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Comment by osuairt | Hacker News Reader

There is a push by conservative Canadian politicians in Ontario and Saskatchewan to use Uranium.

Saskatchewan wants to have a mining contract. While Doug Ford of Ontario, wants to maintain the energy monopoly in the province, and has actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.

I would gather that you will be hearing less about this after Doug Ford leaves.

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While I also hate Ford and think he's a national embarrassment, 60% of Ontario's power comes from 3 nuclear power plants: Bruce, Darlington and Pickering. We're happy with our nuclear [1]. We'd be happy with wind and solar too - but substantially the entire Ontario grid is already renewable. 92% zero-carbon power. [2]

[1] https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/canadians-support-gove...

[2] https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

If you have to mine a finite Uranium resource from Saskatchewan, you do not have renewable energy.

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-sources...

Ah yes, the old “what will we do in 10000 years when the Uranium runs out” problem.

Easily mined uranium will deplete in less than 100 years unless we start using breeder or thorium reactors that are more efficient in using up fuel.

100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean. Breeder technology, and (thorium fuel cycle) are pretty well understood at this point. In fact, CANDU reactors widely deployed already support thorium fuel cycle. The reason we don't use them is because with all the uranium available, it's not necessary.

We could say the same about lithium supplies. It turns out 'mining' something measured in the parts per billion is enormously damaging to environments and quite expensive to the point of impracticality

Early stages, but current state of the art involves putting fabric out that captures the uranium passively. [1]

> Mining of underground uranium has environmental challenges not encountered with extracting it from the oceans. And Wai says the fibers, which have affinity for more heavy metals than just uranium, can likely be used one day to clean up toxic waterways themselves. He says the fibers have potential to extract vanadium, an expensive metal used in large scale batteries, from the oceans instead of mining it from the ground.

[1] https://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4514

Yes, filtering ocean water for material is a well known technique. You need a massive throughput of ocean water for a small output and you also filter salts, other metals, polymers, and sea life. You must further refine those materials to get the stuff you want. You also change the ph of the filtered water in a way that would be disastrous if reinjected, and you consume filter media quickly. That all adds up to a huge waste and massive ecological damage.its simply not practical at scale.

I'm curious why you think deploying some of these fabrics would change the pH of the ocean? There are geological processes which replenish dissolved uranium in the ocean per the article I linked. I haven't seen any particular waste or sustainability concerns. The nice thing about uranium is that it's so incredibly energy dense that you don't really need to pull out all that much. I'm not ready to be so defeatist.

I defer to the researcher.

> "We have chemically modified regular, inexpensive yarn, to convert it into an adsorbent which is selective for uranium, efficient and reusable," said Chien Wai, president of LCW Supercritical Technologies. "PNNL's capabilities in evaluating and testing the material, have been invaluable in moving this technology forward."

> 100,000 years supply is dissolved in the ocean.

Yes, but that's not so easily mined. Point being that the cost of nuclear power will go up once the easily mined material is consumed.

Surprisingly not really. The cost of fissile material is extremely small relative to the cost of generated electricity. Raw uranium contributes $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear power. In breeders it’s $0.000015/kWh. The article I linked suggested that even today sweater extraction costs just double what mining costs, so 3/10th of a cent per kWh.

This is why we don’t use breeder reactors right now. The cost of uranium is a rounding error relative to the value of the generated electricity.

"Suggested cost" is speculative. We won't know what it will really cost to scale until we actually start doing it.

There are also reasons to use breeders beyond fuel cost, such as dramatically decreasing the amount of waste and the time the waste is hazardous; both are reduced by 100x each IIRC.

Agreed on both counts.

This is from the 2020 IAEA world's uranium resources report [0];

"Meeting high case demand requirements through 2040 would consume about 28% of the total 2019 identified resource base recoverable at a cost of < USD 130/kgU (USD 50/lb U3O8) and 87% of identified resources available at a cost of < USD 80/kgU (equivalent USD 30/lb U3O8)."

Apply some exponential growth to that, and those allegedly 10.000 years would actually end up looking more like not even 50 years.

[0] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/worlds-uranium...

The 10,000 years refers to the 4 billion tons dissolved in the ocean. However consider that its possible to dramatically extend the useful life of supplies with breeder reactors - and also to use thorium in existing designs such as the CANDU.

Is that really a problem? I mean technically any energy resource is finite/non-renewable due to second law of thermodynamics. That doesn't mean anything in practice.

