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Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

cbc.ca

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Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#151

Post by pfdietz »

nickserv wrote: post #146
consensus1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see that France has the most nuclear heavy grid and also some of the cheapest energy costs and lowest CO2 emission per unit energy in the world. When I see that matched by a solar / wind focused grid I will believe the cheap renewables hype. And even when I see that, the low energy density still has its own problems. The amount of resources needed for the panels and batteries is massive in itself. And the land area…

France has higher prices than several EU countries. Spain in particular has low prices thanks to their solar and wind, and the Nordics thanks to hydro.

And the French cannot seem to replicate the putatively low price they paid for their first nuclear rollout.

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#153

Post by pfdietz »

roenxi wrote: post #76
jmyeet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it. Nuclear power is the…

> Nuclear power is the highest cost source of electricity in LCOE terms [1]. The graph actually suggests something different - you can see how coal (a mature and well -understood technology) has basically flat-lining costs that increase very slowly over time as we mine out the easy fuel. That is pretty much what we'd expect for a mature technology. Gas, Solar and Wind have rapidly decreasing cost curves following som…

> Nuclear has the most bizzare cost curve of any new technology where every year it costs more than the year before; a pattern which makes effectively no sense and is really only explainable by the heavy and effective political attack

Or by the technology being heavily subsidized and its flaws papered over until they became expensively unignorable.

But no, it must be the extremely selective omnipotence of the greens that did it. /s

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#154

Post by cindyllm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #104
chollida1 wrote: post #7

Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…

They don’t seem to have any plans to build more CANDU, in so many ways the world has moved on for instance those centrifuges have made uranium enrichment more economical for most countries except (seemingly) the US and Iran. What is exciting to me is that these just installed the first module of the BWRX 300 at Darlington. I was so afraid that BWRX was going to be another SMR that gets talked about for decades but it…

[dead]

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#155

Post by kvakerok »

jmyeet wrote: post #49
chollida1 wrote: post #7

Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…

I don't understand the online obsession with nuclear power in spite of all the evidence that it's simply not economical. Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, which is how long it takes to build a new nuclear power plant. And it can be done today, incrementally with renewable sources and before anyone screams "baseload", that's what batteries are for if it really comes down to it. Nuclear power is the…

We can't generate power out of thin air and the coal/natural gas powerplants got shut down what do you propose?

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#156

Post by jleyank »

jtbayly wrote: post #112
chollida1 wrote: post #7

Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…

More renewables means the need for more base load? This is the first I’ve seen anybody say that.

Crypto, AI and EV. Heating/Cooling. Raw material processing. There's going to be a need for every KW that's available. Hell, there's probably going to be a copper shortage the way things are going.

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#157

Post by jleyank »

kasey_junk wrote: post #120
chollida1 wrote: post #7

Makes alot of sense. Canada has: - one of the largest uranium reserves - a well respected and safe nuclear design in CANDU - experience with building and refurbishing nuclear reactors(Darlington) and for Ontario itself A need for more baseload to work with the large amount of solar and wind that Ontario has added in the last 10 years. Saskatchewan also now has a potential need for nuclear for industrial use now that…

Will Alberta go along?

Will Alberta go (away)? If/when the price of crude goes back down, they'll feel the cash crunch. Curiously, if they leave Canada, they need a path through a foreign country to get their oil out of Alberta.

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#158

Post by pfdietz »

motohagiography wrote: post #95

new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly. We should have mor…

Micro reactors have micro markets. The diseconomies of scale kill it for general grid power.

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#159

Post by zdragnar »

awesome_dude wrote: post #98
zdragnar wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one thing, nuclear power plants produce much less waste than most people imagine. Waste can also be reprocessed into new fuel, further reducing it. In the US, we have a suitable site that has been authorized and cancelled for 20 some years now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r... The reasons it keeps being cancelled, and the waste is stored on-site at nuclear plants instead, is purely…

I've never understood how people think "less" solves the issue, it's not negligible and asking to increase the number of plants surely increases the waste. Reprocessing, isn't infinite. There's going to be waste to deal with. You've not presented any technical solutions, instead you made it political by claiming that's the only problem. Do you have an actual understanding of the problems or are you just pushing nucle…

I actually did produce a technical solution: stick it deep in yucca mountain and forget about it. It's safe, and there's more than enough room for the little waste that can't be turned back into fuel.

Re: Canada plans 'nuclear renaissance' with up to 10 reactors built by 2040

#160

Post by fc417fc802 »

delecti wrote: post #80
martinbfine wrote: post #37

[dead]

Leaving aside that Canada is huge, waste is really just not that much of a problem. It would be easy to safely store all the waste that will ever be produced at a dedicated storage site, if you could drum up the political will for such a site to exist. But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site. Not that much waste is produced; stick it in a cask and leave it alone.

> But really, it's even easier to just store it all on-site.

I agree with the rest but on site storage of high level waste is a terrible idea. Even after vitrification that's material that will remain dangerously radioactive for longer than agrarian human civilization has existed. Ideally it should enter a disposal chain that keeps as little of it at ground level for a short a time as possible in order to hedge against the long tail possibility of a large scale disaster stranding it on the surface.

I think the finnish plan to bury it on site 500 meters down in bedrock is a decent one.

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