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Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

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Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#171

Post by specialist »

thawaway1837 wrote: post #15
StillBored wrote: post #3

A few years ago Toshiba was going to build a small reactor in Alaska. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galena_Nuclear_Power_Plant But it got canceled, and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone thinks its better to truck in heavy fuel oil for generators vs having a small reactor buried in the ground for 30 years. I've been saying for a few years now that green energy only advocates are basically on the side of…

Only if the “green energy” people actually had that much power... In reality there are 2 forces that have stopped nuclear. NIMBYism. And terrible economics. But the green energy people are an easy punching bag for the nuclear advocates who are simply unwilling to face up to the reality of why nuclear keeps failing to take off.

Probably file under "economics":

The nukes and communists share the No True Scotman's defense: the prior failures weren't true communism, err, nuke power. If only we had clapped louder, Tinkerbell would fly.

Maybe only Tennessee was more pro nuclear than Washington. Alas. Incompetence, corruption, delays, and cost overruns aborted the nukes under construction, which then killed all hopes of building more nukes.

For decades, WPPSS (pronounced "Whoops!") was the punchline for local jokes about government, waste, bureaucracy. My favorite was a two-billed baseball hat that said "WPPSS", kinda like this: https://www.villagehatshop.com/photos/product-alternate/gian...

--

https://www.historylink.org/File/5482

"Several factors combined to ruin construction schedules and to drive costs to three and four times the original estimates. Inflation and design changes constantly plagued all the projects. Builders often got ahead of designers who modified their drawings to conform to what had been built. Safety changes imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission increased costs too,

but the biggest cause of delays and overruns was mismanagement of the process by the WPPSS.

The directors and the managers of the system had no experience in nuclear engineering or in projects of this scale. System managers were unable to develop a unified and comprehensive means of choosing, directing, and supervising contractors. One contractor, already shown to be incompetent, was retained for more work. In a well-publicized example, a pipe hanger was built and rebuilt 17 times. Quality control inspectors complained of inadequate work that went unaddressed."

(Attempted emphasis mine.)

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#172

Post by bregma »

dmix wrote: post #47
Akababa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Doug Ford the one selling the drugs?

I think it's been well established Doug used to sell weed when he was a teenager.

He still does, but it turns out he's not very good at it. His government's policy on cannabis sales is doing more to bolster the black market than its own revenues. Very suspicious, given his past connections to the black market.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#173

Post by tonyarkles »

lemmox wrote: post #18
j9461701 wrote: post #13

I would much rather live near a nuclear power plant than a coal plant. I thoroughly support this, and hope they dismantle the big smoke-belching power plant in my city in favor of clean nukes. My only concern is the scalability of this technology - mciro plants sound fine for powering far off native settlements in the far north. But for providing grid power to the urbanized south of the country, wouldn't it make more…

Saskatchewan is a little more than 1M with cities smaller that 250k and New Brunswick is even smaller. Northern Ontario is also quite sparse. I think these are pretty good areas for the tech!

And we (SK) have massive high-quality Uranium deposits up north. I haven't gone too deep into the full plans here for these SMRs, but I have high hopes that other parts of the value chain will pop up here. We have a terrible habit in this province of growing/mining/drilling/whatever natural resources and then shipping them away unprocessed. Maybe we'll actually have a reason to start processing the Uranium here beyond just cleaning it up and getting it ready for export.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#174

Post by bregma »

dghughes wrote: post #40

Those not up on Canadian politics may not see what a Canadian would see here. These are three politically conservative premiers (think US state governor) that are often aggressive in their policies; cuts to social programs, anti-environmental, no carbon tax. Knowing their policies it makes this out-of-the-blue project seem suspicious. I'm all for nuclear power especially if it's using CANDU reactors and thorium. But…

These guys also just came off a federal election in which the environment was a major issue, and their federal counterpart party was the only one without a solid environmental program in their policy. These conservatve premiers all campaigned against the federal environmental programs and launched civil court cases to defeat federal environmental policies after being elected, and then saw the federal government reelected based on those policies they oppose. They're not fools, they can see the writing on the walls.