If you have to contend with the expansion and death of the Sun, you do not have renewable energy.

CTRL+F tells me Uranium isn't mentioned once in the page you linked. So where exactly does it prove that running out of Uranium is a problem?

It’s the four billion tons of uranium dissolved in the ocean and the trillion tons that replenish it as it’s removed that I was referring to. [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

Just curious, how finite is it?

Agreed. Conflating nuclear with renewable into 'zero carbon' is wrong

Darlington, Bruce and Pickering are reaching EoL and all three together supply 60% of Ontario’s electricity. How do you propose the province replace that amount of supply? The go with solar or wind would mean colossal investments in high tension transmission infrastructure, given the distributed nature of those power sources. We already have appropriate infrastructure in place for nuclear distribution; and the added benefit is that these SMRs can power northern regions as well when fully developped

Sure renewable energy is not everything, but spending 200 millions to tear down wind farms is also not how you get there https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-green-energ...

As far as I understood it, they weren't torn down as much as the contract was cancelled and more weren't built.

I live in Windsor-Essex and still see new windmill projects going up all the time.

That links says that (a) they were torn down, complete or incomplete, and (b) the company was paid a (huge!) contract break fee for this, as you would expect.

Yes, apparently they tore down 4 turbines, which is a waste of money.

But if you've ever been to Chatham-Kent you'd notice that there are places where you can do a 360 degree turn and never see fewer than 10 windmills in your field of vision. Ontario has 2,600 wind turbines.

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/10/23/news/wind-turbin....

Of course the turbines will not have been scrapped, but will be sold on. Probably the blades, too.

So, only the towers, really.

Huge as in the price of Twitter 44 billion or the 1 billion breakup fee?

Wind? The 24% hydro they have will help bridge demand and supply just as it does with nuclear today.

What do you see as the problem with that?

Last night, at peak, Ontario was generating ~140MW of wind power. Not bad.

Yesterday, all day without variation, Ontario was generating 9300-9600MW of nuclear power.

They aren't even in the same universe.

Source: https://www.ieso.ca/power-data

Yeah, well if they shut down the nuclear plants, they'll be generating 0.

So they need to either build a lot of nuclear or build a lot of wind.

One of these is cheap, easy and fast, one is hard, expensive and slow.

3-4 years of German rollout of onshore wind would probably do the job.

Not to mention a MW of wind is not equivalent to a MW of nuke. If you want wind you need a substantial overbuild that is geographically diverse and the necessary transmission to support that, which will cost as much as the generation itself, or you need storage which again costs as much as the generation itself. I am all for wind power, but only when we realistically consider the real world engineering constraints involved.

Always "mentioned", always irrelevant.

Obviously if you will rely on wind or solar for baseline, you will need to build out storage. And, equally obviously, you don't waste money building out storage you don't yet have capacity to charge up.

It is a trivial observation that adds no light.

You might consider it a trivial observation, but the economic and physical implications are not trivial. They still cost money, and the physics still don't work if you don't consider them. Any discussion of the cost or viability of a generation source must include the cost and viability of augmenting the weaknesses of that source to address these deficiencies. Anything else is wishful thinking at best and magical thinking at worst.

The physics of practical storage have been fully understood and well internalized in civil engineering for centuries: E = Fx. All that remains unclear is which forms will turn out to be cheapest at the time when they need to be built.

What is known now is that costs are falling even faster than did solar and wind, and are already of similar order.

The same Germany who can't cut Russian oil supplies or the country falls apart. Not sure I'd go that direction.

Not a single country with any manufacturing and/or industry [0] to speak of [1], can just casually cut off their main hydrocarbon supplier without major consequences, nor do nuclear reactors replace such resource dependencies.

If Russia stops delivering gas, then ultimately that will translate to a higher German oil demand, as a lot of formerly gas tailored usage will be retooled to oil.

As Russia is sitting on the single largest gas supply on the planet, nearly a quarter of the worlds supply [2]. While with oil there are a few somewhat competitive non-Russian alternatives [3]

So if Russia's resources will continue to be geopolitically taboo, then a lot of Europe will shift back to oil instead of gas.

[0] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/11/f68/Products...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?location...

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/gas/gas-reserves-by-country/

[3] https://www.worldometers.info/gas/oil-reserves-by-country/

Going all in on nuclear wouldnt have fixed that. At least, not without an additional $2-$3 trillion spent.

