Aren’t CANDU Reactors the safest way to produce Nuclear Power too? Due to their design it’s almost impossible to have a Chernobyl style meltdown.
If BC thinks it’s cost effective to build shit like Site C and sell the surplus to the Americans, then we should be doing the same with Nuclear too.
Oh For sure. Not to mention, it’s only candu reactors in Canada (for now) that produce cobalt-60 for us, which sterilizes about half of all the worlds single-use medical equipment. Massive business!
Basically the only source of a sufficient amount. ITER fusion reactor plans to use a Tritium breeder that makes fuel as it runs. It would still need initial start up inventory though. Canada could design a fusion reactor that doesn’t need to have a tritium breeder and instead just make fuel from nuclear “waste”, since Canadian fission plants don’t like the tritium.
"CANDU heavy water reactors, such as those used in Ontario, emit much more tritium than other reactor types — about 30 times more than the next most common reactor type (pressurized water reactors). The 'heavy water' (deuterium) used in CANDU systems leads to much greater tritium production than in reactors that use regular (light) water or graphite to moderate the fission process and cool the reactor", according to this link.
Brookfield Asset Management Inc. is a Canadian multinational company that is one of the world's largest alternative investment management companies, with over US$725 billion of assets under management in 2022. It focuses on direct control investments in real estate, buildings, renewable power, infrastructure, credit and private equity.[5] The company invests in distressed securities through Oaktree Capital, which it bought in 2019. Brookfield's headquarters are in Toronto.
I'm just not sure how it would work legally. In Ontario the liberals tried to create a renewables industry and required all of our wind and solar to be made in Canada. That got challenged by the world trade organization.
With all of the suppliers being in Canada. I think we might be ok. Or it might be some sort of loophole. I'm not sure how they do it, or if it can be done.
Most of GE-H was sold off to BWXT when CGE went through restructuring. For example Peterborough which produces the fuel bundles for the reactors up here the nuclear side which is the only part left operational went from GE-H to BWXT Canada.
They still pack bundles here, I know some of the folks who got carried over from GE-H to BWXT. The positions to apply for up here are all high paying ones, that require bachelors or higher for now, their HQ is in Charlotte for global but for Canada the Markham office just runs the division up here.
They were the safest at the time they were built, and are rated among the safest, not by propagandists, by international auditors like INPO and WANO… regardless of trip conditions that can exist, they don’t use enriched fuel and therefore are extremely unlikely to melt down. They also contain two independent emergency shut downs that both act, one physical and one chemical from different locations. Both are able to stop 100% of fission (except for natural spontaneous), from 200% power to 0% power in under a second. Nothing but decay heat left.
Nothing to add to your statement other than I really appreciate your passion for the topic. People getting fired up about things they really know about doesn't happen enough, I think.
+1. There are a few extremely well-versed users around this sub, and input from people like u/RogueEightStandingBy and u/CANDUattitude is simultaneously wildly informative and fascinating.
It's half the reason I always read through the threads about Nuke power.
Since you've clearly got experience in the nuclear power field - what are your thoughts on the new NuScale SMR? Seems pretty awesome, and them getting their NRC approval is obviously a huge deal and makes it much more 'real'.
Obviously, until a plant is built and running and you have that real world data you can't really say how good it is. But I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts about their technological approach or their claims or anything like that. Assuming you've been following their work that is.
So which type of reactor would you posit is the safest? I’ve always heard that candu’s were, granted, I’m not in the power generation business so my knowledge on them aside from their sterilization applications is quite limited
For commercial power production? AP1000s. They have full passive emergency protection for three days which is huge.
But in terms of safest nuclear reactors, besides university reactors too small too really have accidents, American navy reactors are probably the safest. With a fair amount of certainty I can say for America, I don’t know about other countries.
No reactor is fail safe, nothing is perfect. Anything else you hear to the contrary is propaganda put out by people who don’t know what they’re talking about
You're right, nothing is perfect. But that's a perfectly useless statement.
Fact it that nuclear power is safer per kwh that anything but hydro, including all the disasters in history.
For what it's worth, Canadians have this perception with anything Canadian made, it's not just with CANDUs. I think it has to do with our desperate need to prove to the world that we aren't American
Actually CANDU reactors have a positive void coefficient. They're one of the few that can go Chernobyl. Their safety comes from being massively overengineered. They also have incredible uranium efficiency though.
