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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

#411

Post by senderista »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #61
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…

You’re missing the point which is to create jobs, it’s what the Canadian government is pushing really hard for now, with all the infrastructure projects it’s launching. Something that will need people working on building for 15 years sounds about right for what government is doing now.

Sounds like California high speed rail, where the state government is actually touting the number of jobs created as the measure of its success, even without a single mile of working track.

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

#412

Post by bonesss »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #53
mig39 wrote: post #29

A nuclear reactor in the Alberta Oil sands would take care of a large amount of the CO2 produced in the production of crude.

Doesn’t help with the burning part. Or the stranded infrastructure once the demand goes away.

Nuclear process heat in refining would enable releasing less CO2 per fuel-unit. It doesn’t solve burning directly, but reduces the impact of what is going to happen anyways.

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

#413

Post by Moldoteck »

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 just hope it'll be Candu and not bwrx

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

#414

Post by gottorf »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #397
gottorf wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You’re missing the point which is to create jobs I sure hope that the ultimate point of a government push to build nuclear powerplants is in fact getting nuclear powerplants on the other side, not just jobs along the way. The latter seems responsible for so many ills in today's Western societies.

Nuclear plants would reduce Canada’s energetic reliance on other countries but - is there any, really? Last I checked, Quebec at least exports power to other provinces and the US. Sure with more power generation Canada has more to sell and any country would be happy to have more energy, but it doesn’t sound like something the country _needs_ as much as, say, more housing. Or deep health care system improvements and s…

Cheaper energy unlocks all of those things. All human problems are energy problems, in the end.

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

#415

Post by Moldoteck »

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…

i still hope it'll be candus even if lot of bwrx supply chain is in Canada

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

#416

Post by Moldoteck »

lukan wrote: post #331
leonidasrup wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

it also depends on the rate of consumption. On top of that, the burning aint perfect, you also get amplifiers like monoxide or NOx. It also depends on the type of burned wood - some trees grow faster, others slower. If you burn a tree that grew slowly, it'll be +- zero after a long time

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

#417

Post by Moldoteck »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #352
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…

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.

It makes sense for Canada. Unless you love using gas for firming of course

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

#418

Post by Moldoteck »

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…

global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater

Seawater extraction is already comparable to most expensive land mines looking at China so it's no longer prohibitively expensive. India is moving fast with it's Thorium design https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-criticality-fo...

"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.

The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming

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

#419

Post by Moldoteck »

somenameforme wrote: post #405
myrmidon wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it wasn't clear in my post, the entire point is not that we'd run out, but that it'd become economically unviable. As the supply starts to run out and/or we turn to more expensive sources, prices go up - sharply. We'll never really run out of anything - it will just become so expensive that it's no longer viable for widespread usage. Nuclear is quite sensitive to this issue because the primary, and arguably sole,…

Ore is currently about 2% of the capex of a reactor. And many mines globally have lowered production because it's too cheap. Even if you 10x the price of the ore, it'll still be cheap

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

#420

Post by credit_guy »

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…

> Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that

In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.

For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.

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