For Sweden, the coal plants were exclusively for cogeneration (district heating with electricity as a byproduct) and only used as peaker plants in winter. Some of them still exist but have been converted to burn biofuels instead, mostly woodchips and other byproducts from the forestry industry.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I may be wrong, but I believe the british experience with biofuels is that although you want to believe its surplus byproduct, the cheapest source is often grown to be fuel for a biofuel generator. It's like soy/corn for ethanol, it isn't sufficiently profitable to do this solely with waste product, you get better margins growing to fulfill the contract.
That may be true in many places, but the Swedish forestry industry is very big, and the district heating plants really do burn mostly forestry byproducts. Of all the biofuel used in Sweden (not just for energy generation), 75% comes from forestry products, and the vast majority of it is either unrefined wood products or byproducts from Kraft process paper manufacturing (like tall oil and turpentine etc).
Specifically in district heating, 87% of the forestry-sourced fuel is unrefined wood products. Almost half of it is just bark, branches and treetops. Of all the biomass in an average mature tree logged in Sweden, 43% ends up as pulpwood, 43% as saw timber, 8% gets burned for fuel and the remaining 6% is treetops and branches which also tend to end up burned for fuel.
There is definitely a lot of debate in Sweden about sustainable forestry practices, though. The industry really wants to clearcut everything for convenience, but it's really bad for biodiversity and the general public hates it.
Addendum: I believe there's also been some studies and experiments involving importing olive pits from the Mediterranean olive oil industry for burning in district heating plants, but I don't think it's been done at scale.
Depends on the input into growing the biomass. If you are using industrial fertilizers, it's very far from net-zero. Besides that, from my memory there are studies analyzing this and I think they found it's never net-zero.
> For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.
I think "practical purposes" should include the fact that thanks to also shutting down a bunch of nuclear, Sweden regularly imports German/Polish coal power.
Sweden claiming fossile free is only technically true. Practically there's a mountain of greenwashing.
So no, I would not say what you just said. I find that greenwashing dishonest.
By being anti nuclear, the green parties around the world have caused more radiation[1] and climate changing co2 than any other movement in history.
[1]
An oft cited statistic is that coal causes more deaths every single year from radiation (excluding accidents) than nuclear has has caused in its entire history INCLUDING accidents.
I mean, you can call it a "mountain" of greenwashing but to me it looks more like a mole hill. Total Swedish electricity production is typically 160 to 165 TWh per year and total consumption is usually between 135 and 145 TWh.
In 2025, the net export was about 33 TWh. Gross import from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, including transit to other countries, was 1 TWh. So, imported power from countries with coal power plants was less than 1% of total consumption, and the amount of fossil free power exported was more than 30 times greater than the amount of (potentially) fossil power imported. 1-2% fossil energy in the mix is to me not really significant, and especially not considering how much fossil free power is exported.
I think it's huge greenwashing to claim to not have coal power, but just import it when needed. What practical difference is that to having coal power domestically? That's just saying you recycle all plastic, only to send it to the third world to dump in rivers.
So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts. I rely on being able to take a breath every couple of seconds. If I only get an annual average of a breath every few seconds, I'll die.
One could show great generation and net export statistics with a sufficiently large batteryless solar installation, and still import coal power every night and cloudy day.
What is true, but can easily imply an incorrect conclusion, is that Sweden's very good in being self sufficient in clean power generation statistically. Yes, very much true. But it's largely due to geography, and not merely something to replicate. Sweden has way more viable places where hydro could be installed, than most countries (though where economical and otherwise acceptable, it already has). And it's sparsely populated; Sweden is bigger than the UK, but with one seventh the population. So if the implication is that "if we can do it, so can you" then that's false.
Luckily the political wind (including population opinion) has started to turn in favor of nuclear power, again. Maybe everything can be solar in 100 years, but we can't have 100 more years of coal.
> So I think it's untrue to say that Sweden doesn't rely on coal power. Without coal power it'd have regular blackouts.
The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible. But it's not the case that there would be blackouts, since the price mechanism is used to match production, demand and return on production investments. So policy decisions to ramp down fossil generation result in investment decisions to new non fossil generation capacity.
