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

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

#331

Post by lukan »

leonidasrup wrote: post #278
magicalist wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

Biomass in Demark is in large part not green technology. Could be even worse then fossil gas. "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." https://noah.dk/Biomass-consumption-in-Denmark

Even if the wood is imported, it still counts as green, as it regrowing and does not add CO2 that was in the ground before.

(So it depends how much CO2 the ships used to transport it there)

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

#332

Post by kioleanu »

GL26 wrote: post #326

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.

Hopefully it will go better than the last time someone had such an ambitious plan with nuclear plants

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

#333

Post by leonidasrup »

cyberax wrote: post #306
leonidasrup wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste was stopped not for technical reasons, but for political reasons. The primary reasoning was that: US reprocessing of civilian nuclear waste would encourage other non-nuclear weapon states to build nuclear reprocessing capabilities which would make easier access to plutonium - nuclear weapon material. "On April 7, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced that the United S…

Yeah. My former coworker was researching ways to make steel less "activatable". Turns out that the most problematic contaminant is niobium, so he was working on possible ways to remove it completely. The proliferation risk was real at that time, but it's now a moot point. The details of plutonium refining are well known.

Principles of plutonium separation are well known (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUREX), but preventing non-nuclear weapon states from having access to nuclear materials usable for nuclear weapons (Plutonium, Highly enriched uranium) is still cornerstone of US foreign policy. See the current events in Iran. Or the discussions with South Korea:

"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.

https://www.iaea.org/topics/additional-protocol

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

#334

Post by burnt-resistor »

reppap wrote: post #319
sleepyguy wrote: post #13

Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected. Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be consi…

I wonder how much much renewables you would get for the same 100 billion investment though. How much battery storage does even 50 billion get you.

Metric shittons. A 650 MW solar plant is around $900M USD, so $100B translates into 72 GW. That would power ½ of Canada. It's cheaper to use hydro (PES) rather than batteries (BESS) at scale, and Canada already has a lot of hydro power. $50B would buy lots of PES and distribution/transmission levelizing BESS that would allow greater flexibility in generation production.

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

#335

Post by leonidasrup »

peterfirefly wrote: post #329
somenameforme wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.

"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...

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

#336

Post by myrmidon »

peterfirefly wrote: post #329
somenameforme wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way.

But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.

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

#337

Post by bvcp »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #242
awesome_dude wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said from the start that the argument you presented was fallacious, and all you did was present it, now, because you have no other argument, you're working on aggressive attacks. You're on your own now. Bye.

Do please explain how it's fallacious? I've made the claims that one, there is a sufficiently low volume of waste produced per unit of generation that geologic disposal is affordable and scalable and that two, said geological disposal is in fact safe. Where's the fallacy? It appears to me that you are attached to a position that you aren't capable of defending.

also its not really waste, its waste by law only, in reality its unrefined fuel

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

#338

Post by myrmidon »

troupo wrote: post #299
rickydroll wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

> Chasing baseload is a fool's game. You will always have a mismatch between power needed and power produced. 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 guarant…

> nuclear reactors are capable of changing power output at 3-5% of nameplate capacity per minute

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.

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

#339

Post by TomK32 »

reppap wrote: post #319
sleepyguy wrote: post #13

Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected. Wind and solar could be deployed for a fraction of the proposed $100 billion investment and should be consi…

I wonder how much much renewables you would get for the same 100 billion investment though. How much battery storage does even 50 billion get you.

With the prices for solar (the expensive parts are not the panels but the inverters and labour costs) and batteries still going down you will get more than what you thought when you started to spend the first billion.

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

#340

Post by peterfirefly »

danhor wrote: post #102
roenxi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 that nuclear has been under in the US and EU. Or by generally exploding costs of megaprojects. Look at e.g. high-speed-rail in UK, France, Germany, ... . The first projects were the che…

A lot of those rising costs are also due to a (much) heavier regulatory environment.
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