- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another
If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry
Could be a good way to kickstart a canadian nuclear industry that would expand into the US, exploiting the a big thing the US is bad at, coordinating infrastructure projects with multiple government groups, not making infrastructure builds incredibly overpriced and take an incredible amount of time and not being hyper litigious.
Vancouver vs. the bay area is my current example, or california HSR general, or the billion dollar pedestrian tunnel in new york, and just the general level of shabby of everything compared to canada in public infra at least.
You have to realize that the dollar bill for equivalent infra in the USA is much, much higher even though it feels more expensive in canada relative to it's income
Canada is not even a little bit better at the big thing, and it may be worse. Same ailment, basically. Better look to countries like Spain and Japan for inspiration on how to deliver very big projects on time and on budget.
Standardizing doesn't mean you never change, but there is a middle ground between the current design is locked in stone forever vs. every plant is completely bespoke with no interchangeable parts and operationally different
Same way you do for planes, cars, etc. You have long(ish) life-cycles and some pieces that can be independent (e.g., same turbine engine on several plane models).
Brings its own risks. See the 737max debacle. Now imagine that but causing a massive radiation leak and requiring all your power stations to be be put offline while a fix is found.
Nothing about the 737 MAX situation had anything to do with the fact that it was standardized and every plane wasn't bespoke. That is a weird thing to compare this to. You could absolutely still screw it up if you were designing each reactor from scratch every time
Huh, a lot on the 737 Max situation was due to standardisation.
Boeing didn't want the time, expense, and hassle of certifying (= standardising) a new narrow-body aeroplane, so they continued to reuse the FAA type certificate (= standardised design) of the original 737 from 1966.
This meant they had to keep, inter alia, the short landing gear, which in turn made the wings lower to the ground, which forced them to position the new big engines ahead of the CG, which forced them to add the faulty MCAS computer, which killed all those people.
Admittedly the decision to use just a single sensor on said MCAS was due to systematic, decades long corruption and emasculation of the FAA.
The fact that every 737 MAX was the samew design also means that, upon rcognizing the flaw, every one could be grounded and fixed properly. We did not have to verify 15 different designs were all vulnerable due to Boeing trying to nickel and dime their customers (by making the third sensor esssentially a paid upgrade/addon)
So the problem was that they diverged from the standard design in key important ways. The trick would be not to do that, to actually stick to the standard design. Or, to make sure that the impacts of deviations are fully accounted for and incorporated back into the overall design and project
Again, the standardization didn't cause the problem. Boeing's piss poor engineering culture did. There's no reason that they couldn't have built the plane how they wanted but in a way that didn't crash. Similarly, it's entirely possible that each of these nuclear reactors will be built with flexible designs per project that result in half of them melting down.
Safety and quality control is critical no matter what strategy they use
The point is that standardisation can act as an impediment to innovation. People then use creative engineering to remain technically compliant. This ultimately leads to hidden or hard to detect risks because everything is "to standard", except it's not.
This is good to keep in mind, but we'd need a substantial proliferation of nuclear before we get into a position where over-standardization is a problem.
They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran.
What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it looks like they are really doing it. See https://www.autonocion.com/us/canada-tonne-grid-nuclear-reac... !
Exciting development. I really wish somebody would nail a commercially viable Thorium reactor but it seems there are real engineering complications around scaling molten salt reactors.
The trouble with molten salt thorium reactors is that they need an attached chemical plant that processes molten sodium mixed with radioactive elements.
This is not something a utility wants to own, maintain, and operate.
Here are some studies on such plants.[1] No full scale long-running salt reprocessing plant has ever been built.
The great thing about boiling water reactors is that you just have to handle water. The radioactive portion of the systems is simple. Which is good, because it can't be maintained much during the entire lifespan of the plant.
When you look at the history of nuclear reactors, almost all the problems involve plumbing.
The less that can go wrong with the plumbing, over 60 years or so, the better. For molten salt reactors, the physics is promising, the chemistry is a pain (fluorine, for starters), and the plumbing has major corrosion and clogging problems (high temperature radioactive molten salts and pipes just do not get along, even with really exotic alloys.)
It's not impossible. But it's going to be prone to expensive problems, some of which probably will not be anticipated. Remember Ft. St. Vrain, the helium gas cooled reactor. Great idea. Ran for ten years. Even used some thorium. Troubles in the radioactive portion of the gas plumbing system meant it had to be shut down and dismantled.[2] That was sad, because it actually worked well for years.
Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (reprocessing inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
I was at the first Thorium energy conference and presented a timeline for reactor development based on the timeline Oak Ridge had in the 1970s. I was still surprised that the Chinese nailed it!
These days I am more excited about Plutonium cycle reactors using chloride salts because they fix the problems of the FBR (occupational safety in fuel fabrication for one) and the fluoride salt reactors (having to dispose of used graphite cores). You do get some longer lived TRUs but you have so many excess neutrons you could burn some of the fission products. Most important the Pu cycle can be launched with the nuclear waste we already have, whereas the math doesn’t really work for launching LFTR.
It requires chlorine isotope separation or else you make Cl-36, a beta emitter with a half-life of 300,000 years.
Moltex got around this in their concept by only using chloride salts inside the fuel tubes; the surrounding sterile molten salt was a fluoride. Being sterile, the oxidation potential of the fluoride salt could be kept low enough to be compatible with stainless steel.
(Moltex ran out of money last year, I've read, and has been selling its IP as distressed assets.)
> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear.
For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.
The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.
(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).
Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
it also depends on the rate of consumption. On top of that, the burning aint perfect, you also get amplifiers like monoxide or NOx. It also depends on the type of burned wood - some trees grow faster, others slower. If you burn a tree that grew slowly, it'll be +- zero after a long time
1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects.
2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy).
1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance
(It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can)
2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
"Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?" by John Sterman.
John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management
"The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change."
> But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal
Utterly irrelevant since that carbon came out of the air to grow the tree in the first place.
> Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain
Of course it's not! Trees are grown as a crop. These aren't ancient forests, they're fields of trees for harvesting. If it was uncertain no-one could make money from forestry.
> Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states?
Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me
It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found.
The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.
Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.
> Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that
In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.
For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.
global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater
"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.
The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming
First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way.
But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
If it wasn't clear in my post, the entire point is not that we'd run out, but that it'd become economically unviable. As the supply starts to run out and/or we turn to more expensive sources, prices go up - sharply. We'll never really run out of anything - it will just become so expensive that it's no longer viable for widespread usage. Nuclear is quite sensitive to this issue because the primary, and arguably sole, argument for it is that it's cheap.
Ore is currently about 2% of the capex of a reactor. And many mines globally have lowered production because it's too cheap. Even if you 10x the price of the ore, it'll still be cheap
The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.
"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"
Some storage can be had for cheap from existing capacity. Hydroelectric dams with reservoirs, abundant in Canada already, can function like a battery to cover times when solar/wind is low.
> A least-cost combination of all the technologies has also been identified (shown in Fig. 3 as Least Cost Mix). Under the IEA/WEO 2023 cost assumptions, the least-cost solution comprises a combination of offshore wind power (66%), solar PV (8%) and CCGT (26%). Onshore wind power cannot compete with offshore wind power, and nuclear power cannot compete with any of the other technologies. This is due to the relatively low offshore and high onshore wind power cost assumptions in WEO 2023. As we shall see later, onshore wind power comes into the least-cost mix when using WEO 2024 or any of the two DEA cost assumptions.
...
> At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.
We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.
Adding pumps isn’t the same as adding battery storage. More batteries means more peak power. Peak power for hydro is limited by the peak power output of the turbines, not the dam capacity.
Overcast winter days tend to be very calm as well. These are periods of minimal solar+wind generation and maximal heating demand.
Having a grid with no baseload generation and only storage is going to spell disaster during extended cold+calm periods. Rolling blackouts when it’s -30C outside…
You don't need storage if you have enough non-intermittent power to satisfy peak load.
Canada uses 1,500 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 750 GWh of storage. Estimated for grid storage costs range from $125 to $250 per kwh for fully installed and connected systems (not just the cost of the cells alone). At $200/KWh Canada would be looking at $150 billion for 12 hours of storage.
Baseload is a large part of the total load, so it absolutely makes sense to provide solid plants that can run predictably at close to 100% capacity for most of the time (maintenance and occasional outages excepted).
Storage can paper over the unreliability problems of the intermittent producers to some extent, but at relatively high cost for comparatively short amount of times.
Filling constant demand with intermittent producers + storage does not make sense.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
Most electricity generation is handled by the government already, particularly in Canada. Worldwide approximately 88% of global electricity generation capacity is owned or controlled by national and local governments.
Some Canadian provinces have IPPs -- Independent Private-Power companies but they are often operating under the patronage of government. Many owe their existence to privatisation, lobbying and sweetheart contracts. (E.g. in British Columbia, private run-of-river hydro companies scandalously secured a 60 year guaranteed non-market rate on electricity. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/12/BC-Hydro-Public-Intere... )
88% seems impossibly high. “Or controlled by” must be doing some heavy lifting. Government owned power is 9% of the US, 25% of Australia, 1% of the UK.
If “or controlled by” means privately owned plants that are subject to local regulations, then that is not particularly interesting or relevant to the discussion
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
The US has operating Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years.
But it's only used to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]
> I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...
It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.
The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).
There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.
You appear to be reiterating an irrational position. I provided links to overviews of the topic; I strongly suggest at least skimming them. The quantity of unavoidable high level waste would appear to be sufficiently small that geological disposal is a cost effective solution.
The high level waste in question is not magically safe. Rather the various reprocessing and disposal methods have been extensively engineered and deliberated. At this point there is no cause to believe deep geological disposal in crystalline bedrock to be unsafe.
I said from the start that the argument you presented was fallacious, and all you did was present it, now, because you have no other argument, you're working on aggressive attacks.
Do please explain how it's fallacious? I've made the claims that one, there is a sufficiently low volume of waste produced per unit of generation that geologic disposal is affordable and scalable and that two, said geological disposal is in fact safe. Where's the fallacy?
It appears to me that you are attached to a position that you aren't capable of defending.
Also worth seeing that less has to be fundamentally safe at some point, otherwise background radiation would be a threat. If examined on its own without considering the surrounding inert volume, one decaying particle is presumably quite radioactive.
So since less->magically safer is true some point, the argument can't be made fallacious by asserting it is true. The worst the argument can be is unpersuasive (although it is persuasive - from a practical perspective there is a tiny volume of toxic waste, it isn't a reason to block progress).
Less waste to deal with makes it safer, simply because you need to control and manage less material.
We also know how to get rid of it entirely, leaving only material that will decay to safe levels within hundreds of years. It's prohibitively expensive right now, but may be feasible in the future once technology matures.
It's called "closed [nuclear] fuel cycle". Just google it. I studied it at a university.
TLDR; if you have enough fast neutrons, you can transmute anything into safe materials. Fast neutron reactors produce enough, classic PWR reactors do not. The only commercial fast reactor right now is in Russia.
If at some point humanity decides to stop making reactors altogether, it's still possible to burn the waste with particle accelerators. It'll take hundreds of years, but waste won't be going anywhere.
And finally, if commercial fusion reactors ever happen, they can also be used as neutron sources to trivially burn up all the waste.
In the US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste was stopped not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. The primary reasoning was that: US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste would encourage other non-nuclear weapon states to build nuclear reprocessing capabilities which would make easier access to plutonium - nuclear weapon material.
"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."
Commercial fusion reactors could be used burn (transmutate) long-term transuranic waste, on the other hand they will produce short-term nuclear waste, like neutron activated steels.
Yeah. My former coworker was researching ways to make steel less "activatable". Turns out that the most problematic contaminant is niobium, so he was working on possible ways to remove it completely.
The proliferation risk was real at that time, but it's now a moot point. The details of plutonium refining are well known.
Principles of plutonium separation are well known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX), but preventing non-nuclear weapon states from having access to nuclear materials usable for nuclear weapons (Plutonium, Highly enriched uranium) is still cornerstone of US foreign policy. See the current events in Iran. Or the discussions with South Korea:
"The U.S. State Department did not give specific responses when asked if the U.S. was open to changing the agreement and what sort of discussions it had agreed to, but a spokesperson said:
"America has a longstanding policy to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities around the world and to seek the highest nonproliferation standards achievable in all 123 agreements.""
This also the reason for monitoring and inspections by International Atomic Energy Agency in all facilities handling nuclear materials (nuclear reactors, fuel manufacturing, nuclear waste storage) or capable of producing nuclear materials - in non-nuclear weapon states.
There's very little waste that lasts hundreds of years, and the reason it's "prohibitively expensive to store" is purely political. Because we safely and cheaply store it now while waiting for multi-decade trillion-dollar projects drilling deep mountain storage close to magma or something.
I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.
The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage
The Earth's crust will take far longer to move yucca than the nuclear waste will be a problem. That's the whole reason that site was chosen. Even Yellowstone isn't set to blow on that time scale.
Why dont you suggest what "safe" looks like, and we can discuss your understanding of safety. Its clear to me that the issue is your standards and not actual waste disposal.
My understanding is that this material remains toxic to life for thousands, to tens of thousands of years.
Safe means that it's stored such that there's no harm to the environment for that lifetime.
In all "bury it" scenarios, the place where the waste is buried will be subject to change resulting in water, air, able to interact with that waste when normal tectonic and erosion processes do their thing.
I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
How do you think spent uranium interacts with the environment?
There's an estimated 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Naturally occurring. I honestly think we missed a trick when we outlawed dumping in the ocean, there's basically no way for human generated nuclear waste to even move the needle on ocean sources.
Lets say I take you completely at face value. Every notion of yours comes to pass. We cask it, and leave it in an underground vault. 9999 years later, a cask fails. Whats the issue? Are you using that vault as a busy thoroughfare? Its still in a big hole in the ground. Maybe theres an earthquake? And the vault shears a little. What is the radiation now doing in your mind that makes it dangerous? TBH we shouldnt leave signs warning people to stay away, we should leave a concrete recipe behind on all the signage.
There's life thriving in Pripyat just past the big concrete dome. There's a war going on there.
> I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
The problem you're running in to is most likely that you asked someone to define a subjective measure. What you then bump into with the anti-nuclear crowd is safety has one standard for most things and then a different, inconsistent standard when "nuclear" gets mentioned. So a level of harm (or cost/benefit to be more precise) that would be fine for say, lead poisoning or car safety would be a shut-down-the-industry event if it involved nuclear material.
And there isn't really a follow up at that point because there is a definitional tautology where, because it involves nuclear material, nuclear material can't be safe. The problem with that is obvious if you want people to have access to clean-cheap-safe power, but it is logically valid and there isn't really a socially acceptably way to have a go at someone for having inconsistent standards if they are happy to own it. And the argument just got derailed away from the actual issues.
The more argumentatively correct line is to ask what level of harm is acceptable for nuclear, get told "zero", then point out that this is a standard that isn't applied to anything else in power generation and that our standards of harm from nuclear power should be consistent with everything else. The argument then isn't over a definition but why they think it is acceptable to have an unreasonable and inconsistent standard (which is the real issue).
You accuse the "nuclear crowd" of dealing in misinformation while suggesting yucca mountain isn't a safe storage site because of plate tectonics, which is a total non-issue, or as you call it, "some wild theories that only live in your imagination."
Hi, what's your physics understanding of the problem?
You need to get very concrete. The waste is the problem, not the containment. You can find out what the 'background' levels are X m away from containers, and the containers--and their containers--are very strong and stable.
Tectonic and erosion processes take place over millions of years, so they aren't an issue for waste that's only dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Each year additional waste is added and it will be toxic forever.
The movement of tectonic plates is something that takes millions, not thousands, of years. Not to mention Yucca Mountain is far from the edge of any tectonic plate.
Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
Thankfully a handful of countries have managed to approve and begun building out permanent geologic disposal sites at this point so as long as at least one of them is willing to sell disposal services the problem is now globally solved. At least provided a given country has the political will to pay to export their waste but that seems like a much lower barrier to overcome.
This way you don't need to ridiculously overbuild solar and wind, and you have a better guarantee for power supply. Especially in colder climates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640358
> Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further
So, at best 20 hours of power supply from storage?
That's not how electricity markets operate. Say you have 100GW demand (number are not in any way related to reality) and your Nuclear plant has a capacity of 50 GW. However it's a sunny day and solar is producing 80 GW. That solar will be producing at a much lower price, so no one is interested in buying that extra expensive 30 GW from the Nuclear plant (I'm glancing a bit over how pricing works exactly, but it comes to the same thing).
So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.
The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.
That is an obviously mis-designed "market" as it only prices in marginal costs. This worked when most if not all producers actually were reliable. It doesn't work when you have a high share of intermittents.
Key word: running 24/7. Which neither solar nor wind can do.
> Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.
Is that why countries that boast "we have so much renewable energy now" tend to import electricity from stable sources (nuclear and hydro) the moment there's a long period of overcast skies with little to no wind?
France built 55 reactors in around 15 years during its first build-out and that wasn't an accident, we both know how to do this and Canada seems to be in a good place for that kind of performance.
Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.
Heating is one of the easiest to pair with intermittent power. Heat storage “batteries” can store energy for a very long time. Stockholm recently converted an old cave used to store oil, which now stores heat for a district heating network
It shouldn’t be the first time, this is what natural gas peaker plants have been about for 20 years. Solar and wind can’t sync the grid, they require sync or the grid collapses. Sync (Hz) can only be provided by base load that quickly spin up or down to balance out the frequency of the grid
That explains why Ontario built natural gas plants alongside its wind/solar rollout.
That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.
As a friendly reminder, we are talking about not just nuclear, but base load nuclear. The gas plants in Ontario are used as peaker plants and even if nuclear were to replace them in that role, as unlikely as that is, that would not see it operating as the base load we are talking about — that the earlier comment said Ontario needs more of because of wind/solar installations built over the past decade. Except that is exactly the role that nuclear plays in Ontario and is already sized appropriately to match anything needed from wind/solar.
Ontario anticipates that electricity usage will climb in the future and is working to build more capacity to accommodate future demand. There will be need for increased nuclear capacity to service that. However, it remains uncertain what that has to do with a wind or solar install from 10 years ago?
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
And you forgot the most important one, that justify nuclear over the alternatives:
- is very far North and can't really use solar at all for 3 month per year because in winter the nights are long, the weather is terrible and the sun is always low in the sky.
you can get cheaper power if you play the cards well. By this I mean sacrificing a bit nuclear CF but not too much. Also VRE can be paired with hydro up to it's capacity and the rest would be nuclear. This will give better results vs nuclear only grid
Because solar and wind are renewable, cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. They don't require destructive mining for enriched uranium or create the security implications of dealing with fissile material. Solar/wind do not create long term hazardous waste that's complicated to dispose or create the risk of widespread radioactive fallout. They also help to decentralise the energy grid making it less dependent on a single point of failure.
Nuclear power has its advantages, and may be worth it short term because climate change is a threat to humanity, but nuclear is not a renewable resource. Solar/wind with proper recycling could in theory sustain itself into perpetuity. Humanity needs to find sustainable ways for powering itself in the long term.
Decentralization is not a feature but a bug- it needs massive grid investments which drives up prices in a era where you want prices to be low for electrification. France has the best of both - decentralized grid but centralized groups of power. This way grid costs less
Nuclear can be recycled. It's not done because it's cheaper not to.
Ignoring that the last time Ontario attempted to build nuclear power the utility went into bankruptcy forcing the public to take on an absolutely enormous stranded debt.
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
Probably it depends on what part of the world you are and on what is your goal, what you want to optimize for.
In many countries there are usual systematic weather events where all renewable production goes to basically nothing for few days or even 2 weeks. You can not solve that by improving renewable sources, there isn't enough raw energy they could capture.
Storage for that long is currently impossible and even if it would be, it would be prohibitively expensive. So what you can do, build gas or coal plants. Building those, having people on call all the time, and the opportunity cost is probably many times more expensive than the building cost of renewables themselves.
And you still need to buy and store fossil fuels, you are still dependent on geopolitical issues, and you still produce a lot of CO2.
If your goal is environment protection or reducing climate change, then nuclear is probably better. If your goal is to reduce energy cost then probably renewables + short term battery storage + gas backup is the winner if you use an appropriate electricity pricing model.
Nuclear seems to be the old, known, stable thing, while renewables are the new and shiny thing that solves everything cheaply (and that sounds like it has huge catch). When you are building such critical infrastructure as the electrical grid, then staying safe and choosing the known, but expensive solution might seems to be the right choice for many people.
I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.
And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/
Spain has 3x the emissions intensity of France. The Nordics (some of them) have energy that is cheap and clean like France. That's because they have base load that doesn't emit CO2 like France.
And the germanics have higher price than France, which can benefit from importing cheap spanish power (when not in outage) and reselling it at 5x to germanic countries.
It is a political choice. Pro-nuclear propaganda in Australia is all about the long time frames, and the fossil fuels needed until they start coming online. Climate targets get to be pushed back, scrapping 2030 targets in favor of 2050 targets. It keeps coal, gas and oil money flowing for another generation. And the problem of actually building and paying for the nuclear power plants is also next generations problem, as they are expected to all be over cost and delayed, and not a priority once all the new gas plants are online. Everybody knows all this, but nuclear still gets traction because when you put lipstick on it and take all the most optimistic estimates from the salesmen, it looks like a pro-environmental policy. One that the right and far right can get behind, because it is not what the greens are saying needs to happen and anything those communists want must be bad.
I don't know if it is similar in Canada. Solar is less viable, relying more on wind. And they have more experience building and running nuclear power plants.
Canada has own supply chain and all recent refurbs were on time and budget.
Ironically, if SA contracted Korea for a npp (and if nuclear was legal there) at the same time as UAE, it'll probably be a net exporter of low carbon power by now.
Australia is expanding gas exploration even under current govt. Climate targets seem to be pushed back regardless
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
It could take much less in Canada. And recent refurbs being on time and budget are encouraging. We'll see in fact Canada's capacity to deliver sooner, but not in Canada - Romania already signed for Cernavoda expansion to a full 4 unit plant.
Did the native tribes negotiate with whoever they last defeated? Or did Europeans literally invent the concept of conflict and war, and all the tribes of North America just filed into America in an orderly fashion and never battled each other?
I'm not saying every square mile of land in Canada, America, Europe has been controlled by at least two distinct tribes or nations, and been fought over at some point since the dawn of man, however I would say that most desirable land probably has. Many cultures have been partly or fully wiped out over human history. It's sad in all cases, but I'm not convinced there's any purpose served by arbitrarily elevating some of those cultures as noble and deserving of special veto power.
Note: I acknowledge that regardless of the above, Canada has formally granted them such powers anyway, so, yep, they get to live in that system they've created.
First Nations have treaties with Canada with constitutionally protected land use rights that have implications beyond tiny reserves. Rights to hunt and fish can be implicated by heavy industrial land use which compels a duty to consult. Doesn't mean that First Nations can veto a project, but also doesn't mean that all this can be ignored.
All of this is more complex in British Columbia where in many places treaties were never signed and so the land is unceded and under unresolved land claim.
That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.
> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.
> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.
Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.
It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:
1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];
2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];
3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.
Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?
But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.
TMI cleanup costed 1bn, so far lower than the secondary insurance amount.
