Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 500 posts

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

#321

Post by awesome_dude »

roenxi wrote: post #298
protocolture wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement. How do you think spent uranium interacts with the environment? There's an estimated 4.5 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater. Naturally occurring. I honestly think we missed a trick when we outlawed dumping in the ocean, there's basically no way for human gene…

> I keep coming back to this to reply but I cant really figure out how to tackle it. Theres so much of a particular view of the world in each statement. The problem you're running in to is most likely that you asked someone to define a subjective measure. What you then bump into with the anti-nuclear crowd is safety has one standard for most things and then a different, inconsistent standard when "nuclear" gets menti…

I love how the pro nuclear crowd deals in misinformation to denigrate anyone that dares not agree with them.

They asked for my standard - despite it being a tactic to try and throw the thread, they got their reply and then complained.

You decided a pile on was appropriate with some wild theories that only live in your imagination.

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

#322

Post by awesome_dude »

leonidasrup wrote: post #286
awesome_dude wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that this material remains toxic to life for thousands, to tens of thousands of years. Safe means that it's stored such that there's no harm to the environment for that lifetime. In all "bury it" scenarios, the place where the waste is buried will be subject to change resulting in water, air, able to interact with that waste when normal tectonic and erosion processes do their thing.

You would be surprised how much toxic industrial waste is been currently stored in deep geological repositories. For example Herfa-Neurode underground repository contains (as of 2025): https://www.kpluss.com/en-us/our-business-products/waste-man... 690,000 tons of waste containing dioxins and furans , 220,000 tons of waste containing mercury, 127,000 tons of waste containing cyanide, and 83,000 tons of toxic waste co…

I am not surprised - I am, however, surprised how little people pay attention to the risks involved with the practice.

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

#323

Post by troupo »

arkh wrote: post #311
troupo wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what would you use for seasonal storage?

> Then what would you use for seasonal storage? Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU. So Nordic countries hydro and nuclear, and some French nuclear. While lobbying to make all those interconnections increase domestic prices for the providers.

> Like Germany: coal and the energy provided by the rest of the EU.

So, from actual non-intermittent sources like checks notes nuclear?

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

#324

Post by leonidasrup »

jmyeet wrote: post #126
xp84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All forms of generation have downsides. > Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsu…

> Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. If you build the solar and wind you don't need the nuclear. That's the point. > Also, you're predictably citing a couple of bad nuclear accidents, over like 70 years of nuclear generation. Here we go with hand-waving away all the uncomfortable counterexamples. It's hard to get exact numbers because of plant decmossioning and that some nuclear r…

1. Lot of nuclear fission products from Chernobyl catastrophe have already decay ed away. There was mapping done for the long term plan of shrinking the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

"In the long term, the Ukrainian radiation protection authorities can use the BfS measurement data as a planning basis for reassessing the size of the exclusion zone. The data can be used to assess which areas of the exclusion zone could be reopened for use."

https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/BfS/EN/2022...

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47227767

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has halted the reassessment of Chernobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine has currently much bigger problems than Chernobyl. One could also say that, the decline of nuclear power in Europe because of Chernobyl accident caused much stronger dependency of Europe on Russian fossil fuels and indirectly supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine by bringing a lot of European money to Russia.

2. They got the currency symbol wrong in the cleantechnica article. "First estimates included costs as high as ¥1 trillion (US$13 billion), as cited by the Japanese Prime Minister at the time, Yoshihiko Noda "

"In 2016, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry estimated the total cost of dealing with the Fukushima disaster at ¥21.5 trillion (US$187 billion)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident_cle...

Lot of missing nuclear electricity production after 2011 in Japan was replaced with electricity production from imported LNG. Because of impacts Iran war on LNG gas delivery Japan is now rapidly moving to restart nuclear power plants.

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/18/japan-nuclear-fukus...

3. Three Mile Island was very costly destruction of power generation asset without impacts on the public health, but it caused mass panic amplified by the simultaneous release of the The China Syndrome movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident#Act...