The primary beneficiaries of these MRDs would be isolated northern communities (eg. Kashechewan) that currently use diesel generators. It's incredibly expensive to ship in diesel, it's widely acknowledged as polluting, and there are political problems associated with relegating indigenous communities to cast-offs from the south. Most of Canada is not on the grid and with the sun gone six months of the year, solar is a non-starter. Wind requires high maintenance and incredibly high construction costs so it's not really viable in remote communities.

MRDs look like a god-send for conservative premiers: be seen to be proactive for indigenous communities, be seen to be pro-active on the green front (but without carbon taxes or targeting the fossil fuel producers), pour money into tech research in Saskatoon and Toronto (two areas that don't traditionally vote Conservative), and one-up the federal government. What's for a conservative premier not to like?

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#175

Post by pvaldes »

londons_explore wrote: post #169
lizknope wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Nuclear fission reactors are built by large corporations like General Electric and Hitachi. If these companies wanted to they have the expertise to build a nuclear bomb but why would they unless their governments asked them to?

A huge number of 74 year old technologies are available for $0.75 direct from China. The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin and included in every $15 childrens toy to power lights is in large part because of public perception and government regulation rather than real safety/health concerns - there exist plenty of typical household materials that are more dangerous than the safest…

On the other hand, a child swallowing a tiny nuclear plant in the shape of a smiley would be an entirely new experience in the A&E department but that would never happens? would it?. I could see from here the lawyers salivating with a case like that.

Not to mention that those toys would end in a few days in the garbage, ready to be shipped by volume to be burnt ("recycled") in some other country.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#176

Post by tonyarkles »

killjoywashere wrote: post #21

The topic is small modular reactors, which are defined as reactors producing less than 300 MW. The Voyager RTGs generate "a few hundred watts" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge... ). The Virginia class submarines use a GE S9G, which produces 150 MWt. Power output is a mix of electric and shaft torque ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S9G_reactor ) The Los Angeles class submarines use a GE S…

Thanks for this! I was curious to see how much power different reactors produced vs. our (Saskatchewan) current generation capacity.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/nrg/ntgrtd/mrkt/nrgsstmprfls/sk-en...

That says we're at around 4500MW right now, the majority of it coming from coal and natural gas (16% renewable). With a 300MW capacity per SMR, it wouldn't take too many of these to cover our base load. That page also suggests that we have 890MW worth of hydroelectric capacity, but I suspect that it only works when things are frozen? (I'm not sure why that capacity, which would be 19.6% on its own, isn't counted in the 16% renewable...)

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#177

Post by chawco »

cf498 wrote: post #143
hvidgaard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's put some numbers to the initiation of this. The entire fleet of reactors in France will after 50 year of operation have produced 5300m3 of high-level waste (the kind you need to store long term). That amounts to less than 400 boxes able to contain a Tesla Model S. 50 years of operation generating 300-400 TWh yearly. I'm not saying it's not problematic, but it's minuscule compared to all forms of power. Even win…

Sure sounds great, what are the best and worst case costs of storing that stuff for how long? And yes i know dry cask storage is much less problematic, but i would still want a realistic plan of what is happening to that stuff and what this is going to cost. What irks me so much is that i am not simply told, look here it what it currently costs, how it would scale and what the realistic liabilities are. If you were a…

I think one additional factor here is that storage isn't the only option. Once a larger amount of waste needs to be managed the attractiveness of fast breeder reactors starts to increase. These reactors can then extract more energy from this high level "waste" (really fuel for fast breeder reactors). These reactors would then reduce the volume of this waste by a factor of about 100. So in the end, those 400 car-sized containers of waste per 50 years becomes 4. One hundred years worth of energy for an entire country producing about a house's volume of waste, total.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#178

