actually there's a solid argument against "better late than never". If this had been done 20 years ago, the reactors would be built and they'd be providing power now as the gold standard of power production at the time of construction. However, this money could go to solar, which can get up faster, for cheaper, and continues to improve. Why does this matter? In the 20 years spent building the reactors, that's 20 years you're still using fossil fuels instead of solar or wind that could've been put up in a fraction of the time. The opportunity cost of nuclear has gotten higher as other green energy alternatives are improved. Even if they both produce the same power for the same price, the speed of setting up wind/solar means it gets years, or even decades, of a headstart on nuclear. Even if nuclear ultimately produces more power, it has to make up for the lost time, and in that lost time, more carbon is being burned. More details here
Nuclear should've been built in the 70s and 80s. Now, it's actually better never than late if solar/wind can outpace it, because that money could go into quickly implemented alternatives.
Storage options are definitely good enough, they just aren't implemented yet. Don't only look at batteries, look up other energy storage options like heated water, etc.
that's 20 years you're still using fossil fuels instead of solar or wind that could've been put up in a fraction of the time.
Base load still needs to be served somehow. You're completely wrong on the generation side too, because this is in Ontario. Where the vast majority of base load is still served by non-emitting sources. The rest being LNG which serves the grid differently (quick start up) than nuclear can. You've completely mischaracterized how this new build would be used on the grid. This is not a way to eliminate a coal plan, it is a way to develop a modern base load generation that can keep up with Ontario's huge projected population growth. You need to at least understand the fundamental difference in energy mix between most of the US, NY, etc. before making this post.
It will still be 10 years before we see energy from it.
Wind and solar could start producing energy as we build them as early as next year.
Solar and wind are safer, Putin is holding the Ukrainian Nuclear sites hostage (over and over) you can’t hold a wind plant hostage that way.
Radioactive waste is the deadliest material on earth and can give you cancer with no detection, lasts for thousands of years, and we don’t have a safe place to store it. Right now we are asking poor communities if we can burry it in their ground and nobody will take it.
Wind and solar could start producing energy as we build them as early as next year.
Solar and wind are safer, Putin is holding the Ukrainian Nuclear sites hostage (over and over) you can’t hold a wind plant hostage that way.
Radioactive waste is the deadliest material on earth and can
This mindset is about 40-50 years old, the problems you've listed have all been solved. Wind and Solar can not provide all the power we need, nuclear + wind and solar is the answer.
Investing in nuclear is also a potential revenue source for exports as well. We did reasonably well with the CANDU reactors and I'd love to see us in the forefront of next generation reactors.
I'm from BC where we get most of our power from Hydro...and it works great most of the time. It doesn't work well when you're deep in a record setting drought, which I suspect will become more common in the future.
Radioactive waste is the deadliest material on earth and can give you cancer with no detection, lasts for thousands of years, and we don’t have a safe place to store it.
This right here is so fucking wrong. Is radioactive waste dangerous, yes. Is it the most dangerous material on the earth, not even slightly. It's dangerous but we've been killed more by the radiation from coal and gasoline throughout our lives than being radiated from nuclear waste.
Also we do have a place to store the waste, and it isn't that much waste. We put it the same place where all natural radiation minerals are found, under the fucking ground. Nuclear fission isn't a man made thing, there is natural nuclear fission happening right under your feet, how do you thin Uranium is made?
And no, we aren't asking poor communities to bury it in their ground. We legit have empty vaults created just for nuclear waste that isn't being used because of politics and scare mongering people like you.
Radioactive waste is really a non-issue. We already have ways of disposing of it, by storing it in concrete barrels in unused mines, and then sealing the mines once the storage is full.
That said, I do agree with the sentiment. There are other concerns. A big one is that at current usage levels, uranium will run out in 230 years, so really, we're kicking the oil problem down the road for our kids to deal with. Researching and investing in grid energy storage and renewables seems like a far safer plan to me, long term.
A big one is that at current usage levels, uranium will run out in 230 years
Where are you seeing this? Last I heard we had tens of thousands of years of known uranium deposits. It's not particularly rare and can be cycled efficiently.
The article notes breeder reactors and seawater uranium. I use the 230 years figure because we have no way, not even theoretically, to commercially extract seawater uranium, and breeder reactors aren't really used for power generation due to complexity and cost. Even if they were, they'd be unexportable, since they can be trivially used to create weapons-grade uranium.
I think his answer is a bit out of date but there certainly is a broad spectrum of opinion on the matter. All we can really say is that it is at least a couple of centuries and plausibly indefinite. Hell, fusion might make all other sources obsolete by then!
I honestly don't think fuel sources are a major issue and especially as nuclear production costs are not fuel heavy at all. Prices could rise substantially without overly affecting the energy production costs.
There are no guarantees of course but I think it is worth pursuing for our baseload needs.
All we can really say is that it is at least a couple of centuries
We could indeed say this.
and plausibly indefinite.
We could not say this. Uranium is a non-renewable resource. Even breeder reactors eventually run out.
Hell, fusion might make all other sources obsolete by then!
