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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

#351

Post by _heimdall »

jibal wrote: post #200
_heimdall wrote: post #188

Interesting to see the general opinion on nuclear swing so far from environmental and safety concerns (whether warranted or not) to pretty broad support for energy independence. I can't help but think its a sign that those concerns were easy to hold when energy was cheap and you could actually trust your neighbors. If that's the case, again huge speculation, it sure makes the concerns feel a bit hollow now.

From the article: "If our goal is to double our grid and build a low-carbon economy in less than 25 years, there is no credible plan to do that without nuclear energy and the clean, reliable baseload power it provides," Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production, especially if saf…

> Reduction in burning carbon and producing greenhouses is the number one concern of environmentalists and is a major driver of the increased acceptability of nuclear power production

Right, and that's my point. The ability to make clean energy with nuclear is not a new idea, that was the argument for nuclear all along.

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

#352

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

magicalist wrote: post #247
red75prime wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The massive solar overcapacity that is required to deal with seasonal variation and the massive energy storage make this endeavor much more costly than nuclear. 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. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054422... Fig. 3

> 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…

Battery and storage tech is improving and innovating all the time. It also has a fast build cycle.

Commissioning reactors that won't come online for 10-15 years makes no sense at all, economically and practically.

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

#353

Post by PaulHoule »

kelseydh wrote: post #285
PaulHoule wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exciting development. I really wish somebody would nail a commercially viable Thorium reactor but it seems there are real engineering complications around scaling molten salt reactors.

I was at the first Thorium energy conference and presented a timeline for reactor development based on the timeline Oak Ridge had in the 1970s. I was still surprised that the Chinese nailed it!

These days I am more excited about Plutonium cycle reactors using chloride salts because they fix the problems of the FBR (occupational safety in fuel fabrication for one) and the fluoride salt reactors (having to dispose of used graphite cores). You do get some longer lived TRUs but you have so many excess neutrons you could burn some of the fission products. Most important the Pu cycle can be launched with the nuclear waste we already have, whereas the math doesn’t really work for launching LFTR.

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

#354

Post by mpweiher »

bildung wrote: post #342
stymaar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you forgot the most important one, that justify nuclear over the alternatives: - is very far North and can't really use solar at all for 3 month per year because in winter the nights are long, the weather is terrible and the sun is always low in the sky.

Canada (at least the part with people) seems to be significantly more in the south than most of Northern Europe, where PV seems to work just fine?

PV doesn't work "just fine" in Northern Europe.

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

#355

Post by mpweiher »

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…

Canada just finished the Bruce Power refurbishment ahead of schedule and under budget, and that seems to generally be the track record in Canada.

https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1007558/ontario-delivers-...

France built 55 reactors in around 15 years during its first build-out and that wasn't an accident, we both know how to do this and Canada seems to be in a good place for that kind of performance.

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

#356

Post by mpweiher »

rickydroll wrote: post #31
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…

> 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…

Baseload is a large part of the total load, so it absolutely makes sense to provide solid plants that can run predictably at close to 100% capacity for most of the time (maintenance and occasional outages excepted).

Storage can paper over the unreliability problems of the intermittent producers to some extent, but at relatively high cost for comparatively short amount of times.

Filling constant demand with intermittent producers + storage does not make sense.

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

#357

Post by mpweiher »

myrmidon wrote: post #338
troupo wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They actually do not. Struggle, that is.

But yes, it absolutely makes more sense to run those plants 24/7 at 100% capacity.

And we have base-load that matches this reliable generating capacity very well.

The 40%-60% base load absolutely should be provided by nuclear if you don't have hydro (and even if you have hydro, some nuclear still makes sense).

The remainder should almost certainly be a mix: some more reliable nuclear, some storage, some wind, some solar.

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

#358

Post by peterfirefly »

leonidasrup wrote: post #335
peterfirefly wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Copper prices may be higher in 2035 but I'll be astonished if lithium prices are. I expect lithium to be much cheaper by then.

Note that we kept extracting copper long after people said we would run out. We even increased production AND lowered prices.

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

#359

Post by lukan »

leonidasrup wrote: post #345
lukan wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

1. We can comfortable say that the CO2 from burned wood stays in the atmosphere for at-least 100 years (time necessary for the next tree to grow), with all the associated effects. 2. I could not imagine scaling biomass to country like India or China to cover the same share in electricity production mix as in Dermark (Denmark currently produces 20% of electricity from Bioenergy). https://ourworldindata.org/profile/ene…

1. No, if you take wood out of the forest and let it regrow, it is roughly +-0 CO2 balance (It is not just the new trees binding CO2, taking advantage of the new sunlight, all the other plants and existing trees start to bind CO2 the moment they can)

2. No, it is not and I doubt anyone claimed that this is possible.

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

#360

Post by _aavaa_ »

Gud wrote: post #318
protocolture wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMR's seem like a pipe dream tbh.

Why? It's a proven concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85gesta_Nuclear_Plant

The problem isn’t the technology, it’s the economics.

The assembly and economies of scale for “mass production” have not been proven in practice; who will you sell the countless expensive ones before it gets cheaper?

And the smaller reactor has diseconomies of scale working against it for the electricity it produces. So the $/MWh price is much higher than for larger reactors.

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