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A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

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Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#101

Post by clarionbell »

jseban wrote: post #69
arcticbull wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I want to cover the entire desert with solar panels instead of having one neat little tube shaped steam box? You know three nuclear power plants (spanning 19 reactors) in Ontario provide electricity for 9 million people? How many solar panels and wind turbines would you need to put in their place? A solar PV facility must have an installed capacity of 3,300 MW and 5,400 MW to match a 1,000-MW nuclear facili…

But solar has the benefit that it doesn't need to be centralised, people can cover their own roofs and have a battery to be self sufficient and now you don't even need a grid.

Until they need replacement components for any of this. Which they will need evry couple of years. Then they will need centralized infrastructure in form of manufacturing plants, roads, rail and finally (because it is imported from China most likely) ports.

Every step producing greenhouse gasses or other pollution.

Self sufficiency of this sort is largely a sub-urban myth. A comfortable, optimistic one, but a myth nonetheless.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#102

Post by rkagerer »

Manuel_D wrote: post #7
ttul wrote: post #2

To the extent that nuclear power plants emit waste heat, you can use this waste heat to counteract the frigid temperatures found in the Canadian hinterland, displacing the need for natural gas and oil heating of industrial processes.

Desalination through waste heat is also viable. It's "free" energy in the sense that it would have otherwise gone unused.

That would only help near the coasts. Most of Canada's population is in southern Ontario and Quebec where there's no saltwater.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#103

Post by ncmncm »

jseutter wrote: post #43
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

The background on Canada's plans for small modular reactors (of which this is just one of three projects) can be found here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-provinc... Supposedly this is promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, but the details don't always match this rhetoric. In particular they're thinking they can use nuclear power to replace piped-in natural gas to mine the Alberta…

Good points. This design seems quite similar to the pebble bed reactor idea in that it relies on the fissile material being encased in a graphite mixture (stubby cylinders instead of spheres) as well as heat transfer using helium instead of water. The pebble bed reactors seemed to have stability issues created by graphite rubbing off of the spheres as the pebbles we loaded in the top and removed from the bottom. This…

Nukes can never turn out to be cheap power. It is always, always, always heavily subsidized by taxation, thus sometimes masking true cost.

It is fortunate that extracting tar sands produces very expensive oil. As demand for oil drops, cost for oil from tar sands will be unable to match prices offered.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#104

Post by ncmncm »

a_square_peg wrote: post #20
photochemsyn wrote: post #12

The background on Canada's plans for small modular reactors (of which this is just one of three projects) can be found here: https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Canadian-provinc... Supposedly this is promoting clean energy and fighting climate change, but the details don't always match this rhetoric. In particular they're thinking they can use nuclear power to replace piped-in natural gas to mine the Alberta…

I really don't know enough about this to know if it's a good idea or not (it sounds like it could be quite useful) but in any case I'm very glad to see Canada doing something new in technology.

It would be better if Canada could do something actually useful.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#105

Post by clarionbell »

worik wrote: post #70
prawn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also thought we should've developed a nuclear waste industry here in South Australia. There was a 'citizen's jury' on the topic a while back but obviously public opinion swayed political action to rule it out. We have a lot of "unused" and stable land well away from population centres. I imagine transport from afar is an issue though.

Storing waste is too expensive to contemplate. Wherever it is put the high level waste (not much in quantity but...) is deadly and a silent killer for over a hundred thousand years. This is geologically significant time period, and we can make bets, but have no guarantee of any place on Earth being stable on those time scales. So it must be monitored. For a hundred thousand years That would be us making future genera…

On time scales of centuries or millennia there are only three outcomes for humanity:

- Extinction - We don't need to care about it, because there are no descendants.

- Advancement - We will be able to handle the problem better as our technology improves.