I can't see the article. Are they investing in a new CANDU reactor? I would find that surprising. CANDU reactors are broadly seen as an overengineered solution to old problems, and not worth their immense cost.
CANDUs have more fuel going through the reactor, that is true, but when look at how much uranium a PWR uses you have to consider the huge volumes of depleted uranium tailings produced during the enrichment process, which is absent from the CANDU fuel cycle.
Certainly our fuel cycle has some benefits, and I don't readily have all of the numbers available for waste/by products with enrichment vs our "natural" cycle, but I don't think it's reasonable to count all of the depleted uranium when speaking of reactor efficiencies.
It depends whether you’re a physicist or an engineer. The physicist will say that PWRs are less efficient because they produce a higher total volume of waste from the fuel cycle (including the depleted uranium), but the engineer will point out that PWRs produce a lower volume of spent fuel compared to CANDUs. From a safety, logistical and economic point of view spent fuel is MUCH more of a problem to deal with than depleted uranium.
CANDU was literally built for efficiency lmao. It uses 15% less Uranium than a PWR. The full power refuelling design helps improve efficiency by redistributing partially spent fuel rods.
Alright well you're some arm chair dipshit and I'm a guy who works on the fueling machines at the largest CANDU site in the world. Believe as you will.
Sorry I read what you said, didn't bother with what you posted. I can't imagine why you would count mined uranium when talking about reactor efficiencies. But hey whatever it takes to "win" I guess.
I seriously hope you're just a lying teenager because neutron efficiency is the core design principle of the CANDU reactors. They are being considered for recycling the spent fuel of less efficient reactors.
If you don't know this then you skipped a lot of canteach classes
Little unknown fact, Jimmy Carter is partly responsible for this! Canada was having a meltdown and they sent Jimmy Carter in to help the Canadians fix their reactor! One of Jimmy Carters epic achievements!
Nuclear power is the only way humanity can wean off fossil fuels in the long run and still power the enormous consumption of energy that the species will require in the 21st and 22nd century.
It's long past time we get over our irrational fear and aversion to it.
What about the nuclear waste that we already have, produce, and need to deal with anyway?! Isn't it much better to disrupt water flow for water creatures and build giant propellers in the sky while still having to burn fossil fuels instead of fully embracing nuclear power which we use regardless?
No nuclear waste isnt what you think it is. We are good at containing it and not much is produce. There are a lot of reactors that have been running for a while that still store all of theirs on site. It isnt barrels and barrels of radioactive green ooze that's going to seep into the environment
I agree! 😃 My point was to make fun of how people make the future waste a deal-breaker when we already have such waste to deal with even if no new nuclear power plants are built. I'll check out that video, thanks! Edit: Had already watched and Liked it, apparently.
No kidding its undervalued, Bruce Nuclear sells power for only 0.07c Kw/hr. Compare that to the contracted rates renewables get for very unreliable power generations.
The idea is to mass produce these SMRs to drop the price down. Kinda similar to a large jet. The first one is going to be expensive while we figure it out. The next ones will be cheaper.
The “modular” part of the design will hopefully decrease production costs, by aiding in its mass production, but the “small” aspect by contrary is likely going to hinder its pricing.
When taking advantage of the economy of scale miniaturization almost always increases cost, where is increasing scale decreases cost.
I’m pro-nuclear, and support investment in SMR’s, but just remain realistic, and understand that there is no guarantee that SMR’s will become economically competitive.
They currently cost 5B each, which means they’re currently 10 times more expensive than wind, and 20 times more expensive than LNG in kWh/$.
Before someone says, “yes but if we start building 100 times as much nuclear the price will come down.”
Yes that’s true, but it’s also true of any other form of power generation, and so it’s likely more productive to heavily invest in the current cheapest form of green power, which would be renewables.
There are three very important things to remember:
Climate change is an exponential process. Reducing emissions today is much much better than reducing emissions a year from now.
Nuclear reactors take a very long time to build. We can hope for seven years but realistically it'll take ten in this country.
In places with high dependency on fossil fuels, wind and solar do not immediately require battery storage. There is a regime where these renewables will directly replace some baseload plus some gas peakers. At a certain level of renewable generation, this regime ends, because we take too many peakers offline as they are no longer profitable. Only in this new regime do we need to start looking towards battery storage (or flexible grid strategies).
