Canada Plans 'Nuclear Renaissance' With Up To 10 Reactors Built By 2040 (www.cbc.ca) 181
Canada has unveiled a national strategy to build up to 10 new nuclear reactors over the next 15 years as it seeks to double electricity-grid capacity by 2050. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson called it a plan for a "new civilian nuclear renaissance."
"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," Hodgson said. "There is no credible plan for Canada to become an energy superpower if we choose not to build upon one of the strongest energy advantages we have." CBC News reports: The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035. It also calls for a Canadian-made microreactor to be finalized by 2035 and deployed to a remote community by the late 2030s. [...] Right now, Canada has four nuclear power plants -- three in Ontario and one in New Brunswick -- which generate about 15 per cent of Canada's electricity.
A new proposed facility at the existing nuclear plant in Darlington, Ont., would see the first small modular reactor in the G7, capable of producing up to 300 megawatts per unit. Saskatchewan is also looking at the potential to bring small nuclear reactors online by the mid 2030s. The energy deal between Ottawa and Alberta also committed to collaborating on developing a strategy to build a nuclear power plant. Officials from Natural Resources Canada told reporters in a background briefing that construction of the reactors outlined in the new national strategy could cost more than $100 billion. The strategy does not say how Canada would pay for them, though an official pointed to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund as possible funding sources. Hodgson said the strategy would double the 90,000 jobs in Canada's nuclear sector "over the coming decades."
The plan also looks to expand sales of Candu reactors to new export markets. It says the government wants to break into at least four new international markets by 2040 and "engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon, cementing Canada as their partner of choice." Thirty Candu reactors currently operate around the world, including in South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Pakistan and Romania, and there are plans to build two more. [...] "Reactor exports are not transactional. They establish multi-decade partnerships, creating durable geopolitical and commercial relationships that advance Canada's broader foreign policy interests," the strategy says. "As Canada works to diversify its trading relationships and strengthen ties with middle powers, Candu can be a central instrument of that strategy."
"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," Hodgson said. "There is no credible plan for Canada to become an energy superpower if we choose not to build upon one of the strongest energy advantages we have." CBC News reports: The strategy calls for construction to start on two new large-scale reactors by 2035, for five more to be planned or under development by 2040 and for at least one reactor to be under construction outside Ontario by 2035. It also calls for a Canadian-made microreactor to be finalized by 2035 and deployed to a remote community by the late 2030s. [...] Right now, Canada has four nuclear power plants -- three in Ontario and one in New Brunswick -- which generate about 15 per cent of Canada's electricity.
A new proposed facility at the existing nuclear plant in Darlington, Ont., would see the first small modular reactor in the G7, capable of producing up to 300 megawatts per unit. Saskatchewan is also looking at the potential to bring small nuclear reactors online by the mid 2030s. The energy deal between Ottawa and Alberta also committed to collaborating on developing a strategy to build a nuclear power plant. Officials from Natural Resources Canada told reporters in a background briefing that construction of the reactors outlined in the new national strategy could cost more than $100 billion. The strategy does not say how Canada would pay for them, though an official pointed to the Canadian Infrastructure Bank and the Canada Growth Fund as possible funding sources. Hodgson said the strategy would double the 90,000 jobs in Canada's nuclear sector "over the coming decades."
The plan also looks to expand sales of Candu reactors to new export markets. It says the government wants to break into at least four new international markets by 2040 and "engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon, cementing Canada as their partner of choice." Thirty Candu reactors currently operate around the world, including in South Korea, China, India, Argentina, Pakistan and Romania, and there are plans to build two more. [...] "Reactor exports are not transactional. They establish multi-decade partnerships, creating durable geopolitical and commercial relationships that advance Canada's broader foreign policy interests," the strategy says. "As Canada works to diversify its trading relationships and strengthen ties with middle powers, Candu can be a central instrument of that strategy."
Cool! (Score:2)
Hopefully they have cooler water than in France right now.
