Is nuclear power sustainable in a carbon-free world? The case of Sweden

ABSTRACT

Politicians and the public alike doubt the ability of nuclear power in the United States to compete as a significant low-carbon emission contributor to electricity production in a fully decarbonized electricity sector. Establishing whether or not these doubts are justified is challenged by the complexity of the highly disaggregated US electricity markets, including the highly varied mix of subsidies, production credits, and power purchase mandates that exist at the individual state level. The authors focus on answering the question of nuclear power’s competitiveness by examining the electricity market of Sweden, a nation which has already fully decarbonized its electricity sector, basing its electricity generation entirely on a mix of hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and the use of biofuels, with much smaller contributions from renewables such as solar PV and wind-generated power. In this market, nuclear power is an effective competitor against renewable power generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear energy
• renewable energy
• Sweden
• energy economics
• nuclear waste storage

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago (EPIC) at the University of Chicago. We would like to thank Dr. Lindsay Krall of SKB and Dr. Ingrid Nohlgren of Chalmers Industriteknik for both helpful comments and for assisting us with the identification of data sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Carbon capture and sequestration involves technologies for capturing carbon dioxide at its production site and then permanently removing it from the environment, such as storage in deep geological repositories. Alternatively, carbon dioxide may be removed from the environment by industrial reuse of this gas (Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management 2021).

2. Renewable energy credits or certificates are tradeable legal assets representing renewable energy and are used to confirm the generation or use of renewable energy.

3. Renewable purchase obligations are policies that require all generators to purchase a minimum percentage of total electricity requirements from renewable sources.

4. Renewable portfolio standards are policies that require electricity suppliers to provide a minimum percentage of electricity from renewable sources.

5. A carbon offset is a reduction in greenhouse gases through some mechanism (such as planting trees or carbon capture and storage) to offset greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, measured in metric tons of emissions.

6. A carbon tax creates a financial burden (additional tax) for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted by generators and businesses.

7. A cap-and-trade agreement sets a cap on and commodifies emissions. This allows entities that emit fewer greenhouse gases to sell their remaining allowable emissions to more polluting entities.

8. The average output for large hydro plants in Sweden is 90 MW, and Energiforsk commonly refers to this class of hydro plants as “hydroelectric 90” in order to distinguish them from the large number of smaller hydro plants. However, the hydroelectric 90 group generates most of the total hydro energy in Sweden (22,471.6 GWh/hr out of a total of 25,550.67 GWh/hr, or 88%; cf., Appendix 1 of Rudberg 2013).

9. An öre is equivalent to 1/100 of a Swedish krona (SEK), or the centesimal subdivision of the krona. It is no longer in active use for commercial transactions

10. For the current (01–09-2021) exchange rate (1 SEK = 100 öre = $0.121921), these costs translate to $0.071/kWh (nuclear), $0.067/kWh (wind onshore 150 and 10), and $0.060/kWh (hydroelectric 90).

11. These calculations exclude the policy instruments and assume a 6 percent cost of capital adjusted for inflation using the Swedish Consumer Price Index with October 2020 as a reference point. Referencing October 2020 against October 2014 gives a CPI adjustment factor of 1.073084517 (SCB 2021).

12. It is useful to note that this nuclear waste tax, which translates to approximately $0.006/kWh, is six times the so-called “mill fee” which was charged to US electricity customers using electricity generated by nuclear power plants. As of 2014, the US stopped collection of this fee.

13. This legislation, passed by the Swedish Riksdag in 1980, followed the US Three Mile Island accident of 1979 and a national referendum on nuclear power in Sweden (which endorsed the elimination of nuclear power); it specifically prohibited any new construction of nuclear power plants in Sweden, and targeted 2010 as the date by which Swedish nuclear power would terminate.

14. For example, the published electricity price (including taxes) in neighboring Denmark in 2020 was €0.2833/kWh, while the comparable electricity price in Sweden was €0.1826/kWh (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Electricity_price_statistics)

15. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Swedish-government-delays-repository-decision

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Rosner

Robert Rosner is the William E. Wrather Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Astronomy & Astrophysics (http://astro.uchicago.edu/index.php) and Physics (http://physics.uchicago.edu/) at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Rosner served as director of Argonne National Laboratory (http://www.anl.gov/), where he had also served as chief scientist. His current scientific research is mostly in the areas of laboratory and astrophysical fluid dynamics and magnetohydrodynamics and computational physics. His policy-oriented work has focused on the future of nuclear power and the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, as well as various aspects of electrifying the transport sector. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Sabrina Fields

Sabrina Fields is a graduate student at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. She works as a research assistant for Robert Rosner and studies the economics of nuclear energy and electric vehicles. Prior to her time at the University of Chicago, Fields worked as a research associate focused on event detection through open-source intelligence. Her most recent project looked at trends in misinformation, including detecting and analyzing networks of coronavirus-related misinformation on social media platforms. She also conducted research on extremist messaging networks and emerging datasets. Fields holds a Bachelor of Science in science, technology, and international affairs from Georgetown University.