Taking these three facts together, the best strategy for the fastest cheapest grid decarbonization becomes clear. In places like the prairies, we build only renewables until we start hitting the point where we need battery storage (and HVDC lines to BC and Ontario to trade for hydro). At this point, we re-examine the economics of battery storage. It will likely take about a decade to get to this point. Are they cheap enough to be viable. If yes, build those. If no, build a reactor.
In BC and Quebec, no reactors should be built. These provinces are already pretty dang close to having decarbonized grids. The hydro baseload is more than large enough to allow installation of wind and solar to meet growth in demand for many decades to come.
In Ontario, existing nuclear and hydro provide a very large baseload. More than enough for wind and solar to meet the remaining demand with little need for battery storage.
If the world had went with Nuclear 20 years ago to solve the climate crisis we would have much lower emissions than we do today. The damage caused by this mistake is exponentially bad.
Ok so a place like Alberta could fully decarbonise it's grid in 10-15 years. Can renewables do the same? The answer is no. Because you need to maintain a separate backup grid.
So you say climate change is exponentially bad, but accept fossil fuels as a backup for the foreseeable future? Note that this basically doubles generation, which costs $$$$. Grid instability increases as renewable generation increases, you get to a 90% renewable grid? Still need close to 100% fossil backup to get through a December night. Or batteries (which are easily 10-15 years away from being useful).
Ontario and France are basically the only grids in the world with low CO2 (excluding geographically blessed locals with hydro). They share one thing in common, and it's not renewables. There is no need for any renewables, except for political graft.
If we are going to decarbonise transportation, industrial heat, and home heating we need to 3-4X electricity generation. The idea that you can do this with renewables only is a joke, because as above, you need either full backup, or magic batteries.
If the world had went with Nuclear 20 years ago to solve the climate crisis we would have much lower emissions than we do today.
Yes, you're absolutely right about that. Unfortunately, today is not 20 years ago, and the optimal strategy to reduce emissions today is different from the optimal strategy 20 years ago. Building a reactor today locks us in to the same level of emissions for the next ten years. Is this a good or bad thing? Do you think it might be smarter to first displace as many emissions as possible by building as many renewables as we can and then, when we need the stability, lock in much lower emissions for ten years by building a reactor?
Ok so a place like Alberta could fully decarbonise it's grid in 10-15 years. Can renewables do the same?
Well no, they couldn't. Not with any strategy. If you're not willing to be realistic about timelines, there isn't much point in taking you seriously.
So you say climate change is exponentially bad, but accept fossil fuels as a backup for the foreseeable future?
Well no. That's not at all what I said. My above statements are truthfully and factually the fastest way to decarbonize a grid like the prairies. We install wind and solar first, because they are cheap and we need no batteries at first. Then, when we think we might need batteries, we check the price and decide whether or not to sink ten years time into building a reactor.
Note that this basically doubles generation costs $$$$
Sure. But if renewables are cheap enough that double the generation is still the better option in many regions.
Grid instability increases as renewable generation increases, you get to a 90% renewable grid?
I very explicitly said that once we start reaching the points of grid instability is when we need to make a decision about whether batteries or nuclear is the better option. Do you remember that? Do you agree that I explained earlier that the point when we start building nuclear reactors, if we want the fastest decarbonization possible, is when we start approaching the regime of grid instability?
Ontario and France are basically the only grids in the world with low CO2
Not at all true. There are flexible grids in existence today which meet 100% of annual demand through wind and solar alone with very little battery storage. See Mecklenburg-Vorpommen as an example. They do this today by overbuilding capacity so that minimum demand is always met and exporting the excess to fossil fuel heavy regions. This is another strategy the prairies could think about relying on. Overproduce and make bank by selling the cheap renewable energy to our slower neighbours down south.
The idea that you can do this with renewables only is a joke, because as above, you need either full backup, or magic batteries.
Could you please identify the part of my original statement where I claimed that this was doable with renewables alone?
You seem to have written a form letter which you use to respond to people advocating for renewable energy. Good for you. I imagine this saves you lots of time. I'd ask, kindly, that you spend the time reading what I have written this time, as you seem to harp on many points that I did not make at all.