Post by StillBored »

hvidgaard wrote: post #139
cf498 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading the article (and hoping i didnt just read over the part), they never mention the word waste once when it comes to the cost calculation. Thats rather convenient seeing as the number of functioning deep repository sites today is rather limited. What good are small operating costs when the build costs are this expensive and we dont have a viable solution for waste management (yet?). In practice these costs are e…

Let's put some numbers to the initiation of this. The entire fleet of reactors in France will after 50 year of operation have produced 5300m3 of high-level waste (the kind you need to store long term). That amounts to less than 400 boxes able to contain a Tesla Model S. 50 years of operation generating 300-400 TWh yearly. I'm not saying it's not problematic, but it's minuscule compared to all forms of power. Even win…

The other part is some of that "waste" has industrial uses. Think medical isotopes, RTG's, clocks, etc.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#179

Post by squiggleblaz »

vidarh wrote: post #75
jlawson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most extreme-left political advocates, who dominate green advocacy because of their high motivation, aren't interested in solving climate change alone. What they want is to dismantle what they see as an entire system of racist sexist capitalist corporate transphobic colonialist evil. Nuclear power, if it was used and solved climate change, wouldn't help with the other aspects of that goal. And, in fact, it would…

"The most extreme-left" has historically been firmly pro-nuclear. There's a massive schism between the traditional far left, whose ideologies tends to be founded on the basis of a firm belief in the advancement of technology (e.g. half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is praise for the advancement brought by capitalism and what it will make possible), and the groups you describe, that tends to elicit d…

Indeed. I mean, "left" and "right" do an awful lot of work. "Left" simply means anyone who isn't opposed to the current order, or it can mean one of several particular ideologies. "Extreme left" would tend to mean communist.

But green communists are a real thing, so while I would prefer to say "some of the extreme left is anti nuclear" or some such. Or perhaps more relevantly for the OP's point, "many greens".

Because not all greens are left, and not all leftists are green. Indeed, many contemporary Green voters in Australia are positively mainstream in terms of their economics. I think in Germany they can even trend right. And in east Europe, they're outright right.

Re: Canadian provinces band together to develop nuclear reactor technology

#180

Post by dexen »

londons_explore wrote: post #169
lizknope wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. Nuclear fission reactors are built by large corporations like General Electric and Hitachi. If these companies wanted to they have the expertise to build a nuclear bomb but why would they unless their governments asked them to?

A huge number of 74 year old technologies are available for $0.75 direct from China. The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin and included in every $15 childrens toy to power lights is in large part because of public perception and government regulation rather than real safety/health concerns - there exist plenty of typical household materials that are more dangerous than the safest…

>The fact the nuclear reactor hasn't been miniaturized to the size of a coin

But it has, or at least close to:

RTGs[1] weighting a couple dozen kilograms are used in space exploration and in rare cases in cold climates. Their main problem is low power density.

Nuclear pacemakers[2] of just a few centimeters across used to be a thing - long lasting and reliable. Also used thermoelectric generators. Replaced by cheaper lithium-based batteries due to high costs of making the nuclear capsule resilient against various possible sources of damage - like body cremation, car accidents, etc.

Nonetheless we have reached certain natural limit of nuclear fission, and only use of nuclear fusion[3] (or major scientific and engineering break-throughs) could change the status quo. The three main unsolved problems for wide scale commercial deployment of fission power:

1) radiation shielding - right now we only have passive shielding via use of structural materials, weights a lot

2) critical mass for active chain reaction (heavy and requires active management) vs passive generation via spontaneous fission (low power density)

3) operational safety and non-proliferation issues: a fission device requires radioactive material, and radioactive material is by its nature dangerous

Notably all three issues are either minimized or entirely absent for nuclear fusion.

Lastly, in typical nuclear power plant, the power generation facilities are usually of comparable size to, or even larger than, the nuclear reactor building itself - so miniaturizing the reactor would yield only diminishing results. High-temperature superconductors ought to be of some help here.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

[2] https://www.medicaldesignandoutsourcing.com/medtech-memoirs-...

[3] "Typical fuel pellets are about the size of a pinhead and contain around 10 milligrams of fuel." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion

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