Fukushima cleanup will take less. Most exclusion areas were lifted (with delays but still). JP already wants to extract unmelted fuel elements to gain xp to later do it with the rest. Ukraine is less lucky - recent russian strikes destroyed part of the equipment meant to extract corium.
> If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.
Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?
In the short term, one would burn natural gas in turbines. The marginal cost of displacing this by using nuclear instead would lead to an enormous cost per unit of CO2 avoided, so high that most other uses of fossil fuels would be eliminated first (like, all use in ground vehicles).
In the long term, either non-fossil fuels burned in turbines (e-fuels like hydrogen or biofuels), or bulk thermal storage of renewable electricity. These both have lousy round trip efficiency (maybe 40%), but that's still cheaper than using batteries, because the capex per unit of storage capacity is far lower, and the cost of the RTE is low when there are so few charge-discharge cycles (as happens with seasonal storage); cost of seasonal storage is dominated by capex, which is why using high-capex batteries for it is such a bad idea.
Personally, I consider bulk thermal storage of cheap DC-coupled PV the most promising approach, as being pursued by Standard Thermal. They claim to be able to deliver 365/24/7 heat at 600 C for $3-5/GJ, which is competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.
I would prefer to reduce emissions using technology that exists today, I know it works, and I have seen it operate at national grid scale, not speculative future tech.
You do highlight something there: the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. If not, the 40 (or 60, or 80) year investment horizons needed to partially shore up the bad economics of nuclear become utterly absurd.
(The criticism that renewables don't last as long as nuclear suddenly looks like praise when viewed in this light; renewables don't need those very long time horizons to pay out.)
But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed even in a nuclear-powered world, because of existing hydrogen demand that is currently satisfied by steam reforming of fossil fuels (mostly natural gas). So lots of hydrogen will be made; it doesn't require new technology to make some more.
I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser, since burner reactors are far too fuel-inefficient to last very long on existing estimated uranium resources. The current estimate of uranium resources at 3x current price would provide the world's current rate of primary energy demand for just 5 years, if burner reactors were used.
> the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance.
1. No, it doesn't
2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
> But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
> Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed
Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales. All known methods are either extremely complex and volatile, or require large amounts of energy to release hydrogen back, or cannot store much hydrogen to begin with: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S025405842...
> I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser
something something assuming no rapid advances or something
It does, for the reason I gave. You didn't give a reason why not.
> 2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
Incredibly, you seem unaware of just how rapidly the cost of solar and wind and batteries have dropped.
If we project the demonstrated experience curve of PV forward another five doublings or so, PV energy will be delivered at under $0.01/kWh. This is basically impossible for nuclear to compete with.
> 3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve. If anything, it has shown a negative experience curve.
But in any case, even if nuclear were capable of rapid advance, this would still argue against assuming 40 (or 60, or 80) year lifetimes for nuclear power plants when calculating their economics. The power plants would be obsolete and uncompetitive long before that time span ended.
One cannot have it both ways: both assuming rapid advance, and assuming long economic life.
> Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top. This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't. Listen to the market when it's sending you such a strong signal.
> Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales.
Yes we do. We store it just like we store natural gas, in underground caverns. This is demonstrated technology, and would be very cheap (capex < $1 per kWh of storage capacity). There's a well-advanced project to do this in Utah, for example. The salt formation there could store enough hydrogen to power the entire US grid for something like a day.
> something something assuming no rapid advances or something
I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear. I'm willing to consider nuclear advances, I just note that nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
> nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
Kind of circular reasoning / begging the question here, since in North America we essentially stopped building nuclear over 35 years ago.[1] We stopped because people were scared of nuclear, and thus a ton of regulatory roadblocks were increased, making it uneconomic. Note that the changes in regulations post-1986 were not new regulations to improve the safety of plants, rather, they were increased environmental review burdens, state-level moratoria and voter approval requirements -- populist measures designed to do exactly what they did do: kill nuclear.[2]
So, we've chosen to not build any reactors anymore, which means comparatively little advancement is happening (since who would invest in that when no one is soliciting bids for a new plant), and then we're saying "See, nuclear isn't advancing, so we shouldn't invest in it."
[2] The 1990s saw much lower growth of electricity demand, too, so few new plants were needed during that decade, and by the time more capacity was needed, cheap shale gas drove the rest of the nails in the nuclear coffin. Of course, anti-nuclear activists who are also anti-carbon-emissions activists shouldn't count that as a win.
You didn't give reasons. You presented this as an undeniable fact. And the whole reason is "but advances".
E.g. you literally listed green hydrogen as a viable storage solution even if we literally don't know how to store it reliably at required scales. Oh, wait. Your answer to that is "we just store it in underground caverns" lol. Even though it's very, very different to storing natural gas. For example, it takes 16 times as much energy to compress hydrogen as methane. Or that hydrogen embrittlement is a thing (I'm pretty sure you didn't know about this and think that we just pump hydrogen or, indeed, natural gas into empty caverns underground).
And so on and so forth.
> Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve.
Could it be almost 40 years of fear mongering and no advances in nuclear? Whereas France with its nuclear reactors has been busy keeping Germany afloat after it shut down its plants. And whereas China is went from 9 constructions in 2000 to 36 in 2025, 42 new ones proposed, and over 140 on the roadmap, 6-7 years construction time per reactor.
> One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top.
Ah yes. So on top, that once there's winter all "on top" countries end up importing energy from countries with stable power generation in form of nuclear and hydro.
> This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't.
Nuclear isn't installed due to 40 years of nuclear fear-mongering and anti-nuclear policies. China has no issues installing both nuclear and renewables.
Many countries are now reverting their stance on nuclear precisely because diversifying energy sources is a good thing, and we literally don't have more stable sources of electricity than nuclear. We're literally discussing this under a post about Canada finally admitting that nuclear is a good thing actually why don't we build more of it. Following most of Europe, for example. And Asia has never been shy of nuclear energy, with China busily building reactors all over Asia and Middle East.
> I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear.
Note how you again invent requirements for no advances, assume this is a fact, and pretend that it is I who requires this. Imagine if you ever had an argument in good faith.
No, it's ok if you schedule maintenance during summer. And with more AC adoption you'll partially reduce this heavy swing. Nuclear at 60%cf is still economical. The problem arises if your plant takes 20y and 20bn to build
1. Lot of nuclear fission products from Chernobyl catastrophe have already decay ed away. There was mapping done for the long term plan of shrinking the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
"In the long term, the Ukrainian radiation protection authorities can use the BfS measurement data as a planning basis for reassessing the size of the exclusion zone. The data can be used to assess which areas of the exclusion zone could be reopened for use."
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has halted the reassessment of Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine has currently much bigger problems than Chernobyl. One could also say that, the decline of nuclear power in Europe because of Chernobyl accident caused much stronger dependency of Europe on Russian fossil fuels and indirectly supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine by bringing a lot of European money to Russia.
2. They got the currency symbol wrong in the cleantechnica article.
"First estimates included costs as high as ¥1 trillion (US$13 billion), as cited by the Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Yoshihiko Noda "
"In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)"
Lot of missing nuclear electricity production after 2011 in Japan was replaced with electricity production from imported LNG. Because of impacts Iran war on LNG gas delivery Japan is now rapidly moving to restart nuclear power plants.
3. Three Mile Island was very costly destruction of power generation asset without impacts on the public health, but it caused mass panic amplified by the simultaneous release of the The China Syndrome movie.
Other industries also don't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a large disasters.
"US law requires payment of 8 cents per barrel of oil to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund for all oil imported or produced. In exchange for the payment, operators of offshore oil platforms, among others, are limited in liability to $75 million for damages, which can be paid by the fund, but are not indemnified from the cost of cleanup. As of 2010, before payouts related to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the fund stood at $1.6 billion.
The hydroelectric industry is not generally held financially liable for catastrophic incidents such as dam failure or resultant flooding. For example, dam operators were not held liable for the 1977 failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho that caused approximately $500 million in property damage."
>Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.
You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.
Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.
What's the worst accident involving a Model T, maybe a dozen dead? Early steam boilers aren't going to be much worse either. Nuclear accidents are essentially unlimited in size. Nothing else can do that kind of country-sized - let alone it being permanent.
Chernobyl showed the potential impact. Fukushima showed that even several decades down the line things can still rapidly run out of control. All the knowledge and experience in the world isn't going to save you when something unexpected happens and things are just waiting to spiral out of control.
When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths).
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.
The problem with Chernobyl was that (1) it didn't have a containment dome, and (2) it was designed so as the temperature increased, the reaction sped up. It was fundamentally unstable.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
Chernobyl was triggered by humans but the ultimate problem was it's design. And it shows - Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design. But since the design was much better, the impact is much milder vs Chernobyl
> Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design.
And honestly it wasn't, not really. It was hit with a record-breaking earthquake and a record-breaking tsunami... and more lives were lost due to evacuation than to the plant shutdown.
The design was bad in the sense they backported generator placement from US BWR projects in basement. It makes sense in US but risks in Japan are different
Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.
Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.
In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.
I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.
Some of the GenIV designs would be compact and easily mass-produced.
You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.
As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.
Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.
It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.
Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
Bear in mind the decay is exponential, so most of the radioactivity is in the near term. There's no fissile, and by mass it's about 1% as much as we're getting now from conventional reactor spent fuel. Encase it in glass and bury it, and you're probably good.
I'm mildly optimistic about fusion as well. One big advantage is regulatory; fission reactors can be safe if you design them well, but fusion reactors can't do much damage even if they're terrible. The NRC has already decided on a much lighter regulatory regime for them.
> The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
> I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I'd rather see this simplified and improved than stopped.
> I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
Ground mounted solar is clearly superior in terms of safety.
What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
Hypothetically, a train could derail, the train was carrying nuclear waste, the derailment occurred in a highly populated area, near a Virology Lab. The lab was damaged, which released a deadly form of Smallpox, which spread to every corner of the Earth, killing every single human. That would be pretty bad, but not sure if it would be the absolute worst.
You don't need the nuclear waste in that, the train could derail, be carrying a lazy courier transporting a deadly bio-hazard, and unleash a deadly virus and kill literally everyone. From a human-centred perspective that is probably the worst case.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks?
People drink contaminated, unpotable water and die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails?
People die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Life-critical infrastructure that depends on the communication fails in a bad way and people die.
> Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
People die.
Nothing in life is without risk.
Nuclear reactors spiraling out of control have killed fewer people per KWH generated than any other source of energy that human beings have come up with.
What's the absolute worse if a dam breaks? Oh, only up to a quarter of a million dead [1]. And yet we propose to build more dams because they are a great renewable source of energy.
> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].
The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.
Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.
Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).
> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.
> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.
Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.
We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.
Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.
And the much heavier regulatory environment exists for a bloody reason.
The US alone spent billions to clean up superfund sites on the taxpayers dime (because companies created a huge mess in pursuit of profit and unhampered by regulation in the 20th century).
Everything that exists for a reason; the question is whether the reason is good. We've spent decades being told that climate change is going to cost us percentages of GDP to avoid, and your first counterexample is the suggestion that mitigations might be in the billions for the US over the course of a century.
One of those numbers is bigger than the other; and it favours nuclear pretty decisively. The regulations set up an environment where business as usual appears to be worse than if actual unlikely nuclear catastrophe occurred, all the air pollution in the interim and the reduced access to cheap abundant energy are real problems that have real consequences.
Whoever accepted those reasons has blood on their hands, so well might they be called "bloody reasons". The consequences have been serious and terrible even before getting in to oil-related resource wars and the like.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack
Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.
But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s
> I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical.
Independence from China and the US. Once you have your reactor engineering set and can churn them like China almost everything can be sourced either locally or you have multiple providers. Solar and wind? China. Batteries? China.
When you get in a spat with China you suddenly have to setup those industries from 0 at home. And that won't be just 15 years to ramp-up.
So the best is to start building nuclear reactors, silicon fabs, rare earth processing etc. now instead of having the exact same argument we had 20 years ago in 2045.
France has lower prices vs Germany and now, during peak summer heatwaves you can see who does best https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... . Germany spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french fleet. Results are clear
Which is a metric having one source throughout all weather, coupled with 2018 battery storage as per the study showcased in the blog.
Not sure what the relevancy is.
Here, a modern article modeling "System LCOE". In other words, the whole grid including transmission backup and everything else.
It starts by giving new built nuclear power the benefit of doubt, having it cost 40% less than Flamanville 3 and 70% less than Hinkley Point C. Since no one would ever be stupid enough to greenlight a project like that again.
What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
Barakah took about 8y/unit.
But local projects are expected to take less. Part of the reason is precedent govts were willing to ditch the industry entirely like Germany
My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.
The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.
I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).
Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.
I asked Claude:
"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."
One of my pet peeves is that people keep quoting numbers about solar costs oblivious to location, time of year, etc. No wonder some people are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "neener neener neener".
Battery storage for diurnal variation in favorable locations looks feasible, battery storage for annual variation looks absurd. Maybe you can overbuild solar by a 3x factor in some places, I've gotten cost numbers from 'a little less than what an AP1000 is claimed to cost' to 2x more with back of the envelope calculations that probably aren't worth anything. Then there's Dunkelflaute.
It would help if you could find a good use for the excess energy but the capital cost of anything you don't use all the time is multiplied.
Household batteries work wonders for residential consumption. It is interesting what happened once subsidies for batteries was introduced in Australia. The uptake was huge (because free or cheap electricity in off peak periods). Average install size went up, covering about 24 hours of winter usage. Subsidies needed to be tweaked, to reduce the number of 50+ kWh installations. It is not unreasonable to use current technology to have 24 hours or maybe 48 in most or all residences, with an investment payback time to consumers of around 5 years. With dynamic pricing, most consumption switches to non-peak. All distributed, rather than large scale battery facilities. As long as you are prepared to import from China, manufacturing is available. What is needed is political backing to make it a good investment for consumers via subsidies, and loans to ensure people without spare cash can also benefit. And maybe the numbers work out well, with less subsidies going to fossil fuel generation.
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
you can create even more jobs with ren. But not all jobs are the same. With ren you compete with China. With nuclear - you are somewhat protected since many don't like the idea of a hualong near them
Sounds like California high speed rail, where the state government is actually touting the number of jobs created as the measure of its success, even without a single mile of working track.
> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs
I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.
Nuclear plants would reduce Canada’s energetic reliance on other countries but - is there any, really? Last I checked, Quebec at least exports power to other provinces and the US.
Sure with more power generation Canada has more to sell and any country would be happy to have more energy, but it doesn’t sound like something the country _needs_ as much as, say, more housing. Or deep health care system improvements and staffing. Or … jobs.
It cuts both ways. Solar and wind are great but intermittent, and the storage issue seems to be treated as a solvable ergo solved problem. Add a sprinkle of "overcapacity", gas peakers and demand shaping and we can have a fully green grid.
So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production? Where are the seasonal battery storage facilities that places like Europe or I guess most of NA would need?
My only conclusion is that renewables are also far more expensive than the sticker price, due to the needed grid investment, batteries and frankly unsolved problems of seasonal storage.
I don't mind being wrong, but status quo seems to be, let's not build nuclear because it's too expensive, we're sort of building renewables, but CO2 emmissions, never mind levels, keep on increasing.
What doesnt add up? Almost all western industrialized nations are on a downward trajectory (or flat) regarding electricity use.
So there is simply little economic incentive to "greenify" electricity quickly because demand is already met by existing infrastructure.
Lots of people are completely unwilling to pay more for energy just to decrease emissions quickly (you might be surprised about peoples selfishness!).
But if you look at countries where electricity demand grows, you can clearly see renewables overtaking everything else; China had more growth in solar PV energy (GWh/y) in the last 2 years than nuclear power in 2 decades (and they're a pretty nuclear-friendly environment, too).
These Western countries are also still exporting their manufacturing and energy use to China. Meanwhile, Chinese CO2 emmissions are still increasing, regardless of how much renewables they are building. This would mean that the marginal cost of burning coal is still lower for them than the "dirt cheap" renewables, when accounting for everything. Either that or China can't count, which I doubt.
In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.
It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.
Why would you expect people to go for fully renewable grids right now? You'd need no pre-existing dispatchable power for that to be appealing to start with, and this is the case approximately nowhere (excluding countries that get free hydro from their geography here).
Electric storage to get rid of the last percent of dispatchable fossils in the grid is invariably gonna be the last thing that happens because its just not appealing economically; future overprovisioning is gonna eat into your margins, capex for batteries is non-negligible and you are basically making a longer term investment into rapidly improving tech which is always rough.
But just consider a single household right now: You can just slap panels on the whole roof for peanuts and put 100kWh of batteries somewhere (that's basically a single chunky car-battery)-- that's pretty much autarky right there, and it is very feasible (but if you rely on a bit of dispatchable fossil grid power instead that's still cheaper and easier for now).
In my opinion all that we would need to accelerate this tremendously is like a $300/ton in carbon tax, then just re-emit the gains into mainly lower income tax brackets (poor-ish people might even come out ahead!) and tax literally every import comparably that can't demonstrate a clean chain of the same CO2 taxation for its inputs. But people would wine endlessly, because suddenly flying into vacation 3 times a year or similar BS becomes actually expensive, oh the horror...
I don't know if this is true; I'm not making any claim; weren't renewable energy figures also not economical before we invested a ton of money in them? In other words, is there a situation where nuclear becomes economical because we build a lot of it before it's economical?
China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.
Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.
Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
Alberta ships through BC now and I think they’ve gone from half to full capacity. That profit might not survive Hormuz opening and unfortunately much of it leaves Canada.
OK, so when does the first one come online? "The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035."
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
Ok, I was kind of excited about this, until you pointed out the dates.
Of all Western developed countries, Canada is pretty much the last hope for a country with the skills to build nuclear at something that's within spitting distance of being economical.
The US and France have shat the bed royally over the past two decades, they're out of the game of construction competence. The UK stopped doing their own and outsourced to overpriced and unreasonable French reactors, that are only going forward with what be massive amounts of corruption in order to justify such expensive energy when there's cheaper batteries + offshore wind. Finland had France build them a reactor, and wisely negotiated a fixed price up front, and the construction overruns bankrupted the French company which is now really French in the sense that it bankrupted itself on Olkiluoto and had to be nationalized in the name of national security.
That leaves Canada, with their famous CANDU reactors and can-do attitudes. But 9 years of planning before construction? Perhaps that's what's actually needed, and they'll have a chance of actually constructing it in five years, but.... super super doubtful.
Canada, do not fall into the same trap as the rest of the nuclear frauds in the Western world. Five years for construction? Don't kid yourselves, even China breaks ridiculous timelines like that, and as good as you are, Canada, you're no China when it comes to massive massive construction projects. Just look at how hard it is to build in Vancouver, for example...
China's current plan: Since the country’s first Hualong One unit came online in 2021, 6 additional units have begun commercial operation, 16 units are under construction, and 18 units have received government approval in China. According to the CNNC, the Hualong One will become the country’s mainstream type of third-generation thermal reactor by 2030.
The Hualong One is a successor of the Westinghouse AP1000. The US has two of those operational, at Vogtle. Then Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt.
China has four operational. All later units in China are Hualong One units or later designs.
These are all classic pressurized water reactors, all about 1 gigawatt. Nothing exotic here. The technology is known and works well.
Environmental assessments and consultation with native groups will quite literally require 2+ years. Impact assessments and community approval will take at least another year. None of this will run in parallel, at least not much of the time. Beyond that, while laudable, there is a quite rigid tender process which must be followed, to ensure contracts are fair, equitable, and not influenced by government officials.
That tender process will take a few years on its own, and can only conclude once locations have been vetted, and passed environmental + native approval. Even once approved, at any moment the entire process could be derailed, even if billions have been spent.
There is a lot to be said in terms of dealing with native groups correctly. Yet we've been seeing groups, "historical" native nations which have never been recognized before, or even really heard of before, simply appearing and stalling development of, well, anything.
To see a project stall which has billions of investment, was planned for 20 years, and still have roadblocks due to 58 people is ... disheartening. Yet in most cases such native groups are simply paid off. EG, kickbacks.
In terms of environmental assessments, of personal note, I was trying to buy some land from a farmer. This farmer spent 2+ years going through all the required steps to sell a few pieces of his land, this was to be for his retirement.
He successfully conducted all the surveys, applied for and had zoning work done, land separated into a few parcels, while still keeping most of his farm. He just wanted to sell a small portion of land, so he and his wife could retire comfortably. This process took 2+ years.
He and I had negotiated a fair price, and were working on the purchase, and then the environmental assessment came to play. This took an additional 6 months, and found one, I repeat one bird that was seen in the branches of a tree of "special concern". For clarity:
Extinct (X)
A wildlife species that no longer exists.
Extirpated (XT)
A wildlife species no longer existing in the wild in Canada, but occurring elsewhere.
Endangered (E)
A wildlife species facing imminent extirpation or extinction.
Threatened (T)
A wildlife species likely to become endangered if limiting factors are not reversed.
Special Concern (SC)
(Note: Formerly described as “Vulnerable” from 1990 to 1999, or “Rare” prior to 1990.)
A wildlife species that may become a threatened or an endangered species because of a combination of biological characteristics and identified threats.
Not at Risk (NAR)
(Note: Formerly described as “Not In Any Category”, or “No Designation Required.”)
A wildlife species that has been evaluated and found to be not at risk of extinction given the current circumstances.
--
Note the language. Special concern is May become threatened. Not threatened, just "May become".
This bird was not nesting on site. No other members of the species were seen on the land. The bird was simply seen on a tree branch.
Entire sale?
Terminated. Land can not be sold without multiple follow-up assessments.
I could understand if the species was threatened and nesting. Or at least even just threatened.
Even so, this region of Canada has trillions of acres of untamed land, and millions upon millions of acres of farmland surrounding this area. Further, building a house on a multi-acre lot, does not mean "all the trees and land will be destroyed".
I guess my point is, there is sensible custodianship of the land and relationships with first nations, and there is bad-shit crazy, bend over backwards, destroy everything around you custodianship.
As you can likely tell, I think there's too much red tape.
And that red tape is why it takes a decade to even hope to start. And there's no way, unless things change dramatically, that a decade will be enough. We'll have fusion power before a shovel hits dirt.
There’s a very clear anti-building conspiracy in Canada. I can only think that someone must be limiting supply to keep prices high to protect profits.
Because my friend had the craziest protectionism story.
He wanted to build a multi family home on his existing lot.
Of course all kinds of studies need to be done. One of them is a tree study. Which costs $3,000 alone per tree. He hired firm and they were doing a study (for building purposes).
Then one day a crew shows up and cuts the tree all of a sudden. Turns out that his neighbour, unknown to him, was complaining that the tree was creating too much shade. So without any study they just came and cut it down.
It's hard not to fully agree with this take. The facts are obviously putting the actual timelines into fantasy territory, where projects fizzle and die. Even a 10-year plan should be flagged as high-risk as solar and wind builds tied to grid battery continues to explode in growth.
Always thought it was weird that the Commonwealth Realm nations had never pooled resources to have standardised reactor designs and expertise. Canada and Australia have loads of uranium - seems like an obvious strategic move. Instead, the UK turns to China, lol.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
The basic premise of "have a factory that produces reactors small enough to ship" always made sense to my uneducated mind. Is there a flaw in the idea? It seems like it should be much cheaper than if every reactor were bespoke
With smaller reactors, one needs more of everything: reactor vessels, containment structures, cooling systems, generators, etc. This is why industrial facilities are usually built as large as reasonably possible, and why SMRs fell out of fashion as soon as GW-class reactors became feasible in the 1960s.