The nuclear plants they shut down were a drop in the bucket compared to gas, solar and wind.

>not in the same universe

You're right, they aren't. Yes, thanks to decades of power-lobbying, viable wind and solar energy were both kept as low-key and forgettable as possible - and shut-down whenever possible. Apart from the vast sums of excessive money involved, lurking in the background was the fearful and sure knowledge that everyone, everwhere had potential and certain access to endless power ... without any constraints or arm-twisting politics.

Yes ... wind and solar ARE in a different universe ... one where all of humanity can and will survive and be free of the pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.

Not sure how any of that is relevant in the context of Ontario or the linked article.

> pernicious influence of centralized energy overlords, and their wars.

My centralized energy overlords are extremely well run and regulated nuclear power operators. Seems great to me!

And I can't remember the last war over nuclear fuel...

I live in the hotbed of Ontario wind power, the intersection of Chatham-Kent and Windsor-Essex, and if all those windmills only account for 140MW I am very curious where the space would come from to even reach 1000MW. It already feels like they're everywhere.

Exactly, wind and solar are massive environmental disrupters, huge amounts of land and habitat destroyed for small unreliable gains. Nuclear on the other hand is turned into the bogey man of clean energy. Where do all the out of commission solar panels end up? Definitely not as carefully stored as the nuclear waste.

Panels are recycled now. Wind and solar don't destroy habitats and don't take up "huge amounts of land". Wind turbines take up negligible land that can be used for other purposes. Agrivoltaics is showing you can even do this with solar and it boosts some crop outputs. I really don't get the renewable hate. It has its place in the energy mix.

Yes, PV waste isn't being addressed a lot right now, but research is ramping up alongside production on these. Alternatives to Si like perovskites may end up easier to recycle as well. Also, PV does produce waste, but it has the advantage of not being radioactive. That isn't to say it's not harmful, just quite a bit less volatile as nuclear. All in all, I do think nuclear should be reintroduced, but it has it's own issues, especially in the US due to construction difficulties (permits, safety, etc). In comparison, PV benefits greatly from economies of scale, and can be deployed at utility scale or in distributed micro-grids, which gives it more granularity then all-or-nothing nuclear.

You can lie, and lie, and lie. You might even get somebody to believe you, but it says more about you than about the topic.

Wind and solar are not, in fact, environmental disrupters. Waste panels are not an environmental hazard, and are in fact extremely valuable. Anyone not warehousing their dead panels is an idiot.

Nukes are lately the darling of big coal, because they guarantee another ten years of sales that in total exceed the cost of that much solar generation capacity. Spent on solar, it would displace the coal immediately.

I agree, at least turbines have relatively small footprints. Tearing up farmland for solar would be a disaster, imo.

Colossal investment in transmission infrastructure would be a much better bet than investing in nuclear. It would pay off the way that colossal investments in highways, railroads and fiber have. Betting on nuclear is like choosing circuit switching over packet switching for your network. A fear driven anxiety about reliability that prevents people from understanding that a new way of doing things is possible.

Ontario’s Long-Term Energy Plan is counting on Bruce Power to provide a reliable and carbon-free source of affordable energy through 2064.

It’s okay. If the Progressive Conservatives wave their hands fast enough, they can solve this problem with wind power.

> actively torn down recently completed and functional wind farm projects.

WTF?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/doug-ford-green-energ...

""For this government to rip up contracts and literally rip wind turbines out of the ground is a huge waste of money and makes absolutely no sense," said Green party Leader Mike Schreiner.""

Well, yes. $230m to prevent power being generated, either for ideological reasons or bribes.

At this point in time the cost is Wind: .75/kilowatt hour Nuclear: 0.05/kilowatt hour

Makes sense for a lot of reasons. The most costly energy was the fixed rate 75c per hour that was for ideological reasons going to transform Ontario into the solar power maker of the world. That went to California then and now China.

Do those numbers take into account construction and dismantling costs?

9 wind turbines is nothing.

I hear that the Nelson River in Manitoba has an extremely large capacity for power production.

Just saying.

Building new dams in the west is almost entirely unfeasible. Too much environmental impact sensitivity (maybe a good thing) and NIMBYisim (not so good)

Manitoba Hydro spends a lot of marketing money on making renewable resources attractive, specifically Hydro Generating Stations. Isn't the newest one from 2018?

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