Projects like this are commonly used by opponents of nuclear energy to demonstrate that nuclear energy is expensive compared to solar/wind and thus should not be pursued. I wonder how fast the Hanhikivi plant will be built and how much it will cost in the end. Recent Rosatom's record is quite good, so hopefully they will be an example of economic feasibility of nuclear energy and that the nuclear expensiveness is mostly not technological, but an organizational problem.
Comparing nuclear with solar/wind has always been a false comparison. In order to make a fair comparison one would need to combine storage with solar/wind, and in latitudes for Finland this would mostly mean wind with storage capacity in terms of months.
The alternative is fossil fuels in combination with wind/solar, the most cost effective grid that currently exist. During optimal weather conditions renewables are the cheapest energy on the planet, and during non-optimal weather conditions fossil fuels is usually the cheapest energy that can meet demand.
Living in Sweden, I am slightly hopeful that the nuclear plant in Finland might reduce the need to run the oil power plant located in southern parts of Sweden. The oil power plant is the single highest contributor for carbon emissions in the south of Sweden, despite the fact that Sweden mostly operate on hydro and nuclear. 70 tons of oil per hour goes up in smoke in a time where the oil need to stay in the ground. More solar/wind will not have much of an effect on this oil power plant since it only operates during non-optimal weather conditions. Currently we are several weeks in with a weather of low wind conditions, with energy prices skyrocketing as a result. The Finish project had some good luck in term of timing by turning on the nuclear power plant right in the middle of exceptional high energy prices.
The thing is, solar/wind are getting cheap enough that it is becoming viable to just construct a massive overcapacity. Paying twice as much for your electricity to cover the OPEX of half your capacity idling 80% of the time is _still_ cheaper than going nuclear.
And, as you mentioned, having fossil in reserve for edge cases is definitely a viable option.
For solar you would have to build something like 100x or more overcapacity to get enough power for winter in Finland. Solar is effectively useless in Finland as it produces effectively nothing when we need it most (winter).
Wind can work but also partially has the same problem but to the same extent. Usually the colder it gets the less windy it gets. Basically in Finland during the winter it gets cold when there is no wind bringing warm air from the Atlantic (gulf stream) usually as a result of a high pressure zone parking itself over the country.
Fortunately, HVDC transmission lines have been improving rapidly in cost and efficiency, making power delivered from far south a practical prospect.
It does mean you depend on processes you have little say in. Somebody else specifies and builds much of the transmission line, and all of the generating capacity.
Well at the moment this is not true. Sweden can't even saturate the existing transmissions lines between Finland and Sweden as the national grid in Sweden is not in good enough shape and will most likely take over a decade to be properly fixed. (Basically the lines between northern and southern Sweden are not good enough).
This is one of the reasons why the electricity prices hiked up as high as they did here. Basically Norway and Sweden do have some electricity available for cheaper then running reserve gas plants in Finland but they can't get that electricity from the south all the way up north.
And being that reliant on another nation is not good for the national safety of a country. Imagine if a significant portion (like lets say 30%) of the electricity used in US came from solar farms in Mexico (or even further south being transmitted through multiple countries). This would make US economy and national defense really vulnerable (both require massive amounts of energy to really function)
In other words, as I said in the very post you replied to,
> "It does mean you depend on processes you have little say in. Somebody else specifies and builds much of the transmission line, and all of the generating capacity."
Wind turbines in cold climates also require deicing. If you don't deice them, the performance drops dramatically. Deicing takes power too though, a few percent of the total turbine output depending on how often it's needed and how much downtime the turbine has.
Fossil fuels are not a viable option. It is simply the seemingly cheapest option, sacrificing the environment for short term economic gain.
Overcapacity has its issues. It does not remove the dependency on fossil fuel, and you still need to have independently the same capacity in fossil fuel plants. A big part of the fossil fuel cost in term of economics is have them standby and operational, which today is paid primarily through subsidies. Having a bunch of wind turbines running at 20% efficiency while at the same time paying a fossil fueled power plant be ready to step is not cheap. Is it _still_ cheaper than nuclear? Hard to say. All the comparisons I have seen are done on the theoretical cost per watt produced, not what the grid costs to operate on a year to year basis in order to provide the service of a stable grid.
Looking at the day prices per local zone around Sweden and Finland, the prices goes down the closer you get to hydro and nuclear and goes up the closer you get to wind and fossil fuels, with as high as 10x. Economically that makes the case for wind + fossil fuels a bit harder to buy, through I am not blind to the fact that its previous generations that enabled it. Living next to wind+fossil fuel is right now very expensive, with industries moving north as a direct result.
