To believe that we can (or should) rely on renewable energy alone is a kind of madness, so this news from a month or so back was welcome news.
Reuters (June 20):
Sweden’s parliament on Tuesday adopted a new energy target, giving the right-wing government the green light to push forward with plans to build new nuclear plants in a country that voted 40 years ago to phase out atomic power.
Changing the target to “100% fossil-free” electricity, from “100% renewable” is key to the government’s plan to meet an expected doubling of electricity demand to around 300 TwH by 2040 and reach net zero emissions by 2045.
Right-wing governments strike again!
“This creates the conditions for nuclear power,” Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said in parliament. “We need more electricity production, we need clean electricity and we need a stable energy system.”
Hydropower, easily the most reliable form of renewable energy, supplies around 45 percent of Sweden’s electricity. But there is a limit to the number of dams the country can build. Nuclear power (for decades the subject of fierce controversy in Sweden and, for a long time, scheduled to be phased out) provides around 30 percent, and wind supplies almost all the rest.
Sweden has some of the largest uranium reserves in the EU but banned uranium mining in 2018 after the Centre Party (a rural party with a long tradition of opposition to nuclear energy) sided with the Greens and other left-wing parties.
Here’s what the Centre Party spokeswoman had to say at the time:
It’s clear to us that ‘the renewables society’ is on the doorstep, and nuclear energy has no place in it. Which means no place for uranium mining, a hazardous business, either. All things considered, we see no future in it.
Okey-dokey.
But now the right-wing government has struck yet again.
Via the London Times (emphasis added):
Uranium mining is set to return to mainland Europe as the region seeks alternatives to Russian nuclear fuel and Sweden pushes to treble its atomic energy capacity, the country’s climate minister has said.
Romina Pourmokhtari, who last year became the youngest cabinet minister in Swedish history at the age of 26, said there was a parliamentary majority behind lifting Sweden’s ban on uranium extraction and opening up by far the largest deposits in the European Union.
Nearly 40 years after the completion of the country’s last new nuclear power plant, Pourmokhtari has announced plans to build at least ten large reactors to meet an anticipated surge in demand for zero-carbon power.
She said that while wind and solar power would be important, the country also needed massive volumes of nuclear-generated electricity because output can be reliably dialled up or down to keep the power supply steady through the peaks and troughs of renewable generation.
Needless to say, Sweden’s Greens have objected.
#Science