The Golfech nuclear power plant had to be stopped on Monday because of the river reaching 28 degrees centigrade. This is the legal limit they decided on for plant and animal life protection.
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It's not an arbitrary limit either. Previously they killed a large amount of wildlife and plants by dumping hot water into the river during a heatwave. Their nuclear plants were not designed for climate change.
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Hopefully they have cooler water than in France right now. The Golfech nuclear power plant had to be stopped on Monday because of the river reaching 28 degrees centigrade. This is the legal limit they decided on for plant and animal life protection.
The Great Lakes are very large and less prone to this than a river.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Bye bye gas turbines... maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
It is a hopeful sign, but I fear any new generation will be gobbled up by the mega-datacenter projecrts and ridding the grid of gas turbines will remain an aspirational goal. Ontario, where I live, is powered largely by a mix of hydroelectric and nuclear, dont think there is any coal left. When the 'green' energy plague rolled in there was an exxplosion of gas turbines for peak and backfill for the inevitable slumps in wind and solar. Track record for nuclear builds and refurbishments has been pretty good -- the last project finished ahead of schedule and under budget. Dont know much about how the other provinces handle it but locally there is a lot of construction and operational knowlege. Wind and solar might be fine for off-grid stuff where the demand can be managed but they are not dispatchable, although the big battery banks do help but bring their own risks. When Ontario went down this road their greenhouse gas production went up... so much for dumping coal.
Re: Bye bye gas turbines... maybe (Score:3)
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Fellow Ontarian here, and much less knowledgeable than you when it comes to our nuclear industry. How did our GG emissions end up increasing as a result of nuclear power plants?
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GHG went up because of all the gas turbines deployed in a rush during the wind/solar rollout blitz. But it should not be ignored that making the cement for both the nukes and the wind turbines generates huge amounts of GHG. Why I excluded the material fabrication emissions in the discussion. Sadly, no free lunch.
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And that concrete will reabsorb the CO2 over the next decades while it continues to reharden into "rock".
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Observation on the concrete -- the huge masses of concrete used as footers for wind turbines are buried, so minimal exposure to the atmosphere. Concrete in nuclear sites, at least the ones I have seen, are mostly above ground and penetrated with voids -- so greater chance of exposure.
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Why? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is for AI slop isn't it? We're going to get a whole bunch of unsafe nuclear reactors thrown up as cheaply as possible to power AI data centers. Meanwhile by 2030 AI slop will be guzzling enough water for 1 billion people.
There is no way the businessmen involved in building these reactors are going to want to spend the time and money to properly maintain them let alone decommission and shut them down when they are no longer
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Sometimes your posts make sense.
Sometimes they are idiotic. This one is idiotic.
Canada is building CANDU reactors. They invented them, they designed them.
They are not unsafe, they just unfortunately produce the same / similar waste "standard reactors" do.
Otherwise they are actually quite fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
One of the neat tricks CANDU reactors can do is burning the "waste" from "standard" reactors. They can also run on thorium.
This reads like a fantasy novel (Score:2, Interesting)
If they start today with full steam ahead precisely zero reactors will be operational by 2040. The planning and siting will take years before any actual project can start. You're looking at 2045 at a minimum for maybe one operational reactor.
Also exporting Candu? Who would buy that? No one wanted it previously, it was basically obsolete compared to others, with even Chinese reactors beating it on tech. All development for a GenIV design were scrapped, all development for Candu SMR were scrapped. Right now t
Re:This reads like a fantasy novel (Score:4, Informative)
If they start today with full steam ahead precisely zero reactors will be operational by 2040. The planning and siting will take years before any actual project can start. You're looking at 2045 at a minimum for maybe one operational reactor.
