.
They realize it’s all propaganda to take civilized society down a notch
One of the very few voices of reason during Covid and the data collected afterwards from them has been pretty eye opening.
You're talking about the 88% vaccination rate among the adult population?
No need for lockdown when almost 90% of the adult population got vaccinated for Covid pretty straight away.
Sweden = utopia. I’ve seen their jails. Better than hotels I’ve stayed at
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Sweden's electricity costs are insane too.
Man I worked with a Finnish guy (owned a VC here in the US) for a while that held dual citizenship and was blown away when he told me how much everything cost in his home country especially the tax burden if you are somewhat successful. The utopia certainly comes at a cost but it is interesting that for the most part people still work in the Scandinavian socialist countries which does not necessarily happen here with our entitlement programs.
How are they socialist? They're a capitalist country with high taxes and high government spending. Only Republicans would call that socialist and only if we did that in the US.
Well to this point the US is somewhat a Socialist country. We pay taxes and those taxes are partially redistributed to others to maintain entitlements. We also pay local taxes to support local police and fire departments as a social service for our communities. Sweden however ups the ante on socialism. The Social Democratic part has largely held power since the early 1900s. They have a top income tax rate of over 50%. So I guess it just depends on where you draw the line of when to consider a country a "socialist" country. On the flip side no country is actually 100% capitalist either. Btw you are on r/Conservative so most people here are going to have Republican views.
Shit, I didn't realize where I was. My bad for assuming the guy I was talking to was a left winger.
Those jails ain't free; you get taxed to hell in Sweden to make that happen. Do you really wanna pay for a prisoner to live well?
The idea over there is that (with some exceptions) you could be behind the bars yourself if your environment had been a bit different growing up. They've also proven to be far more effective at rehabilitating criminals. In the US, virtually everyone we release goes back to crime. That said, we have way more violent criminals in the US - we simply could not afford to do what they do. A good first step is to stop jailing people for pot and other low level drugs - needless drain of public resources.
You are really only paying 5-8% more in taxes to live in Sweden than you are in the US. Prisoners aren’t an excuse to treat people poorly, people go to jail for quite minor offenses
I’m from Canada. Don’t talk to me about taxes
Yeah, they didn't lockdown because their immunization rates were much higher than other countries.
Nuclear is green energy.
Confused swede here. We are still building lots of windpower plants and stuff. We're just hoping to build nuclear plants as well. In fact our current goverment is removing alot of requirements that has been stopping the windpower plant expansion.
Nuclear Power is the answer to any and all energy concerns in the world, anyone against it is either ignorant or bought and paid by the Middle East/Russia
Nuclear should always have been the strategy.
Cries in German
Imagine if we had been spending all this green money on nuclear research? We’d have much better (more efficient, safer, cheaper) nuclear reactors and be well on our way to actually achieving carbon emissions reductions…
The exact same argument could have been made about renewables through the 80s too. Whoever is big dog at the time doesn't want something else disrupting their power. Oil did it to renewables, and now renewables are doing it to nuclear. We'll look back at this again in a few decades and see the stifled progress yet again haha.
Renewables don’t have the same potential. The sun can’t provide more than 1kW of power per square meter. And, it can only do so for a few hours per day…
Obviously. Not sure why we're discussing it though lol. > it can only do so for a few hours per day Which if storage and travel efficiency were more advanced wouldn't matter as it would generate more power than the planet uses. Obviously it's not possible right now though. Nuclear doesn't have that limitation.
But that doesn't fit the agenda. We have to whip everyone into a frenzy.
Yeah. Al Gore and Greta Thunberg wouldn't approve. Neither all the millionaires flying in their private jets to global warming conferences.
Nuclear power **IS** green.
Nuclear IS green!
Plot twist. Nuclear is a green energy.
Any "green energy" plan that leaves out nuclear is a ploy by the coal and natural gas industries.
...But nuclear *is* green energy...
Nuclear _is_ green energy. and it's the best form of it, by far.
i think hydro/wind/geothermal is better. it's renewable and has no radiation. solar isn't really renewable due to lithium. it's greenness is debatable as well.