> The european grid is interconnected so it's basically all fungible.
This is the point I'm making. It's not a counter point, it's exactly the point I'm making. Sweden "has" a bunch of coal plants, just located in Germany and Poland. This allows Sweden to skip planning for exactly what renewable is bad at.
Otherwise this is like saying "antibiotics are completely unnecessary because 99.99% of the time you don't need them, and when I do need them I just get them from a pharmacy". Right… so you do need and rely on them.
But Sweden also has a geographic electricity transportation problem. Electricity generation exists where (most) consumers are not. And this is also due to the MUCH more limited flexibility of renewables, especially hydro. Could easily be cheaper to get coal power in the south instead of hydro "shipped" from way up north. Hell, sometimes electricity in the north has a negative price.
Sweden is a good local example of why we also can't just power all of Europe from some solar panels in Sahara. Except instead it's hydro way up north.
The Norwegian Consumer Council's entire yearly budget is about 100M NOK, or about $9.5M USD at the current exchange rate. They most assuredly did not spend >$1M USD on a short video clip.
No, she's absolutely wrong about this. The book is based very closely on Feynman's lectures. He wrote the material and gave the lectures. Other people edited that material into book form, but Feynman did the lion's share of the work.
Saying that Feynman didn't write the book is just dishonest, unless you immediately clarify afterwards that Feynman did indeed write almost all of the material in the book, in something very close to its final form.
You should watch the whole video. From memory, the video author claims that the books are not based directly on the recordings nor on material that Feynman wrote himself, but rather on lecture notes written by another professor who had to cover for Feynman (who is also listed as one of the authors in the book). She also mentions how those lecture notes from this other professor correct some small mistakes Feynman made in some calculations and diagrams from the lecture. Her claim is that Feynman was not the person who actually wrote the text of the book.
You can literally listen to audio recordings of Feynman delivering the lectures. The book follows those lectures closely.
All lectures that professors deliver have mistakes in them. He produced a massive lecture series covering huge areas of physics over hundreds of hours of class time. There are bound to be typos and small math mistakes.
The complaint that Feynman had an editor makes me think the person who created this YouTube video has no idea how publishing works, not to mention academic publishing.
To me, claiming Feynman didn't write the lecture book is a stretch since they are fundamentally based on his lectures. But I think you are misconstruing some of her arguments and claims. I suggest you watch the whole video, because imo it does a good job at analyzing Feynman's figure.
I mean, for the most part the book is an edited transcription of what he said at the lectures (or, in some cases, what a guest lecturer said). But the lectures weren't scripted, and we know this because his lecture notes are preserved[0] and they do not contain anything like he full text of even a single lecture. They're just lecture notes, not a script. And of course, the book also contain a lot of example problems and graphics - those are mostly the work of Bob Leighton, I believe. There's a reason the book has had so many errata corrected over the years: it was never written and edited in the way a book manuscript would've been written and edited.
Now your complaint is that Feynman didn't literally write down every single word he was going to say? He prepared more than 600 pages of notes and then delivered hundreds of hours of lectures. They were transcribed and published as a book, with normal editing. Feynman is the primary author of that book, for good reason.
Sweden's first commercial nuclear plant[0] was built right next to a newly constructed suburb precisely so that it could be used for district heating too. And also for producing small quantities of weapons grade plutonium, for... research purposes. Waste not, want not!
(It didn't last very long and was shut down in the mid 1970's, for somewhat obvious reasons.)
Those are some big heatpumps, but in terms of installed capacity at a single location they have yet to beat the Stockholm municipal heating utility's installation at Hammarbyverket, which since its most recent expansion in 2013 has a total of 7 heat pumps capable of extracting up to 225 MW of heat energy from treated sewage. The utility claims it is (still) the world's largest heat pump installation. Notably it actually uses both the hot and the cold side of the heat pumps; the cold side is sent into the district cooling network.
Looks like the expansion to 300 MW will have Stockholm beat soon if it hasn't already happened! Or is that in a different plant? Wasn't entirely clear to me, but great progress nonetheless!