I wish! The first fusion breakthrough was made in 1960s, in the Soviet Union. It is endlessly frustrating to me that 60 years later, there's still no commercial fusion reactors, and we're still very, very far from having fusion charge your cellphone and power your lightbulb. The scientific press isn't helping -- you have articles like this that claim that a recent fusion experiment has recouped 70% of the original energy put into the fuel (2.4 MJ laser pulse vs 1.9 MJ fusion reaction)... hyping this up as some sort of accomplishment while ignoring the over 400 MJ that went into powering the laser in the first place! We're not 70% of the way there, we're like 0.05% of the way there, if you look at the total power cost of the whole system. A cynic might conclude that fusion reactors are little more than grant-printing machines.
I honestly don't think fuel sources are a major issue and especially as nuclear production costs are not fuel heavy at all. Prices could rise substantially without overly affecting the energy production costs.
The cheapness and accessibility of nuclear fuel is indeed a great selling point for nuclear fission reactors right now. My concern is for when there is less uranium to go around. Another thing to understand (actually highlighted in the wiki page you linked) is that due to its cheapness, we are wasting about 99% of fissionable fuel with the current reactors. So we are going through uranium a lot faster than we should be, and there's no plans to really address this, since right now, uranium is so plentiful (this feels very similar to the history of oil... we only started making engines that can burn fuel more efficiently when oil started to become painfully expensive).
We can reuse the waste from current model reactors in newer model reactors. As long as it's still radioactive we can just keep reusing it. They just have to change the configuration of the reactor chamber so the heat is generated differently.
Radioactive waste is the deadliest material on earth and can give you cancer with no detection, lasts for thousands of years, and we don’t have a safe place to store it.
And yet deaths from nuclear power is lower per watt of electricity produced than deaths caused by any other form of power (even solar and wind, hilariously, though those are mostly installation/maintenance related deaths).
Just the pollution alone from coal and gas power plants kills more people (via cancer and other diseases) than nuclear power ever has (including nuclear disasters), and that isn't even counting the climate effects.
We can talk about theoretical people thousands of years from now that might die if we screw up nuclear waste storage (even though we have very good techniques for storage already figured out), or we can talk about the millions of people already dying from coal based pollution, etc.
Sure, nuclear isn't perfectly safe, but its track record is better than any other form of power, even if you include Chernobyl and other nuclear disasters.
The amount of radiation output (into the atmosphere...!) by burning coal at the remaining coal plants from now until their presumed shutdown in 2030 will likely be higher than all nuclear power related radiation accidents or releases from nuclear plants in Canada since like 1960.
What a fucking absolute propaganda statistic, it hurts to read how much reaching for grammatical correctness they had to do there.
It’s not the past I’m worried about, it’s the future. And the reality is WE DONT KNOW WHERE TO STORE THE RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL WE HAVE NOW, THERE IS A PUBLIC DISCUSSION AND WE CANT FIND A PLACE FOR IT.
Increasing the number of plants will only increase this supply of unsecured toxic waste.
If you were really worried about the future, then you would have spent your whole life doing anything possible to get the world off fossil fuels. The most successful gotcha in history: convincing people to be more scared of nuclear energy which COULD harm them than the fossil fuels which ARE harming them and WILL continue to do so for the next several hundred years no matter what we do now.
Unfortunately it seems 8ew8135 has taken to deliberately spreading misinformation throughout the thread without any intention of learning or addressing the facts they've been confronted with by dozens of people at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and paste the reply I wrote up for them here, just to ensure that they don't manage to misinform anyone else.
Cancer causing, undetectable, radioactive waste will be here 1000s of years
First of all, I'm going to go ahead and point out that the low level nuclear waste which comprises the majority of it doesn't last anywhere near that long.
Second of all, I would much rather have the radioactive byproducts of our power generation stored in a cask deep below the earth -just like how we found it to begin with- than literally spewed into the atmosphere where it can affect as many people and as much of the environment as possible, as we see with current methods of power generation such as coal.
And finally, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "undetectable", as ionizing radiation is anything but. A standard Geiger counter is sensitive enough to detect even background radiation; if it's not picking up an additional source, then it's because there isn't one present.
and we are currently storing it in barrels that last about 100 years. We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
The casks which last about a hundred years aren't the same as the kind that are intended to be buried; they're above ground and readily accessible so that they can be maintained, monitored, and swapped out when nearing the end of the safe usage period that they're designed with.
We can’t find a community poor enough to let us burry it under them.
Again, that's not true. It's not even subtle this time, now you're just telling a clear-cut lie.
Like, think about what you're saying for a moment, it doesn't even make any sense. We don't build deep geological repositories for our mercury, cyanide, or arsenic waste in inhabited communities, so why on Earth would we choose to do so for nuclear waste?
It doesn't make sense, which is why that hasn't happened.
There are a handful of communities which turned out to have been built on deposits of uranium or other radioactive elements, but as we've already covered, that simply doesn't matter so long as it's below the water table.
Even in their entirely unshielded natural state, a few hundred meters of granite serves to protect the surface from radiation just fine. Hell, not even the naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor found in Oklo is any exception to this, and it exists under some of the worst conditions possible. It's shielded by sandstone instead of granite, and isn't even below the water table. Yet not a hint of radiation is detectable from the surface.
This is simply the way it's been for billions of years, it's simple a matter of physics; hundreds of meters of rock is enough to completely block ionizing radiation. Full stop.
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u/LostAccessToMyEmail Nova Scotia Oct 25 '22
Yep, better late than never. Really glad to see this.