SMRs have their use. Depending on the model and design you can build them or even bring them [0] to a remote place where you want to build industry but the infrastructure and access to electrical grid is lacking. I'd argue nowadays they are even more important with the huge rise in electricity demand.
Is that actual cost or projected cost because right now large reactors look prohibitively expensive meanwhile as you say we haven't really tried building SMR's on a production line.
Meanwhile Sweden is putting its money where its mouth is:
It's less about money and more about timeline risks. Canada's BWRX will cost per MW by plan more than French flamanville with all delays. But unlike Flamanville it has chances to be put on the grid faster
Technically yes, but in the case of nuclear, regulatory cost is what matters more. If the paperwork needed for construction of one large scale reactor is much more expensive than that needed for construction of a hundred smaller identical reactors, then the SMRs will win.
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
You could be right about the Korean plants. I only relied on google to give me the top 5 nuclear plants active in the world. The Korean plants you mention were not on the list.
Wikpedia has more info, plus WNN and other industry publications usually are more up-to date.
Kori[1] has 7 operational units today and 1 commissioning and 1 under construction
Hansul[2] has 8 operational units and another 2 more under construction.
All 4 new units are APR-1400 reactors ~1400 MW capacity. Kori should retains its top position, Saeul-3 in Kori Phase II has already reached criticality in April.
Tianwan in China will come close but its 7/8 units are slightly behind in construction than Saeul-3/4 in South Korea, plus the plant is also bit smaller at 6600MW now . The Russian VVER-1200 design China are using is also slightly smaller than Korean APR-1400.
>As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
> should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse
It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire ; so much so that the site had to be renamed to Sellafield.
The rollout was hampered by the choice of two ultimately dead end technologies, Magnox and AGR. Then it ran into the industrial unrest and general lack of money of the 1970s, during which the government cancelled its space program (Black Arrow), and very nearly cancelled Concorde. The "white heat of technology" had worn off. Thatcher attempted to restart it, resulting in Sizewell B, but of course after 26 April 1986 any new nuclear was completely unthinkable and that was the end until Hinkley C. Which is still not finished.
If not aware - uk government is backing Roll Royce to produce small reactor solutions (SMR). And Rolls is going around the world signing up sales agreements for them.
The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the economics.
The assembly and economies of scale for “mass production” have not been proven in practice; who will you sell the countless expensive ones before it gets cheaper?
And the smaller reactor has diseconomies of scale working against it for the electricity it produces. So the $/MWh price is much higher than for larger reactors.
Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence.
I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.
I think its mainly just different "environmentalist" subgroups: You have the oldschool environmentalists that are more "holistically" concerned with sustainability, ecological footprint, species preservation, pollution, etc.
I'd argue that this subgroup already achieved *tons* of goals over the last half century, and are nowadays playing second fiddle to the subgroup that is first and foremost concerned about climate change: Because those goals are far from met and much more urgent.
Those subgroups tend to have a very different outlook on nuclear energy: Nonsustainable superfund sites in the making for the first group, and highly useful emission stopgap for the second...
Yeah that's always possible. I only remember seeing the change after Russia escalated their war a few years ago, but maybe my memory is failing me there.
"If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides,"
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if safety concerns are met. Also from the article:
> Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
The problem of course is that safety has costs and people cut corners, leading to events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists
Is it?
Nothing is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric dams. In Canada, there are endless rivers to dam, while also leaving endless rivers undammed. Further, damming a river doesn't destroy nature, it does however turn a river into a lake. Over the years it takes to build and complete the project, including the initial flooding, some species leave, new species take their place, and a healthy ecosystem remains.
Yet dams are attacked with a ferocity in this country, as if somehow having a dam is worse than a coal power plant. And while nuclear is great, we're therefore left with nuclear power, and all the outcome if that goes wrong, because using 0.0000001% of our rivers to build a few more dams, is "bad" for the environment.
Canada is massive.
I'm sure someone will want to reply with how horrible dams are, the concrete and carbon cost of concrete. Yet what's really the problem is that some want nothing ever built. Not a single method of new power generation, ever.
And so? This is what we end up with. Nuclear it is.
The concrete is a small part of the problem. Flooding gigantic areas and stopping the natural water flow have serious consequences for widelife, but most people don't care enough.
Actually, I addressed that in my comment. There are no real serious consequences for wildlife, instead, the local ecosystem changes and different wildlife moves in.
You do realise that rivers are constantly shifting, disappearing, lakes forming and disappearing, that none of this is static, yes?
> Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production
Right, and that's my point. The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
No, that was not your point. I refuted your claim "the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns" -- it hasn't swung.
> The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
It was one argument at some point but hardly "the" argument "all along", nor the major argument, nor the primary motivating argument. The initial arguments were about "atoms for peace", electricity "too cheap to meter", and independence from foreign oil. Global warming wasn't even an issue until James Hanson's Congressional testimony in 1988.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.
They're not building anything. The French are building it and doing a terrible job for the third time straight. Flamanville at home, Olkiluoto in Finland and now Hinkley.
Nuclear process heat in refining would enable releasing less CO2 per fuel-unit. It doesn’t solve burning directly, but reduces the impact of what is going to happen anyways.
Absolutely ridiculous that I was down voted and flagged for some mild griping about the state of my province's inability to execute on infrastructure projects, but offhand jokes (I hope it's a joke) about nuking my home is completely fine?
Downvoted? Seriously? It's an objective fact that the comment is dead, which refutes the claim that people thought it's completely fine. And the comment has nothing to do with some totally different claim that was downvoted, thus it is objectively whataboutism, and obviously ridiculous.
These are a bunch of contradictory quotes. We'll have to wait till NRCan or whatever comes up with a real plan. "Up to 10 reactors built by 2040" doesn't really match "two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035". Like, what is that. "planned or under development" seems like a big "or". Like how BART has 1500 lines completed or described in concepts online.
It's obvious to me there will be a renaisance, but the question is which design will win.
There are so many companies building small modular reactors right and various different designs with different fuels and cooling mediums.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.
>Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
Even if Canada winds up relying more on CANDU reactors than SMR's, there is a case to be made for enriching domestically. There are a lot of potential customers looking for a reliable, ethical supplier. Canada has the raw minerals, political stability, and a long record of refusing to weaponize despite having the capability.
10 new reactos by 2040 is huge when you come to think of it, this is just in 14 years, this is about 0.72 reactors built each year. Knowing you need to build : the whole reactor building, the machines building, the whole plumbery system, the electrical system, the control command system, the reactor, reliability features, and all of that knowing you have to pass the nuclear regulation authorities controls.
Did people really forget just how much nuclear power sucks? Storage may not be a problem now but that's pushing the problem onto future generations yet again
Are we finally re-entering the Atomic Age? It seems that the Soviets extended the Oil Age by about 40 years, by blowing up the Chernobyl plant in 1986.
Alberta has energy. Canada wants energy without Alberta. The Candu reactor program is so defunct that the feds have been trying to sell it for about a decade. Candu makes plutonium and was responsible for a lot of nuclear weapons proliferation in the 1980s, but again, Candu isn't Alberta. Also it's a way to spend an enormous amount of money, and Canada isn't quite bankrupt yet.
I say go for it.
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
The regulation of it is an entirely different thing from the budgeting and promotion of it. Promotion of nuclear power has become a very vocal Ford government thing in the last few months.
So we're willing to put our greatest national asset (the environment) at risk in the name of "moar power". Well that's just great.
I hope Jimmy Carter's ghost will be just as willing to help us out the next time a reactor goes into meltdown as his physical self was the first time that happened. RIP Jimmy Carter.
That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radioactive emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.
Leaving aside that Canada is huge, waste is really just not that much of a problem. It would be easy to safely store all the waste that will ever be produced at a dedicated storage site, if you could drum up the political will for such a site to exist. But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site. Not that much waste is produced; stick it in a cask and leave it alone.
> But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site.
I agree with the rest but on site storage of high level waste is a terrible idea. Even after vitrification that's material that will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than agrarian human civilization has existed. Ideally it should enter a disposal chain that keeps as little of it at ground level for a short a time as possible in order to hedge against the long tail possibility of a large scale disaster stranding it on the surface.
I think the finnish plan to bury it on site 500 meters down in bedrock is a decent one.
Most dangerous phase of the waste is first ±300y. Afterwards most radiation is low energy and most of the danger would come from ingestion like with any toxic chemical
This is why I always scoff at people talking about the scarcity of landfill space. We have damn near unlimited space here. It might not look like it if you never leave a major city, but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
The only hard part is ensuring your waste doesn't enter the water system, but that's just bog standard mining engineering.
> but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
Problem is you'll get some tribe coming out of the woodworks claiming whatever inaccessible area hundreds of miles from civilization is some sacred ground that can't be touched.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
I think most (all?) nuclear plants use once-thru cooling. There is a water intake upstream (or in an ocean/lake) of the plant, the water passes through the cooling loop interfacing with a heat exchanger that has hot heavy water from the core on the other side. Some of the water is evaporated in hyperboloid cooling towers, and the rest is discharged downstream (or back in the ocean/lake)
Totally unnecessary : I did the Math to cross-verify - Elon Musk is 100 % right !
Just ONE square mile of batteries and a TOTAL of 100 x 100 square miles of Solar can power the entire USA 24/7. Area required will be much lesser for Canada.
How convenient for Musk that technology connections did this exact topic and these exact calculations (and much more) as a topic months and months ago: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?is=wOjIwPKFuYj2Smrh
Why up Musk? Is he your primary source of news and ideas?
I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind.
Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.
Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.
Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.
Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable.
PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.
I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
> […] nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.
I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.
As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.
It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
A biogas turbine for the last few percent of demand??
Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns).
If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing.
Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything.
Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda.
This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.
And as much as a cyclist I dislike cars, the nice thing about electric cars is the potential that most often they can be charged at a time when it is convenient for the network. Mind you, cars just sit around 95% of the time.
So it's no longer "just solar" with a biogas turbine for the remaining few % demand, is it? It's solar with batteries to cover 3x the current daily solar output plus perhaps more to deal with multi-day fluctuations.
> That's a new trend and easy to miss
It's not new and not easy to miss, it's obvious they need storage to cover any more demand. This has literally been the biggest issue for solar for at least 20 years.
> but it will push out coal and gas.
Maybe. How much more credible are these claims than the "solar killed coal" idiocy from years ago? I mean solar and battery tech does continue to get better so you can mindlessly point to that and yes if it kept continuing surely it would push out fossil fuels (everywhere including airplanes and ships). But if we are talking actual timeframes and realistic technology projections?
You realize that doesn't address the sum of what I wrote though? That is batteries taking over from gas peaking. Fossil fuels sit somewhere north of 75% of national generation when the sun is down.
> And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:
And electricity peaking is well suited to batteries because it is very high prices and not a long period. It's great if they can be used here to reduce prices, possibly they could be used independently of solar (though solar does make them a lot cheaper to charge).
But you presumably do understand how that is not removing fossil fuels from generation with just "solar and biogas turbines for a few % of peak", or no?
Jokes aside, Canada is well positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance, now that they have easy access to raw materials, easy access to cooling facilities and they can export surplus to energy hungry neighbor, it also makes it a good candidate for hosting lots of datacenters
new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
Depends what you mean by viable. Solar is easily economically viable, but integration at grid scale is tricky when your peak summer generation is 10x your winter generation.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
Its not so much the days but the hours. Days start getting pretty short in winter. The sun also doesn't get as high in the sky so the efficiency of a fixed panel drops further.
With the prices for solar (the expensive parts are not the panels but the inverters and labour costs) and batteries still going down you will get more than what you thought when you started to spend the first billion.
Metric shittons. A 650 MW solar plant is around $900M USD, so $100B translates into 72 GW. That would power ½ of Canada. It's cheaper to use hydro (PES) rather than batteries (BESS) at scale, and Canada already has a lot of hydro power. $50B would buy lots of PES and distribution/transmission levelizing BESS that would allow greater flexibility in generation production.
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
Canada is not an infrastructure “joke.” It is a country with some world-class delivery organizations operating inside a political system that too often destroys continuity. Relative to the G7, that makes it mediocre and volatile, not uniquely incompetent. And, in nuclear specifically, probably no worse positioned than its peers, though the ten-reactor rhetoric is substantially more ambitious than the underlying commitments at this time... (not surprising - it's a politician making an announcement, which is something of a prerequisite for making a "real plan" anyways).
As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility. Projects like Calgary’s Green Line often suffer from shifting scopes, fragmented authority, and delayed funding. Conversely, the recent Darlington nuclear plant refurbishment finished early and under budget. This proves that Canada can successfully execute megaprojects when planning is front-loaded and standardized.
Another comment I'd make is that the Carney government is only just a bit more than one year old. They're writing a whole lot of new policy. Will they succeed more than past governments? Who knows. But, at least they're spending the majority of their political capital trying to build stuff.
Which are these "world-class delivery organizations" and are they the exception or the rule?
We can acknowledge that political volatility is a main cause but it's not some exogenous factor. It's inherent to the federal structure of the country and it hamstrings trying to build social goods, whether that's transit or healthcare infrastructure.
There is also nowhere near a culture of developing and trusting institutional planning expertise. Infrastructure is done on a pork-barrel basis of which promises will get who elected and create which jobs and allocate which contracts. Or who complains the loudest about the design of any given plan.
Canada's 20th century social system was also based on maintaining social stability through mass property ownership, which is now breaking down as unrestrained property speculation is displacing any kind of productive investments (while also ending the possibility of that mass property ownership in the near future).
Sorry to bring the negativity but I feel as a whole that Canadians are much too tolerant of institutional dysfunction (in the manner of the classic "Canadian nice") and think our society is far more advanced than it actually is. It's a completely complacent and naive culture that is quickly being left in the dust by more functional systems.
You can have all the technical competence in the world, but if those competent people are not allowed to build things your society simply is inept at building stuff in the end. It's a choice society has made.
It's certainly not unique to Canada though. The US and other western societies have made similar choices. Much less risky to employ a lot of expensive people to come up with reasons to not build stuff vs. taking risks and upsetting people by building.
Good points. I would refine my comment: Canada has isolated examples of excellent megaproject execution, but lacks a system that reproduces that performance reliably. The nuclear announcement is credible only insofar as Canada can replicate the OPG/Bruce fleet-program model—stable authority and funding, standardized designs, repeat teams and accumulated learning—rather than its usual election-cycle, one-off megaproject model.
I dearly hope that we're not going to see that model again, but maybe that's likely.
>Canada is not an infrastructure “joke.” It is a country with some world-class delivery organizations operating inside a political system that too often destroys continuity.
>As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility.
>Another comment I'd make is that the Carney government is only just a bit more than one year old.
I know that Liberals since early 2025 have done their best to pretend that Justin Trudeau never existed, but one would think by your words that the Carney regime succeeded one of another party, as opposed to the Liberals in 2025 forming their fourth consecutive federal government, after 2021, 2019, and 2015.
You're right: you didn’t claim a lack of engineering competence. I introduced that distinction. Sorry. If the question is whether the Canadian society can build reliably, then governance and political instability count as part of its overall competence, not as external excuses.
I would agree with you that political volatility exists and stifles an otherwise decent country. It's very frustrating.
Federal funding for the green line was announced in 2015, and IIRC they originally predicted a 2026 opening date for branches covering the north and south of the city - street running in the north central part and a bit in Seton, a short tunnel downtown, and dedicated ROW elsewhere. This was back when planners were still really into streetcars/trams. The funding mix was supposed to be $1.5 billion each from the city, province and feds.
The city sat on their hands for years, perfecting and re-routing the downtown part[1]. Eventually, the plan was shortened to 16 Ave N to Shepard with a long tunnel downtown. The city ordered $100s of millions of low-floor trains, incompatible with the existing ones, necessitating building a new maintenance facility. The cost at this point was $5.something billion.
Then, in 2020, the provincial government put a "pause" on the project. When it came back to life, costs had increased dramatically, and the city came out with a modified plan the (the $6.8 billion stub train from downtown to Lynnwood). The province then threatened to pull their part of the funding, and commissioned a new downtown segment plan that advocated for elevated downtown, and nothing north of there.
Today? We are building the original truncated south phase to Shepard (by 2031!), but not the downtown part. The city is still debating what's going to happen downtown, dismissing elevated. They are hearing from office building and parking lot owners who are worried about its effect on property values, but I think they are also rejecting any ideas from the province on principle. About the only positive thing I can say is that the project is tangibly under construction now, with actual bridges over roadways done or nearly complete.
I blame the city (both planners and elected officials) and the province in that order, but mostly the city.
[1] One positive thing to come from that is the routing in Inglewood/Ramsay and 26 Ave SE that avoids taking down heritage buildings and destroying a vital community corridor.
unfortunately yes. Too much bullshits jobs (to suck up funds mostly and critize every aspects of non existant projects) and not enough people to take risks and do the job.
I love nuclear reactors and CANDU are quite cool. But I don't think that today we have any reasons to build CANDU reactors, except possibly that Canada can demonstrate they can build them for cheaper than others can build light water reactors. The ability to build is something that has little to do with the technical merits of a nuclear reactor design. But all things being equal, a PWR or a BWR should cost less per GW than a CANDU reactor and have other advantages too:
- main problem with CANDU: proliferation. India was able to build nuclear weapons after using a Canadian built heavy water reactor (basically a CANDU reactor) [1]. There is no guarantee that another country will not try something similar in the future, the design has no built in proliferation resistance. An operator can remove irradiated fuel at any time, and if the IAEA discovers they engage in plutonium manufacturing and they get on a black list, they can manufacture their own fuel quite easily, because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium. With light water reactors, you need enriched fuel, so if you are flagged as a proliferator no fuel manufacturer will be allowed to sell you fuel, and it's going to be much harder for you to manufacture your own fuel, since you can't enrich. If you can enrich uranium, you might as well try to build a uranium bomb (like Iran is trying to do). Also, with light water reactors, you refuel only at discrete times, generally about 18 months apart, so it is much more difficult to extract lightly irradiated fuel without being caught by the IAEA.
Now some less important problems:
- because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium, it produces much more nuclear waste per GWh compared to light water reactors. Nuclear waste is not the boogeyman nuclear anti-advocates make it to be, but still, if you generate 5-10 times more nuclear waste than the mainstream alternatives, it is less than ideal.
- there is one positive reactivity feedback loop in a CANDU design. Because of that CANDU designs are not licenseable in the US. The Canadian nuclear regulator is comfortable that the design is stable [2], but if you can choose between a design with one positive feedback loop and one without any positive feedback loop, why would you choose the first?
Proliferation is irrelevant. It was not a Candu reactor what India have used and without Russia's help it's unlikely it would have happened. But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.
We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).
I was being a little flippant there - but I think we've gone way too far in the "nuclear is risky" direction, largely because of Chernobyl, which was a) a very specific disaster caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck and b) not that deadly. In the US about as many people die every year due to coal pollution as have yet (or will ever) die because of Chernobyl. About the same number die in Europe every year because of a lack of AC. Those are just invisible risks that we accept already and we need to start seeing them.
I'm all down with spamming nuclear plants but will that, in the end, give free electricity to the consumer? Lower the rates? ..or just continue to be an economic weapon against the masses?
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
The Alberta government absolutely banned new solar and wind development, first a short-lived moratorium and then with regulations meant to "protect the natural beauty", restrictions mind you that absolutely do not apply to the pump jacks any company can place on your land and which you do not have the right to refuse. Or to the vast stretches of Mordor-like tailing ponds.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
Then perhaps they should start collecting money for their orphan well problem rather than letting it worse with the clear goal of making the rest of the country pay for it.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
If this principle is applied to all energy sources it would hurt new nuclear development far more than new solar/wind given the huge capital requirements of a new nuclear plant.
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Makes alot of sense. Canada has:
- one of the largest uranium reserves
- a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU
- experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington)
and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that wasn't present before from its existing population.
if the government can clear the red tape by using a well tested reactor design then they could certainly get some of these reactors built in that time frame.
15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.
If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis
If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
> If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious
Surely it would increase variance of outcomes, but the expectation is the same of each and overall?
Agree it would be mad though. Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint, or the modular thing in the news occasionally, and just churn out basically the same thing everywhere as needed.
Yeah I mean obviously each one would be managed on its own to an extent but one big problem we have in the US at least is that we build so few reactors that each one is bespoke. They may be based generally on certain designs but they will vary enough that operators and maintenance engineers have to train and be certified on each one, and that training and certification does not carry over to any other facility. Parts are bespoke and can't be used from one to another
If Canada builds them all similar enough that you only need one simulation/training facility, parts can be used between all of them, engineers can move from one to the other, and otherwise they are as close to each other as possible they will get incredible economies of scale that we don't typically get in North America in this industry
Could be a good way to kickstart a canadian nuclear industry that would expand into the US, exploiting the a big thing the US is bad at, coordinating infrastructure projects with multiple government groups, not making infrastructure builds incredibly overpriced and take an incredible amount of time and not being hyper litigious.
Are you also Canadian? I only ask because I feel expensive and overdue infrastructure is already something we (canada) suck at
Vancouver vs. the bay area is my current example, or california HSR general, or the billion dollar pedestrian tunnel in new york, and just the general level of shabby of everything compared to canada in public infra at least.
You have to realize that the dollar bill for equivalent infra in the USA is much, much higher even though it feels more expensive in canada relative to it's income
Canada is not even a little bit better at the big thing, and it may be worse. Same ailment, basically. Better look to countries like Spain and Japan for inspiration on how to deliver very big projects on time and on budget.
>Seems already a bit mad not to standardise internationally on a rough blueprint
How do you evolve the design then?
Standardizing doesn't mean you never change, but there is a middle ground between the current design is locked in stone forever vs. every plant is completely bespoke with no interchangeable parts and operationally different
Same way you do for planes, cars, etc. You have long(ish) life-cycles and some pieces that can be independent (e.g., same turbine engine on several plane models).
Brings its own risks. See the 737max debacle. Now imagine that but causing a massive radiation leak and requiring all your power stations to be be put offline while a fix is found.
Nothing about the 737 MAX situation had anything to do with the fact that it was standardized and every plane wasn't bespoke. That is a weird thing to compare this to. You could absolutely still screw it up if you were designing each reactor from scratch every time
Huh, a lot on the 737 Max situation was due to standardisation.
Boeing didn't want the time, expense, and hassle of certifying (= standardising) a new narrow-body aeroplane, so they continued to reuse the FAA type certificate (= standardised design) of the original 737 from 1966.
This meant they had to keep, inter alia, the short landing gear, which in turn made the wings lower to the ground, which forced them to position the new big engines ahead of the CG, which forced them to add the faulty MCAS computer, which killed all those people.
Admittedly the decision to use just a single sensor on said MCAS was due to systematic, decades long corruption and emasculation of the FAA.
The fact that every 737 MAX was the samew design also means that, upon rcognizing the flaw, every one could be grounded and fixed properly. We did not have to verify 15 different designs were all vulnerable due to Boeing trying to nickel and dime their customers (by making the third sensor esssentially a paid upgrade/addon)
So the problem was that they diverged from the standard design in key important ways. The trick would be not to do that, to actually stick to the standard design. Or, to make sure that the impacts of deviations are fully accounted for and incorporated back into the overall design and project
Again, the standardization didn't cause the problem. Boeing's piss poor engineering culture did. There's no reason that they couldn't have built the plane how they wanted but in a way that didn't crash. Similarly, it's entirely possible that each of these nuclear reactors will be built with flexible designs per project that result in half of them melting down.