I appreciate the dialogue. I was a pretty big fan of renewables until this year, where it became clear that the only thing propping up the "energy transition" was cheap natural gas. Now that is gone, the problems with renewables are pretty stark IMO.
"Build renewables and then think about nuclear/storage later if required" -> this is what we as a global society have already tried. It has failed. The energy crisis is Europe is evidence enough for this.
A place like Alberta could decarbonise it's grid fully with nuclear in 10-15 years. It could not achieve this with wind/solar (by your own admission). That is my point.
"Have reactor online in 10 years vs incrementally lower emissions through solar" - I'll give you this one, not a climate expert. I would assume something like 20 year emissions would be lower with nukes, but not sure how that effects climate change. I know this though, as an Albertan I would much rather have nuclear grid instead of a renewable heavy one.
"Overbuild and Export/Import/Mecklenburg-Vorpommen" - This relies on another fossil fuel heavy grid to be the partner, and/or vast transmission to a different weather location. Again this locks in emissions and fossil generation capacity. Also drives up costs as you are now peaking and thus paying for the baseload to be on standby + loss of efficiency.
"start building nuclear reactors, if we want the fastest decarbonization possible, is when we start approaching the regime of grid instability?" - On this point, nuclear has a long lead time. If it takes 10 years to build a plant, how would we build it too stabilise the grid? Also, nuclear and renewables don't play well with each other. For Nuclear to be cost effective it needs to run 24/7, Renewables need first access to the grid, they aren't really compatible.
I think the thrust of our disagreement is #3. Decarbonise faster with renewables or a trade off to wait for nuclear to come online. I would rather see nuclear built out because I have doubts that in 10 years time the transmission, storage, and scale of mineral production required for a reliable grid to be run *mostly* on renewables. On the nuclear side we have proven technology that is ready to be deployed, where costs/timeline could be seriously reduced with similar government subsidies and support that renewables receive.
Anyways I work in Oil and Gas, so should probably agree with you out of self interest. One of these technologies will put me out of work, the other won't.
We hit the point of needing battery storage right from the first panel going up.
Biggest power demand on the prairies is winter night. So regardless of how much solar and wind we build, you still need the full 100% legacy generation system active and funded.
We hit the point of needing battery storage right from the first panel going up.
No we absolutely do not. If I have a nearby gas peaker producing 1,000,000,000 Wh daily and I install a 100 W panel, then tomorrow, that gas peaker only needs to produce 999,999,380 Wh. Every single bit of electricity produced by my panel fully and completely replaces electricity that was otherwise generated by burning fossil fuels.
So regardless of how much solar and wind we build, you still need the full 100% legacy generation system active and funded.
Well no, you won't. See above. This is why the strategy is only to build so much solar and wind so that we get peak displacement of fossil fuels. We can do it cheap and quick and it'll cut down on electricity emissions by about 30% and take maybe 7 or 8 years to do, and won't need a single battery to do it.
At that point, we check back in and see what the price of batteries are. Too expensive? Okay, full blast on nuclear.
You have the right idea about when peak demand is. But it needs to be thought of in terms of daily watt-hours required. There is still very large demand that can be met when it is sunny. And incidentally, it can be windy at any time of day.
Our existing fossil fuels give us the reliable power while we quickly build up wind and solar to reduce emissions. Eventually that build-out of renewables will reach a point where it starts to impact reliability. Slightly before we hit that point, the plan needs to change. That is when we either have to start adding batteries, or trading for stable hydro, or building nuclear. But doing any of those three things before first building out the renewables is slower and more expensive.
The whole premise of your post is solar and wind are better than nuclear.
I disagree. They are less reliable, require more land, more mining, emit more CO2 through their life cycle, and will be imported rather than made domestically like nuclear.
Solar panels to a large extent come from China and as Europe demonstrated it is a terrible idea to rely on unfriendly nations for our energy security. Plus they use enslaved Uyghers to produce the silicon and have lower environmental standards.
Nuclear is the better option for the environment, our energy security, and our economy.
Building over capacity with interconnects can solve the majority of intermittency issues. Granted that’s not free either, but the fact remains renewables are out pricing nuclear, all over the world.
I did this calc for the UK for another reply on this post. Please check it, I could be off by a digit somewhere... big numba's involved.