Site construction progress - Spring 2026;
Excavation and blasting of all three major on-site shafts – tunnel boring machine launch shaft, reactor building shaft, and forebay shaft – is now complete. In April, the 2.1 million pound diaphragm plate steel composite basemat – the foundation of the Unit 1 reactor building – was successfully placed 35 metres down into the reactor shaft, allowing for construction on the reactor building to begin moving upwards. A dedicated crane foundation pad is being prepared beside the reactor shaft to support a tower crane which will be used for component installation and material handling activities at the reactor building. At the turbine building, pile installation is nearing completion, while construction of the Administration and Control Buildings remains on track. Construction of the Holt Switching Station continues to progress. This station will transmit electricity generated by Unit 1 to Ontario’s electricity grid until the planned SMR units are connected to the Bowmanville Switching Station. The tunnel boring machine – nicknamed Harriet Brooks - is being assembled ahead of tunneling commencement in support of the Condenser Cooling Water system later this summer.
https://www.opg.com/projects-s... [opg.com]
Don't quit your day job. Maybe watch some educational movies.
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I believe Saskatchewan is already preparing to have a reactor or two operating well before 2040.
Of course, if the communists win the next election it will probably be cancelled.
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I believe Saskatchewan is already preparing to have a reactor or two operating well before 2040.
Of course, if the communists win the next election it will probably be cancelled.
Several other provinces are looking to get on board if OPG's numbers work out for the SMRs currently under construction. No real reason to think they won't, they have an excellent track record.
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My take is this is to keep the dumb, but loud nuclear fabois quiet. Give them something imaginary that they are too mentally limited to recognize for what it is.
No-ranium (TM) Radiative Nuclear Fusion Capture (Score:3)
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My take is this is a lie by misdirection, used to keep certain loud nil wits quiet. There is no way Carney does not know the abysmal economic numbers and the horrible external dependencies of nuclear power. Also, maybe they want one or two reactors to build up a nuclear weapons capability in case the US goes completely down the drains.
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What a totally insightless statement.
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> Wind and battery-backed solar are adequate to this purpose
You do realize Canada is at a high latitude, winters can drop below -40, and solar panels can go for days in winter producing maybe 10% of their rated power due to clouds?
Besides which, AI data centres require reliable power.
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producing maybe 10% of their rated power due to clouds?
The only way a solar panel is producing 10% of their rated capacity is during dark thick storm clouds which never last all day. Typically on overcast days solar panel output ranges from 25-35%. Incidentally the UK has no problem with solar despite being at a higher latitude and with more bad weather than most of Canada. If a bunch of whinging britts can do it why are you so weak?
Re:No-ranium (TM) Radiative Nuclear Fusion Capture (Score:4)
Dude, I have solar panels at my house in Canada. I know how much they produce, and it's around 10% of rated power on cloudy days in winter.
I looked at setting the house up so it could run entirely on solar and ended up calculating that I'd need at least 30kW of panels and 60kWh of batteries and would still have to cut out anything power-intensive on cloudy days because more than two in a row in winter would leave me out of power otherwise.
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That implies you only have exceptional thick clouds, or call thin clouds not cloudy.
Your math makes sense, but with current prices - unless you have idiotic Trump tariffs - that would be a roughly $20k - 30k investment. Probably still to expensive right now ... for your use case.
Point is: you are over dramatic about the loss during clouds. Perhaps you have odd, age old panels?
We are talking about: production over the day, in kWh. During clouds the panels do not have the close to 100% peek, but produce "all
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Or maybe just heavy snow on the panels which can make them produce 0%.
Take Winnipeg for example. In December the Peak Sun Hours calculation is 1. That means they on average product 1KW/h per square meter PER DAY.
https://peaksunhours.app/canad... [peaksunhours.app]
Perhaps you don't live in a north climate and instead are in the sun belt so you are unaware of these challenges. The Earth also does this tilt as it rotates, and in the winter months Canada has very short days with little to no sun due to clouds that can last a week
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Or maybe just heavy snow on the panels which can make them produce 0%.
Snow doesn't stick to solar panels very well at all, and industrial solar parks use single axis trackers, simply moving to the stow position periodically cleans them.