Safety and quality control is critical no matter what strategy they use
The point is that standardisation can act as an impediment to innovation. People then use creative engineering to remain technically compliant. This ultimately leads to hidden or hard to detect risks because everything is "to standard", except it's not.
And on the other hand people can just design dangerous and dumb products even without the constraint of standardization.
This is good to keep in mind, but we'd need a substantial proliferation of nuclear before we get into a position where over-standardization is a problem.
They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran.
What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it looks like they are really doing it. See https://www.autonocion.com/us/canada-tonne-grid-nuclear-reac... !
Exciting development. I really wish somebody would nail a commercially viable Thorium reactor but it seems there are real engineering complications around scaling molten salt reactors.
The trouble with molten salt thorium reactors is that they need an attached chemical plant that processes molten sodium mixed with radioactive elements. This is not something a utility wants to own, maintain, and operate. Here are some studies on such plants.[1] No full scale long-running salt reprocessing plant has ever been built.
The great thing about boiling water reactors is that you just have to handle water. The radioactive portion of the systems is simple. Which is good, because it can't be maintained much during the entire lifespan of the plant.
When you look at the history of nuclear reactors, almost all the problems involve plumbing. The less that can go wrong with the plumbing, over 60 years or so, the better. For molten salt reactors, the physics is promising, the chemistry is a pain (fluorine, for starters), and the plumbing has major corrosion and clogging problems (high temperature radioactive molten salts and pipes just do not get along, even with really exotic alloys.)
It's not impossible. But it's going to be prone to expensive problems, some of which probably will not be anticipated. Remember Ft. St. Vrain, the helium gas cooled reactor. Great idea. Ran for ten years. Even used some thorium. Troubles in the radioactive portion of the gas plumbing system meant it had to be shut down and dismantled.[2] That was sad, because it actually worked well for years.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1484689
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Saint_Vrain_Nuclear_Power...
(Molten salt, not molten sodium. There are molten sodium reactors, which have their own set of problems.)
There is also the political aspect.
Online reprocessing of nuclear fuel necessary for some thorium fuel cycle designs (reprocessing inside the nuclear power plant) could increase the risk of nuclear proliferation. U.S. government, as a general policy, doesn't like when non-weapon states do nuclear reprocessing.
I was at the first Thorium energy conference and presented a timeline for reactor development based on the timeline Oak Ridge had in the 1970s. I was still surprised that the Chinese nailed it!
These days I am more excited about Plutonium cycle reactors using chloride salts because they fix the problems of the FBR (occupational safety in fuel fabrication for one) and the fluoride salt reactors (having to dispose of used graphite cores). You do get some longer lived TRUs but you have so many excess neutrons you could burn some of the fission products. Most important the Pu cycle can be launched with the nuclear waste we already have, whereas the math doesn’t really work for launching LFTR.
It requires chlorine isotope separation or else you make Cl-36, a beta emitter with a half-life of 300,000 years.
Moltex got around this in their concept by only using chloride salts inside the fuel tubes; the surrounding sterile molten salt was a fluoride. Being sterile, the oxidation potential of the fluoride salt could be kept low enough to be compatible with stainless steel.
(Moltex ran out of money last year, I've read, and has been selling its IP as distressed assets.)
i still hope it'll be candus even if lot of bwrx supply chain is in Canada
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> Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. Power storage is necessary to move excess power produced to times of excess power need. e.g., shave the peaks to fill the valleys.
Any storage reduces the need for baseload and peaker plants. 4-6 hrs move daytime excess solar to fill evening needs. Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further reduces the need for expensive power sources such as nuclear and gas.
The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear.
For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3
> For example, in Denmark[1] a solar-dominated grid would cost around 565 EUR/MWh. A nuclear-dominated grid would cost around 141 EUR/MWh.
That's not what it says. It says that would be the cost assuming the current grid and power came from only solar or only nuclear. The majority of the cost then is for overprovisioning and storage, especially to handle the lack of sun in the winter.
The actual low cost power comes from mixes of renewables, that they note nuclear can't compete with (especially in their hypothetical future energy system with things like scheduled EV charging). They give an example of offshore wind (66%), solar (8%), CCGT (26%) (primarily natural gas) for 66 EUR/MWh, or, restricting to biomass for the gas plant: offshore wind (84%), solar (13%), CCGT (3%) at 99 EUR/MWh.
(it's also worth noting that this is for Denmark. Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude).
Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas.
"The utmost amount (46%) of wood pellets comes from the Baltic countries (Latvia and Estonia) and 30% from the USA, Canada and Russia.6 Estonia and Latvia have steadily been the primary exporters of biomass to Denmark, mainly in the form of wood pellets and wood chips."
https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark
Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before.
(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
it also depends on the rate of consumption. On top of that, the burning aint perfect, you also get amplifiers like monoxide or NOx. It also depends on the type of burned wood - some trees grow faster, others slower. If you burn a tree that grew slowly, it'll be +- zero after a long time
1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects.
2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy).
https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/denmark
1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can)
2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
"Does wood bioenergy help or harm the climate?" by John Sterman.
John Sterman is the Jay W. Forrester professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management
"The EU, UK, US, and other nations consider wood to be a carbon neutral fuel, ignoring the carbon dioxide emitted from wood combustion in their greenhouse gas accounting. Many countries subsidize wood energy – often by burning wood pellets in place of coal for electric power – to meet their renewable energy targets. But can wood bioenergy help cut greenhouse emissions in time to limit the worst damage from climate change? The argument in favor seems obvious: wood, a renewable resource, must be better than burning fossil fuels. But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal – and far more than other fossil fuels. Therefore, the first impact of wood bioenergy is to increase the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain and takes time – decades to a century or more, depending on forest composition and climatic zone – time we do not have to cut emissions enough to avoid the worst harms from climate change. More effective ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions are already available and affordable now, allowing forests to continue to serve as carbon sinks and moderate climate change."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2022.2...
> But wood emits more carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour than coal
Utterly irrelevant since that carbon came out of the air to grow the tree in the first place.
> Forest regrowth might eventually remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but regrowth is uncertain
Of course it's not! Trees are grown as a crop. These aren't ancient forests, they're fields of trees for harvesting. If it was uncertain no-one could make money from forestry.
Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle.
Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
> Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.
Because we won't need base load in 15 years? Or because you're arguing that we'll have so many batteries, and they'll be so cheap, and they'll be so over-provisioned regarding summer/winter variance, that we won't be able to sell excess nuclear power to the states?
Personally, I wouldn't make either bet, no matter what odds you give me
It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course
I chose those numbers to emphasize the system cost. Too many people go "Solar panels are cheap! Why don't we have them everywhere?" That's why.
Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.
It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found.
The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.
Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.
[1] - http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2026/ph241/flanagan2/
[2] - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-global-uranium-rese...
> Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that
In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.
For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.
global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater
Seawater extraction is already comparable to most expensive land mines looking at China so it's no longer prohibitively expensive. India is moving fast with it's Thorium design https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...
"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.
The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming
A few hundred years on thorium then fusion.
Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?
First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way.
But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
If it wasn't clear in my post, the entire point is not that we'd run out, but that it'd become economically unviable. As the supply starts to run out and/or we turn to more expensive sources, prices go up - sharply. We'll never really run out of anything - it will just become so expensive that it's no longer viable for widespread usage. Nuclear is quite sensitive to this issue because the primary, and arguably sole, argument for it is that it's cheap.
Ore is currently about 2% of the capex of a reactor. And many mines globally have lowered production because it's too cheap. Even if you 10x the price of the ore, it'll still be cheap
The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.
"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"
https://www.iea.org/reports/global-critical-minerals-outlook...
Copper prices may be higher in 2035 but I'll be astonished if lithium prices are. I expect lithium to be much cheaper by then.
Note that we kept extracting copper long after people said we would run out. We even increased production AND lowered prices.
> Something like 98% of Canadians live south of Denmark's southernmost line of latitude
...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
There is not enough wind capacity in most countries
You can combine solar with wind. And the good thing: wind is complementary to solar. So no need for solar overcapacity and massive energy storage.
https://freeingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Graph-s...
Edit: this is exactly what your link is showing > Demonstrates that mixed wind–solar portfolios outperform single technologies.
no it's not fully complementary. And that's the main challenge. Countries without nuclear and hydro tackle this with gas/coal
Some storage can be had for cheap from existing capacity. Hydroelectric dams with reservoirs, abundant in Canada already, can function like a battery to cover times when solar/wind is low.
> A least-cost combination of all the technologies has also been identified (shown in Fig. 3 as Least Cost Mix). Under the IEA/WEO 2023 cost assumptions, the least-cost solution comprises a combination of offshore wind power (66%), solar PV (8%) and CCGT (26%). Onshore wind power cannot compete with offshore wind power, and nuclear power cannot compete with any of the other technologies. This is due to the relatively low offshore and high onshore wind power cost assumptions in WEO 2023. As we shall see later, onshore wind power comes into the least-cost mix when using WEO 2024 or any of the two DEA cost assumptions.
...
> At the case level, we find that in countries such as Denmark with available wind and solar energy resources, nuclear power does not seem to be part of the least-cost solution, neither in today's energy systems nor in future systems of climate neutral societies. This conclusion is valid for the present cost of nuclear power in Europe as well as for IEA/WEO future expectations. The future overnight cost for nuclear power of 4500 EUR/MW in 2050 represents the so-called “nth-of-a-kind” cost for new reactor designs, with assumed substantial cost reductions from the first-of-a-kind projects, while this violates the historical experience of nuclear power technology.
We're talking about Ontario. I live in Ontario. The sky is overcast 8 months of the year. We're not building enough storage to charge for 4 months and drain for 8.
Ontario _already_ gets a quarter of its power from storage, in the form of hydro. If you add some pumps you can use the existing dam capacity more.
Adding pumps isn’t the same as adding battery storage. More batteries means more peak power. Peak power for hydro is limited by the peak power output of the turbines, not the dam capacity.
You have wind right?
Overcast winter days tend to be very calm as well. These are periods of minimal solar+wind generation and maximal heating demand.
Having a grid with no baseload generation and only storage is going to spell disaster during extended cold+calm periods. Rolling blackouts when it’s -30C outside…
You don't need storage if you have enough non-intermittent power to satisfy peak load.
Canada uses 1,500 GWh of electricity per day. 12 hours of storage is 750 GWh of storage. Estimated for grid storage costs range from $125 to $250 per kwh for fully installed and connected systems (not just the cost of the cells alone). At $200/KWh Canada would be looking at $150 billion for 12 hours of storage.
Baseload is a large part of the total load, so it absolutely makes sense to provide solid plants that can run predictably at close to 100% capacity for most of the time (maintenance and occasional outages excepted).
Storage can paper over the unreliability problems of the intermittent producers to some extent, but at relatively high cost for comparatively short amount of times.
Filling constant demand with intermittent producers + storage does not make sense.
Your power storage is the Uranium fuel, which is a better battery than batteries. Much denser and lasts longer.
In a sanely designed grid you overprovision non-reliable renewables like solar and wind to provide your peak daytime usage and nuclear (or hydro if you are lucky enough) takes up the rest during the night and when wind is not blowing. Batteries to further flatten the duck curve and provide grid firming as required.
Then you have fallback to nuclear and load shedding programs for rare seasonal issues solving that last 1-3% that is incredibly expensive with non-dispatchable power sources. No need to build natural gas plants that sit idle 95% of the time. You overbuild solar since it's basically free from a capex standpoint and use that to charge your batteries when the sun shines.
This lets you maximize capital investment over your entire generating fleet while still providing relatively cheap and - most importantly - reliable power for industrial usage.
Of course, the choice society has made to make nuclear exceedingly expensive might make it pencil out that it's cheaper to subsidize natural gas. But I think that's naive and foolish for the long run.
Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Batteries have no reasonable path forward for seasonal storage in many locations in the world. Nuclear does. Solving overnight storage is simply not interesting, as it's the easy problem to solve.
tldr; Build it all. Nuclear, solar, wind, batteries, and hell - even natural gas as a last resort.
Your proposal is to use nuclear as only backup? Or for only late nights (after batteries have discharged)? That dooms nukes economically, they need to run and sell power at close to 100% 24/7 to have any chance paying back the capex & opex.
What you’re saying makes sense but only for a planned state economy where the government owns (or subsidizes) all generation. It’s not possible in a free market economy, the nukes would go bankrupt/ never be built
Most electricity generation is handled by the government already, particularly in Canada. Worldwide approximately 88% of global electricity generation capacity is owned or controlled by national and local governments.
Some Canadian provinces have IPPs -- Independent Private-Power companies but they are often operating under the patronage of government. Many owe their existence to privatisation, lobbying and sweetheart contracts. (E.g. in British Columbia, private run-of-river hydro companies scandalously secured a 60 year guaranteed non-market rate on electricity. https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/09/12/BC-Hydro-Public-Intere... )
88% seems impossibly high. “Or controlled by” must be doing some heavy lifting. Government owned power is 9% of the US, 25% of Australia, 1% of the UK.
If “or controlled by” means privately owned plants that are subject to local regulations, then that is not particularly interesting or relevant to the discussion
Nuclear advocates say “we want to sell power at the same price 24/7”
They can’t cope with variable load, they can’t cope with other sources. They are only remotely viable with large amounts of storage.
> Nuclear waste would be the other large remaining issue, but again - society chose to create that problem and not solve it. It's not technical in nature.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
For one thing, nuclear power plants produce much less waste than most people imagine.
Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it.
In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely political and nothing to do with the technological or safety aspects, according to the GAO.
The US has operating Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, a deep geological repository licensed to store transuranic radioactive waste for 10,000 years.
But it's only used to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear waste.
Most waste isn't spent fuel, it's contaminated other things. You aren't reprocessing any of that.
I thought contaminated clothing are low level waste. They are quite safe after 30-ish years, but rated to store for 100 years
I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste.
Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with.
You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem.
Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nuclear because it's aligning with you politically
Edit: it's clear from the down votes i am getting that this is political, not technical.
If you're down voting with no technical understanding you're political.
I think it is you who hasn't bothered to do basic research before forming an opinion. I suggest at least skimming the wikipedia page on radioactive waste. [0] There's also a page documenting the various national management plans. [1]
> I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible ...
It just needs to be little enough that the cost of constructing long term storage space isn't cost prohibitive.
The amount produced is something like 25 to 30 tons per GW per year before reprocessing; after reprocessing it's something like ~5% of that. Unfortunately I couldn't readily find numbers for the dilution rate when vitrifying the waste for geological disposal. Regardless, that amount is almost nothing when considered in terms of volume. A full size shipping container is somewhere between 75 and 108 cubic meters depending on which standard you prefer. To give a rough idea that equates to ~180 (US) tons of borosilicate glass (one of the materials commonly used to vitrify high level waste) on the low end (assuming I got the math right).
There are also alternative disposal methods to consider such as breeder reactors (rather expensive at present) or horizontal drillholes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_m...
You're repeating the problem - You're saying that there is less waste to deal with which magically means it's safe.
You do understand that don't you?
You appear to be reiterating an irrational position. I provided links to overviews of the topic; I strongly suggest at least skimming them. The quantity of unavoidable high level waste would appear to be sufficiently small that geological disposal is a cost effective solution.
The high level waste in question is not magically safe. Rather the various reprocessing and disposal methods have been extensively engineered and deliberated. At this point there is no cause to believe deep geological disposal in crystalline bedrock to be unsafe.
I said from the start that the argument you presented was fallacious, and all you did was present it, now, because you have no other argument, you're working on aggressive attacks.
You're on your own now. Bye.
Do please explain how it's fallacious? I've made the claims that one, there is a sufficiently low volume of waste produced per unit of generation that geologic disposal is affordable and scalable and that two, said geological disposal is in fact safe. Where's the fallacy?
It appears to me that you are attached to a position that you aren't capable of defending.
also its not really waste, its waste by law only, in reality its unrefined fuel
Also worth seeing that less has to be fundamentally safe at some point, otherwise background radiation would be a threat. If examined on its own without considering the surrounding inert volume, one decaying particle is presumably quite radioactive.
So since less->magically safer is true some point, the argument can't be made fallacious by asserting it is true. The worst the argument can be is unpersuasive (although it is persuasive - from a practical perspective there is a tiny volume of toxic waste, it isn't a reason to block progress).
He literally mentioned tonnes of waste being generated.
But don't let that get in the way of a good pile on.
Less waste to deal with makes it safer, simply because you need to control and manage less material.
We also know how to get rid of it entirely, leaving only material that will decay to safe levels within hundreds of years. It's prohibitively expensive right now, but may be feasible in the future once technology matures.
> We also know how to get rid of it entirely, leaving only material that will decay to safe levels within hundreds of years
In the interests of fairness, is like a citation showing that
It's called "closed [nuclear] fuel cycle". Just google it. I studied it at a university.
TLDR; if you have enough fast neutrons, you can transmute anything into safe materials. Fast neutron reactors produce enough, classic PWR reactors do not. The only commercial fast reactor right now is in Russia.
If at some point humanity decides to stop making reactors altogether, it's still possible to burn the waste with particle accelerators. It'll take hundreds of years, but waste won't be going anywhere.
And finally, if commercial fusion reactors ever happen, they can also be used as neutron sources to trivially burn up all the waste.
In the US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste was stopped not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. The primary reasoning was that: US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste would encourage other non-nuclear weapon states to build nuclear reprocessing capabilities which would make easier access to plutonium - nuclear weapon material.
"On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United States would defer indefinitely the reprocessing of spent nuclear reactor fuel. He stated that after extensive examination of the issues, he had reached the conclusion that this action was necessary to reduce the serious threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, and that by setting this example, the U. S. would encourage other nations to follow its lead."
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/read...
Commercial fusion reactors could be used burn (transmutate) long-term transuranic waste, on the other hand they will produce short-term nuclear waste, like neutron activated steels.
Yeah. My former coworker was researching ways to make steel less "activatable". Turns out that the most problematic contaminant is niobium, so he was working on possible ways to remove it completely.
The proliferation risk was real at that time, but it's now a moot point. The details of plutonium refining are well known.
Principles of plutonium separation are well known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX), but preventing non-nuclear weapon states from having access to nuclear materials usable for nuclear weapons (Plutonium, Highly enriched uranium) is still cornerstone of US foreign policy. See the current events in Iran. Or the discussions with South Korea:
"The U.S. State Department did not give specific responses when asked if the U.S. was open to changing the agreement and what sort of discussions it had agreed to, but a spokesperson said: "America has a longstanding policy to limit the spread of enrichment and reprocessing capabilities around the world and to seek the highest nonproliferation standards achievable in all 123 agreements.""
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/south-korea-us-agree...
This also the reason for monitoring and inspections by International Atomic Energy Agency in all facilities handling nuclear materials (nuclear reactors, fuel manufacturing, nuclear waste storage) or capable of producing nuclear materials - in non-nuclear weapon states.
https://www.iaea.org/topics/additional-protocol
There's very little waste that lasts hundreds of years, and the reason it's "prohibitively expensive to store" is purely political. Because we safely and cheaply store it now while waiting for multi-decade trillion-dollar projects drilling deep mountain storage close to magma or something.
See page 15: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/202... Only 0.2% of all waste is High Level Waste that is both long lived and highly radioactive.
[dead]
I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.
It's not.
The time frame we are talking about invalidates the "safety" because the earth's crust moves and warps, which allows water to access that sort of storage
The Earth's crust will take far longer to move yucca than the nuclear waste will be a problem. That's the whole reason that site was chosen. Even Yellowstone isn't set to blow on that time scale.
Why dont you suggest what "safe" looks like, and we can discuss your understanding of safety. Its clear to me that the issue is your standards and not actual waste disposal.
My understanding is that this material remains toxic to life for thousands, to tens of thousands of years.
Safe means that it's stored such that there's no harm to the environment for that lifetime.
In all "bury it" scenarios, the place where the waste is buried will be subject to change resulting in water, air, able to interact with that waste when normal tectonic and erosion processes do their thing.
I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
How do you think spent uranium interacts with the environment?
There's an estimated 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Naturally occurring. I honestly think we missed a trick when we outlawed dumping in the ocean, there's basically no way for human generated nuclear waste to even move the needle on ocean sources.
Lets say I take you completely at face value. Every notion of yours comes to pass. We cask it, and leave it in an underground vault. 9999 years later, a cask fails. Whats the issue? Are you using that vault as a busy thoroughfare? Its still in a big hole in the ground. Maybe theres an earthquake? And the vault shears a little. What is the radiation now doing in your mind that makes it dangerous? TBH we shouldnt leave signs warning people to stay away, we should leave a concrete recipe behind on all the signage.
There's life thriving in Pripyat just past the big concrete dome. There's a war going on there.
> I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement.
The problem you're running in to is most likely that you asked someone to define a subjective measure. What you then bump into with the anti-nuclear crowd is safety has one standard for most things and then a different, inconsistent standard when "nuclear" gets mentioned. So a level of harm (or cost/benefit to be more precise) that would be fine for say, lead poisoning or car safety would be a shut-down-the-industry event if it involved nuclear material.
And there isn't really a follow up at that point because there is a definitional tautology where, because it involves nuclear material, nuclear material can't be safe. The problem with that is obvious if you want people to have access to clean-cheap-safe power, but it is logically valid and there isn't really a socially acceptably way to have a go at someone for having inconsistent standards if they are happy to own it. And the argument just got derailed away from the actual issues.
The more argumentatively correct line is to ask what level of harm is acceptable for nuclear, get told "zero", then point out that this is a standard that isn't applied to anything else in power generation and that our standards of harm from nuclear power should be consistent with everything else. The argument then isn't over a definition but why they think it is acceptable to have an unreasonable and inconsistent standard (which is the real issue).
I love how the pro nuclear crowd deals in misinformation to denigrate anyone that dares not agree with them.
They asked for my standard - despite it being a tactic to try and throw the thread, they got their reply and then complained.
You decided a pile on was appropriate with some wild theories that only live in your imagination.
>they got their reply and then complained.
I did complain, and I tried to help frame things up for you a bit.
You accuse the "nuclear crowd" of dealing in misinformation while suggesting yucca mountain isn't a safe storage site because of plate tectonics, which is a total non-issue, or as you call it, "some wild theories that only live in your imagination."
This whole thread is wild.
Hi, what's your physics understanding of the problem?
You need to get very concrete. The waste is the problem, not the containment. You can find out what the 'background' levels are X m away from containers, and the containers--and their containers--are very strong and stable.
Tectonic and erosion processes take place over millions of years, so they aren't an issue for waste that's only dangerous for tens of thousands of years.
You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories.
For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025):
https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man...
690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste containing arsenic. Each year additional waste is added and it will be toxic forever.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untertagedeponie_Herfa-Neurode
I am not surprised - I am, however, surprised how little people pay attention to the risks involved with the practice.
Uranium is a heavy metal, like lead. It always was, and will be toxic. Naturally occurring uranium is toxic, even without any enrichment.
