Honestly I don't care if it's solar, wind, geothermal, biofuel, or nuclear, as long as it displaces fossil fuels. And it's feasible on a very near time scale.

If Sweden did an honest investigation and found that renewables would be more costly and take longer, let em get nuclear.

We need an "all of the above" approach. This fight between nuclear and renewables is just stirred up by fossil fuel interests. Either is good. Both is good.

Imo, renewable should still be the target, nuclear should be the bridge towards renewable until it's feasible enough

I don't get why people here are so hyped. Why is it a good thing to completely dump renewables?

Hell yeah, tell me the best future isn't nuclear power and electric rail like an old space Lego set.

One of the biggest problems that we have today when it comes to energy production (and a whole lot of other things) is putting all our eggs in one basket. Well how the fuck does this change anything?

I am not anti-nuclear, but dumping ALL renewable targets is moronic. Now you've simply replaced one egg for another egg, but it's still just ONE egg. A stable energy portfolio is diversifying your sources.

Dosent sweden already have a fairly high and fairly stable energy production through their hydroelectiric power plants . Wouldnt it be better to just build more of those.

10 reactors? How long is that gonna take to build? A single reactor can take at least 8 years. So hopefully they aren’t ditching renewables all together. You can build a lot of solar and wind farms in those 8 years.

Swede here.

Just clarifying some things.

Sweden is not dropping renewable energy. We are (at least for now) going to include nuclear energy among the other alternatives such as water, wind and solar.

But here's one of the problems we are trying to solve with nuclear power:

Sweden is a major producer of high quality steel and we have set a target to become CO2 free in 2045 when it comes to steel production.

Currently the steel production in Sweden is responsible for 5500000 metric tons of CO2 per year and we have plans to go 0 CO2 by 2045.

To be able to do this we need, just for the CO2 free steel production, 70 TWh per year.

In 2020 there were 4333 wind turbines 26TW of electricity in Sweden. While you might think that we'd just build 9000 more it will not likely not solve the main problem with wind and solar power production: reliability.

So either we continue using fossil fuel to produce steel or we don't. It's as easy as that.

A low carbon energy source is useless if it cannot cover peak loads, which are now being covered by fossil fuels. Years of greenie obstructionism now means that the nuclear plants that would have been built are now missing, and the solutions offered by the anti-nuclear lobby seems to be "let them have energy poverty, brownouts and outright blackouts are not our problem". This will happen once coal and oil plants shut down, renewables alone cannot cover the demands, especially at peak load.

Great news. A zero emissions electricity grid requires nuclear, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future; new battery techs are not there yet, and other non-intermittent sources like geothermal are too small scale and/or geographically specific. An irrational aversion to nuclear power has been a big obstacle to decarbonization, so every step in this direction is to be celebrated!

Downvote me all you want but nuclear is not a long term solution. Short term at best.

It's relatively clean compared to fossil fuels but it has several critical flaws on the long term.

For starters, it produces extremely toxic waste which we have no idea how to get rid of besides burying it and forget about it. Everytime someone mentions this all we hear is "we can create x method to dispose of it cleanly". Right, but while we develop X method that shit keeps piling up. And when X method fails to work as we intended "oh, well, just keep bury it and lets start thinking about Y".

And the biggest problem is this. Nuclear is actually relatively safe since the security regulations are (or should) be very strict. But all it takes is one bad enough disaster. Disasters like Chernobyl had the potential to leave half of Europe inhabitable for centuries. But, hey, as long as the regulations are strict and we have equipment and procedures that manage the human error we would be fine, right? Not really. Murphy's law. The worst scenario will happen eventually. A obscure bug in the security systems, an unexpected natural disaster, war or terrorism. There's always a failure point. In other energy types, we can manage that risk. One very rare disaster is not enough to make it not worth it if the good outweights the bad. Not in nuclear energy. Only one disaster can be potentially catastrophic and outweight all the good it made for decades or even centuries.

On the long term it is just not worth it. On the short term...it's a gamble.