Fun fact solar is the energy source of choice for the most snowy and inhospitable areas of the planet. There are grid scale solar farms withing both Artic and Antarctic circles.
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Just as long as it's outside of those periods of completely end ending darkness.
Solar is simple to rollout, it's used on Mars which is even more inhospitable than the arctic poles.
Large storms can still cause problems and those aren't rare.
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I know how much they produce, and it's around 10% of rated power on cloudy days in winter.
Your house is not an ideal place for solar panels. Solar parks and grid scale solar are designed with efficiency in mind. Yeah my solar panels produce fuck all compared to properly placed solar parks as well.
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Wind and battery-backed solar are adequate to this purpose. They're already very effectively displacing fossil fuel power plants elsewhere. They get more economically attractive every day.
They have run the numbers. Adding significant storage to renewables increases the cost substantially.
https://smrroadmap.ca/wp-conte... [smrroadmap.ca]
New CANDU? (Score:2)
CANDUv2, I'm sure that will be developed at the same speedy pace as EPR2.
In the end ... (Score:2)
Nuclear technology can use some love (Score:3)
I wish the technology existed that converted radiation or heat directly into electricity in a similar manner as to
how solar panels work.
If you want to piss off a Nuclear Engineer, remind them that their big fancy setup is just a complicated and :P
expensive hot water heater used to make steam.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:4, Interesting)
If they can put nuclear there, they can put other stuff there. The Chinese have solved the terrain issues too, they install wind turbines and solar panels on the sides of mountains with drones.
https://noticiasambientales.co... [noticiasambientales.com]
Nobody wants a nuclear plant in their back yard either.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:2)
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Sounds very expensive, and potentially a big problem when they have a meltdown. What water source are they using for cooling?
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:2)
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I also believe that molten salt, which is used in Chinese plants, can provide a cooling alternative to water alone. We're not talking about the relatively low AI data centre heat output and heat management.
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Accounting for risk just means they looked at the design and decided that the probability of a meltdown was low, which incidentally is exactly what the Soviets did. Even assuming that their evaluation was correct and we get lucky and none of the failure modes they found actually happen, there is also a chance that it wasn't built exactly to spec and that causes problems.
Molten salt is a bad idea. Liquid sodium ignites on contact with air, so if there is any small leak you have a really nasty fire. The ones
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:5, Informative)
It is not liquid sodium. It is just more or less standard cooking salt. Hence the name: liquid salt
The name is actually âoemolten saltâ and it is generally something more exotic like LiF-BeF2, LiF-NaF-KF or NaCl-MgCl2, not simple table salt (NaCl).
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Chernobyl did not melt down.
It suffered a Graphite Explosion.
Completely different things.
Those are, indeed, completely different things but only one of them happened at Chernobyl. The graphite didn't explode, the explosion was caused by steam. The reactor also melted down. you can see pictures of the rather famous "elephant foot" proving such.
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It is not called a steam explosion when the graphite moderator block explodes in fire. Obviously in such an explosion a lot of steam from the cooling system is created.
The graphite was not the material that provided the explosive force, the steam was. That's why it's called "a steam explosion." If you blow up a rockface with TNT, it's a "TNT explosion" and not "a rock explosion." This is not a difficult concept.
Fukushima "melted down" after power loss, due to the tsunami, and steam explosions wrecking the reactor vessels
Damn, you just love getting shit wrong. They were hydrogen explosions.
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Looking up a nuclear plant near me, the sustained power output is about a gigawatt.
Roughly looking up peak theoretical solar for a farm that could sit in the same footprint, it touches *maybe* 500 MW under impossibly ideal conditions.
Power density story is rough.
Further, the latitude causes some challenges seasonally for solar.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:2)
Great Scott! We just need 0.21 gigawatts more!