0.2% of waste is toxic for thousands of years. Page 15: https://international.andra.fr/sites/international/files/202...
> $100 [billiards] ball of Thorium = 100 years of energy. ... A newer video:
> "THORIUM: World's CHEAPEST Energy!" https://youtube.com/watch?v=U434Sy9BGf8 re: Copenhagen Atomics' waste burner designs
Also, there's He3 for Fusion in Natural Gas and ocean water.
The movement of tectonic plates is something that takes millions, not thousands, of years. Not to mention Yucca Mountain is far from the edge of any tectonic plate.
Political constraints are extremely important in the real world if the goal is to actually get things done. Yucca Mountain isn't actually a viable solution because, despite the technical arguments in favor, it lacks the support to implement.
Similar problem if local communities fight new nuclear plants tooth and nail, dragging out the timelines/increasing costs. Having the "correct" argument based on objective facts doesn't really matter if people/elected officials who have veto or dilatory powers aren't buying it.
Thankfully a handful of countries have managed to approve and begun building out permanent geologic disposal sites at this point so as long as at least one of them is willing to sell disposal services the problem is now globally solved. At least provided a given country has the political will to pay to export their waste but that seems like a much lower barrier to overcome.
Nuclear waste isn’t an issue.
> Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced.
That's why all modern (aka the last 40-50 years or so) nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute: https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-12...
This way you don't need to ridiculously overbuild solar and wind, and you have a better guarantee for power supply. Especially in colder climates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48640358
> Overnight baseload excess can refill the batteries to cover the morning excess need before solar fully kicks in. Expanding battery capacity to 8-12 hours further
So, at best 20 hours of power supply from storage?
> nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute
This is not a technical problem, but nuclear plants already struggle to compete on cost of energy when running 24/7.
Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.
They actually do not. Struggle, that is.
But yes, it absolutely makes more sense to run those plants 24/7 at 100% capacity.
And we have base-load that matches this reliable generating capacity very well.
The 40%-60% base load absolutely should be provided by nuclear if you don't have hydro (and even if you have hydro, some nuclear still makes sense).
The remainder should almost certainly be a mix: some more reliable nuclear, some storage, some wind, some solar.
That's not how electricity markets operate. Say you have 100GW demand (number are not in any way related to reality) and your Nuclear plant has a capacity of 50 GW. However it's a sunny day and solar is producing 80 GW. That solar will be producing at a much lower price, so no one is interested in buying that extra expensive 30 GW from the Nuclear plant (I'm glancing a bit over how pricing works exactly, but it comes to the same thing).
So either you restrict the amount of solar that can be produced or you subsidize the Nuclear prices. Both solutions are increasing prices for idiological reasons. If we do that might as well invest in solutions that are on exponential trajectories, like solar and battery.
The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman. Both intermittent (like solar and wind) and constant output (like Nuclear) are baseload technologies, despite working very differently. Both require over provisioning, on demand sources or storage. It does not make any sense to bet on a solution that despite significant subsidise over almost 70 years has failed to produce any exponential count reduction, if the other solution is on an exponential curve right now.
That is an obviously mis-designed "market" as it only prices in marginal costs. This worked when most if not all producers actually were reliable. It doesn't work when you have a high share of intermittents.
For mis-designed electricity markets, see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000–2001_California_electrici...
It can be fixed easily by giving priority to reliable producers and only allowing intermittent producers in once the reliable producers are used up.
> The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman
No. It is actually essential, because intermittent renewables cannot reliably supply electricity, yet we need reliable electricity supply.
Intermittents are not baseload technology, because they cannot reliably supply electricity when needed.
> The whole baseload argument when talking about renewables is a strawman.
Didn't know that the requirement for electricity to always be available despite weather conditions is a strawman
> when running 24/7.
Key word: running 24/7. Which neither solar nor wind can do.
> Every minute such a plant runs at less than nominal output, those already bad economics grow worse.
Is that why countries that boast "we have so much renewable energy now" tend to import electricity from stable sources (nuclear and hydro) the moment there's a long period of overcast skies with little to no wind?
Germany is notorious for that https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Canada just finished the Bruce Power refurbishment ahead of schedule and under budget, and that seems to generally be the track record in Canada.
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007558/ontario-delivers-...
France built 55 reactors in around 15 years during its first build-out and that wasn't an accident, we both know how to do this and Canada seems to be in a good place for that kind of performance.
More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.
Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.
Heating is one of the easiest to pair with intermittent power. Heat storage “batteries” can store energy for a very long time. Stockholm recently converted an old cave used to store oil, which now stores heat for a district heating network
* already is.
Copper prices are through the roof, and the usual copper players are seemingly unwilling to expand much
(Atleast in India)
Probably the assumption is that renewables replace a different base load like coal or gas powered plants.
Yeah, it's utter crap.
It shouldn’t be the first time, this is what natural gas peaker plants have been about for 20 years. Solar and wind can’t sync the grid, they require sync or the grid collapses. Sync (Hz) can only be provided by base load that quickly spin up or down to balance out the frequency of the grid
That explains why Ontario built natural gas plants alongside its wind/solar rollout.
That does not explain why Ontario needs more nuclear power generation some nebulous time in the future to support those same wind/solar installations per the original comment and parent reference.
It needs nuclear to avoid using gas. Ren will be curtailed anyway. May as well curtail them for nuclear. Germany is a prime example of fossils+ren combo https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
As a friendly reminder, we are talking about not just nuclear, but base load nuclear. The gas plants in Ontario are used as peaker plants and even if nuclear were to replace them in that role, as unlikely as that is, that would not see it operating as the base load we are talking about — that the earlier comment said Ontario needs more of because of wind/solar installations built over the past decade. Except that is exactly the role that nuclear plays in Ontario and is already sized appropriately to match anything needed from wind/solar.
Ontario anticipates that electricity usage will climb in the future and is working to build more capacity to accommodate future demand. There will be need for increased nuclear capacity to service that. However, it remains uncertain what that has to do with a wind or solar install from 10 years ago?
> Solar and wind can’t sync the grid
Grid-forming inverters, particularly with batteries, can totally do this job.
Nuclear also works well with grid batteries to smooth demand curves, which Ontario is targeting 2700MW of scale by 2030.
Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.
It’s not that far off, a major benefit is insitu refueling, so that’s a major reason it looks like that.
And you forgot the most important one, that justify nuclear over the alternatives:
- is very far North and can't really use solar at all for 3 month per year because in winter the nights are long, the weather is terrible and the sun is always low in the sky.
Canada (at least the part with people) seems to be significantly more in the south than most of Northern Europe, where PV seems to work just fine?
Ren don't work just fine in Europe. There are serious challenges https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
PV doesn't work "just fine" in Northern Europe.
>A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years.
Once you have base load from nuclear why do you need solar and wind at all?
you can get cheaper power if you play the cards well. By this I mean sacrificing a bit nuclear CF but not too much. Also VRE can be paired with hydro up to it's capacity and the rest would be nuclear. This will give better results vs nuclear only grid
It's still cheaper, and especially solar production correlates well with increased electricity usage.
In Canada? I would have thought winter had by far the highest energy usage.
The sun still comes out in winter!
It corresponds with solar generation in the sense that more electricity is used during the day, when the sun is out.
Because solar and wind are renewable, cheaper and cleaner than nuclear. They don't require destructive mining for enriched uranium or create the security implications of dealing with fissile material. Solar/wind do not create long term hazardous waste that's complicated to dispose or create the risk of widespread radioactive fallout. They also help to decentralise the energy grid making it less dependent on a single point of failure.
Nuclear power has its advantages, and may be worth it short term because climate change is a threat to humanity, but nuclear is not a renewable resource. Solar/wind with proper recycling could in theory sustain itself into perpetuity. Humanity needs to find sustainable ways for powering itself in the long term.
Nuclear mining is mostly insitu nowadays and has low env impact. Env impact of nuclear is low in general https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20... and mining requirements are minimal
VRE do still create hazards, but at different supply chain steps - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6nly288j4o
Decentralization is not a feature but a bug- it needs massive grid investments which drives up prices in a era where you want prices to be low for electrification. France has the best of both - decentralized grid but centralized groups of power. This way grid costs less
Nuclear can be recycled. It's not done because it's cheaper not to.
And ren alone are not sufficient. Countries that have both nuclear and ren are in best position. This can be seen today in case of Germany vs France/Sweden https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Canada also has cold weather, which makes Nvidia's pairing of closed-loop liquid coolant and passive cooling datacenter design more attractive.
Always wanted to go to ... Uranium City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_City
While you're at it, add Radium Springs and Asbestos to your itinerary!
Radium Hot Springs (BC), you mean? +Dildo (NF) +Dawson Creek (BC) +Regina (SK) +Snafu (YK) +Stoner (BC) +Climax (SK) +Radville (SK) +Emo (ON) +Crotch Lake (ON) +Sober Island (NS)
Elbow, Eyebrow, Heart’s Content, Heart’s Desire, and Heart’s Delight
Misery Bay
Asbestos was renamed due to the negative connotations.
15 years, to be clear.
I just hope it'll be Candu and not bwrx
Ignoring that the last time Ontario attempted to build nuclear power the utility went into bankruptcy forcing the public to take on an absolutely enormous stranded debt.
Winter district heating would be the icing on the cake.
I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it.
Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. We just need to look at Hinkly Point C ("HPC") in the UK. HPC was proposed in 2010, approved in 2016, began construction in 2018 and is scheduled to completion currently somewhere between 2029 and 2031 for the first reactor with the second following 1-3 years after (IIRC). From an initial cost estimate of 15 billion pounds in 2015, it's ballooned to 31-35 billion and may well exceed 50 billion [2][3].
The contracted price per MWh is linked to inflation and currently pushing 140 pounds, about 50% more expensive than offshore wind that could be built in a fraction of the time.
So there is a 35 year contract period for power but HPC has a lifespan of 60 years. What happens after? Market rates. Many will argue it'll get cheaper as the plant is paid off. If that's the case, why hasn't electricity from nuclear sources gotten cheaper as the existing plants have aged?
The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
And we haven't even touched the negative externalities yet. That is, the uranium fuel cycle. Processing uranium ore produces waste. Using fuel rods produces waste. We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste. There's a lot of hand-waving about "just store it underground and centuries from now we'll hope they've figured it out". Storage, particularly for the first decade or more is not as easy as the hand-waving makes it out to be. It requires cooling ponds because the waste still produces significant heat. So you need infrastructure from that. UF6/UF4 from procesing aren't a solved problem either.
I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
[2]: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/edf-announces-hi...
[3]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/02/20/hinkley-poin...
> I will never understand why so many otherwise smart people keep trying to make nuclear happen in their minds.
I don't really get this either. I've come to think that it comes down to two pieces. The easy piece is that some people don't seem to realize just how good renewable power sources have gotten in the last 10-20 years. Nuclear has simply been outcompeted in so many ways. But this happened pretty quickly, so not everyone has gotten the message.
The other one is more subtle. For decades there were a lot of bad attacks on nuclear as a technology. (And a few good criticisms, but for some reason those never seem to get the attention, even though they should -- they're pretty strong arguments!) There's a certain type of person who loves to debunk these bad arguments, and there's plenty of that type of person around here. And that can get you emotionally invested into the thing you've been defending (perhaps rightfully: they were crappy arguments against it), and might keep you promoting it after its natural time has passed.
(To be clear: I don't think nuclear plants are worthless, and I think keeping the ones we've got operating smoothly as base load stations is probably an excellent idea. But I don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be building more of them these days.)
Probably it depends on what part of the world you are and on what is your goal, what you want to optimize for.
In many countries there are usual systematic weather events where all renewable production goes to basically nothing for few days or even 2 weeks. You can not solve that by improving renewable sources, there isn't enough raw energy they could capture.
Storage for that long is currently impossible and even if it would be, it would be prohibitively expensive. So what you can do, build gas or coal plants. Building those, having people on call all the time, and the opportunity cost is probably many times more expensive than the building cost of renewables themselves.
And you still need to buy and store fossil fuels, you are still dependent on geopolitical issues, and you still produce a lot of CO2.
If your goal is environment protection or reducing climate change, then nuclear is probably better. If your goal is to reduce energy cost then probably renewables + short term battery storage + gas backup is the winner if you use an appropriate electricity pricing model.
Nuclear seems to be the old, known, stable thing, while renewables are the new and shiny thing that solves everything cheaply (and that sounds like it has huge catch). When you are building such critical infrastructure as the electrical grid, then staying safe and choosing the known, but expensive solution might seems to be the right choice for many people.
I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype.
And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area requirements are going to turn vast swathes of wild land into something like this: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSUY5dhiVF6/
France has higher prices than several EU countries.
Spain in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.
Spain has 3x the emissions intensity of France. The Nordics (some of them) have energy that is cheap and clean like France. That's because they have base load that doesn't emit CO2 like France.
Spain has better weather, more hydro, cheap African gas and still nuclear. And emissions are worse
And the germanics have higher price than France, which can benefit from importing cheap spanish power (when not in outage) and reselling it at 5x to germanic countries.
And the French cannot seem to replicate the putatively low price they paid for their first nuclear rollout.
It is a political choice. Pro-nuclear propaganda in Australia is all about the long time frames, and the fossil fuels needed until they start coming online. Climate targets get to be pushed back, scrapping 2030 targets in favor of 2050 targets. It keeps coal, gas and oil money flowing for another generation. And the problem of actually building and paying for the nuclear power plants is also next generations problem, as they are expected to all be over cost and delayed, and not a priority once all the new gas plants are online. Everybody knows all this, but nuclear still gets traction because when you put lipstick on it and take all the most optimistic estimates from the salesmen, it looks like a pro-environmental policy. One that the right and far right can get behind, because it is not what the greens are saying needs to happen and anything those communists want must be bad.
I don't know if it is similar in Canada. Solar is less viable, relying more on wind. And they have more experience building and running nuclear power plants.
Canada has own supply chain and all recent refurbs were on time and budget.
Ironically, if SA contracted Korea for a npp (and if nuclear was legal there) at the same time as UAE, it'll probably be a net exporter of low carbon power by now.
Australia is expanding gas exploration even under current govt. Climate targets seem to be pushed back regardless
All forms of generation have downsides.
> Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now,
Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsuit-filing laptops right now.
Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Both are actually pretty well understood. If we applied that risk management logic to forms of transport, you wouldn't even be allowed to walk anywhere.
It could take much less in Canada. And recent refurbs being on time and budget are encouraging. We'll see in fact Canada's capacity to deliver sooner, but not in Canada - Romania already signed for Cernavoda expansion to a full 4 unit plant.
You think they shouldn’t negotiate with native tribes?
Did the native tribes negotiate with whoever they last defeated? Or did Europeans literally invent the concept of conflict and war, and all the tribes of North America just filed into America in an orderly fashion and never battled each other?
I'm not saying every square mile of land in Canada, America, Europe has been controlled by at least two distinct tribes or nations, and been fought over at some point since the dawn of man, however I would say that most desirable land probably has. Many cultures have been partly or fully wiped out over human history. It's sad in all cases, but I'm not convinced there's any purpose served by arbitrarily elevating some of those cultures as noble and deserving of special veto power.
Note: I acknowledge that regardless of the above, Canada has formally granted them such powers anyway, so, yep, they get to live in that system they've created.
If they're not building reactors on the land allocated to native tribes, why should they?
First Nations have treaties with Canada with constitutionally protected land use rights that have implications beyond tiny reserves. Rights to hunt and fish can be implicated by heavy industrial land use which compels a duty to consult. Doesn't mean that First Nations can veto a project, but also doesn't mean that all this can be ignored.
All of this is more complex in British Columbia where in many places treaties were never signed and so the land is unceded and under unresolved land claim.
That's the thing, they will be on unceded land. As I understand it Canadian settlers signed treaties which allowed indigenous people to retain rights to the land. Canada then violated those treaties and built on land they didn't own. Today Canada is trying to respect the original treaties while also appreciating that they can't undo what's already been done.
> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point.
> Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation.
Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples.
It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear reactors don't produce electricity (eg they are breeder reactors for plutonium or isotopes for medicine) but an estimate of somewhere between 400 and 440 worldwide seems reasonable. I've also read that fewer than 700 nuclear reactors have ever been built. Not a single one without significant subsidies I might add. Of those 440 (for argument's sake), we've had 3 serious accidents:
1. Chernobyl. The absolute exclusion zone for Chernobyl remains at 1000 square miles ~40 years after the accident with no end in sight. The estimates of the accumulated cleanup costs seem to be at least $700 billion [1];
2. Fukushima. It'll likely take more than a century to clean this up and the cost may well exceed $1 trillion [2];
3. Three Mile Island. Far less significant than the other two but still involved a core meltdown.
Do you have any idea how much renewable power generation $700B and $1T could've bought instead?
But it gets worse. The US nuclear energy doesn't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a nuclear disaster. The Price-Anderson Act limits liability to (in 2026) $500 million in primary insurance, $15 billion in secondary insurance from an industry-wide fund paid in by operators and there's also another limit I forget on incidents that cover more than one reactor [3]. So how do you get from $15B to $700B or $1T? Why the government of course, which means the taxpayers.
[1]: https://globalhealth.usc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016...
[2]: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/16/fukushimas-final-costs-...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
You can see how you dont need nuclear with your strategy today in Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
TMI cleanup costed 1bn, so far lower than the secondary insurance amount. Fukushima cleanup will take less. Most exclusion areas were lifted (with delays but still). JP already wants to extract unmelted fuel elements to gain xp to later do it with the rest. Ukraine is less lucky - recent russian strikes destroyed part of the equipment meant to extract corium.
Germany spent so far on EEG alone double the cost of entire french fleet. You can see the results. Not just financial https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10640-025-01002-z
> If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear.
Don't forget the enormous battery arrays for winter, cloudy skies, or wildfire smoke. Hope you have enough batteries. But you won't, so ok, now you need gas reactors to fill in the blanks. Isn't that what we're trying to get away from?
Ah yes, the ridiculous strawman engineering of saying batteries would be used for seasonal storage.
Then what would you use for seasonal storage?
In the short term, one would burn natural gas in turbines. The marginal cost of displacing this by using nuclear instead would lead to an enormous cost per unit of CO2 avoided, so high that most other uses of fossil fuels would be eliminated first (like, all use in ground vehicles).
In the long term, either non-fossil fuels burned in turbines (e-fuels like hydrogen or biofuels), or bulk thermal storage of renewable electricity. These both have lousy round trip efficiency (maybe 40%), but that's still cheaper than using batteries, because the capex per unit of storage capacity is far lower, and the cost of the RTE is low when there are so few charge-discharge cycles (as happens with seasonal storage); cost of seasonal storage is dominated by capex, which is why using high-capex batteries for it is such a bad idea.
Personally, I consider bulk thermal storage of cheap DC-coupled PV the most promising approach, as being pursued by Standard Thermal. They claim to be able to deliver 365/24/7 heat at 600 C for $3-5/GJ, which is competitive with Henry Hub natural gas.
I would prefer to reduce emissions using technology that exists today, I know it works, and I have seen it operate at national grid scale, not speculative future tech.
You do highlight something there: the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance. If not, the 40 (or 60, or 80) year investment horizons needed to partially shore up the bad economics of nuclear become utterly absurd.
(The criticism that renewables don't last as long as nuclear suddenly looks like praise when viewed in this light; renewables don't need those very long time horizons to pay out.)
But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed even in a nuclear-powered world, because of existing hydrogen demand that is currently satisfied by steam reforming of fossil fuels (mostly natural gas). So lots of hydrogen will be made; it doesn't require new technology to make some more.
I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser, since burner reactors are far too fuel-inefficient to last very long on existing estimated uranium resources. The current estimate of uranium resources at 3x current price would provide the world's current rate of primary energy demand for just 5 years, if burner reactors were used.
> the case for nuclear requires one to assume that the competing technologies stop their rapid advance.
1. No, it doesn't
2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
> But making this bet, that renewables will suddenly come up short, that the experience curves will suddenly break their historic trends on the log-log plot, has never worked out well.
Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
> Something like hydrogen seems guaranteed to be available if needed. Realize that green hydrogen is needed
Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales. All known methods are either extremely complex and volatile, or require large amounts of energy to release hydrogen back, or cannot store much hydrogen to begin with: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S025405842...
> I'll add that if you are sticking to currently available commercial technologies, nuclear is a loser
something something assuming no rapid advances or something
> 1. No, it doesn't
It does, for the reason I gave. You didn't give a reason why not.
> 2. Other tech has to actually show this rapid advance, and not be the permanent state of fiction
Incredibly, you seem unaware of just how rapidly the cost of solar and wind and batteries have dropped.
If we project the demonstrated experience curve of PV forward another five doublings or so, PV energy will be delivered at under $0.01/kWh. This is basically impossible for nuclear to compete with.
> 3. You assume that nuclear is incapable of advances
Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve. If anything, it has shown a negative experience curve.
But in any case, even if nuclear were capable of rapid advance, this would still argue against assuming 40 (or 60, or 80) year lifetimes for nuclear power plants when calculating their economics. The power plants would be obsolete and uncompetitive long before that time span ended.
One cannot have it both ways: both assuming rapid advance, and assuming long economic life.
> Renewabl;es do come short in one very specific area: they are intermittent, and to account for that they have to be very extremely overbuilt and all available large scale storage is very short-term.
One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top. This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't. Listen to the market when it's sending you such a strong signal.
> Speaking of technologies that are permanent fiction. We don't even know how to reliably store it at required scales.
Yes we do. We store it just like we store natural gas, in underground caverns. This is demonstrated technology, and would be very cheap (capex < $1 per kWh of storage capacity). There's a well-advanced project to do this in Utah, for example. The salt formation there could store enough hydrogen to power the entire US grid for something like a day.
> something something assuming no rapid advances or something
I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear. I'm willing to consider nuclear advances, I just note that nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
> nuclear hasn't been very good at delivering them quickly or economically, unlike renewables and storage.
Kind of circular reasoning / begging the question here, since in North America we essentially stopped building nuclear over 35 years ago.[1] We stopped because people were scared of nuclear, and thus a ton of regulatory roadblocks were increased, making it uneconomic. Note that the changes in regulations post-1986 were not new regulations to improve the safety of plants, rather, they were increased environmental review burdens, state-level moratoria and voter approval requirements -- populist measures designed to do exactly what they did do: kill nuclear.[2]
So, we've chosen to not build any reactors anymore, which means comparatively little advancement is happening (since who would invest in that when no one is soliciting bids for a new plant), and then we're saying "See, nuclear isn't advancing, so we shouldn't invest in it."
[1] https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/USN...
[2] The 1990s saw much lower growth of electricity demand, too, so few new plants were needed during that decade, and by the time more capacity was needed, cheap shale gas drove the rest of the nails in the nuclear coffin. Of course, anti-nuclear activists who are also anti-carbon-emissions activists shouldn't count that as a win.
> It does, for the reason I gave.
You didn't give reasons. You presented this as an undeniable fact. And the whole reason is "but advances".
E.g. you literally listed green hydrogen as a viable storage solution even if we literally don't know how to store it reliably at required scales. Oh, wait. Your answer to that is "we just store it in underground caverns" lol. Even though it's very, very different to storing natural gas. For example, it takes 16 times as much energy to compress hydrogen as methane. Or that hydrogen embrittlement is a thing (I'm pretty sure you didn't know about this and think that we just pump hydrogen or, indeed, natural gas into empty caverns underground).