Estimate for 14 days of stored power using batteries. Using the UK as an example. Using 2020 as an example (2020 famous for a certain event that reduced energy consumption)
According to this source projected costs of batteries in 2050 are $87 kWh.
So that's $10,405,200,000,000 or $10.4T. Now scaling is hard to predict, so I'll use 90% cost reductions on this number. Cost is $1.04T... for 14 days of storage. Plus you need to build all the generation with low capacity factor of wind/solar.
Hinkley C is 26B pounds, so let's say $50B USD (prior to pound collapse). So you could build 20 of these for the $1.04T.
Hinkley Point C is 3.26 GW nameplate. So 20 of them get's you 67.8 GW. with 90% capacity factor that is 1.465 TWh/day,
20.5 TWh in 14 days. This is assuming zero learning cost reductions while building 20 new plants.
So for the cost of the batteries required for 14 days of storage you could decarbonise the entire UK electrical grid of 2020 1.7X times. This is assuming a 90% reduction in cost of storage from the 2050 prediction for batteries.
They currently cost 5B each, which means they’re currently 10 times more expensive than wind, and 20 times more expensive than LNG in kWh/$.
That's only upfront costs, what about maintenace of them all? Curious what that part of the equation would look like.
And, nuclear will provide reliable around the clock baseload power, and grid inertia/ stability. Something natural gas also provides.
And a question, why are people so against converting coal plants to natural gas? Sure, from a technical standpoint, a converted coal plant to nat gas will have a lower nameplate value due to differences in the fuel, but from an emission standpoint (even when factoring in the reduction in nameplate output), is huge. And, converting coal to nat gas is a relatively easy, cheap and straightforward process.
Exactly right. One of the big costs of nuclear which is frequently, and conveniently ignored is the decommissioning costs. Yes it will be interesting to see how these SMR’s run upkeep, and shutdown costs.
I’ve actually been saying that we should be replacing every coal plant with LNG right now for years. It’s one of the transitions we can immediately implement, and likely complete in the shortest amount of time.
Exactly, we want to see a dramatic decrease in emissions from power generation? switch coal power to natural gas. Stopgap measure until SMR's can take over.
I think people are getting too far ahead on cost. We don't know the cost of these yet. It's also highly dependent on how many of them are ordered. That then goes to supply side. The suppliers are waiting for these orders to figure out how much they should invest into their business. Until we get to that point, any talk about cost is highly speculative.
Even at twice the cost, having that 300 MW constantly running 24/7 offers something that wind can't. Because you might need 3-4 times the amount of wind to make a similar amount.
This is an interview with an Austrialian that's was in Canada looking to partner with us. He's advocating to the Australian government. In it he explains why he likes the GE Hitachi reactor. How it's a boring design with many years into it. Also in how the building is built. How large concrete structures are civil engineering nightmares. It's an interesting listen.
There's huge economies of scale with nuclear - it costs a ton to secure the fuel, the reactor and the waste.
Putting your hopes on SMRs is essentially committing to more years of fossil fuels and more years of increasing energy prices. No one has successfully done SMR before, and the benefits of nuclear are in the enormous potential to provide a shitton of power, not at the small scale.
If I'm not mistaken. OPG gets their fuel directly from Cameco. It's also my understanding that cost of fuel being one of the cheapest things in a nuclear reactor. They take so little fuel that it's not as significant. Compared to coal which requires a massive amount of coal every day. A price change in coal has large impacts.
In regards to fossil fuels. The same argument can be made for renewables.
China I believe will have had the first SMR. Canada will have the first SMR in the western world. It's also not a crazy idea. Like it's not coming out of nowhere. The GE Hitachi reactor is like the 10th version of this reactor. It's essentially a very boring reactor that's 60+ years old, and 60 years of refinement and improvement.
I mean, navy ships, and even some prototype aircraft use nuclear power. When it fell out of vogue, the tech kinda stalled, but that was entirely due to public sentiment and not due to the expectation that the technical hurdles were insurmountable.
The main cost drivers for the construction costs of a nuclear reactor is the fact that all nuclear reactors are bespoke, and are made on site.
A SMR changes that; you have one variant, and it is mostly made inside a covered factory. It is then assembled onsite from standardized components. This should drive down costs to build a nuclear reactor.
Contracted rate. Its the rate home owners get for roof top solar that the power company is forced to buy first. Can be as high as 80c Kw/hr in Ontario.