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:2)
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But then you need about 5 acres for support equipment and another 40-100 acres for a security perimeter (minimum). It is also just 1/3 the capacity needed for current generation data centers.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:2)
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If they can put nuclear there, they can put other stuff there. The Chinese have solved the terrain issues too, they install wind turbines and solar panels on the sides of mountains with drones.
The Chinese have built more nuclear plants in the last 15 years than the rest of the world combined and currently have 39 currently under construction. They are smart enough not to put all their eggs in one basket. They have plans for many more reactors in the future and are building an impressive supply chain for export.. We hope to do the same for smaller ones.
https://world-nuclear.org/info... [world-nuclear.org]
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And yes I want a nuclear power plant in my backyard.
I'd be fine with that as well. I already live just a few miles from Canada's only level 4 biolab. Same sort of people worry about that too.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems like they have the sense to realize nuclear is likely the best option for long term, clean, reliable, industrial grade energy source with a high return of energy generated per square meter of footprint. Wind and solar have their place. It's not an either-or discussion, it's a fit for purpose one.
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Is it really fit fur purpose when it's so expensive, and takes so long to build? 2050 is a long time to wait for some expensive energy. Don't Canadian industry and domestic customers need it ASAP?
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Time to build has two issues. If quality of work is the focus, then spending time to make SURE things like concrete aren't deficient in some way. Going with cheap materials might cause problems later. Being extra careful with quality is just a good idea. And then, you have the lazy contractor issue, where some politicians don't impose strict guidelines and rules. If the contractor claims it will be done in 2 years for XXXXX amount of money, then government should say, "if it takes 10 years, you wo
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it really fit fur purpose when it's so expensive, and takes so long to build? 2050 is a long time to wait for some expensive energy.
First up, you're mixing up two dates. The summary references ten reactors that are to be online by 2040, which is 14 years away. The 2050 date is the target to double the capacity of the grid. Only part of that is this nuclear project.
Don't Canadian industry and domestic customers need it ASAP?
In a word, no. Our capacity is currently such that we have reasonably-priced electricity all the way down to the consumer. While we do project ever-increasing demand, we're not - in general - in an undersupply situation. In fact, we sell quite a bit of power to the US.
This whole project is about ensuring that it stays that way.
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Hopefully Slashdot will be around in 14 years time, and if it is I will eat my metaphorical hat if they have 10 new reactors online and actually producing useful amounts of energy for the grid.
Re: What's the motivation? (Score:5, Funny)
It is more likely that Canada has 10 new reactors on-line in 14 years than Slashdot having Unicode support by then.
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I don't see the basis of Funny, especially since there was a Japanese version of Slashdot that apparently had Unicode a long time ago. Lost code problem? Or was it actually a Shift-JIS nightmare?
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The summary references ten reactors that are to be online by 2040, which is 14 years away.
If the summary promised you'll be riding on a unicorn powered rainbow will you believe it? There's precisely ZERO chance of having a single reactor online with 14 years of a policy decision. Even China take 10 years to build them on existing approved and completely planned locations, and they actually have a meaningful industry supporting the construction.
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The no brainer for them is:
- they can/do engineer them themselves
- they have all the industries to make all parts "at home"
- they have all the resources they need
- they have the man power, engineers with the education needed
- they have the fuel, and the capacity to process it to the way they want it
In other words: they do not have to buy shit from asshole countries
- Oh, and if some idiot would manage to create a Chernobyl, as sure as hell he would get executed.
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You seem to be latched on to numbers that don't matter in order to justify your OOH NEATO GLOWING ROCKS MAKE POWER fetish.
The primarily nuclear derived power in Ontario, Canada is quite competitive price-wise and slightly less than the overall North American average price.
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Yes? Canada's solar, wind and storage capacity is all growing at double digit rates and BC just finished an enormous new set of hydropower dams.
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The people to the south will pay anything for electricty during certain times.
3 to 5 billion Can dollars per year.
The cash flow from the exchange over the boarder. Canada economy would stop without energy exports.
Volume: 35.64 TWh (enough to power over 3.3 million U.S. households).
