So yes, there were new power plants coming online, but after budget overruns and missed timelines.
Anyway, nuclear is still great baseline source of energy, so pity we don't build it better.
In the UK, the Hinkley Point C project is over-budget and late, partly because they had problems with their initial concrete pours that necessitated exceptionally costly and time-consuming rebuilds. But as Hinkley gets closer to completion, the lessons learned are being transferred to Sizewell C, another EDF plant. [1]
The world needs these large nuclear plants and we can’t just give up because the first few constructed went over budget and took too long.
[1] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2022/06/23/energy-securit...
The world is notably worse for these projects diverting money away from renewables that would have already been displacing carbon emissions for a decade by now.
Other significant projects to check is the building by KEPCO and ENEC, I think BARAKAH-1 was the first unit connected: https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
There are a lot of teams working on this issue, like Oklo: https://oklo.com
[0] https://www.french-nuclear-safety.fr/asn-informs/news-releas...
In what way? For the price that they actually cost after construction you can get double the capacity in wind, and double the capacity in solar, and a CAES plant capable of storing several days of energy at the same capacity, and the same capacity in a combined cycle gas plant, and a redox flow battery with 12 hours of storage, and a hydrogen electrolyser capable of producing enough hydrogen or methane to run the gas plant with change left over.
All so you can make your energy infrastructure beholden to one fuel supplier where your country is not allowed to produce any yourself. Then you have to find somewhere to put the waste for millenia.
And that only if you're on the short list of countries that the US, China, or France will even sell fuel to.
That's a lofty claim and I have heard CAES storage at economic scales is still unsolved, else we'd see a rocketship company in the space. If you do know of a stealthy rocketship here, who is it?
Production increased from 2.3 TWH in 2015 to 7.8 TWH in 2020, and capacity keeps increasing jumping from 2.3GW in 2020 to 3.3GW in 2021. And that recent growth has been without subsides.
Wind really scales best with hydro as you only get so much rain per year, but you have a great deal of flexibility when you release it. As Finland has a great deal of hydro they can make use of plenty of wind.
If I can choose the time and place for when to do the trade, I would make a huge profit trading 2 units of energy and getting 1 unit back later at my specified time and place. The top price is around 40cent per kwh when the wind is still and demand is at its peak, compared to ~3c kwh when the wind is at the maximum production and demand is at the lowest. paying 6c worth of wind power and getting 40c when I specific it would be massive profit.
Green hydrogen if burned for energy would cost about 3-10 times that of nuclear per kwh. In the future that cost might go down but for now that is a bit (which is why no one are producing green hydrogen in order to produce energy). Again, if you are willing to sell green hydrogen for the price of nuclear, eating the loss, then sign me up. I will happy buy that and sell it for minimum 3x of what I pay for it since there are plenty of industries that want energy when demand is high and supply is low.
The cost of energy is not determined by how much it cost to produce. It is determined by the time and place it is delivered. 1 unit of energy produced today is not fungible for 1 unit of energy produced tomorrow. Only energy produced at the same time can be evaluated based on how much they cost to produce.
Think a high-altitude reservoir where water is pumped up all night and then released all day when it's required.
The biggest problem is getting permission to move that much water around. I live next to a lake and shudder at the regulatory hurdles I'd encounter building something like this. There'd be at least 4 government agencies before I even negotiated to sell to the public utility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
Wind power doesn't work like that. Instead of a daily pattern of high and low supply, you get random amount of weeks and days of high supply followed by random amount of weeks and days of low supply.
Storage need to discharge in order to generate profits. If you get 30-50 discharge cycles each year, then those periods need to provide profits for the cost of 365 days of operations and it also need to repay the original investment.
One way to get around this is with subsidies. This is how some fossil fuel plants operate, called "reserve energy". When the wind blow they don't run the generator, but they still get paid through tax money. Then they start the engines when the wind isn't blowing and demand exceed supply. This scheme helps to reduce the peak price in northern Europe, through obviously it isn't really that cheap. It mostly just hide the true price behind subsidies.
And the capacity factor of wind is ~33%, which means you need ~3 times as much wind as nuclear. The capacity factor of solar is ~25%, so you need four times as much:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#United_States
It's also with noting that nuclear has a higher capacity factor, but it's not 100%.
And then LCOE isn't even the right metric, because what matters is the CO2 produced by 2040, not the CO2 produced between 2040 and 2100 as we have to solve this now, or the world will be too unstable to finish a nuc.ear reactor, let alone run one until decomissioning. This makes the LCOE of renewables a little higher, but for nuclear it is between 10x and infinity times the cost per unit carbon.
None of this have ever happened beyond "research" projects at extremely small scale. You can't take nuclear "actually cost after construction" - which in some countries like Korea or China is maybe 20% more than original estimations - and apply assumption that anything of this is actually able to scale, not even talking about cost of this.
you are aware that you are posting on an article about Ontario and Saskatchewan, correct?
How about you go review the tables showing how little solar energy these provinces receive in the winter?
So when we need energy to heat our homes and power our lights, our solar output is also greatly reduced?
Solar may be great further south, where it is sunny all year round, but in the north we need reliable power all year long, including our cold and dark winters.
It doesn't get cold and snow here for no reason, it is caused by the reduction in solar energy we receive.