My understanding is that at the moment there's no expansion happening at the Katri Vala plant (the 160MW mentioned in the link above), the 300 MW is the total heat pump capacity spread out over half a dozen locations.
Maybe. I guess it's easier to handle in treated form though. At the point where it gets to the facility it's actually not really sewage anymore, it's just clean water, so after passing the heat pumps it's just released into a nearby lake via a small turbine (both the sewage treatment plant and the heating plant ar located above the water level of the lake).
Heating with gas is absolutely not a thing in Sweden, I don't think even a single percentage point of homes use that. Firewood is way more common (it's relatively commonplace in the countryside still). Gas is used for stoves in some older buildings in a few specific cities but is almost extinct in that application too. Heating with gas hasn't really been a thing historically either - at first it was mostly wood, then coal and wood, and then district heating and fuel oil completely took over from the 1950's. For a while in the 1970's resistive electric heaters were popular because electricity was cheap with the then-new nuclear plants, while the oil crisis made oil expensive. That didn't last very long.
A lot of the Nordic heat pumps are ground source, that is to say you drill a hole a couple of hundred feet down into the bedrock where it's always a bit above freezing and you circulate your heat exchange fluid down there and back up again. Air-source heat pumps are mostly a thing in the southern parts where the climate is relatively mild.
Air-source heat pumps are also somewhat common in retrofits where the remaining expected lifetime of the building isn't big enough to be worth spending some 20-30k€ (?) that installing a ground source heat pump costs. A significant part of the cost being drilling the hole.
Similarly for small houses the cost of the hole drilling might not be worth the reduction in electricity consumption.
The fuel pump not automatically restarting on power loss may actually have been an intentional safety feature to prevent scenarios like pumping fuel into a fire in or around the generators. Still part of the Swiss cheese model, of course.
It wasn't. They were feeding generators 1 & 2 with the pump intended for flushing the lines while switching between different fuel types.
The regular fuel pumps were set up to automatically restart, which is why a set of them came online to feed generator 3 (which automatically spinned up after 1 & 2 failed, and wasn't tied to the fuel-line-flushing pump) after the second blackout.
There are dozens if not hundreds of issues just like this one in ffmpeg, except for codecs that are infinitely more common. Google has been running all sorts of fuzzers against ffmpeg for over a decade at this point and it just never ends. It's a 20 year old C project maintained by poorly funded volunteers that mostly gives every media file ever the be-liberal-in-what-you-accept treatment, because people complain if it doesn't decode some bizarrely non-standard MPEG4 variant recorded with some Chinese plastic toy from 2008. Of course it has all of the out-of-bounds bugs. I poked around on the issue tracker for like 5 minutes and found several "high impact" issues similar to the one in TFA just from the last two or three months, including at least one that hasn't passed the 90 day disclosure window yet.
Nobody who takes security even remotely seriously should decode untrusted media files outside of a sandboxed environment. Modern media formats are in themselves so complex one starts wondering if they're actually Turing complete, and in ffmpeg the attack surface is effectively infinitely large.
The issue is CVE slop because it just doesn't matter if you consider the big picture.
I don't get why you think linking to multiple legitimate and high quality bug reports with detailed analysis and precise reproduction instructions demonstrates "slop". It is the opposite.
This is software that is directly or indirectly run by millions of people on untrusted media files without sandboxing. It's not even that they don't care about security, it's that they're unaware that they should care. It should go without saying that they don't deserve to be hacked just because of that. Big companies doing tons of engineering work to add defense in depth for use cases on their own infrastructure (via sandboxing or disabling obsolete codecs) doesn't help those users. Finding and fixing the vulnerabilities does.
All of these reports are effectively autogenerated by Big Sleep from fuzzing.
Again, Google has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade and has found untold thousands of vulnerabilities like this one. It is not at all clear to me that their doing so has been all that valuable.
Google fuzzing open source projects has eliminated a lot of low hanging fruit from being exploited. I am surprised you think that finding these vulnerabilities so they can be fixed has not been valuable.
For most practical purposes, Swedish electricity generation has been basically fossile free since the 1980's.