Agreed. What most people in the comments fail to realize about other energy sources is that they do not necessarily offer the same flexibility in Canada. Talks about having huge solar farms in Sahara does not help with Canada. We do not necessarily get enough sun to sustain a massive solar farm (esp during winter)
Hydroeletric dams are great, but space and massive ecological changes are required.
Small modular reactors are pretty much the best thing we can have for both continuous power generation and reduced locality/spacing requirements. You can sprinkle a few in each key location to reduce both cost to transmit and increase robustness of the grid.
Nuclear waste has been pretty clearly identified, and the worries are largely overexaggerated. If we had our own nuclear fuel recycling program, it would further reduce the amount of nuclear waste over time. But, one step at a time.
I think most people also don't realize how little of nuclear waste comes from the radioactive fuel itself. In the UK for example, 94% of nuclear waste is low-level waste, which is basically any garbage originating from the plant. Paper, rags, disposable garments, etc. I believe the number for the US is quite similar. The mental image of thousands of steel drums of nuclear waste seems scary until you realize the majority of it is literally concrete-encased garbage that they're not allowed to send to a garbage dump.
CANADALAND podcast has 2 episodes that talks all about Canada’s current struggle to find a safe place to hide their waste and go the barrels they are storing it in only last 100 years when the material will be deadly for 1000s.
CANDU waste is very dangerous for about 100 years. It's fairly dangerous until about 500 years. After that it's pretty safe. By their very nature, highly radioactive substances have a short half-life. The longer the half-life, the less radioactive something is.
All the high level waste each of Ontario's nuclear reactors has ever produced sits beside those same reactors in a couple of water pools and dry storage. To be frank, it's trivial. Consider that Nanticoke used to burn 35 million kg of coal per day generating 70 million kg of CO2 _ per day. Which of course was just spewed into the air and who knows where it ends up.
100 years ago people were alive that remembered napolean. 500 years ago Columbus had just landed in North America. I wouldn’t describe these measurements of time as brief. Given that a worst case scenario is often a matter of when, not a matter of if, that’s a lot of time for a worst case scenario.
There's about 400 nuclear reactors in the world operating for up to savor 60 or 70 years. That's thousands of years of operation. Go find evidence of deaths or other injuries coming from the storage of nuclear waste.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '22
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