Well, here it’s all about wearing double layers of snowmobile suits! 😂

Is it snowing on your hill 😂

I think that’s quite accurate. Renovating can end up being significantly more expensive than building new if you don’t continuously plan for ongoing operations and perform the maintenance required. (But in the end, that won’t help either, of course, no matter how much you renovate, the cost will eventually become too high, for example, when structural components eventually need to be replaced).

As I have written, it stems from the referendum where the majority wanted to phase out nuclear power.

Probably, when it comes to R1, the decision to phase out was made as early as 2015 with the goal of it happening in 2020, and after that it would be a dereliction of duty to carry out more long-term maintenance. By 2020, it was probably too late to decide to continue without it resulting in enormous costs, perhaps more than building anew.

However, it’s not ridiculous because that’s the line that has been pursued since then. A new referendum would have been needed to change direction.
I would rather say that it would be undemocratic not to pursue the line that the people have actually voted on until it is clear that the people want something else. 
The mistake was perhaps to have a referendum from the beginning. If it had been avoided, maybe even the nuclear power policy would have changed faster when the view on nuclear power changed. 

However, I would actually wish that we had more referendums (e.g. in connection with elections) and a little more direct democracy. 
It would lead to faster changes based on the will of the people. 

It’s quite true in a way that things have worked out quite well. We have expanded wind power that, together with hydroelectric power, works well, and we operate enough reactors to produce the electricity needed. We export more than we import.

The people have gotten exactly what they voted for. 😉

No, he wants to report those behind the decision to shut down, but it feels like it’s too late for that now when the basis is an old referendum.

Agreed, even some environmentalists are starting to realize that nuclear power may not be such a bad idea after all. Approaching the nuclear power issue based on an ancient referendum (like the red-green parties have done) when conditions change and the actual risk is seen to be minimal, is just plain foolishness.
That’s why I believe that a new referendum should have been held 10-20 years ago. The question is whether any recent surveys have even been conducted to see what people think?
As you say, it’s important to communicate information so that as many people as possible have the correct facts and don’t vote just because they are either generally terrified of nuclear power or, on the contrary, have bought into the myth that nuclear power is the only sensible alternative.

Well, that is in the near future so it is significantly more relevant. The decision to close and decommission was made back in 2015, and Vattenfall themselves considered it unprofitable to continue operating it with the electricity prices we had in 2020.
The costs of keeping it running may have been too high, especially if long-term maintenance that would have been necessary if the decision to decommission hadn’t been made back in 2015 wasn’t carried out.

I would need to see the calculations to know if it would have been worth keeping it or not, but even if it may have required a subsidy from the state, it would probably have been better to continue operating it. However, it’s not impossible that by 2020 it was actually too late to continue operating it economically.

But again, the foundation lies in the fact that the general decision was once made to decommission. If that hadn’t happened, things would look completely different. We might not have had more nuclear power plants, but we wouldn’t have shut down the ones we had because then they would have been gradually maintained and improved as long as possible. Research and development would have continued, which might have led to better efficiency, etc. If nothing else, we would probably have been better prepared the day it was time to build something new.

Sure, the red-green coalition voted against it, but in this case, I find it difficult to determine if it was right or not.

It seems like the most important thing for many people is that we have nuclear power regardless, not that we have cheap electricity production.