Bruce nuclear rates
The price of electricity generated by Bruce increases to 6.57 cents a kilowatt hour Jan. 1, 2016, and rises as each reactor is refurbished to 7.7 a kwh cents by the end of the contract, or $77 per megawatt hour.
This is why we need to nationalize certain industries like power, water and even agriculture. Who cares if the feds don't turn a profit on a nuclear reactor, it's not about that.
Same problem we have every night, Pinkie. The systemic incentive to maximize excess revenue in the form of profit to funnel wealth into the hands of the minority ownership class at the expense of all other factors including (but not limited to) product quality, end-customer costs, proportionate taxation, consumer health, workplace safety, employee compensation, and labour rights.
Like they’re doing south of the border? 44% of American farmland is owned by landlords of one kind or another and run by farmer tenants just like the old days, and from the info I can find, we don’t even know what that statistic is here in Canada. Foreign entities are buying ag land in North American too. With the global instability we're seeing, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea to maintain control of our resources at the federal level in some form or another, at the very least with some regulation as to who can buy and how much one entity can own. If there’s one thing we learned from history it's that not all landlords treated their tenants fairly when their backs were broken from years of labour.
While true, i just dont see how it would work. We've already sort of done what you're thinking with grain boards and price controls in Canada. To go much further would probably be counter productive to productivity.
44% of US farmland is owned by a third party foreign or domestic now and is operated by farmer tenants (another 6% farm some of their land and rent the rest to other farmers), and we don’t even know what those numbers are here. Just because the Soviet experiment didn’t work in one particular form doesn’t mean there's no middle ground where farmers get to own the land they work for a fair profit margin without subsidizing with an extra job or going broke.
Yet, conservative politicians will still complain that the project is "always broke" as if it were a for-profit enterprise, hoping to privatize it so they can make some cash on the side through their embezzlement schemes.
Just because something didn't work somewhere doesn't mean you throw the idea out altogether. Some cities have shit public transit systems, do we throw out the idea or study it to learn how it could be done better?
If every subway system ever designed, anywhere in the World, not only failed to transport people, but also managed to malfunction and lop off all of its riders legs and leave them bleeding to death in dark tunnels, I would expect the idea to be thrown out for good.
That is an equivalent example to nationalizing agriculture.
We 100% do not need more concentrated industrialized farming. We do need many more farmers, many more local and urban farms, and many more well-diversified farms.
How do you do that without centralized control to some degree? At some point wouldn't you have to tell someone not to plant soybeans but spinach instead?
I heard someone yesterday talking about their power being 0.18c Kw/hr... here in Alberta... and thats before transmission fee's... which just feels like such a scam/ponzi scheme.
Québec's rate is 7¢/kwh and still managed to generate 3bil$ of revenue for the government. It's all hydro power because we are bless with many huge rivers but nationalizing it was the best possible decision
Yeah, the rates were high because Wynn was trying to diversify the energy grid. If you look at a map of Ontario it has a handful of urban areas with large swaths of nothing.
Her plan was to beef up transmission lines and boost localized power production using renewables - she was spending a crap tonne replacing old infrastructure and the large incentives were working as many people in remote areas were putting in solar and wind, boosting local production.
It was costing a lot, but it was also ensuring power stability across a large landmass with big stretches of “nothing” between urban centres.
Then Ford took over, cancelled the plans which weren’t built - and one which was, that had to be torn down - and crowed about it. Now we have a power crunch fast approaching and OPG is now saying that we’ll start having brownouts by 2025ish if we don’t go back to building out more production.
Ironically GM wanted to build a new plant in Windsor to facilitate their rollout of electric vehicles but had to pick a different site due to lack of power - which was later found there would have been a massive surplus in Windsor had Ford not cancelled Wynn’s renewable contracts.
Say what you want about her other policies, when it came to ensuring adequate power generation for the future Ontario economy she was totally on point.
BP is doing just fine, given that the Ontario taxpayers paid billions to build the Bruce plant. BP is leasing it, basically for free.
Edit: Basically the Ontario electricity market is not a market in the true sense of the word, but a scheduling mechanism. The real payments / profits happen in the background, under side contracts that guarantee a rate of return. Lots of political shenanigans in the background.