Total Value: $3.13 billion CAD.Net
Exports: 12.43 TWh (accounting for Canada's growing electricity imports from the U.S.).
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The total Canada government budget ---
Canada's total federal bud
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Because by 2050 nuclear is going to be completely irrelevant and look like an even worse economic deal than it is today.
Could you expand on this statement? Do you mean that other sources like solar and wind will be so much more valuable that nuclear power could not compete?
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Nuclear power is already highly uncompetitive on cost. If you look at how fast renewables are growing, and how far ahead with them some other countries are, it's pretty clear that by 2050 the market is going to be saturated with cheap and abundant energy.
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With the rate datacenters are gobbling up all the electricity they can get, I don't think 'abundance' is quite what you expect it to be.
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Re:What's the motivation? (Score:4, Informative)
. If you look at how fast renewables are growing
Solar is, by far, leading the growth of renewables. Solar is not a good source of energy in Canada, due to their high latitude (the angle of the sun is much less thus passing through more atmosphere), the disparity in amount of daylight received from season to season, and then the amount of snowfall they get, which covers solar panels.
Nuclear is one of the better sources of clean energy for a country like Canada.
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Is latitude really an issue for solar in Canada? There are plenty solar farms dotted around the English countryside. London, in the south of the UK, and at 51.3 degrees north is further north than of most of populated Canada. That's the same latitude as the southern tip of Hudson Bay. It's halfway between Calgary and Edmonton, but north of Vancouver and a long way north of Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City.
If you'd said snow cover was an issue, I wouldn't have objected ;)
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My panels produce about 4x as much power in the summer as in the winter. Winter can hit -40C or below, and the bozos in Ottawa want us to switch to electric heating.
So yes, it is kind of a problem here.
Snow too, but the optimal angle for winter production is near vertical where snow is less of an issue. That way the panels pick up light reflected from nearby snow as well as direct sunlight from the sun.
Re:What's the motivation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Montreal and Toronto do get around 26% more sunlight than London, in terms of hours per year, but London doesn't really have winter either. They don't get 85 inches of snow per year like Montreal.
Canada's power already comes from renewables as a strict majority: 57.4% from hydro, 9.1% from other renewables. For the clean-but-non-renewables, you've got nuclear at 13.5%. The vast majority of the rest is natural gas. But hydro can be difficult and expensive to expand (even if it's cheap in the long-run), and many renewables other than hydro struggle to serve base-load applications.
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What's the real motivation here? Are they thinking that they missed the bus on renewables and that nuclear might be an export industry one day in the distant future? Or just back handers for politicians making this decision? Surely they don't want weapons.
Because by 2050 nuclear is going to be completely irrelevant and look like an even worse economic deal than it is today.
Actually, as per TFA the plan IS to have "at least four new international markets by 2040 and engage six to 10 new nuclear entrant markets over a 15-year horizon".
I can't speak for my government nor my fellow Canadians, and this news is a surprise to me. My first thought also was about solar and wind farms. But then I remembered something I've been pondering recently: with the not-reliably-predictable weather changes coming as a result of AGW, are wind and solar a good long-term bet?
Could weather become sev
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Betting on international markets developing seems unwise. There are proliferation issues, and countries we do trust to have civilian nuclear tend to want it to buy the technology in and run it themselves, so they aren't dependent on someone else to keep it operating, and so that the huge investment goes back into their own market.
And since you mention climate change making some types of generation fail, France is shutting down nuclear plants again due to the extreme heat.
Solar and wind are fine with climate
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The electricity grid has limitations because it was designed around centralized generation,
and the intermittent nature of solar and wind power has problems with reliability and storage.
There is a need for electricity even in the middle of windless winter nights,
and while nuclear power is not completely free from carbon emissions, it is much smaller than that of fossil fuels.
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Nuclear is not dispatchable and so it has the same problem as renewables of producing enough electricity when it is needed.