- Stagnation/regression - We don't need to care about it. Our descendants will have to worry about dysentery, crop failures and regional warfare. Some magic rocks that kill people will end up as curios in warded laden boxes after first adventurous monk opens sarcophagus and succumbs to curse.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#106

Post by ggm »

paranoidrobot wrote: post #80
ggm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't been in the arguments about "why nuclear makes no sense now" much have you? the post-60s time to deploy skyrocketed, in lawsuits. By now, its a 20+ year fight to do anything with nuclear, even on federally owned land. in 20 years, the argument runs that either its too late, or the cost of PV/Wind has dropped to make it irrelevant. The problem space we're in now is multi-dimensional. Purely on economic and…

> the cost of PV/Wind has dropped to make it irrelevant The cost of PV and Wind (with Storage included) is already vastly lower than any commercially available Nuclear Power design. They're also a whole lot easier to deploy and maintain, don't come with all the risks involved in current Nuclear Power designs.

I mostly agree with this in pragmatic sense. I'm seeking coulda woulda shoulda alternate history counterfactuals here, I argue no future nuclear proposal will make sense but in deep time, 60s, we missed the boat and could have been in a radically different place.

There is no future path where even SMR can arrive at price point and power rating to replace the overbuild of wind and solar with storage, which provides the same energy reliability. Overbuild sounds negative but it's not: you need more than nameplate power and more units widely dispersed to avoid outages from local weather. With that comes more for storage, more for H2 conversion, desalination, other uses.

Basically, we should be further along our de-carbonisation. It's all about the past.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#107

Post by ncmncm »

eternauta3k wrote: post #65

Not sure if it's quite the same thing, but Argentina has been building a modular reactor for a while now. Doesn't look like it'll be ready anytime soon (probably financing problems). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAREM https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Nucleoelectrica-cont...

"Financing problems" translates to "people finally recognized it could never earn back what they would need to put in to finish it".

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#108

Post by ncmncm »

greenknight wrote: post #52
wryun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes too long to build fission plants to replace coal in the short term; easy to spin up lots of wind/solar. We've also got a ridiculous amount of renewable potential. (I'm a candidate for the Fusion Party; we'd like to remove the ban on nuclear power in Australia because it would enable research)

Having direct involvement in the wind industry... most plan -> completion developments take 5-10 years. heck even one from 2013 still hasnt had ground broken. The main reason? NIMBYs. Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire. imagine what these retires would do if their picturesque landscape is now comprised of windfarms? and they dont have anything else to do to fill up their day?

Two words: Offshore wind.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#109

Post by chii »

greenknight wrote: post #52
wryun wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Takes too long to build fission plants to replace coal in the short term; easy to spin up lots of wind/solar. We've also got a ridiculous amount of renewable potential. (I'm a candidate for the Fusion Party; we'd like to remove the ban on nuclear power in Australia because it would enable research)

Having direct involvement in the wind industry... most plan -> completion developments take 5-10 years. heck even one from 2013 still hasnt had ground broken. The main reason? NIMBYs. Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire. imagine what these retires would do if their picturesque landscape is now comprised of windfarms? and they dont have anything else to do to fill up their day?

> Loads of people go out to the countryside to retire.

they imagine themselves wanting to go out to the country side to retire, but would find that living in remote places that doesn't have facilities to be poor quality life.

you want to travel to the countryside for leisure - may be even for extended vacation. But you will almost always want a "home base" in a big metropolitan area for when services are needed - such as medical or home helper etc.

Re: A first for Canada: New type of nuclear plant opening by 2028

#110

Post by ncmncm »

tfigment wrote: post #74
onethought wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Country the size of Australia could actually build sizeable solar assets across multiple timezones. The "backup problem" is a storage problem that could be solved more locally to the consumption. (houses with batteries, or suburbs, or cities, or states). The "night time" generation problem is a bit BS given electricity demand drops significantly at nigh in Australia, so the storage requirement is no where near the ge…

There is very high demand from 6-10 pm and lesser in morning when solar is not available or very diminished. Also solar still needs cleaning all of those panels. Solar requires rare earths and that is surprisingly toxic manufacturing/refining process. Distribution and transmission is also not as easy as just building everything in Africa and sending it elsewhere. We need a mix of systems in practice.

Solar does not, in fact, require rare earths. (And, incidentally, "rare earths" are very, very far from rare; that is just a name.) And, the cost to clean them once in a while is very low.

You are reaching. The fact is that renewables are the cheapest source of power that has ever happened on this planet, and they are still getting cheaper.

Storage is likewise cheap and very quickly getting much, much cheaper. By the time we actually need any, you will not notice the cost.

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