And so on and so forth.
> Unlike renewables, nuclear hasn't demonstrated a good experience curve.
Could it be almost 40 years of fear mongering and no advances in nuclear? Whereas France with its nuclear reactors has been busy keeping Germany afloat after it shut down its plants. And whereas China is went from 9 constructions in 2000 to 36 in 2025, 42 new ones proposed, and over 140 on the roadmap, 6-7 years construction time per reactor.
> One can model to determine the effect of intermittency and renewables still come out on top.
Ah yes. So on top, that once there's winter all "on top" countries end up importing energy from countries with stable power generation in form of nuclear and hydro.
> This is why renewables are being installed globally and nuclear largely isn't.
Nuclear isn't installed due to 40 years of nuclear fear-mongering and anti-nuclear policies. China has no issues installing both nuclear and renewables.
Many countries are now reverting their stance on nuclear precisely because diversifying energy sources is a good thing, and we literally don't have more stable sources of electricity than nuclear. We're literally discussing this under a post about Canada finally admitting that nuclear is a good thing actually why don't we build more of it. Following most of Europe, for example. And Asia has never been shy of nuclear energy, with China busily building reactors all over Asia and Middle East.
> I'm pointing out your requirement that no advances be considered also rules out nuclear.
Note how you again invent requirements for no advances, assume this is a fact, and pretend that it is I who requires this. Imagine if you ever had an argument in good faith.
> Then what would you use for seasonal storage?
Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU. So Nordic countries hydro and nuclear, and some French nuclear.
While lobbying to make all those interconnections increase domestic prices for the providers.
> Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU.
So, from actual non-intermittent sources like checks notes nuclear?
No, nuclear is terrible for covering seasonality, since unless it's used with high capacity factor the cost per kWh skyrockets.
No, it's ok if you schedule maintenance during summer. And with more AC adoption you'll partially reduce this heavy swing. Nuclear at 60%cf is still economical. The problem arises if your plant takes 20y and 20bn to build
> No, nuclear is terrible for covering seasonality,
wat
How is nuclear bad at covering the seasonality of, for example, winter in the Nordics?
It's best for covering a constant demand, not a seasonal component of demand.
If renewables grow to the point where there is no remaining near-constant unmet demand, nuclear has no place at all.
1. Lot of nuclear fission products from Chernobyl catastrophe have already decay ed away. There was mapping done for the long term plan of shrinking the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
"In the long term, the Ukrainian radiation protection authorities can use the BfS measurement data as a planning basis for reassessing the size of the exclusion zone. The data can be used to assess which areas of the exclusion zone could be reopened for use."
https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/EN/2022...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47227767
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has halted the reassessment of Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine has currently much bigger problems than Chernobyl. One could also say that, the decline of nuclear power in Europe because of Chernobyl accident caused much stronger dependency of Europe on Russian fossil fuels and indirectly supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine by bringing a lot of European money to Russia.
2. They got the currency symbol wrong in the cleantechnica article. "First estimates included costs as high as ¥1 trillion (US$13 billion), as cited by the Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Yoshihiko Noda "
"In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...
Lot of missing nuclear electricity production after 2011 in Japan was replaced with electricity production from imported LNG. Because of impacts Iran war on LNG gas delivery Japan is now rapidly moving to restart nuclear power plants.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/18/japan-nuclear-fukus...
3. Three Mile Island was very costly destruction of power generation asset without impacts on the public health, but it caused mass panic amplified by the simultaneous release of the The China Syndrome movie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Act...
Other industries also don't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a large disasters.
"US law requires payment of 8 cents per barrel of oil to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund for all oil imported or produced. In exchange for the payment, operators of offshore oil platforms, among others, are limited in liability to $75 million for damages, which can be paid by the fund, but are not indemnified from the cost of cleanup. As of 2010, before payouts related to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the fund stood at $1.6 billion.
The hydroelectric industry is not generally held financially liable for catastrophic incidents such as dam failure or resultant flooding. For example, dam operators were not held liable for the 1977 failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho that caused approximately $500 million in property damage."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...
>Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want.
It kind of does though, since it demands pretty lavish subsidies to be built at all and those subsidies would give WAY more bang for the buck if used on pumped storage, batteries, solar and wind.
You also have to cap liability in case of nuclear disaster. Private insurers won't touch nuclear power with a barge pole unless taxpayers are forced to pay for disaster cleanup. As a taxpayer Id rather not have that liability.
We're not allowed to flood valleys anymore, so pumped storage is not cheap. Maybe that would change if there was a climate emergency cough
They could mass replicate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community and drop country-wide fossil fuel consumption about 1/3 and save money, but there's no big company pushing that.
What if, we actually instead overbuild power gen and distribution, that it actually supresses price?
Imo, the answer should always be, yes, build, please.
Heavy industries (which support blue collar growth) come to places with cheaper power.
Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...
To be fair Chernobyl was designed what, 15 years after the invention of nuclear technology? Even discounting all the politicial and management control problems, the engineering and scientific knowledge of nuclear reactor design was still in its infancy. Imagine if we judged the safety of automobiles on pre-Model-T cars. Or steam boilers and engines on the first 20 yearrs of their invention.
What's the worst accident involving a Model T, maybe a dozen dead? Early steam boilers aren't going to be much worse either. Nuclear accidents are essentially unlimited in size. Nothing else can do that kind of country-sized - let alone it being permanent.
Chernobyl showed the potential impact. Fukushima showed that even several decades down the line things can still rapidly run out of control. All the knowledge and experience in the world isn't going to save you when something unexpected happens and things are just waiting to spiral out of control.
Steam boilers have a lot of regulation, all written in blood. Entire boats would explode killing most/all onboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boiler_explosions
It's even worse: the problems of that reactor type were, in fact, well-known at the time.
Which is one of the reasons that reactor would never have gotten an operating license in any western country. Oh, and not having any containment.
When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths).
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
Chernobyl's reactors were fundamentally unsafe designs from an engineering perspective, to say nothing of the perverse incentives at play because of the Soviet political system. We've learned a lot since the RBMK was designed in the 1960s.
Not convinced. The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.
The problem with Chernobyl was that (1) it didn't have a containment dome, and (2) it was designed so as the temperature increased, the reaction sped up. It was fundamentally unstable.
Neither of these problems is true of more recent reactors.
We don't make bridges safe by getting humans to cooperate better and cross bridges one car at a time. We make them strong and stable so humans can drive however they like and the bridge is fine. That's how all engineering works, and it applies to nuclear reactors just like anything else.
Chernobyl was triggered by humans but the ultimate problem was it's design. And it shows - Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design. But since the design was much better, the impact is much milder vs Chernobyl
> Fukushima was triggered by tsunami, but ultimate problem was again the design.
And honestly it wasn't, not really. It was hit with a record-breaking earthquake and a record-breaking tsunami... and more lives were lost due to evacuation than to the plant shutdown.
The design was bad in the sense they backported generator placement from US BWR projects in basement. It makes sense in US but risks in Japan are different
Yes, radiation killed zero. Evacuation - thousands
>Not convinced.
What, if anything, would convince you?
Compact, mass produced nuclear energy projects with no nuclear proliferation risk and radioactive waste management time limited to less than one human generation's professional career span. That seems like a decent baseline to me.
Not sure if fission will ever be able to reach that. Fusion perhaps? I'd certainly like to see that researched with high priority.
In the short to medium term at the very least, I see more economic potential in simple, modular tech. Cheap generation using solar, wind and water. Matching supply and demand better through storage and interconnects.
I'd also be very interested in actual research on how to actually lower demand, in beating the Jevons paradox.
Some of the GenIV designs would be compact and easily mass-produced.
You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products. But the really long-term stuff is plutonium and other transuranics. Those are unburnt fuel. Fast reactors and some molten salt reactors are supposed to eliminate that. Bury the fission products for 300 years and they're back to the radioactivity of the original ore.
As an American this seems like a long time to me, but when I lived in Germany it didn't so much. We had a brewery in town that had been operating continually for 800 years.
Proliferation resistance gets complicated but some designs are a lot better at it than others. Almost everything requires at least some enriched fuel for startup, even if unenriched works after that. CANDU reactors don't require enriched fuel at all but they don't achieve the waste requirement. Some designs let you extract usable weapons material from reactor fuel (including current CANDU reactors), with others there's no way to extract fissile that's easier to enrich than natural uranium ore.
It might be doable to centralize startup fuel production in nuclear powers, and use reactors that take unenriched fuel after startup, have no way to extract weapons-grade material, and consume the transuranics.
Fusion of course would fix a lot of this. D-T fusion does produce a lot of neutrons that you could use to make plutonium, but you need those neutrons to make more tritium. You get activated reactors parts but those fit your time requirement.
> You'll never get waste management below about 300 years with fission, because that's basically what you get from the fission products.
That's at least one and probably more like five wars over the reactor territory.
I'm mildly optimistic about fusion's potential...
Bear in mind the decay is exponential, so most of the radioactivity is in the near term. There's no fissile, and by mass it's about 1% as much as we're getting now from conventional reactor spent fuel. Encase it in glass and bury it, and you're probably good.
I'm mildly optimistic about fusion as well. One big advantage is regulatory; fission reactors can be safe if you design them well, but fusion reactors can't do much damage even if they're terrible. The NRC has already decided on a much lighter regulatory regime for them.
Proliferation is not much related to plants. It's cheaper to build a weapon with distributed enrichment capacity for uranium in some caves.
> The problem is with the human layer of managing large complicated projects.
I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
> I guess we should stop having large, complicated projects. Potable water mains, road and rail networks, the power grid, the internet, bridges, medicine, etc, are all too complicated for humans to manage.
I'd rather see this simplified and improved than stopped.
> I mean, nuclear is only the safest form of energy generation that humanity has ever produced, but you're absolutely right.
Ground mounted solar is clearly superior in terms of safety.
What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails? What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
Hypothetically, a train could derail, the train was carrying nuclear waste, the derailment occurred in a highly populated area, near a Virology Lab. The lab was damaged, which released a deadly form of Smallpox, which spread to every corner of the Earth, killing every single human. That would be pretty bad, but not sure if it would be the absolute worst.
You don't need the nuclear waste in that, the train could derail, be carrying a lazy courier transporting a deadly bio-hazard, and unleash a deadly virus and kill literally everyone. From a human-centred perspective that is probably the worst case.
If we're talking non-human it is a bit harder.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a water mains breaks?
People drink contaminated, unpotable water and die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a train derails?
People die.
> What's the absolute worst that could happen when a backhoe snacks on a fiber trunk?
Life-critical infrastructure that depends on the communication fails in a bad way and people die.
> Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
People die.
Nothing in life is without risk.
Nuclear reactors spiraling out of control have killed fewer people per KWH generated than any other source of energy that human beings have come up with.
What's the absolute worse if a dam breaks? Oh, only up to a quarter of a million dead [1]. And yet we propose to build more dams because they are a great renewable source of energy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
> Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history
Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
Isn't that a little hyperbolic? Sure cancer rates will be elevated wherever the fallout blows but it's not going to end anything.
In terms of severity, Chernobyl was a long way from the worst case.
If the core had melted down to a body of water, the steam flash could have vaporized it & ejected it high into the atmosphere.
That's city-ending, if not quite "continent rendered uninhabitable".
The problem is more about Chernobyl affecting global nuclear deployments imo
> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].
The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology.
Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following some sort of asymptotic pattern which is what we'd expect for new and exciting technologies.
Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. On a technical basis it is probably going to be cheaper than coal and if allowed to innovate likely much cheaper than solar and wind (the too-cheap-to-meter line is plausible, we've seen that sort of market in networking).
> The answer is the same with any nuclear criticism: "this time it'll be different". Fukushima? "This time it will be different." Chernobyl? "This time it will be different." Spiralling costs? "This time it will be different." Massively delayed completion dates? "This time it will be different."
That sounds like an extremely reasonable answer? It was different after Chernobyl and Fukushima. We've never seen a plant melt down that was designed & built around the 1970s. And again, project budgeting is mostly about politics not the technology involved. If costs are consistently X the technical estimate, planners will add in a factor of X unless there is a political reason not to.
> We don't really have a good solution for dealing with that waste.
Seems to be a solved problem? We've been doing this for 50 years now and despite their best efforts the anti-nuclear crowd haven't managed to come up with a concrete example of what the problem is that isn't easily ignored. Society produces a lot of toxic waste already and it really isn't that big of an issue. I did the calcs once a long time ago for a HN post and we're often talking about a few shipping containers worth of material in these conversations; ie nothing.
We haven't figured out how to deal with the toxic byproducts of solar panels either and that is largely a non-issue. Plan A is to dump the waste somewhere and Plan B is to go with a better option if one turns up. Problem solved.
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack that nuclear has been under in the US and EU.
Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the cheapest, after that it only got more and more expensive.
A lot of those rising costs are also due to a (much) heavier regulatory environment.
And the much heavier regulatory environment exists for a bloody reason.
The US alone spent billions to clean up superfund sites on the taxpayers dime (because companies created a huge mess in pursuit of profit and unhampered by regulation in the 20th century).
Everything that exists for a reason; the question is whether the reason is good. We've spent decades being told that climate change is going to cost us percentages of GDP to avoid, and your first counterexample is the suggestion that mitigations might be in the billions for the US over the course of a century.
One of those numbers is bigger than the other; and it favours nuclear pretty decisively. The regulations set up an environment where business as usual appears to be worse than if actual unlikely nuclear catastrophe occurred, all the air pollution in the interim and the reduced access to cheap abundant energy are real problems that have real consequences.
Whoever accepted those reasons has blood on their hands, so well might they be called "bloody reasons". The consequences have been serious and terrible even before getting in to oil-related resource wars and the like.
it's one thing to have regulation that makes sense and it's another thing to have regulation that doesnt do much. UK is prime example with HPC
> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack
Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.
But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s
> I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical.
Independence from China and the US. Once you have your reactor engineering set and can churn them like China almost everything can be sourced either locally or you have multiple providers. Solar and wind? China. Batteries? China.
When you get in a spat with China you suddenly have to setup those industries from 0 at home. And that won't be just 15 years to ramp-up.
So the best is to start building nuclear reactors, silicon fabs, rare earth processing etc. now instead of having the exact same argument we had 20 years ago in 2045.
It's because you dont want to. Nuclear env impact is low https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
France has lower prices vs Germany and now, during peak summer heatwaves you can see who does best https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min... . Germany spent on EEG alone so far double the cost of entire french fleet. Results are clear
HPC is not a rule but exception. And it'll work for more than 60 for sure. Existing nuclear is in fact cheap https://www.kkg.ch/de/uns/geschaefts-nachhaltigkeitsberichte... or check Lazard data for it
>LCOE
Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...
Which is a metric having one source throughout all weather, coupled with 2018 battery storage as per the study showcased in the blog.
Not sure what the relevancy is.
Here, a modern article modeling "System LCOE". In other words, the whole grid including transmission backup and everything else. It starts by giving new built nuclear power the benefit of doubt, having it cost 40% less than Flamanville 3 and 70% less than Hinkley Point C. Since no one would ever be stupid enough to greenlight a project like that again.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422...
It finds that for Denmark, a country with very low insolation and awful winters that renewables are 53% cheaper than the nuclear system.
>Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now.
Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.
What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2? There's a lot of places without hydro or geothermal power, and if you needs gobs of power for, say, making aluminum you need as much as you can get power wise.
It if "becomes urgent" (it already is), spending a decade and a half building a reactor won't exactly be helpful, will it?
>What if it becomes urgent to reduce CO2?
What?! It has been urgent for years.
Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
Barakah took about 8y/unit. But local projects are expected to take less. Part of the reason is precedent govts were willing to ditch the industry entirely like Germany
I wouldn’t say you cannot but I also wouldn’t say it is proven that you can.
My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.
The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.
I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136403212...
Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.
I asked Claude:
"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."
One of my pet peeves is that people keep quoting numbers about solar costs oblivious to location, time of year, etc. No wonder some people are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "neener neener neener".
Battery storage for diurnal variation in favorable locations looks feasible, battery storage for annual variation looks absurd. Maybe you can overbuild solar by a 3x factor in some places, I've gotten cost numbers from 'a little less than what an AP1000 is claimed to cost' to 2x more with back of the envelope calculations that probably aren't worth anything. Then there's Dunkelflaute.
It would help if you could find a good use for the excess energy but the capital cost of anything you don't use all the time is multiplied.
Household batteries work wonders for residential consumption. It is interesting what happened once subsidies for batteries was introduced in Australia. The uptake was huge (because free or cheap electricity in off peak periods). Average install size went up, covering about 24 hours of winter usage. Subsidies needed to be tweaked, to reduce the number of 50+ kWh installations. It is not unreasonable to use current technology to have 24 hours or maybe 48 in most or all residences, with an investment payback time to consumers of around 5 years. With dynamic pricing, most consumption switches to non-peak. All distributed, rather than large scale battery facilities. As long as you are prepared to import from China, manufacturing is available. What is needed is political backing to make it a good investment for consumers via subsidies, and loans to ensure people without spare cash can also benefit. And maybe the numbers work out well, with less subsidies going to fossil fuel generation.
You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
you can create even more jobs with ren. But not all jobs are the same. With ren you compete with China. With nuclear - you are somewhat protected since many don't like the idea of a hualong near them
What’s ren? What’s hualong?
Ren= renewables. Hualong is the domestic Chinese reactor design
Sounds like California high speed rail, where the state government is actually touting the number of jobs created as the measure of its success, even without a single mile of working track.
Sounds like Canadian high speed rail :)
> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs
I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.
Nuclear plants would reduce Canada’s energetic reliance on other countries but - is there any, really? Last I checked, Quebec at least exports power to other provinces and the US.
Sure with more power generation Canada has more to sell and any country would be happy to have more energy, but it doesn’t sound like something the country _needs_ as much as, say, more housing. Or deep health care system improvements and staffing. Or … jobs.
Cheaper energy unlocks all of those things. All human problems are energy problems, in the end.
It cuts both ways. Solar and wind are great but intermittent, and the storage issue seems to be treated as a solvable ergo solved problem. Add a sprinkle of "overcapacity", gas peakers and demand shaping and we can have a fully green grid.
So why didn't this happen anywhere - except perhaps two of the sunniest and windiest places in the world, Australia and California, where energy demand (AC) also matches production? Where are the seasonal battery storage facilities that places like Europe or I guess most of NA would need?
My only conclusion is that renewables are also far more expensive than the sticker price, due to the needed grid investment, batteries and frankly unsolved problems of seasonal storage.
I don't mind being wrong, but status quo seems to be, let's not build nuclear because it's too expensive, we're sort of building renewables, but CO2 emmissions, never mind levels, keep on increasing.
It doesn't seem to add up to a coherent story.
What doesnt add up? Almost all western industrialized nations are on a downward trajectory (or flat) regarding electricity use.
So there is simply little economic incentive to "greenify" electricity quickly because demand is already met by existing infrastructure.
Lots of people are completely unwilling to pay more for energy just to decrease emissions quickly (you might be surprised about peoples selfishness!).
But if you look at countries where electricity demand grows, you can clearly see renewables overtaking everything else; China had more growth in solar PV energy (GWh/y) in the last 2 years than nuclear power in 2 decades (and they're a pretty nuclear-friendly environment, too).
These Western countries are also still exporting their manufacturing and energy use to China. Meanwhile, Chinese CO2 emmissions are still increasing, regardless of how much renewables they are building. This would mean that the marginal cost of burning coal is still lower for them than the "dirt cheap" renewables, when accounting for everything. Either that or China can't count, which I doubt.
In any case - displacing fossil fuels is cheaper than operating a fully renewable grid - because you have the luxury of simply dialling back gas or coal production when it's windy and sunny. The proble starts when you dont rely on these at all - this is my point. I haven't seen this happen anywhere or anywhere close to it either.
It's one thing to provide some marginal power generation in a grid based predominantly on fossil fuels, and another to do the same thing without that backup. The typical solar PV plant doesn't care at all about energy storage - it's someone else's problem, and hence cost as well.
Why would you expect people to go for fully renewable grids right now? You'd need no pre-existing dispatchable power for that to be appealing to start with, and this is the case approximately nowhere (excluding countries that get free hydro from their geography here).
Electric storage to get rid of the last percent of dispatchable fossils in the grid is invariably gonna be the last thing that happens because its just not appealing economically; future overprovisioning is gonna eat into your margins, capex for batteries is non-negligible and you are basically making a longer term investment into rapidly improving tech which is always rough.
But just consider a single household right now: You can just slap panels on the whole roof for peanuts and put 100kWh of batteries somewhere (that's basically a single chunky car-battery)-- that's pretty much autarky right there, and it is very feasible (but if you rely on a bit of dispatchable fossil grid power instead that's still cheaper and easier for now).
In my opinion all that we would need to accelerate this tremendously is like a $300/ton in carbon tax, then just re-emit the gains into mainly lower income tax brackets (poor-ish people might even come out ahead!) and tax literally every import comparably that can't demonstrate a clean chain of the same CO2 taxation for its inputs. But people would wine endlessly, because suddenly flying into vacation 3 times a year or similar BS becomes actually expensive, oh the horror...
We can't generate power out of thin air and the coal/natural gas powerplants got shut down what do you propose?
I don't know if this is true; I'm not making any claim; weren't renewable energy figures also not economical before we invested a ton of money in them? In other words, is there a situation where nuclear becomes economical because we build a lot of it before it's economical?
> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1].
That's utterly incorrect. For a country like Canada (or Germany), the priciest form of energy is solar. Wind is close second.
And no, I'm not hallucinating. The key here is _guaranteed_ power during wintertime. There are no generally feasible renewable solutions for that.
Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now
Canada won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?
I think the assumption is that anything that you can build now, you can build more of later. Unless you think there is some reason you can't?
China, Canada, Sweden and others, are not stupid. We really don't understand how it is that all the experts say that Nuclear needs to be parts of the equation but all of you "online activist" keep insisting that, they are just idiots and industry shills. It is the same playbook the anti-vaxers use.
The same China that started construction on at least 10 reactors last year?
Will Alberta go along?
Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.
Alberta needs a pathway through a foreign country to get their oil out right now. Existing pipelines lead to the US, and the Keystone XL expansion Obama halted, Trump resumed, and Biden halted.
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
Alberta ships through BC now and I think they’ve gone from half to full capacity. That profit might not survive Hormuz opening and unfortunately much of it leaves Canada.
>Alberta ships through BC now
Yes, in minuscule amounts.
As of 2025, 90% of Canadian crude and 100% of natural gas goes to the US. <https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma...>
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OK, so when does the first one come online? "The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035."
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
Ok, I was kind of excited about this, until you pointed out the dates.
Of all Western developed countries, Canada is pretty much the last hope for a country with the skills to build nuclear at something that's within spitting distance of being economical.
The US and France have shat the bed royally over the past two decades, they're out of the game of construction competence. The UK stopped doing their own and outsourced to overpriced and unreasonable French reactors, that are only going forward with what be massive amounts of corruption in order to justify such expensive energy when there's cheaper batteries + offshore wind. Finland had France build them a reactor, and wisely negotiated a fixed price up front, and the construction overruns bankrupted the French company which is now really French in the sense that it bankrupted itself on Olkiluoto and had to be nationalized in the name of national security.