The solution for both is the same: grid storage.
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A nuclear generator can generate electricity at any time of the day regardless of the weather or season
and typically has a capacity factor of 85-95 percent, meaning it delivers electricity almost all the time.
This makes nuclear power a reliable baseload power source.
Whereas for wind power that is only 25-40 percent.
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That almost never happens, because it's cheaper to run at 100% 24/7 and import and export electricity as needed to meet demand. For this reason, no country runs on 100% nuclear power, even France doesn't. But grid storage can change this.
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See
https://fdehydro.com/base-load... [fdehydro.com]
-> Base Load = The minimum power a grid needs at all times, delivered at a steady, constant rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
-> Capacity factor = The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of actual electrical energy output over a given
period of time to the theoretical maximum electrical energy output over that period.
And check the Wikipedia curve for different energy sources.
Re:What's the motivation? (Score:4, Informative)
>>What's the real motivation here? Are they thinking that they missed the bus on renewables and that nuclear might be an export industry one day in the distant future?
One word: mining. Canada is the second largest producer and largest exporter of uranium in the world. 33% of the US's uranium comes from Canada. Nuclear is ALREADY a huge export industry for Canada, and developing new uses for it like micro-reactors is way to expand the market (which until recently had been in decline).
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Ah, that explains it. SMRs do go through fuel even faster than full size reactors.
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In a word, winter.
No sun, dead calm, very cold.
Look up how many hours of day light Winnipeg gets in December.
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So now is when you get to plot out the duration of no wind periods. Then ask yourself how many tons of batteries it will take to get through the calm periods.
I did that for the local conditions here in eastern Washington. I had to invert a new unit, the aircraft carrier equivalent. It was quite common to need the equivalent of over 20 aircraft carriers in batteries to get through the inversions which feature both heavy overcast and dead calm.
It was quite the wake-up.
Favorite graph here,
https://transmission. [bpa.gov]
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This will make less people die from air pollution, a lot less.
You can create all sorts of conspiracy theory nut things on top of this.
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Because by 2050 nuclear is going to be completely irrelevant and look like an even worse economic deal than it is today.
The average consumer electricity cost in Ontario, Canada (~65% nuclear) is half that of Europe. They don't need your advice at all, it's not very useful.
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Probably just some magic thinking and maybe some political tactics. I do expect the Canadian leadership knows quite well that nuclear power makes no sense whatsoever at this time and that SMRs are worse and entirely unproven. But note the timeline and that it is all SMRs. Make the right type of contract, have the first SMR deliverer not perform, point out that the projects are not needed anymore, and the financial damage stays quite limited.
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Politicians seem to like nuclear. Lots of public money for their pals, and it takes so long they will be long gone by the time it gets delayed and costs overrun.
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How do you figure? Fusion reactors seem to always be 5-10 years away. Battery tech could theoretically improve and come down in cost enough to make it truly viable as type of base load power when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing. We could finally come up with a viable way to viable generate electricity from the ocean while also not killing what lives in there.
But all
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Since you keep stating over and over that everyone else has no understanding of what base load means when it comes to the electrical grid, please give us your definition since all others seem to fall right in line with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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CANDU is fine. It's mostly about "eating our own dogfood" in terms of energy.
I am not opposed to building more nuclear reactors, I am opposed to building reactors that are not safe by design. A reactor that requires enriched uranium, leads us to the problem we see in Iran. We have not seen any meltdowns with CANDU, but we have seen nuclear material exfiltration from countries who we have exported CIRUS (Research Reactor) to. Specifically India. India has no Uranium, so they use Thorium.
In terms of "where",
Re: Oil and Gas Trolls (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, who needs plastics, fertilizer, or chemical feedstock?
Re: Oil and Gas Trolls (Score:2)
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Produce ship-sized SMRs. Problem solved.
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Re:That makes sense (Score:4, Funny)
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Found one of the fools this hallucination is designed to impress. Apparently quite successful.