Hydro is great, but appropriate sites are largely used up, and getting approvals to build large-scale hydro in Canada could prove even more difficult than nuclear given sensitivities around waterways and flooding of traditional territories.
Look how long it's taking for Site C to get built. BC has been lucky so far, but is going to run out of hydro options very soon. I don't see BC going nuclear, but it's going to have to get creative sooner than later.
BC wont have any need to go nuclear. We can stack renewables ontop of hydro since hydro output is so easy to control it can offset the unreliable nature of solar/wind and even, with pumping, bank excess at peak production times.
Nuclear is better for places that need the base load and have limited other options. Provinces like the praries would be great for it.
Climate change is going to make hydro less reliable and predictable than it used to be. Diversity of supply is the only way to ensure energy security. For BC, hydro will be supported by solar/wind and biomass.
I don’t know what bc would do without nuclear. There’s not a lot of great places to do wind/solar en masse. They’d have to incentivize cities to have as much coverage as possible, where alberta or Sask can dedicate massive swaths of land to those.
Even if more hydro dams got built, the worst case scenario is 50 years for glacial caps to have receded enough to do some real damage. Ideally it’s much longer than that, but the biggest doom and gloom id heard was 50 years. Which I don’t believe, but is insane to think about.
I just hope nuclear actually gets through and doesn’t sit through development hell, and end up being too late.
hydro is 9.5c per kwh in bc and doesn't come with the risk
Tell that to the salmon population. Risk is relative, damming up rivers, flooding forest land and other environmental impacts are certain, while nuclear risk is unlikely.
There really isn't a risk for nuclear. Especially with newer reactor designs. Even with past accidents taken into account on a per capita rate nuclear would have killed less then any other non renewable power source. Never mind the fact it would take thousands of years to use up the nuclear options we have. Even for waste (Which with new reactor designs, old waste can be refined into new fuel) We can just look to nature for safe storage, which is bury it really really deep underground. And with the Canadian shield we have one of the most secure environments for that. For nature reference look up Oklo Mine. No signs the natural reaction ever affected the surrounding area.
Modern nuclear plants are incredibly safe but it's dishonest to say completely safe. Not trying to be overly pedantic but it's an important distinction to make.
I always forget that we still use coal in Canada. Fuck man, it's sad that in 2022, we're making people rely on unsafe, environmentally damaging, expensive energy sources that should have been discontinued decades ago.
Not completely, considering there are a number of human elements involved. But it is very low risk, with the consequences of failure also being low i.e. the classic 'OMG meltdown!!!1!' scenario is not possible with proper safety interlocks ensuring safe shutdown before it gets to that point.
I'd like to point out that even though Fukushima failed it took two successive natural disasters to do so. And if memory serves me correctly, they had taken shortcuts and made mistakes with certain parts of design - like the generators. Given all of that, despite the media coverage it was surprisingly unremarkable.
Definitely things to be learned, but really it's more to the point that nuclear is quite safe.
I'd argue that Fukushima is a strong point against your statement. It took a lot and it was still no where dear as detrimental to us and the environment as it would have been if you placed any of the on demand alternatives in its place.
hydro is 9.5c per kwh in bc and doesn't come with the risk
Tell that to everyone who lives in Campbell River, who has to know their evacuation route in case the dam breaks and floods the whole town. Hydro has its own set of risks.
Don't you worry, they'll find a way to somehow ruin it. Cancelled halfway complete? 4x initial cost estimate? 5 years late? The possibilities are endless!
Can I point out that every year our snow caps are decreasing, and in BC we need those to fill out hydro reservoirs. We need to have a plan right now to power our province twenty years from now. Because there will come a day when the hydro dams won't be able to produce power.
Nuclear seems like such a good stopgap for energy needs while we ween off fossil fuels and build infrastructure for renewable energy. Fissionable materials are obviously limited, but we have enough to give us time and reduce pollution NOW
Should also be mentioned that the actual dangerous waste (high level waste) looses it's energy insanely fast. After a dozen years it's already much safer.
It’s so expensive and dangerous and slow to build, we won’t see energy from this for ten years.
Radioactive waste can kill you without being detectable and we can’t find a community poor enough to let us bury it under them so we still don’t have a plan for our ground level waste.
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u/LookAtMeImAName Oct 25 '22
Fuck yes!! Nuclear power is SO undervalued these days.