Utopia Talk / Politics / Denmark goes nuclear

Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 15 03:31:49 A tiny insignificant country with an even tinier electricity consumption has lifted a ban on nuclear energy. Maybe in 50 years they will decide to plan to look at some designa for choice of architecture of the council to investigate what kind of building that will house the council that will choose the reactor design. A microscopic step towards sanity at the pace of a snail.
williamthebastard Member	Thu May 15 03:42:09 Yawnism @ the expected technofascism "Billions of people will want robot friends!"- really stupid people brought up by scifi movies instead of caring parents
murder Member	Thu May 15 15:38:37 One small step towards energy independence, one giant leap towards becoming a nuclear armed state. :oP
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 15 19:27:04 As they say, when it rains it pours. Belgium scraps nuclear phase out plans.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 15 19:28:07 Though I guess, dribs and drabs is more appropriate.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Thu May 15 19:37:18 It seems that the delusion has subsided. You can’t electrify at the scale you want without nuclear. You can’t rely on wind and solar with the current storage technology, and a grid that was built for large dispatchable turbines. These are infrastructure projects about or likely more expensive than building nuclear power plants, with the caveat that no one has actually built one and the storage technology doesn’t exist.
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon May 19 04:55:49 Germany drops opposition to nuclear power. This one is huge.
jergul large member	Mon May 19 05:26:23 http://www...kostnader-for-kraftproduksjon/ My main concern with nuclear power is how it can lock us into a high price regime for electricity. I would prefer an internet of things approach. For example, say a modern electic car can store 100 kW/h. It is typically in use about 10% of the time. It has a range of 400 km on a full battery. Scale that up to 1 million cars in a futuristic Denmark and you get a lot of storage capacity. Not worthwile in itself in the form of battery parks, but a car serving a dual purpose as a storage unit / mode of transportation... Or data center plasticity. Data centers scaling down or up usage depending on local wind and sun conditions.
Seb Member	Mon May 19 07:22:24 Not wildly convinced: it mostly needs managing at the network edge if you are introducing tradeoffs (don't draw from the grid, draw down your car battery) that's going to need lots of fiddly stuff for end consumers or weird micro transactions. It would be simpler, and probably cheaper, to identify a portion of static base load requirement and optimise for that. And in any case full electrification is going to require a lot of electrical power for industrial heat. If you can colocate industries with heat requirements that can utilise waste heat from nukes etc etc. But for a country the size of Denmark (in fact most European countries) it would make most sense to have a pan European JV to build to a common design (outsource or license componentry)
jergul large member	Mon May 19 08:08:08 Seb Its just a variation of SEG, but would need to be backed by specific legislation to for various safeguards and optimizations. 100 kW/h is pretty hefty capacity when scaled. By fiddly stuff, do you mean an app?
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon May 19 08:08:11 I found a new use for Chatgpt. Please make this more polite! *** Jergul, I appreciate the direction you’re thinking in—there’s real merit in exploring flexible, distributed solutions like EV storage and data center load shifting. But I think we need to ground the conversation in physical fundamentals, not just techno-optimis That’s why I’m more interested in metrics like EROI and material intensity. These are rooted in first principles—you can’t cheat the physics of how much copper, energy, and land something takes to build and operate. LCOE, by contrast, is a financial abstraction. It hides system-level costs like grid reinforcement, storage, and redundancy—especially for intermittent sources. And to be fair, even NVE’s own methodology (which you linked) acknowledges this. Their LCOE calculations don’t include transmission, distribution, or integration costs. So when people argue that wind and solar are “cheaper,” it’s often because the real infrastructure bill is sitting off the balance sheet. Nuclear isn’t perfect, but it offers high EROI, low material intensity, and stable baseload—giving us a foundation to build more flexible layers on top, rather than gambling the grid on best-case assumptions.
jergul large member	Mon May 19 08:12:33 95% of new passenger car registrations in Norway are currently plug in electric or plug in hydro. Perhaps that is why I think of the latent storage potential inherent to all those battery packs.
jergul large member	Mon May 19 08:18:10 Nimi It is kind of irrelevant for Norway and Sweden. Baseload is served by rediculously cheap hydro. But a discussion on broad principles is of course in order. My thesis remains the same as always. Nuclear needs volume production of NPPs. For Europe, that means standarization and market consolidation. A big producer of NPPs to ensure scale advantages over many years to come (NPPs should be produced for many decades or not at all).
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Mon May 19 08:30:35 It is different in Sweden, we are a small nation but we have heavy industry. All the majorn hydro electric dams are in the north and the choice to build all the NPPs in the south was calculated. Apart from transmission loss over this distances, sending the energy south has risks. The balance in the southern district can change while more being dispatched from the north leading to overload when it arrives. The short story is, again, the current grid was not designed to handle that. And, additionally the loss of big NPP turbines made a mess of how the grid pushes the electricity around. The other act of this is playing out in rising balancing costs, low energy prices, fines to wind mills for producing too much electricity. The Swedish wind industry is slowly dying, has been bleeding money for years.
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