Posted by geox 1 day ago
- 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.
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
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.
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
How do you evolve the design then?
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.
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
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... !
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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).
"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."
(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)
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).
2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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
But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
"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...
Note that we kept extracting copper long after people said we would run out. We even increased production AND lowered prices.
...while also having a colder climate than the Danish. At least while the Gulf Stream is still working.
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.
...
> 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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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... )
They can’t cope with variable load, they can’t cope with other sources. They are only remotely viable with large amounts of storage.
Care to explain, I've never seen a genuine solution that goes beyond hand waving, bad faith arguing, and aggressiveness.
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.
But it's only used to store military nuclear waste, not civilian nuclear 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'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 do understand that don't you?
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.
You're on your own now. Bye.
It appears to me that you are attached to a position that you aren't capable of defending.
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).
But don't let that get in the way of a good pile on.
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.
In the interests of fairness, is like a citation showing that
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.
"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.
The proliferation risk was real at that time, but it's now a moot point. The details of plutonium refining are well known.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
I did complain, and I tried to help frame things up for you a bit.
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.
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
> "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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Didn't know that the requirement for electricity to always be available despite weather conditions is a strawman
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?
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.
Copper prices are through the roof, and the usual copper players are seemingly unwilling to expand much
(Atleast in India)
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.
Grid-forming inverters, particularly with batteries, can totally do this job.
- 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.
Once you have base load from nuclear why do you need solar and wind at all?
It corresponds with solar generation in the sense that more electricity is used during the day, when the sun is out.
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 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 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.)
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.
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 in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.
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 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.
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.
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...
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 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.
(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.
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.
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.
So, from actual non-intermittent sources like checks notes nuclear?
wat
How is nuclear bad at covering the seasonality of, for example, winter in the Nordics?
"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...
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.
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.
Imo, the answer should always be, yes, build, please.
Heavy industries (which support blue collar growth) come to places with cheaper power.
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.
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.
Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
Nuclear could become less unsafe once humanity has found ways not to go commity horrble violence every other generation.
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.
What, if anything, would convince you?
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.
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.
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.
Now, what's the absolute worst that could happen when a nuclear reactor spirals out of control?
If we're talking non-human it is a bit harder.
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.
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.
Not at all hyperbole when you consider how badly it poisoned the well for future nuclear projects.
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 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
Is bunk. You should be using LFSCOE instead.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/lcoe-levelised-cost-of-en...
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.
Those can both be true. Canada will likely need more power in 15 years too. It's called long term planning.
What?! It has been urgent for years.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
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...
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."
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.
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.
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).
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.
Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.
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.
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.
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 won't need new power 15 years from now? Did a time traveler tell you about a coming Dark Age?
An independent Alberta will likely join the US, and of course building a domestic-only pipeline is easier than doing so across national borders.
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...>
That's not serious. Construction start is too far away.
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...
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.
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.
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.
0 - https://www.neimagazine.com/news/darlington-smr-secures-fina...
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.
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?
Meanwhile Sweden is putting its money where its mouth is:
https://www.rolls-royce.com/media/press-releases/2026/15-06-...
There are two South Korean plants (Kori, Hangul) larger than Bruce
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.
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.
The underlying tech though is yet to be proven, so some risk won’t deliver on time/to budget/at all.
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.
If it is anything like all my french cookware, it will be done wonderfully.
[0] https://www.atkinsrealis.com/en/markets-and-services/markets...
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'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...
"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.
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.
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.
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.
:/