Other industries also don't pay insurance representing the true potential cost of a large disasters.

"US law requires payment of 8 cents per barrel of oil to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund for all oil imported or produced. In exchange for the payment, operators of offshore oil platforms, among others, are limited in liability to $75 million for damages, which can be paid by the fund, but are not indemnified from the cost of cleanup. As of 2010, before payouts related to the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, the fund stood at $1.6 billion.

The hydroelectric industry is not generally held financially liable for catastrophic incidents such as dam failure or resultant flooding. For example, dam operators were not held liable for the 1977 failure of the Teton Dam in Idaho that caused approximately $500 million in property damage."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

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

#325

Post by eqvinox »

throwaway69123 wrote: post #249
qlte wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if every bit of regulation was scrapped and uranium was free, there are still significant costs to steam turbine based thermal plants plus the reactor itself that can't be hand waved away. As PV costs and now grid-scale storage keep dropping rapidly, the economics of a nuclear plant that takes 5-10 years to get running at full capacity (in the very optimistic case) and even longer to break even look increasingly…

when you're comparing on a cost basis are you amortizing the cost of the nuclear power plant over the multiple lifetime cycles of PV+Battery as the nuclear power plant will outlast many such cycles, nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

> […] nuclear plants if maintained can effectively last forever.

That's a very ambitious statement, every piece of hardware has lifecycle limitations. Engineering things for "infinite" lifetime significantly drives up the cost of the resulting product in most cases.

I would certainly hope the radiation-exposed parts of nuclear power plants are engineered for a very long life, but… there's water and metal involved, these things do need maintenance. And the non-irradiated parts probably need to be maintained much more frequently, e.g. the turbines certainly won't live forever.

As a matter of fact, solid state devices tend to last much longer, and PV is one of very few completely solid state power generation technologies. (It does, unfortunately, suffer from general sun exposure damage.) Personally speaking, without some digging I wouldn't make any claims which of them lives longer, it feels like it could go either way by quite a bit of margin.

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

#326

Post by GL26 »

10 new reactos by 2040 is huge when you come to think of it, this is just in 14 years, this is about 0.72 reactors built each year. Knowing you need to build : the whole reactor building, the machines building, the whole plumbery system, the electrical system, the control command system, the reactor, reliability features, and all of that knowing you have to pass the nuclear regulation authorities controls.

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

#327

Post by audunw »

jleyank wrote: post #156
jtbayly wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Heating is one of the easiest to pair with intermittent power. Heat storage “batteries” can store energy for a very long time. Stockholm recently converted an old cave used to store oil, which now stores heat for a district heating network

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

#328

Post by leonidasrup »

pfisch wrote: post #78
xp84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All forms of generation have downsides. > Canada needs new power now. Not 15-20 years from now, Building nuclear doesn't stop you from building whatever else you want. Though I assume that Canada being Canada, it'll take 15 years just to complete the requisite negotiations with every indigenous tribe and to arrive at a settlement with whatever environmental and assorted NIMBY groups are already warming up their lawsu…

Chernobyl was almost the largest disaster in all of history. I'm not saying nuclear reactors are unsafe now, but the reality is that a true disaster at a nuclear power plant literally means the end of huge amounts of land, enough to end entire countries or large parts of continents. You can't say things like that about walking or other types of transport...

When ranking Chernobyl accident for death toll (95–4,000+ deaths) it's very far behind Failure of Banqiao Dam (26,000–240,000), behind 2023 Derna dam collapse (11,300), behind the world's worst industrial disaster - Bhopal disaster (3,787–16,000), behind 1979 Machchhu dam failure (1,800–25,000), about as deadly as Halifax Explosion (1,950 deaths).

Most tragic thing is that Chernobyl accident could have been prevented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...

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

#329

Post by peterfirefly »

somenameforme wrote: post #282
brainwad wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even then, the costs came down 10x in a decade, so it seems foolish to commit to nuclear which has no prospects of getting cheaper.

It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those poten…

Remember when the world ran completely out of copper?
Post reply on HN