Common sense in Sweden! Energy in Sweden!
Under the policy of Sweden’s current government, the Swedish people are to be allowed to illuminate and heat their homes and do all the other things they use electricity for. The Swedish parliament has formally relinquished the government’s former target of somehow reaching “net-zero” renewable energy by 2045.
Such unreliable means of generating power as erratic wind and erratic sunshine just don’t cut it, says Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson.
“We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity, and we need a stable energy system. In substantial industrialized economies … only a gas-to-nuclear pathway is viable to remain industrialized and competitive.”
The new energy policy is an about-face for Sweden, which decided in the ’80s to nuke nuclear power and pursue 100 percent “renewable” energy.
Sweden is now following the lead of Finland. After Finland’s latest nuclear power plant went on line in April, reports Peta Credlin, “wholesale power prices dropped 75%, almost overnight. The Olkiluoto 3 plant is … delivering 15 percent of the country’s power needs. Nuclear now provides around half of the country’s total electricity generation.”
Nuclear power has gotten a bad rap in many countries, including the United States. But if societies and governments are rightly or wrongly determined to retreat from reliance on fossil fuels while also not pulling the plug on industrial civilization, a steady supply of electricity has to be obtained somehow or other.
Nuclear power is one major way to do the job.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with ChatGPT 4o
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
2 replies on “Sweden’s Electric Sense”
Certainly, some methods of using nuclear fission to generate electrical power are better than others. In the present context, I don’t expect the most appropriate technologies to be used. Our modern states do not take a laissez-faire approach to the insurance of risk. A power generator (of any sort) that cannot be built without the state providing insurance, subsidizing otherwise private insurance, or limiting liability in the event of accident is economically inefficient.
As I understand it, Daniel, nuclear fission, when divorced of ties to the creation of plutonium for bombs, is very safe. The reason to not have developed thorium tech instead of uranium was that thorium was of no use in developing a nuclear arsenal.
If that is true, the whole apparatus of subsidized insurance and heavily regulated industrial production of nuclear energy was an offshoot of the military-industrial complex, not normal market processes.
But I can think of a few reasons why that might not be precisely true. Or even false. I do know that today’s nuclear energy is superior to legacy nuclear energy.