That leaves Canada, with their famous CANDU reactors and can-do attitudes. But 9 years of planning before construction? Perhaps that's what's actually needed, and they'll have a chance of actually constructing it in five years, but.... super super doubtful.
Canada, do not fall into the same trap as the rest of the nuclear frauds in the Western world. Five years for construction? Don't kid yourselves, even China breaks ridiculous timelines like that, and as good as you are, Canada, you're no China when it comes to massive massive construction projects. Just look at how hard it is to build in Vancouver, for example...
China's current plan: Since the country’s first Hualong One unit came online in 2021, 6 additional units have begun commercial operation, 16 units are under construction, and 18 units have received government approval in China. According to the CNNC, the Hualong One will become the country’s mainstream type of third-generation thermal reactor by 2030.
The Hualong One is a successor of the Westinghouse AP1000. The US has two of those operational, at Vogtle. Then Westinghouse Nuclear went bankrupt. China has four operational. All later units in China are Hualong One units or later designs.
These are all classic pressurized water reactors, all about 1 gigawatt. Nothing exotic here. The technology is known and works well.
Agreed. Look at the light rail project in Ottawa for an example of Canadian land issues, timelines and quality. It’s a disaster.
Environmental assessments and consultation with native groups will quite literally require 2+ years. Impact assessments and community approval will take at least another year. None of this will run in parallel, at least not much of the time. Beyond that, while laudable, there is a quite rigid tender process which must be followed, to ensure contracts are fair, equitable, and not influenced by government officials.
That tender process will take a few years on its own, and can only conclude once locations have been vetted, and passed environmental + native approval. Even once approved, at any moment the entire process could be derailed, even if billions have been spent.
There is a lot to be said in terms of dealing with native groups correctly. Yet we've been seeing groups, "historical" native nations which have never been recognized before, or even really heard of before, simply appearing and stalling development of, well, anything.
Recently:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jamie-sarkonak-yet-another-...
To see a project stall which has billions of investment, was planned for 20 years, and still have roadblocks due to 58 people is ... disheartening. Yet in most cases such native groups are simply paid off. EG, kickbacks.
In terms of environmental assessments, of personal note, I was trying to buy some land from a farmer. This farmer spent 2+ years going through all the required steps to sell a few pieces of his land, this was to be for his retirement.
He successfully conducted all the surveys, applied for and had zoning work done, land separated into a few parcels, while still keeping most of his farm. He just wanted to sell a small portion of land, so he and his wife could retire comfortably. This process took 2+ years.
He and I had negotiated a fair price, and were working on the purchase, and then the environmental assessment came to play. This took an additional 6 months, and found one, I repeat one bird that was seen in the branches of a tree of "special concern". For clarity:
Extinct (X) A wildlife species that no longer exists. Extirpated (XT) A wildlife species no longer existing in the wild in Canada, but occurring elsewhere.
Endangered (E) A wildlife species facing imminent extirpation or extinction.
Threatened (T) A wildlife species likely to become endangered if limiting factors are not reversed.
Special Concern (SC) (Note: Formerly described as “Vulnerable” from 1990 to 1999, or “Rare” prior to 1990.) A wildlife species that may become a threatened or an endangered species because of a combination of biological characteristics and identified threats.
Not at Risk (NAR) (Note: Formerly described as “Not In Any Category”, or “No Designation Required.”) A wildlife species that has been evaluated and found to be not at risk of extinction given the current circumstances.
--
Note the language. Special concern is May become threatened. Not threatened, just "May become".
This bird was not nesting on site. No other members of the species were seen on the land. The bird was simply seen on a tree branch.
Entire sale?
Terminated. Land can not be sold without multiple follow-up assessments.
I could understand if the species was threatened and nesting. Or at least even just threatened.
Even so, this region of Canada has trillions of acres of untamed land, and millions upon millions of acres of farmland surrounding this area. Further, building a house on a multi-acre lot, does not mean "all the trees and land will be destroyed".
I guess my point is, there is sensible custodianship of the land and relationships with first nations, and there is bad-shit crazy, bend over backwards, destroy everything around you custodianship.
As you can likely tell, I think there's too much red tape.
And that red tape is why it takes a decade to even hope to start. And there's no way, unless things change dramatically, that a decade will be enough. We'll have fusion power before a shovel hits dirt.
There’s a very clear anti-building conspiracy in Canada. I can only think that someone must be limiting supply to keep prices high to protect profits.
Because my friend had the craziest protectionism story.
He wanted to build a multi family home on his existing lot.
Of course all kinds of studies need to be done. One of them is a tree study. Which costs $3,000 alone per tree. He hired firm and they were doing a study (for building purposes).
Then one day a crew shows up and cuts the tree all of a sudden. Turns out that his neighbour, unknown to him, was complaining that the tree was creating too much shade. So without any study they just came and cut it down.
That’s before even his study results came back.
It's hard not to fully agree with this take. The facts are obviously putting the actual timelines into fantasy territory, where projects fizzle and die. Even a 10-year plan should be flagged as high-risk as solar and wind builds tied to grid battery continues to explode in growth.
Always thought it was weird that the Commonwealth Realm nations had never pooled resources to have standardised reactor designs and expertise. Canada and Australia have loads of uranium - seems like an obvious strategic move. Instead, the UK turns to China, lol.
To my surprise Canada are actually quite ahead with the Darlington New Nuclear Project. There is a construction site [0] with work taking place. Not sure how Kairos Power are progressing in the USA. Nice job, Canada.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor. More capacity is needed in most parts of the world. Lager reactors are needed.
> Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor.
It is not just a small boiling water reactor. It is a 300 MW-electric boiling water reactor, and if successful, it will be followed by 3 more of the same type for a total of 1.2 GW-electric. That is more than an AP-1000 reactor, and much less risky.
> Larger reactors are needed.
Genuine question: Why? Why not many smaller reactors? Small modular reactors seem pretty neat.
Is there an efficiency loss/total cost difference with smaller reactors?
Like most industrial sites, large reactors are much more economical than small ones. This is why nobody has built SMRs since the 1950s.
The basic premise of "have a factory that produces reactors small enough to ship" always made sense to my uneducated mind. Is there a flaw in the idea? It seems like it should be much cheaper than if every reactor were bespoke
With smaller reactors, one needs more of everything: reactor vessels, containment structures, cooling systems, generators, etc. This is why industrial facilities are usually built as large as reasonably possible, and why SMRs fell out of fashion as soon as GW-class reactors became feasible in the 1960s.
SMRs have their use. Depending on the model and design you can build them or even bring them [0] to a remote place where you want to build industry but the infrastructure and access to electrical grid is lacking. I'd argue nowadays they are even more important with the huge rise in electricity demand.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademik_Lomonosov
Is that actual cost or projected cost because right now large reactors look prohibitively expensive meanwhile as you say we haven't really tried building SMR's on a production line.
Meanwhile Sweden is putting its money where its mouth is:
https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/2026/15-06-...
It's less about money and more about timeline risks. Canada's BWRX will cost per MW by plan more than French flamanville with all delays. But unlike Flamanville it has chances to be put on the grid faster
Technically yes, but in the case of nuclear, regulatory cost is what matters more. If the paperwork needed for construction of one large scale reactor is much more expensive than that needed for construction of a hundred smaller identical reactors, then the SMRs will win.
because opex is cheaper. Modularity can be achieved in large units too
I mean, Ontario runs the Bruce nuclear plant which is the second largest in the world in terms of the power it generates at 6,610 MW, Japan gets the top nod with a plant that generates 7,965 MW.
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa ? It has been not in full commercial service for close to two decades now. Only one unit recently restarted this year. 6 units are offline now
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
You could be right about the Korean plants. I only relied on google to give me the top 5 nuclear plants active in the world. The Korean plants you mention were not on the list.
Wikpedia has more info, plus WNN and other industry publications usually are more up-to date.
Kori[1] has 7 operational units today and 1 commissioning and 1 under construction
Hansul[2] has 8 operational units and another 2 more under construction.
All 4 new units are APR-1400 reactors ~1400 MW capacity. Kori should retains its top position, Saeul-3 in Kori Phase II has already reached criticality in April.
Tianwan in China will come close but its 7/8 units are slightly behind in construction than Saeul-3/4 in South Korea, plus the plant is also bit smaller at 6600MW now . The Russian VVER-1200 design China are using is also slightly smaller than Korean APR-1400.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kori_Nuclear_Power_Plant
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanul_Nuclear_Power_Plant
I’m not Canadian so news to me that Canada has built nuclear plants around the world.
As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
>As in the UK we were previously asking a French-Chinese partnership to build here so not sure why Canada didn’t get chosen for that.
Its crazy how fast britain has fallen off nuclear, the original british nuclear rollout should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse but France took it from them.
> should have stood the UK up as a permanent nuclear energy powerhouse
It was a crash weapons program disguised as a civilian energy program, that very nearly went badly wrong at Windscale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire ; so much so that the site had to be renamed to Sellafield.
The rollout was hampered by the choice of two ultimately dead end technologies, Magnox and AGR. Then it ran into the industrial unrest and general lack of money of the 1970s, during which the government cancelled its space program (Black Arrow), and very nearly cancelled Concorde. The "white heat of technology" had worn off. Thatcher attempted to restart it, resulting in Sizewell B, but of course after 26 April 1986 any new nuclear was completely unthinkable and that was the end until Hinkley C. Which is still not finished.
If not aware - uk government is backing Roll Royce to produce small reactor solutions (SMR). And Rolls is going around the world signing up sales agreements for them.
The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.
SMR's seem like a pipe dream tbh.
Why? It's a proven concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant
The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the economics.
The assembly and economies of scale for “mass production” have not been proven in practice; who will you sell the countless expensive ones before it gets cheaper?
And the smaller reactor has diseconomies of scale working against it for the electricity it produces. So the $/MWh price is much higher than for larger reactors.
UK's regulations are so bad that even Hitachi pulled out from building ABWR
The French are undoubtedly a good choice considering nuclear produces the majority of their electricity and EDF already operates in the UK.
So France and Canada both build nuclear plants. Must be something in the french language that makes folks just want to do the cool stuff.
If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.
This analysis is missing that Quebec doesn't have any nuclear plants. (Although NB has one, which counts for half?)
AtkinsRéalis (fka SNC-Lavalin) does build nuclear reactors and is headquartered in Montreal[0].
[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...
They bought CANDU reactor designs from the government
Quebec's geography is so favorable for hydropower that they don't need nuclear, or any other source of electricity.
Quebec has one they shut it down, hydro Quebec is a hydro power company not a nuclear power company
Well there goes that theory.
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Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence.
I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.
I think its mainly just different "environmentalist" subgroups: You have the oldschool environmentalists that are more "holistically" concerned with sustainability, ecological footprint, species preservation, pollution, etc.
I'd argue that this subgroup already achieved *tons* of goals over the last half century, and are nowadays playing second fiddle to the subgroup that is first and foremost concerned about climate change: Because those goals are far from met and much more urgent.
Those subgroups tend to have a very different outlook on nuclear energy: Nonsustainable superfund sites in the making for the first group, and highly useful emission stopgap for the second...
Yeah that's always possible. I only remember seeing the change after Russia escalated their war a few years ago, but maybe my memory is failing me there.
From the article:
"If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides,"
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if safety concerns are met. Also from the article:
> Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
The problem of course is that safety has costs and people cut corners, leading to events like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.
Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists
Is it?
Nothing is more environmentally friendly than hydroelectric dams. In Canada, there are endless rivers to dam, while also leaving endless rivers undammed. Further, damming a river doesn't destroy nature, it does however turn a river into a lake. Over the years it takes to build and complete the project, including the initial flooding, some species leave, new species take their place, and a healthy ecosystem remains.
Yet dams are attacked with a ferocity in this country, as if somehow having a dam is worse than a coal power plant. And while nuclear is great, we're therefore left with nuclear power, and all the outcome if that goes wrong, because using 0.0000001% of our rivers to build a few more dams, is "bad" for the environment.
Canada is massive.
I'm sure someone will want to reply with how horrible dams are, the concrete and carbon cost of concrete. Yet what's really the problem is that some want nothing ever built. Not a single method of new power generation, ever.
And so? This is what we end up with. Nuclear it is.
The concrete is a small part of the problem. Flooding gigantic areas and stopping the natural water flow have serious consequences for widelife, but most people don't care enough.
Actually, I addressed that in my comment. There are no real serious consequences for wildlife, instead, the local ecosystem changes and different wildlife moves in.
You do realise that rivers are constantly shifting, disappearing, lakes forming and disappearing, that none of this is static, yes?
> Is it?
Yes.
[non sequitur discussion of dams snipped]
> Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production
Right, and that's my point. The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
No, that was not your point. I refuted your claim "the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns" -- it hasn't swung.
> The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.
It was one argument at some point but hardly "the" argument "all along", nor the major argument, nor the primary motivating argument. The initial arguments were about "atoms for peace", electricity "too cheap to meter", and independence from foreign oil. Global warming wasn't even an issue until James Hanson's Congressional testimony in 1988.
I won't respond further.
Perhaps relevant.
2005 ish - UK government release energy strategy and declares fission power plant intent.
2010 ish - UK government formally announces Hinkley Point site. It's declared the first reactor will come online 2019.
2019 - it does not.
2026 - best estimate is now 'around 2030'.
Historical cost estimates are an utter quagmire - but roughly estimated at £18 billion a decade ago, back when it was estimated to be online last year.
Current estimates - bring your own hubris - are roughly £46 billion.
This story has been beaten to death, I know - but recall, this is a country with some history of building and operating nuclear fission power plants, with convenient (2h by rail) access to a lot of expertise from France, and it's a joint-venture with China General Nuclear Power Group so presumably plenty of expertise to draw upon there.
These day's it's a common problem in all of the Anglosphere, but it does seem especially bad in the UK; they appear to have just given up the ability to build literally anything.
They're not building anything. The French are building it and doing a terrible job for the third time straight. Flamanville at home, Olkiluoto in Finland and now Hinkley.
Also relevant - all recent Canadian refurbs were on time and budget
When you say 'all' - is that five?
Since 1999?
I mean these https://www.opg.com/news-resources/newsroom/our-stories/stor...
https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007558/ontario-delivers-...
A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.
Doesn’t help with the burning part. Or the stranded infrastructure once the demand goes away.
Nuclear process heat in refining would enable releasing less CO2 per fuel-unit. It doesn’t solve burning directly, but reduces the impact of what is going to happen anyways.
Demand will not go away. There'll be toxic waste to clean up for decades after.
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Absolutely ridiculous that I was down voted and flagged for some mild griping about the state of my province's inability to execute on infrastructure projects, but offhand jokes (I hope it's a joke) about nuking my home is completely fine?
:/
Ridiculous whataboutism. What makes you think that anyone thought that it's completely fine? The comment is dead.
Downvoted? Seriously? It's an objective fact that the comment is dead, which refutes the claim that people thought it's completely fine. And the comment has nothing to do with some totally different claim that was downvoted, thus it is objectively whataboutism, and obviously ridiculous.
The Decouple podcast has taught me more about the Canadian Nuclear industry than I ever wanted to know. https://www.decouple.media/
These are a bunch of contradictory quotes. We'll have to wait till NRCan or whatever comes up with a real plan. "Up to 10 reactors built by 2040" doesn't really match "two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035". Like, what is that. "planned or under development" seems like a big "or". Like how BART has 1500 lines completed or described in concepts online.
It's obvious to me there will be a renaisance, but the question is which design will win. There are so many companies building small modular reactors right and various different designs with different fuels and cooling mediums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_modular_reactor_...
The idea is great, the timeline is super unrealistic. We'll see those reactors in 2070 the earliest, more likely in 2080.
This is great. Hopefully they can make enough to supply the US energy. Because we seem to be incapable of building new reactors.
Microreactor initiatives in the US are at least promising.
Can't wait for this to get bogged down in legislation and never get done
That might take a while. We need to bog down the HSR first.
Maybe this would’ve made economic sense 20 or 40 years ago, but nuclear is too expensive now compared with renewables. I can’t help but think this is a covert plan to bcecome an “almost nuclear” state in response to threats from the US.
depends if you like gas/coal or not https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
>Unlike most other nuclear reactors, Candu reactors don't require enriched uranium. Ottawa says Western allies are turning away from Russia, one of the world's key suppliers of enriched uranium.
Even if Canada winds up relying more on CANDU reactors than SMR's, there is a case to be made for enriching domestically. There are a lot of potential customers looking for a reliable, ethical supplier. Canada has the raw minerals, political stability, and a long record of refusing to weaponize despite having the capability.
Enrichment is already more or less done by Orano and Urenco. They could expand faster if assured that EU bans russian imports
10 new reactos by 2040 is huge when you come to think of it, this is just in 14 years, this is about 0.72 reactors built each year. Knowing you need to build : the whole reactor building, the machines building, the whole plumbery system, the electrical system, the control command system, the reactor, reliability features, and all of that knowing you have to pass the nuclear regulation authorities controls.
Hopefully it will go better than the last time someone had such an ambitious plan with nuclear plants
Did people really forget just how much nuclear power sucks? Storage may not be a problem now but that's pushing the problem onto future generations yet again
it doesnt suck as much as fossils https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/live/fifteen_min...
Are we finally re-entering the Atomic Age? It seems that the Soviets extended the Oil Age by about 40 years, by blowing up the Chernobyl plant in 1986.
From what I've seen out of Canada, this is likely overly optimistic and probably will not be possible in that time frame.
I think it's better to just outsource it to Koreans at least that way you can stay on budget and on time.
I am baffled why Canada don't have massive data centres yet? It is cold with abundant water and energy. Why not?
Lets see if there will be any private investments unless gov guarantees fixed minimum price of MWh.
Alberta has energy. Canada wants energy without Alberta. The Candu reactor program is so defunct that the feds have been trying to sell it for about a decade. Candu makes plutonium and was responsible for a lot of nuclear weapons proliferation in the 1980s, but again, Candu isn't Alberta. Also it's a way to spend an enormous amount of money, and Canada isn't quite bankrupt yet. I say go for it.
The Ontario government is terrible at creating a structure which is capable of finishing any infrastructure project on time ...(see Eglinton Crosstown) and mostly seems to work as a funnel for moving public funds through public-private-partnerships to feed contractor/consultant income for projects that grow to many multiples of their time and budget.
So, yeah, it makes sense that they love nuclear now -- blank cheque to drag on for multidecades over budget. Likely the right people donated the right funds to the PC party and/or attended/funded Ford Fest
The first thing this government did when it got into power was pay out hundreds of millions in penalties for cancelling large wind projects, and for breaching its contract and exiting the cap and trade agreement with California and Quebec.
Ford loves to waste money and then wag his finger about how everyone else is fiscally irresponsible.
Darlington nuclear refurbishment finished ahead of schedule and under budget
https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/projects/2026/0...
Yeah the last decade of Nuclear work is the ONE thing that they have been successful at wrt to project planning.
Hopefully that expertise is well placed to execute on these other projects.
Nuclear industry in Canada is federally-regulated, not provincial.
The regulation of it is an entirely different thing from the budgeting and promotion of it. Promotion of nuclear power has become a very vocal Ford government thing in the last few months.
So we're willing to put our greatest national asset (the environment) at risk in the name of "moar power". Well that's just great.
I hope Jimmy Carter's ghost will be just as willing to help us out the next time a reactor goes into meltdown as his physical self was the first time that happened. RIP Jimmy Carter.
That’s great news ! Have they also solved the nuclear waste problem?
Honest question; here in the USA we have not.
It's not really a problem. The alternative is to grind it up into fine dust, spray it into the air, and call it "clean coal".
That would poison the entire country. Nuclear waste is many many orders of magnitude more radioactive than coal per energy generated. The meme about coal emitting more radiation comes from a 1970s paper that compared radioactive emissions and found them to be on the same order of magnitude between a BWR and an unfiltered coal power plant.
Excuse me that's "beautiful clean coal" I still can't believe that you guys actually chose him as president.
Yes, canada aproved repository site. Similar to Onkalo
Something for future generations to figure out with their AI chatbots.
Im surprised they haven't doubled down on deep drill geothermal.
not least because of the bureaucratic delays making nuclear slow to roll out.
But what do they do with the waste? And how much fresh water is that going to use?
> But what do they do with the waste?
The Canadian Shield [0] is uniquely well-suited for this: it's remote, sparsely populated, and geologically stable.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shield
Leaving aside that Canada is huge, waste is really just not that much of a problem. It would be easy to safely store all the waste that will ever be produced at a dedicated storage site, if you could drum up the political will for such a site to exist. But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site. Not that much waste is produced; stick it in a cask and leave it alone.
> But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site.
I agree with the rest but on site storage of high level waste is a terrible idea. Even after vitrification that's material that will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than agrarian human civilization has existed. Ideally it should enter a disposal chain that keeps as little of it at ground level for a short a time as possible in order to hedge against the long tail possibility of a large scale disaster stranding it on the surface.
I think the finnish plan to bury it on site 500 meters down in bedrock is a decent one.
Most dangerous phase of the waste is first ±300y. Afterwards most radiation is low energy and most of the danger would come from ingestion like with any toxic chemical
This is why I always scoff at people talking about the scarcity of landfill space. We have damn near unlimited space here. It might not look like it if you never leave a major city, but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
The only hard part is ensuring your waste doesn't enter the water system, but that's just bog standard mining engineering.
> but if you drive up north you will see nothing but trees forever.
Problem is you'll get some tribe coming out of the woodworks claiming whatever inaccessible area hundreds of miles from civilization is some sacred ground that can't be touched.
If there's something Canada has in excess it's water and storage space.
This is a problem that can be handled. Finland handles this pretty well IMO as one example. Also Canada is huge. That means lots of potential places (most Canadians live on the southern parts, close to the US border).
The sun uses much more water on earth than people do.
I think most (all?) nuclear plants use once-thru cooling. There is a water intake upstream (or in an ocean/lake) of the plant, the water passes through the cooling loop interfacing with a heat exchanger that has hot heavy water from the core on the other side. Some of the water is evaporated in hyperboloid cooling towers, and the rest is discharged downstream (or back in the ocean/lake)
I wonder if anyone will tell them that's an oxymoron.
Totally unnecessary : I did the Math to cross-verify - Elon Musk is 100 % right !
Just ONE square mile of batteries and a TOTAL of 100 x 100 square miles of Solar can power the entire USA 24/7. Area required will be much lesser for Canada.
See : https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/elon-musk-...
How convenient for Musk that technology connections did this exact topic and these exact calculations (and much more) as a topic months and months ago: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?is=wOjIwPKFuYj2Smrh
Why up Musk? Is he your primary source of news and ideas?
Hopefully this will kick Australia into gear.
Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?
I am not even close to being a Solar doomer, but you need to have more options than just Solar/Wind.
Nuke shouldn't replace Solar, it shouldn't be a competition. Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Solar isn't just about having big empty spaces either, it needs to be located near where people who service it actually want to live. AEMO used to have a policy of not revealing where upcoming solar projects were to be located, leading to multiple competing solar farms, only the first of which would be connected to the grid, the remaining projects being left sitting there doing nothing until transmission upgrades could be completed.
Not to mention, we dont have anything like the battery capacity needed to hold daytime voltage overnight. The Elon Musk battery in SA being famous for supplying a few minutes to hold over a voltage drop from a QLD coal plant failure, while gas came online to support it.