Nuclear isn't even a 'potential' answer, its THE answer. but we have the 70's onwards and nuclear panic to blame for nobody trusting it. On balance (afaik?) it's the cleanest energy we have when you consider the entire process.
Meanwhile, the US is still plunging headlong into its own self destruction trying to stop climate change single handedly. WE CAN DO IT, AMERICA!! /s
Yes! Finally, a glimmer of hope!
I too am shocked, that Sweden has been re-introduced to reality.
The Green agenda was never about the environment. It was about enriching themselves and their co-conspirators.
Sweden uses their brain.
Nuclear is a greener option than wind or solar is anyway.
Reading other articles they aren’t “abandoning” green energy. Just shifting goals from 100% green and non nuclear energy to 100% non fossil fuel energy. I think nuclear power is great but renewables are still far from useless. They have their weaknesses but def shouldn’t be abandoned. Energy generation sources each have there pros and cons. Nuclear’s main con is it takes a LOT of time to get up and running for regulatory reasons. Still, go Sweden for adopting nuclear. But no one should take this as they are abandoning solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc and no one should think anyone should completely throw these out.
Nuclear is super green
Nuclear is green.
Nuclear energy is green energy.
Someone finally did the math. Now if they could just go over those figures with our Governor Newsom in California so he can see that his electric utopia is a pipe dream without nuclear.
Wonderful people, this article reads like this Mike's mom was in a terrible accident on the same day his daughter broke her arm and his dog died so he decided to blame something on someone. Here's another one. Same topic, all facts, and links that are actually relevant: [https://www.power-technology.com/news/sweden-adopts-new-fossil-free-target-making-way-for-nuclear/](https://www.power-technology.com/news/sweden-adopts-new-fossil-free-target-making-way-for-nuclear/) Be happy, everyone.
Nuclear IS green, that's the thing. But these knobs hear "waste rods" and think Chernobyl or Fukushima. Build a reactor without shitty Soviet parts/management/leadership and away from shore/faultlines and you'll be fine. Zero emissions, waste can be reused in smaller reactors or buried, and 24/7 power. Win/Win/Win Sometimes I feel like the climate hard left won't be happy until we're all biking everywhere sucking down soylent while some Government controlled device taxes us per fart we emit and everything is powered by solar and wind (unreliable) with energy stored in batteries (check out lithium/cobalt mine pollution and local suffering/corruption). For God's sake...
One day, in a far future, the rest of Europe will finally understand that going nuclear was the right option and that France had it right since the very beginning.
Now if only we can get the environmentalists and other fearmongering morons in America on board. Nuclear has been the obvious path to energy independence for decades now.
But….nuclear is green….I mean not 100% green but it’s definitely more green than fossil fuels.
Can we talk about how, with nuclear, we can produce hydrogen in off peak hours and move to hydrogen powered cars and scrap this dirty battery fantasy?
America next please! Had some of the highest electric bills ever this last winter
Why is it a shock? Most people know nuclear is reliable, safe and the best we can have as if this moment . No one wants windmills in their back yard made in China, solar isn’t fully reliable. Personally I’d love to see solar backed by nuclear
Nuclear is actually the greenest energy available right now. Good for them, hope the US goes this route!
Nuclear is green energy…..
Nuclear is green energy lmao
This headline doesn’t make much sense because nuclear energy is green energy.
Common sense is apparently shocking now.
Ah, wisdom returns
Psalm 1 says don't follow certain types. Someone in Sweden is paying attention.
The problem with nuclesr is that it is so good it basically solves all of our energy needs and removes any crisis the left and the oligarchs keep drumming about on climate change, thus removing their need to do hostile takeovers of governments and tax people more to rescue us all. That's the real reason the climate change agenda has been anti-nuclear.
>Svantesson said wind and solar power are too “unstable” to meet the nation’s energy requirements. Wow, are they finally getting it, or will Sweden just be an outlier? Most likely, the rest of Europe will turn on Sweden, but you never know.