The oil power plant you describe runs because it makes economic sense to generate electricity from oil and send it to Germany. There is no shortage of electricity (neither energy nor effect) in Sweden. The high prices are caused by gas shortages in continental Europe.
It has been a false comparison with nuclear too. Nuclear storage, processing remediation, etc. are either not mentioned at all or plainly wrong as they differ extremely from country to country and over time periods which are hardly calculable.
The fact that China, which is an absolute leader in nuclear power, wasn't able to scale up this energy source as fast as wind and (soon) solar (in terms of GWh delivered) and the planned 150 reactors will barely catch up with renewables speaks volumes.
I mean, it's a safe and environmentally friendly technology, but it just can't be built fast enough.
By leadership I mean that they're one of the few countries which in the last 20 years managed to consistently deliver new nuclear capacity on time and (roughly) within budget.
The US generally ranks first, but delivered what, one power plant in the XXIth century so far?
Just dig out the numbers and realize this project is as expensive and uneconomic as every other of our +50year history record before..
And as if this was the only problem and it hadn't a lot of huge others, nuclear proponents will use this now as an example how nuclear is the way out of the climate crisis, and how comparing nuclear with renewables is wrong..
No, the best future would be neither fossil nor nuclear.
Density doesn't matter very much outside of niche applications (e.g. submarines). It's not like very running out of space for power production. Cost is essentially the only metric that counts, and current nuclear technology is a bit on the expensive side. Maybe future reactor designs will drastically improve that, but with global warming we don't really have the time to wait for the R&D to be finished.
Now we bring another very specific for that location argument, while the general new consensus for here seems to be that is the ultimate solution to the climate crisis? The rhetoric strawman is also pretty cheap...
I haven't heard any reasonable immediately implementable numbers or solutions from the renewable proponents how affordably store enough energy to heat cold countries during months long winter.
The technologies I like provide solutions to the hard problems.
In Finland, the coldest weather is experienced when, during winter months, there is a persistent anticyclone parked overhead. Those can cover the entirety of the country, and inside them there is negligible wind. For example, on 8th of December it was -20°C, and the average output of wind power (nominal installed capacity ~2800MW) over the day was 330MW. The average output of grid-connected solar was <1MW (It's December in Finland, what did you expect?).
Anticyclones can remain in place overhead for weeks. The value often used to calculate the cost of renewable+storage is 3h. This is a reasonable value for California, where solar production correlates well with use. If you built the grid in Finland based on that, we would just die when it gets cold.
There are no renewables that work well in Finland. Water power is fully built out. Solar only produces power when we don't need it. Wind reliably does not provide power when we need it. Compared to renewable with enough storage, even with all it's overruns, OL3 is remarkably cheap.
But how much of the heating is, or needs to be, electric?
Many current heating fuels are fossil and not great either, but they can be replaced with renewable fuels which solves storage vs renewable-produced electricity.
That does seem to head for electricity based heating. But a web search lead to some (admittedly 6 yrs old) graphs that have electricity being in in 3rd place after fuel based heating solutions by energy use: https://www.stat.fi/til/asen/2014/asen_2014_2015-11-20_tie_0... - and hopefully those new houses are better insulated and use proportionally much less energy than the average housing stock, eg passive houses.
Do you propose to build so many nuclear plants that you can provide peak electricity including heating in cold winter months? Do you have numbers for that? (I imagine that'd be the most expensive solution ever, as nuclear plants are high in capital costs and you're basically proposing to have lots of nuclear plants that only run on very cold winter days.)
I guess what many nuclear proponents seem to forget is that you need flexibility no matter what source of electricity you have - because even if your plant runs 24/7 (which it doesn't), energy needs aren't constant.
Storing heat is not difficult. You just heat up water and put it in an insulated tank. Either steel, or dig a hole in the ground and insulate that, with a floating insulated lid. Once it's big enough, the losses are so low that you can use it for seasonal storage, and with solar to heat it up in the summer, it's cheaper than natgas. At least where I live.
Next year, I think, they're building a storage not far from where I live with 200.000 m³ capacity.
Nobody is using gas to heat anything in Finland. District heating is pretty much all some combination of waste heat from some other industrial process (including electricity production), coal, wood or peat. Some district heating scale heat pump and storage projects are in prototype phase but are meaningless % of actual usage.
For individual house heating it is some combination of pure electric, heat pump, wood and oil.
Gas in general is used very little for electricity here (only ~7% of total energy production) and gas cooking stuff is also relatively rare.