Nuclear isnt as bad as they say for cost either. Every report funded in Australia factors in the sovereign risk that the government might start or permit a project and kill it due to politics.
Theres no practical reason why we couldn't mirror the British rollout, bringing a reactor on every 3-5 years or whatever it was, except that most of those blokes are retired and we would like the british did, build the nuclear industry here from scratch.
> Nuke should push coal and gas out.
Speaking of which, do you happen to know how many TBq (or what) other methods are putting into the atmosphere and hydrosphere?
Why not have a diverse set of energy inputs so your energy economy isn't fragile?
Some black swan event could kill solar. Maybe some mega volcano explodes. It would suck to be 50+% dependent on it in that case.
We should have wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, tidal, and even fossil fuels. We should have a total capacity in greater abundance than what we have today so that we can grow.
If a mega volcano explodes and blocks the sun, lack of electricity will be the least of the world’s problems.
Nuclear is the most expensive type of electrical power generation. Diversity is good, but enough of it is achievable with cheaper options.
The cost is a choice. Not inherent to the power. We could choose literally any day to make it dramatically cheaper.
Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly questionable.
PV solar + batteries is a dead simple, solid state design that's easily scalable without huge up front capital requirements. We're not at the point yet where nuclear doesn't pencil out anywhere, but with current trends it's getting closer by the year.
I wish we built more nuclear 20-30 years ago when the competition was coal and gas but unfortunately we didn't and now the equation has changed. Shutting down existing reactors that are still viable is a bad move to be clear, but new plants are becoming increasingly hard to justify economically.
when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
> […] nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.
That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.
I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.
As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.
It's unclear to me exactly why building big projects is so expensive, but it's not just nuclear. In the US, subway expansion, high speed rail, and bridges are also ridiculously expensive. Whatever is causing the runaway costs and schedules doesn't appear to be related to it being a fission plant.
I would love it if somebody who has recently built something like a fission plant could give us a report as to exactly what happened that caused this.
Great answer, also I imagine that in terms of space, one nuclear reactor would be equivalent to 10 square KM of solar panels (or something like that)
One thing we're not short of here in Australia is space. And sunshine.
I'm not opposed to nuclear in the mix though. It's pretty incredible. And the South Koreans have done a pretty awesome job in the UAE with their reactors it sounds like.
If you're comparing nuclear reactors with solar panels though (which is tricky), depends which metric you go for. If total annual output? Then up it by almost an order of magnitude. 100km2+ would be needed to produce the same annual output as a 1GW at 90% nuclear station.
But we've a ton of land, so it makes a lot of sense.
I think you're off by an order of magnitude there. Intensity should be somewhere between 150 to 300 watts per sq meter per 24 hours. At 200 watts per sq meter that works out to 5 sq km. Estimating 50% panel efficiency that's 10 sq km.
To hit 100 sq km at 50% panel efficiency would mean averaging 20 watts per sq meter (obviously wrong). Even assuming a paltry 10% panel efficiency would only get you to 100 watts per sq meter.
Because no one wants to pay for a lifetime of inflated energy costs (nuclear) for the off chance of it helping in a black swan event. Humans aren’t wired that way, and neither is capitalism
You pay for it.
There is - arguably a case for nuclear power in cold miserable places like Canada or Northern Europe because solar - by far the cheapest form of renewable energy, and still with a substantial runway to get cheaper - produces the least amount of energy precisely when those places need it most.
Australia, being a warm, sunny place, has far less seasonal variation in solar production, and at worst bas a grid that needs roughly the same amount of energy in winter and summer peaks.
Even in a net zero scenario things like running a gas turbine on biomethane or synthesised hydrogen for that last few percent of demand will make more economic sense than building nuclear in Australia.
If someone figures how to churn out SMRs for $3.95 each, sure, that would change matters, but that remains a hypothetical possibility that Australia does not have to plan around.
A biogas turbine for the last few percent of demand??
Peak electricity demand occurs when solar generation has dropped to nearly zero. It's not the last few percent, it's the last 90 something percent demand. This is the entire problem with solar (and wind, though slightly different patterns).
If you're going to "they should just" it, you really need to know at least that. It's just a hard problem even in Australia. The reason these "dirt cheap renewables" have not been pushing electricity prices down to historic lows anywhere in the world is that you've kind of been had by the marketing.
Solar and wind are very important and very cheap where applicable, and with more storage, better grids, and consumers that are better adapted to them they should gradually improve. But they are not going to "just" anything.
Remember how wind and solar was so cheap that it had already killed coal? That was a common mantra I heard maybe 20 years ago. Since then solar panels and wind turbines have become even cheaper and better so surely they must be moving on to just about killing off natural gas too... But no, it turns out 60% of Australia's electricity is generated by fossil fuels today, 40% being coal which is twice the amount that solar generated. How could that be possible decades after coal had been killed by solar? Really was some pretty wild propaganda.
This is not due to government corruption and incompetence and a cabal of coal barons preventing renewables. Nuclear maybe, but solar no. There is electricity generation surplus when solar is working in Australia, they turn off wind turbines and solar panels and try to give the electricity away for free. Cost of solar panels being zero would make approximately no difference to those 20% solar and 60% fossil fuels numbers.
Solar farms come with batteries included these days https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-solar-farm-that-winds-down-a... and https://octopusaustralia.com.au/our-projects/fulham-solar-fa... and https://edp.com/en/asia-pacific/australia/merino-solar-farm and https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2026/06/23/australias-... That's a new trend and easy to miss but it will push out coal and gas.
And as much as a cyclist I dislike cars, the nice thing about electric cars is the potential that most often they can be charged at a time when it is convenient for the network. Mind you, cars just sit around 95% of the time.
> Solar farms come with batteries
So it's no longer "just solar" with a biogas turbine for the remaining few % demand, is it? It's solar with batteries to cover 3x the current daily solar output plus perhaps more to deal with multi-day fluctuations.
> That's a new trend and easy to miss
It's not new and not easy to miss, it's obvious they need storage to cover any more demand. This has literally been the biggest issue for solar for at least 20 years.
> but it will push out coal and gas.
Maybe. How much more credible are these claims than the "solar killed coal" idiocy from years ago? I mean solar and battery tech does continue to get better so you can mindlessly point to that and yes if it kept continuing surely it would push out fossil fuels (everywhere including airplanes and ships). But if we are talking actual timeframes and realistic technology projections?
The evening peak is well on its way to being a solved problem in Australia.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...
And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:
https://www.aemo.com.au/newsroom/media-release/renewables-li...
Looking at past few days, I wouldnt say it's on it's way to be solved https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/AU-SA/live/hourly
SA has highest household prices in Australia (or close to the top at least)
> The evening peak is well on its way to being a solved problem in Australia.
> https://reneweconomy.com.au/big-batteries-took-a-bite-out-of...
You realize that doesn't address the sum of what I wrote though? That is batteries taking over from gas peaking. Fossil fuels sit somewhere north of 75% of national generation when the sun is down.
> And average prices in the Australian national electricity market are going down as a result:
And electricity peaking is well suited to batteries because it is very high prices and not a long period. It's great if they can be used here to reduce prices, possibly they could be used independently of solar (though solar does make them a lot cheaper to charge).
But you presumably do understand how that is not removing fossil fuels from generation with just "solar and biogas turbines for a few % of peak", or no?
Society grows great when old men build nuclear plants whose power they will never get to enjoy.
That's fire! pun intended, IYKYK
Jokes aside, Canada is well positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance, now that they have easy access to raw materials, easy access to cooling facilities and they can export surplus to energy hungry neighbor, it also makes it a good candidate for hosting lots of datacenters
We are trying.
would be good
to begin in 2035, eh?
just join the US already
new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.
We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.
Micro reactors have micro markets. The diseconomies of scale kill it for general grid power.
Canada needs its own nuclear arsenal.
Relying on Trump or any other clown, makes no more sense.
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Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be considered as part of the interim solution, while nuclear remains a long-term strategic project.
Rather than pursuing such an ambitious build out, a more practical approach might be to scale back the plan and focus on constructing one reactor each in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as an initial phase.
How viable is Solar in Canada given its weather? (I am ignorant about it and only know that it's really cold and cloudy most of the time).
Alberta is one of the best locales for solar on the continent -- it's sunny most of the year -- and had an exploding renewables sector.
Until the far right O&G lobbyist provincial government kneecapped the sector.
Depends what you mean by viable. Solar is easily economically viable, but integration at grid scale is tricky when your peak summer generation is 10x your winter generation.
Cold is fine - solar panels perform better the lower the temperature.
That's what makes Calgary ideal for solar.
A city like Calgary gets 233 days of sunny days a year. All across the prairies there is plenty of days filled with sun. British Columbia would probably not be great (like Seattle) but they could probably generate wind and hydro.
Calgary is quite sunny at 2400 hrs/year.
But not nearly as much as Vegas (3800) or LA (3250) or SF (2950).
Its not so much the days but the hours. Days start getting pretty short in winter. The sun also doesn't get as high in the sky so the efficiency of a fixed panel drops further.
I wonder how much much renewables you would get for the same 100 billion investment though. How much battery storage does even 50 billion get you.
With the prices for solar (the expensive parts are not the panels but the inverters and labour costs) and batteries still going down you will get more than what you thought when you started to spend the first billion.
Metric shittons. A 650 MW solar plant is around $900M USD, so $100B translates into 72 GW. That would power ½ of Canada. It's cheaper to use hydro (PES) rather than batteries (BESS) at scale, and Canada already has a lot of hydro power. $50B would buy lots of PES and distribution/transmission levelizing BESS that would allow greater flexibility in generation production.
> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.
Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-...
Historical Ontario Hydro Debt: By the late 1990s, aggressive nuclear builds resulted in $38.1 billion of debt for Ontario Hydro, of which $20.9 billion was stranded.
The Bruce A refurbishment in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw five-fold cost overruns. Bruce A was originally projected to cost $0.9 billion but ended up at $1.8 billion. The Bruce B project was budgeted at $3.9 billion and ultimately cost $6 billion.
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/ontarios-costly-...
Safety and operational issues also plagued the industry. The four units at Pickering had been shut down because of safety concerns—and then shut down again. By 1993, the performance of the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, located on the shores of Lake Huron, had drastically declined. In 1997, Ontario Hydro announced that it would temporarily shut down its oldest seven reactors. By that time, the escalating costs of the newest reactors at the Darlington site were already a cautionary tale. Originally billed in 1978 at $3.9 billion the final cost in 1993 had more than tripled to $14.4 billion (1993 dollars).
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Since it is a make work project, costing more and tried longer is an advantage
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Canada is not an infrastructure “joke.” It is a country with some world-class delivery organizations operating inside a political system that too often destroys continuity. Relative to the G7, that makes it mediocre and volatile, not uniquely incompetent. And, in nuclear specifically, probably no worse positioned than its peers, though the ten-reactor rhetoric is substantially more ambitious than the underlying commitments at this time... (not surprising - it's a politician making an announcement, which is something of a prerequisite for making a "real plan" anyways).
As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility. Projects like Calgary’s Green Line often suffer from shifting scopes, fragmented authority, and delayed funding. Conversely, the recent Darlington nuclear plant refurbishment finished early and under budget. This proves that Canada can successfully execute megaprojects when planning is front-loaded and standardized.
Another comment I'd make is that the Carney government is only just a bit more than one year old. They're writing a whole lot of new policy. Will they succeed more than past governments? Who knows. But, at least they're spending the majority of their political capital trying to build stuff.
Which are these "world-class delivery organizations" and are they the exception or the rule?
We can acknowledge that political volatility is a main cause but it's not some exogenous factor. It's inherent to the federal structure of the country and it hamstrings trying to build social goods, whether that's transit or healthcare infrastructure.
There is also nowhere near a culture of developing and trusting institutional planning expertise. Infrastructure is done on a pork-barrel basis of which promises will get who elected and create which jobs and allocate which contracts. Or who complains the loudest about the design of any given plan.
Canada's 20th century social system was also based on maintaining social stability through mass property ownership, which is now breaking down as unrestrained property speculation is displacing any kind of productive investments (while also ending the possibility of that mass property ownership in the near future).
Sorry to bring the negativity but I feel as a whole that Canadians are much too tolerant of institutional dysfunction (in the manner of the classic "Canadian nice") and think our society is far more advanced than it actually is. It's a completely complacent and naive culture that is quickly being left in the dust by more functional systems.
You can have all the technical competence in the world, but if those competent people are not allowed to build things your society simply is inept at building stuff in the end. It's a choice society has made.
It's certainly not unique to Canada though. The US and other western societies have made similar choices. Much less risky to employ a lot of expensive people to come up with reasons to not build stuff vs. taking risks and upsetting people by building.
Good points. I would refine my comment: Canada has isolated examples of excellent megaproject execution, but lacks a system that reproduces that performance reliably. The nuclear announcement is credible only insofar as Canada can replicate the OPG/Bruce fleet-program model—stable authority and funding, standardized designs, repeat teams and accumulated learning—rather than its usual election-cycle, one-off megaproject model.
I dearly hope that we're not going to see that model again, but maybe that's likely.
>Canada is not an infrastructure “joke.” It is a country with some world-class delivery organizations operating inside a political system that too often destroys continuity.
>As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility.
>Another comment I'd make is that the Carney government is only just a bit more than one year old.
I know that Liberals since early 2025 have done their best to pretend that Justin Trudeau never existed, but one would think by your words that the Carney regime succeeded one of another party, as opposed to the Liberals in 2025 forming their fourth consecutive federal government, after 2021, 2019, and 2015.
> As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility
I never said it was a problem of engineering competence, you read that into my statement
Political volatility getting projects delayed and cancelled is why we're a joke
You're right: you didn’t claim a lack of engineering competence. I introduced that distinction. Sorry. If the question is whether the Canadian society can build reliably, then governance and political instability count as part of its overall competence, not as external excuses.
I would agree with you that political volatility exists and stifles an otherwise decent country. It's very frustrating.
Federal funding for the green line was announced in 2015, and IIRC they originally predicted a 2026 opening date for branches covering the north and south of the city - street running in the north central part and a bit in Seton, a short tunnel downtown, and dedicated ROW elsewhere. This was back when planners were still really into streetcars/trams. The funding mix was supposed to be $1.5 billion each from the city, province and feds.
The city sat on their hands for years, perfecting and re-routing the downtown part[1]. Eventually, the plan was shortened to 16 Ave N to Shepard with a long tunnel downtown. The city ordered $100s of millions of low-floor trains, incompatible with the existing ones, necessitating building a new maintenance facility. The cost at this point was $5.something billion.
Then, in 2020, the provincial government put a "pause" on the project. When it came back to life, costs had increased dramatically, and the city came out with a modified plan the (the $6.8 billion stub train from downtown to Lynnwood). The province then threatened to pull their part of the funding, and commissioned a new downtown segment plan that advocated for elevated downtown, and nothing north of there.
Today? We are building the original truncated south phase to Shepard (by 2031!), but not the downtown part. The city is still debating what's going to happen downtown, dismissing elevated. They are hearing from office building and parking lot owners who are worried about its effect on property values, but I think they are also rejecting any ideas from the province on principle. About the only positive thing I can say is that the project is tangibly under construction now, with actual bridges over roadways done or nearly complete.
I blame the city (both planners and elected officials) and the province in that order, but mostly the city.
[1] One positive thing to come from that is the routing in Inglewood/Ramsay and 26 Ave SE that avoids taking down heritage buildings and destroying a vital community corridor.
> Today? We are building the original truncated south phase to Shepard (by 2031!),
I know, I live by the Shepard station location by the Canadian Tire. Since 2020 they managed to put up a nice sign
> We are building the original truncated south phase to Shepard (by 2031!)
Yeah. 16 years after the federal funding was announced
We have to do better than this. :/
> I blame the city (both planners and elected officials) and the province in that order, but mostly the city
Me too don't worry
unfortunately yes. Too much bullshits jobs (to suck up funds mostly and critize every aspects of non existant projects) and not enough people to take risks and do the job.
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CANDUs are cool, hope to see more in the world
I love nuclear reactors and CANDU are quite cool. But I don't think that today we have any reasons to build CANDU reactors, except possibly that Canada can demonstrate they can build them for cheaper than others can build light water reactors. The ability to build is something that has little to do with the technical merits of a nuclear reactor design. But all things being equal, a PWR or a BWR should cost less per GW than a CANDU reactor and have other advantages too:
- main problem with CANDU: proliferation. India was able to build nuclear weapons after using a Canadian built heavy water reactor (basically a CANDU reactor) [1]. There is no guarantee that another country will not try something similar in the future, the design has no built in proliferation resistance. An operator can remove irradiated fuel at any time, and if the IAEA discovers they engage in plutonium manufacturing and they get on a black list, they can manufacture their own fuel quite easily, because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium. With light water reactors, you need enriched fuel, so if you are flagged as a proliferator no fuel manufacturer will be allowed to sell you fuel, and it's going to be much harder for you to manufacture your own fuel, since you can't enrich. If you can enrich uranium, you might as well try to build a uranium bomb (like Iran is trying to do). Also, with light water reactors, you refuel only at discrete times, generally about 18 months apart, so it is much more difficult to extract lightly irradiated fuel without being caught by the IAEA.
Now some less important problems:
- because CANDU uses non-enriched uranium, it produces much more nuclear waste per GWh compared to light water reactors. Nuclear waste is not the boogeyman nuclear anti-advocates make it to be, but still, if you generate 5-10 times more nuclear waste than the mainstream alternatives, it is less than ideal.
- there is one positive reactivity feedback loop in a CANDU design. Because of that CANDU designs are not licenseable in the US. The Canadian nuclear regulator is comfortable that the design is stable [2], but if you can choose between a design with one positive feedback loop and one without any positive feedback loop, why would you choose the first?
- heavy water is a worse moderator than light water (by a large factor). It [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_and_weapons_of_mass_dest...
[2] https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/resources/research/safety-an...
Proliferation is irrelevant. It was not a Candu reactor what India have used and without Russia's help it's unlikely it would have happened. But there are easier and cheaper pathways - uranium enrichment distributed to be stealthy
Related to US, it'll happen sooner or later https://www.nucnet.org/news/atkinsrealis-to-begin-licensing-...
Isn't it interesting? Now that power generation is seen as the deciding factor between who wins/loses AI, nuclear is back on the table again.
Oh my god, yes, please. It should be 100 over the next 10 years but this is a great start. We should be cranking these out and building cities in the north with clean unlimited power.
Every time I see something interesting about nuclear power, comments like this pop up. Which makes me skittish.
We need responsible growth. We need to acknowledge that there is no magic bullet for power generation, just managed risks. We need to acknowledge that those risks exist for all power sources, to varying degrees, and take different forms (whether it is the environmental impact or reliability of the power grid).
I was being a little flippant there - but I think we've gone way too far in the "nuclear is risky" direction, largely because of Chernobyl, which was a) a very specific disaster caused by a perfect storm of bad decisions and bad luck and b) not that deadly. In the US about as many people die every year due to coal pollution as have yet (or will ever) die because of Chernobyl. About the same number die in Europe every year because of a lack of AC. Those are just invisible risks that we accept already and we need to start seeing them.
Don't forget Fukushima!
I'm all down with spamming nuclear plants but will that, in the end, give free electricity to the consumer? Lower the rates? ..or just continue to be an economic weapon against the masses?
Title is misleading, they want to start building not “build” (I.e. be operational).
Though that only moves the needles from impossible to laughable.
> If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy
There are plenty of credible plans, they all involve wind and solar. But as anyone watching clean energy news will know, Alberta is trying its hardest to get rid of all wind and solar development from the province.
As for the baseload argument, they already get >60% of the electricity from hydro and nuclear. How much more baseload do you really need? 100%?
Doesn't nuclear make sense to increase baseline capacity where hydro isn't available?
Ontario has no more room to grow on the hydro front, and doesn't realistically want to import it from Quebec.
So it's natural gas, nuclear, or renewables. And the Conservative gov't here has a bit of a bias against the latter. It's been growing the natural gas sector, undoing a lot of the hard work the previous Liberal gov't had put in on the wind side. Likely nuclear lobbyists now have their ear.
A village near me in southern Alberta just built a huge wind farm.
That project was absolutely funded before Alberta slashed all funding for renewables projects [0].
This as well as the failed pipeline projects have made Canadian infrastructure projects very high risk from a lending perspective, becuase there's now a non-insignificant risk that a province can welch out of financing a deal purely for short term political gain.
This announcement is a good announcement, but it's just bluster if the entire ecosystem around liability and policy stability isn't managed.
[0] - https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-renewable-energy-investment-co...
Not just slashed funding but actually banned renewables projects for a period of time and then when they removed the ban they kneecapped them with extremely prejudicial regulations that asymmetrically apply to renewables projects but not to dirty oil and gas projects (which have left a mess of abandoned wells across the province).
The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.
The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.
If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.
Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.
(Energy trader here)
The Alberta government absolutely banned new solar and wind development, first a short-lived moratorium and then with regulations meant to "protect the natural beauty", restrictions mind you that absolutely do not apply to the pump jacks any company can place on your land and which you do not have the right to refuse. Or to the vast stretches of Mordor-like tailing ponds.
> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
Then perhaps they should start collecting money for their orphan well problem rather than letting it worse with the clear goal of making the rest of the country pay for it.
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> Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.
What other kind of subsidy is there?
Preposterous take from this parent poster. The AB government routinely subsidizes oil and gas projects and has one of the lowest royalty regimes in the world. The AB government actually put a moratorium on all renewables projects and when they lifted the moratorium they put such intense regulations on renewables projects specifically that it cooled the whole sector despite it being one of the fastest growing industries in the province. The AB government is going out of its way to lift a multidecade ban on coal mining on the eastern slopes of the rockies but thinks that wind farms are a blight. The AB government wants to force BC to allow bitumen pipelines to its coast and to lift tanker bans for same, but openly discriminates against renewables projects on the basis that it will ruin people's views of the foothills. The AB government spread open lies about the cost effectiveness of renewables in public meetings. The AB government wasted the federal government's abandoned oil-well cleanup subsidies while at the same time we have people like this talking about the unsustainability of renewable subsidies.
The people of AB are great. The AB government is one of the most corrupt in the G7.
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I live right in the affected area and allowing more turbines against the eastern slopes of the Rockies would be tragic. Can't put a price on this viewscape.
Oh but you can.
Growing up in Alberta in the 70s and 80s I routinely saw photographs and illustrations with oil pumps set against a vista of a wheat field with foothills and mountains in the background, and this was held up as beauty.
We canoed and camped along upper North Saskatchewan, the Brazeau, Pembina, etc in the foothills. Spent half my childhood in the back of the car on the forestry Trunk Road breathing in kicked up sand and gravel from logging trucks in front of us. Couldn't go more than a few hundred feet without hitting a forestry clear cut, or an oil and gas pipe or cutline or a natural gas installation. The whole eastern slopes were already carved up into resource extraction zones then. Pulp and paper mills were the thing that Don Getty was pushing as a "growth" industry then (they were a flop) and they did _lovely_ things to the rivers.
Wind farms though. Terrible things. Eye sore.
Hopefully, Canada will not get bullied by US for selling it cheaply.
Who else can Canada sell excess power to?
No one else I guess. But they could use it themselves, building whatever plants/factories/server farms needed to use it.
Hydrolysis.